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Swinging the Machine

feature 58-38Bandleader and crimefighter Swing Sisson encounters a critic in Feature Comics #58 (July 1942).

Deems Taylor—composer, critic, narrator of Fantasia, well-known classical music personality of the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s—didn’t much care for jazz, a dislike he took pains to present as airy unconcern. In his book The Well-Tempered Listener, Taylor examined the practice of “swinging the classics,” making jazz band versions of classical chestnuts. This sort of thing had apparently exercised enough indignation that the president of the Bach Society of New Jersey, Taylor reported, sent a letter to the FCC proposing penalties for radio stations that broadcast such numbers. Taylor gave that suggestion a sympathetic shrug:

If you’re going to suspend the license of a broadcasting station for permitting Bach to be played in swing time, what are you going to do to a station for permitting swing music to be played at all? (You might offer the owner of the station his choice of either listening to nothing but swing for, say, twelve hours, or else spending a month in jail.) You can’t legislate against bad taste.

Taylor’s solution was musical rope-a-dope, completely certain that the unaltered classical repertoire would win out. “I believe in letting people hear these swing monstrosities because I believe that it’s the best method of getting rid of them,” he concluded. “A real work of art is a good deal tougher than we assume that it is.”

Jazz has been taking it on the chin lately, prompted by some questionable bits of “satire” that seemed to give tacit permission for a lot of people to assert insecurity as vindication. Jazz is boring. It’s insular. Nobody really likes it. People only listen to it so other people will think they’re cool. And so forth. As someone whose purview is mainly classical and modernist music, I can only say: pull up a chair and have a drink, we’ve already got a tab going.

The only slice of this commentary worth engaging with was John Halle’s broadside against the current state of jazz vis-à-vis progressive politics, mainly because it replaced the shallow context of a consumerist apologia with the rather more interesting context of a radical critique. (Halle’s thesis: “It’s been years since jazz had any claim to a counter-cultural, outsider, adversarial status, or communicated a revolutionary or even mildly reformist mindset.”) But at the core of the article was an assumption about score and performance that is a cousin of Taylor’s. Here’s the crucial passage:

A nadir of obliviousness was reached by the legendary tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson through the inclusion of the standard “Without a Song” in a sequence of classic recordings paying tribute to the then-dominant Black Power movement. Some of the titles of the albums are “Power to the People,” “In Pursuit of Blackness,” “If You’re not Part of the Solution, You’re Part of the Problem,” and “Black is the Color.” So it is more than a little disturbing, in this context, to encounter [in the lyrics of “Without a Song”] the vile Jim Crow racism of the second phrase: “A darky’s born/ but he’s no good no how / without a song.”

As many have pointed out, there’s some slippery cause-and-effect in this paragraph. The album on which Henderson recorded “Without a Song”—1967’s The Kicker—actually predates the more politically centered albums Halle mentions by a couple of years. And Henderson probably knew the song from versions where the lyrics were changed (most notably Billy Eckstine’s suave 1945 recording) or not even there (as with Sonny Rollins’s version on his 1962 album The Bridge).

But the passage also argues a kind of one-way street between intent and performance. The implication is that, no matter Henderson’s intention, the performance is politically regressive because of the original lyrics. The assumption is that the composer’s (or lyricist’s) intent remains paramount, that even a thoroughly transformative performance is still just a reiteration of that intent. To echo Taylor, even a poor work of art, it seems, is a good deal tougher than we assume that it is. There is another possibility, though: the possibility that, no matter Henderson’s intention (or Eckstine’s, or Rollins’s), the performance can offset the lyrics, simply by virtue of who is doing the performing—and how.

* * *

Here’s an interesting thing. Take two weights, connect them with a string, then run the string over a pulley, like this—
atwood1
You can intuitively guess what will happen: if both weights have the same mass, they’ll just hang there, but if one has more mass, it’ll pull the other through the pulley. This seems trivial, but it’s not, not entirely—which is why the Rev. George Atwood, a tutor at Cambridge’s Trinity College, invented this apparatus in the late 1700s, the better to teach principles of classical mechanics. Playing around with Atwood’s machine, students could measure and learn about rates of acceleration, string tension, inertial forces, and the like. One thing that you can determine with Atwood’s machine is that, in the case of unequal masses (and assuming the pulleys are frictionless), the acceleration on both weights is constant and uniform. In other words, if the masses are equal, the system is at equilibrium, but if the masses are unequal, it’s a runaway system, the weights flying through the pulley, ever faster, until they run out of string or vertical space.

But if you take the two weights, run the string over two pulleys, and start the smaller weight swinging back and forth, like this—
atwood2
—some unexpected things start to happen. The swinging weight, via centrifugal force—more pedantically, via the apparent force that results from interpreting a rotating reference frame as an inertial frame (somebody would have left a comment)—counteracts some of the gravitational pull on the larger mass. Which means that the Swinging Atwood’s Machine (as it was dubbed by Nicholas Tufillaro, the physicist who first started playing around with such systems back in the 1980s) can end up doing some very counterintuitive things. Even if the masses are unequal, the system can still reach an equilibrium, the smaller mass locking into periodic and sometimes seriously funky orbits:

TufillaroFig4(From Nicholas B. Tufillaro, Tyler A. Abbott, and David J. Griffiths, “Swinging Atwood’s Machine,” Am. J. Phys. 52 (10), October 1984)

To summarize: if you have two unequal masses that are inextricably bound to each other, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the larger mass always dominates the system. The smaller can still counterbalance the larger. It just needs to swing.

* * *

LennysMahler6Leonard Bernstein’s score of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, from the New York Philharmonic’s digital archives.

It’s only a metaphor, of course. Then again, most writing and talking about music ends up, before too long, at metaphors. “Swing” itself, musically speaking, is a pretty vague concept. It has to do with rhythm, but it has to do with so much more than rhythm: it considers the flow of musical experience through the lenses of momentum and vitality. In its most poetic sense, the metaphor is ecumenical. Those old “Mahler Grooves” bumper stickers could be at once a cheeky incongruity and a recognition that, in its own way, and in a good performance, Mahler could indeed groove, that the symphonies could swing in the grandest sense. But even in the term’s more technical sense—that calibration of the ratio between stressed and unstressed notes—“swing” hearkens all the way back to the old Baroque inégale: a variance, a perturbation, a dance of emphasis and de-emphasis that pulls the music forward.

All performance is a matter of emphasis and de-emphasis; it is, on one level, about choice. And, thanks to music’s singular strangeness—grammar and eloquence forever in search of content and meaning—that choice can extend far beyond technical choices on the part of the musicians. Take the case of classical music’s great Beleth, Richard Wagner, who embodied the human possibilities of greatness and ugliness to an exceptionally intense degree. Because his medium was music, performing and listening to Wagner’s work is an opportunity to choose the greatness over the ugliness. When Rollins and Henderson perform “Without a Song,” it is an opportunity to choose the charm and potential of the melody over the reflexive stereotyping of the lyrics. From an optimistic vantage, this ongoing process of choice might be thought of as practice, training players and audience to imagine a better world, the better to achieve it. A pessimist could point out (quite rightly) that such training is taking an awfully long time to translate into concrete change.

We live in a machine. Its gears are money and power. Inequality—greed, racism, misogyny, discrimination—remain institutionalized and persistent. The music this article has been talking about is, culturally speaking, on the margins, however luxurious; maybe to expect these musics, old or new, to alter the fabric of society, however incrementally, is excessively idealistic. (Confession: in that regard, I am an idealist.) But just in their performance, in jazz’s constant reinvention and classical’s constant re-creation, they mount a defense. In swinging, they swing the machine. They mitigate their lesser mass. They, perhaps, prevent the whole system from running away to a catastrophic end. Or, at least, they keep us from being pulled helplessly through the machine.
In a letter published in the February 1941 issue of the Music Educators Journal, a woman named Rosamond Tanner took Deems Taylor to task over his disdain for swing. On the contrary, Tanner insisted, swing versions of the classics were a great way to introduce children to the repertoire: “When the classics are expressed in a form that is understandable and typical of our present day trends and interests, then they are loved and understood, and their themes are not forgotten.” Actually, this is not really that far from Taylor’s position; the end goal is still to eventually encounter the classics in their original form. But Tanner at least emphasized experiencing the classics in performance as much as simply knowing them, instilling in a hypothetical listener the desire “to go to a concert because he knows that concert holds something personal for him—a bond of understanding between him and the music.”

A few years later, Rosamond Tanner, an Eastman-educated organist and a veteran provider of background music for New York City cocktail lounges, was hired for an unusual gig: she became the house organist for the 86th Street branch of the Manhattan Savings Bank, performing for a few hours every day from a balcony overlooking the banking floor. With most banks—including the other branches of the Manhattan Savings Bank—having already adopted piped-in Muzak, Tanner’s job was quirky enough to gain her a mention in “The Talk of the Town” section of the April 24, 1948, issue of The New Yorker. Tanner was hardly a subversive. She was pleased to report how many more accounts the branch had brought in since she had started playing. But give her credit: she could see the machine, and she could see the effect performance could have on it. “I’m a lot more than an entertainer,” she told the magazine. “I’m supposed most of all to offset all the cold-blooded marble and iron bars downstairs.”
*Homepage featured image courtesy Petras Gagilas via Flickr

What makes you attend a music event? Matthew Sigman

Former editor of Symphony magazine
Currently an executive with R.R. Donnelley & Sons, a board member of the Chicago Civic Orchestra and of the American Music Center

For several years, while I was on the editorial staff of Symphony magazine, it was my honor and anguish to edit the late great Ralph Black, a man whose wit and wisdom and kindness and love for music was matched only by his stalwart procrastination and indecipherable scrawl.  Ralph knew the human heart and pocketbook pretty well, and when it came to the challenges of getting a body into the concert hall he knew every trick in the manager’s book.  Yet one of my favorite Black “notes” pertained not to the symphony, but to the opera. “Nobody ever goes to the opera the first time,” he used to say, “they are taken.”  Well, that’s still somewhat how it is for me and new music.  Unless I know the composer’s work, or I’m a friend of the composer’s, or a friend of a friend, or I’ve been invited by the composer’s publisher or mother or lawyer, or I’ve heard a snippet of something on the radio, or the work is on a program with a work (contemporary or otherwise) that I love. . . Then usually I find myself in a seat in a concert hall at the behest of someone else who has good taste and an extra ticket.  Here’s how it usually works:

Matthew: Hey Fran, I’m going to be in your neighborhood tomorrow afternoon.
Fran Richard: Yeah, meet me at O’Neals around 6:00.  We’ll get a drink.
Matthew: Sounds great.
Fran:  Oh, and there’s a performance of so-and-so’s oboe quintet at Merkin at 7:30.  You wanna go?
Matthew: Sure.

And thus am I taken.

Steve Reich in Conversation with Richard Kessler

[Ed. note: This conversation between Steve Reich and Richard Kessler, then the Executive Director of the American Music Center, was originally published on the American Music Center’s website on July 1, 1998. It was the first of a series of interviews entitled “Music In The First Person” published in the year before the launch of NewMusicBox on May 1, 1999. “In The First Person” served as the model for one of the primary components of NewMusicBox which still continues on the site as “Cover.”]

***
1. Starting Out

RICHARD KESSLER: How do you feel the music business has changed over the last thirty years?

STEVE REICH: Well, thirty years ago I had just returned to New York City from San Francisco. Basically, John Cage was the most important thing in town; Morton Feldman was active; The younger people were James Tenney and Phil Corner and Malcolm Goldstein, and Charles Wuorinen. At that time, the American composers were either under the “downtown” influence of John Cage or the “uptown” influence of Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio and company. But the sad fact is that musically, everybody was under the influence of music that was not “pulsitile,” [not with a regular beat]. You can’t tap your foot to either Boulez or John Cage, nor could you know where you were tonally. The idea of cadence, any sense of tonal center, melody in any sense of the word — including even some Schoenberg — was pretty hard to put your ear on. So I felt sort of out of it and very much alone.

I had contact with Terry Riley, and LaMonte Young was active, but we weren’t very close at that time. So, there was precious little outside of the individual musicians that I worked with at that time. Arthur Murphy, the pianist and composer out of Juilliard, and Jon Gibson, the reed player (now playing with Philip Glass) who had played with me and Terry Riley back in San Francisco in the early sixties, [were active]. That was really my musical universe. I was working on getting the finished form of “Piano Phase”. I’d done the (tape) piece, “Its Gonna Rain,” out in San Francisco and then had come back [to New York].

I was really just getting my own music together for the first time, and it was very exciting. It was a given that I wasn’t going to get a call from anyone at Carnegie Hall or any other institution asking me to come and perform, so fortunately I began to know some painters and sculptors who later became known as “minimal” artists; people like Sol LeWitt and Robert Smithson, who I didn’t know that well, but who was part of that. Paula Cooper was running The Park Place Gallery, and some artists there invited me to give a concert, first in ’66 with the tape pieces and then again in ’67. I remember the Park Place Gallery concerts were a big success and people like Robert Rauschenberg came. A lot of people that were bound up in the Judson scene were there — painters, sculptors, filmmakers, choreographers. But I can’t think of any composers who were, except Phil Corner and James Tenney who were playing.

At that point I was acquiring an audience, basically of artists. In the long run that’s a good way to begin. I would say this to other composers: if you’re 25, and some dancer is 25, and some filmmaker is 25, or some video artist or painter or sculptor is 25, in some ways you’re going to be “swimming in the same soup” by being contemporary. And I think it’s a good, healthy thing — especially as you’re getting started. By all means, go to galleries; go to dance concerts and so on, as a social activity and as an artistic activity, because there’s no formula for what is going to give you understanding of the culture around you. Those artists are where you’re going to get the clearest messages that to with something inside of you, because you’re all alive at the same time, you’ve gone through the same experiences, you’re a part of the same generation in the same country.

To make a long story short, painters and sculptors helped me get gigs. Sol LeWitt bought a score of four organs and some other scores. I used that money to buy the Glockenspiels for “Drumming.” Bruce Nauman helped me get a concert at the Whitney. Richard Sierra helped with that concert and one at the Guggenheim. Michael Snow, the filmmaker, was part of that whole group. This was an exciting and very stimulating situation.

I think painters and sculptors react to music, more naively, in a sense, because their politics are a lot different from our politics. It’s very hard for one composer to listen to another composer without somehow bringing his own mind-set to the music he’s listening to. It’s not that it’s impossible. And that’s only natural, whereas someone in another art field is going to listen to it very naively, in a sense (you hope), and that’s a worthwhile, unbiased opinion. Ultimately, it’s a naive opinion that rules the roost. Stravinsky used to say that if the audience’s reaction was positive, he knew that that’s okay. We’re not so stupid after all!

Now, the most significant difference [in the past thirty years], and I see this in music schools here or in Europe, is that when I went to school there was one way of writing music that was discussed; today, you can write like Mahler and you can say “I’m like David Del Tredici” or John Corigliano or even John Adams for that matter, or you can write like me and Glass and other people, and you can write even rock and roll or techno. All of these things, and others, and the gradations between them are “grist for the mill,” and fairly so. Whether that’s better or worse, who’s to say? But it’s vastly different.

I also think that in the late fifties and early sixties the ambition of becoming a composer clearly lacked any economic expectations. When I decided to become a composer, I expected to have a hard time financially, and even when I got my MA, I felt that I didn’t want to teach, but that I had to have that insurance policy. If I didn’t survive [as a composer], I would fall back on teaching. In those days an MA was significant . Now you have to get a Doctorate! Fortunately, I was able to do part time jobs.

RK: You drove a cab?

SR: Well, yes I drove a cab in San Francisco, and in New York I worked as a part-time social worker. Phil Glass and I had a moving company for a short period of time. I did all kinds of odd jobs: I taught briefly at the New School and the School of Visual Arts but by 1972 I started making a living as a performer in my own ensemble. I would never have thought that it was how I was going to survive financially. It was a complete wonder.

If I had to give any advice to composers, I would say be involved in the performance of your own music, whether you’re a conductor conducting, or whether you are a musician playing. Or, if you’re not talented enough to do either, program a drum machine, or run the amplification board (which I do and which I’ve written myself out of). Just being involved with the performance of your own music will guarantee, insofar as you can guarantee it, that you’re getting the kind of performances that you don’t have to constantly apologize for when you give your friends the tape. And the more you’re involved in it, the better the performances are, the more reflective they are of what you had in mind, and the more likely they are to convey your musical ideas to other people.

2. Audiences

RK: You started talking about the art world, and what I’ve always noticed is that going to a concert of yours over the years, or, let’s say, to Phil Glass’s 30th Anniversary Concert a couple of weeks ago at Avery Fischer-you see a very different audience than you would for, say, the Vienna Philharmonic, or even the San Francisco Symphony playing new music. A very, very different audience. And that audience to me looks like it’s more connected with the art world: younger people who undoubtedly go to the Guggenheim and who go to the Whitney.

SR: Is the audience so typical to “pigeon-hole”? There are professors and there are students.

RK: But one thing’s for sure: as a group, they’re younger.

SR: Yes. with no doubt, and I’m delighted to see this.

RK: What do you think about this?

SR: I think it’s great but everyone has to write music that, in a sense, is who they are. If they try to do it otherwise, then in the long or the short run they will fail. I could mention names, but I won’t. But there are composers who adopt the “style-of-the-month” (and we know who they are and we could even run down the months and the different styles!) and everyone says “Oh, now he/she is doing this. Tuesday, minimalism…” The bottom line is that it doesn’t work! It doesn’t work because whatever it is that people have inside of themselves that’s really joined to some emotional and intellectual perspective on music — that’s what people want. They want the real you and they know when you’re not giving it. How? I don’t know how it works, but it works.

3. Orchestras and Acoustics

RK: But why would a younger crowd go to hear your music and not necessarily go to hear the London Symphony performing…

SR: My music!

RK: That’s very true.

SR: Well, I think, for my money, The London Symphony Orchestra is the best orchestra around for the music I write. But I’ve stopped writing for the orchestra in 1987 when I was writing the “Four Sections,” which I think is a reasonably successful piece for orchestra. At that time, I realized a number of things. Number one: the orchestra is not my orchestra in a purely acoustical, musical sense. The basic idea of the orchestra is that you will get more volume by doubling, and we’ll make balances between the brass, which are naturally loud, the woodwinds, which are reasonably loud, and the strings, which aren’t, by simply doubling the same parts. So when the little girl says to Mom, “Why are all these people playing the same line?” the answer is “to make it louder.”

Well, there is a price to pay for that, and it is the rhythmic agility: everyone is slightly sharp or slightly flat, because they’re human beings, and the note is literally fatter. If you put it on an oscilloscope you’d see, well, it’s wider. And you feel that. The sound of a string section is drastically different from the sound of a solo violin. I began to realize that what I’d been doing over the years was simply to use the microphone to make balances, not to make the music louder, but so that I could have a singer who’s singing in an early music style or a pop style, which is basically small voice, no vibrato, to be heard over percussion and keyboards). Well, when you amplify, it’s very simple.

But in that simple little fact, what you’re doing is turning over the history of the orchestra: The orchestra begins roughly around the time of Haydn. There are thirty-five or forty musicians, then the clarinets come in, and then Beethoven puts in the trombones, so you’ve got to have more strings to balance that off. Then comes Wagner and huge brass, expanded winds to balance that and then it stops. And basically the Wagner orchestra, the eighteen firsts and sixteen seconds and so on, is still with us. It made perfectly good sense for Haydn to have what he had. It made perfectly good sense for Beethoven to have what he had. And it made perfectly good sense for Wagner to have what he had. But once the microphone was invented, there was a complete other possibility: you could either use an acoustical organization created for an acoustical reality, and if you want it louder, you have more people doing it, [or you can amplify].

The invention of the microphone introduced new possibilities. Besides, I’m sixty-one years old; I grew up listening to more recorded music than I did live music (and I dare say I was the first of a generation where almost all the composers after me would have that precise experience). I realized I was used to the sound of music coming out of a loudspeaker. Now, everyone is quick to tell you that there’s a lot wrong with that, but there are a lot of things that are very interesting, as well: the little details of execution; the slide on the string; the sound of the resin on the bow. The little intimate details of the performance come to us because the microphone is very close to the player. So you create the possibility for a great deal of detail, if you keep the texture clear enough, where that stuff is giving you little bits of energy, if you like. You hear every bow stroke; you hear the articulation in the clarinet reed, etc., and you don’t think about that but it gets to you. So when you use amplification, it just becomes a reality of the performance.

And if you take the same piece, like “Tehillim” which was done by my group with solo strings amplified and then Mehta did it with twelve firsts (violins), it still feels like “what’s this big, heavy thing that we’re trying to pull along with this small ensemble inside of it.” And that’s partly my own fault too, for going for the glory of the New York Philharmonic and realizing that it was subverting the music. It took most of the eighties for me to become clear with that because back then my own ensemble had gotten larger after “Music for Eighteen Musicians,” and I was thinking: “Well, this is ridiculous. I can’t travel around the world with an orchestra or anything like that. If I want to write for the orchestra, write for the orchestra.” I was thinking: “Oh, three oboes interlocking and three clarinets interlocking and three strings” — but each of the three strings was eight people. So “The Desert Music” was to me the most successful piece I did that way. The string orchestra is divided in three and the percussion goes in the center, right in front of the composer, or right in front of the conductor (that’s a slip!). Right in front of the conductor, in a piece where the ictus, the beat, is going all the time. If the strings around the percussion can hear it, then it’s fine. If you put the percussion sixty feet away from the conductor in the back of the hall, and the strings are sitting right next to the conductor, he’s beating what the percussionist is playing but the 60-foot delay in the sound causes the whole orchestra to not be together. It’s impossible. So I rearranged the orchestra this way. The result: well, if you have an enormous amount of rehearsal, you can get a reasonably good result, but it guarantees that no one is ever going to play the piece because they’ve got to completely re-seat the orchestra; they’ve got all the electronic paraphernalia; they’d take one look and say “Well, what else have you got?” So I began to realize that my musical acoustical difficulties were also intimately tied with the sociology and practical realities of stagecraft. Also, if you introduce electronics, they might do it once, on commission, and then you can kiss it good-bye. Then I began to realize that my orchestra is my ensemble and there are all these wonderful European ensembles like it, such as the Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Schoenberg Ensemble, Klang Forum Wien, Ictus Ensemble, Avanti Ensemble, and they’re growing like mushrooms all over Europe.

RK: What are your thoughts about the orchestral repertoire issue? The orchestra industry is certainly of — or will be of-importance to our readers. The orchestra industry is facing many challenges: for all intents and purposes, the repertoire stopped expanding in the fifties. There are a small number of works that have entered the core repertoire in the past 30 years. There are many people in the industry wondering what to do about aging audiences, a repertoire that isn’t growing, and composers like you, who aren’t interested in writing for it the medium. What do you make of all this? You talked a little about the social and cultural context earlier…

SR: I feel that the orchestra is no more important and is just another variation on promusica antiqua. It’s very important that early music, like Perotin, be heard. For me it’s just as important that Perotin be heard as it is that Mozart be heard. As a matter of fact, I personally would much rather hear Perotin than Mozart. But whether you like it or not, these guys are both very, very important composers in their age. They were the top of their historical period. Why should we hear more Brahms than Josquin? Because there’s an organization that plays it that’s absorbing so much money. But if you were to just weigh it on the musical scales, you’d say “Well, it depends on your stylistic preference, but this is great music and that’s great music.” My feeling is, and I know there are others who’ve voiced similar ideas, that it would be interesting if there were fewer orchestras, and other musicians would simply go and form whatever kind of groups they want to form. Those orchestras would be larger and encompass all the history of western music. For example: you’d have a group of about 120 musicians that would include a baroque and early music group directed by music director A, who is not an orchestral romantic specialist. Then you would have the large romantic orchestra, with a few gambists from the early music group who might want to sit in the cello section — that would have one of the name conductors in the classical and romantic field. Then you’d have a new music ensemble with a separate music director, another one of the conductors who we could name, with somewhere between fifteen and forty people, again including some crossover from the early music group and from the other orchestra; This sort of large center, sort of like a medical center, would be able to tour. These three major groups would have a couple of venues: a large two-thousand-seater, and a one-thousand-seater, and would employ 120 or more musicians. They would pool their advertising muscle and their appeal to a much wider musical taste.

We’re now seeing pop record departments selling medieval music — how about that! Who would’ve thought that Gregorian chant was going to be a hot numero in any form! Well, live and learn. I think that’s great. No matter how you look at it, I think it would be a very interesting way to go. If you had a regular opportunity to do Gabrieli and also do some Wagner, what’s wrong? And you could go out in different groups. Everything that players in orchestras complain about, the routine and repetitions, wouldn’t be completely solved, but the people who want to change that would have the possibility in the extended repertoire, the extended number of chamber-sized ensembles that were under one aegis.

One of the most wonderful orchestral events I’ve ever been to was one Michael Tilson Thomas did in June of 1996, where he had a festival including The Grateful Dead (sans Jerry Garcia). On the greatest day, I did “Clapping Music” with one of the percussionists out there and Meredith Monk sang; they did Lou Harrison‘s organ concerto; they did an improvisation on Henry Cowell‘s “Tone Cluster” with Michael Tilson Thomas and members of The Grateful Dead, and half the audience was “deadheads” who were dead quiet and listening to everything, really getting off on it. The orchestra itself never came out and appeared as an orchestra, but all these ensembles were right there. This is what every orchestra has within itself, but somehow it can never find the scheduling and the marketing expertise to present itself that way. Anyway, it’s certainly possible and perhaps it will happen.

Personally, I don’t go to orchestral concerts. I don’t listen to that repertoire — I say it over and over again. Back in 1955, when I studied music history at Cornell University with William Austin, he taught it like this: He started with Gregorian chant, we went up to the death of Bach and Handel in 1750, and jumped to Debussy, Duke Ellington, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Charlie Parker, Bartók, the works. And then we went back in the Spring semester and we did Haydn to Wagner. He used to say that he saw a continuity in the back-to-Bach of Stravinsky and the whole neoclassicism of the earlier part of the twentieth century, and an awareness of earlier music in the fifties. Beginning with the Swingle Singers, there was a neo-baroque revival — a sensitivity to the authentic instrumentation that began then. There was something in the Zeitgeist that people were saying “We’re really tuned in to hearing early music.” Alfred Deller was the first counter-tenor to appear at that time. I loved Ella Fitzgerald and I loved Joan Baez and I loved Alfred Deller and I loved Glenn Gould. So what else is new? That was one mentality, and the other mentality was the growth of German classicism and romanticism. And I think there’s a certain truth to that. The sonata allegro form appears really in the classical period: sonatas are not the same sonatas in the baroque period, so the kind of discursive, developmental thinking that goes on from 1750 anywhere on up to Schoenberg is really a body of thinking quite different from what preceded it, and in a sense, from what followed it.

RK: I thought it was interesting reading other interviews you gave, where you were talking about the French impressionists, Debussy, also talking about Stravinsky, also taking about Charlie Parker.

SR: Right. That’s a communality right there.

RK: And the Parker connection, Parker studied Stravinsky and the French impressionists.

SR: Well, you can hear it. When I was a kid, I realized later, you could go into an elevator and you’d hear something that was sort of a rip-off of Ravel, you know? And you’d hear it in the movies. [Sometimes I hear] really great music like Parker and Miles Davis and realize, well, that dominant 11th with the tonic on top of it that I used in ‘Four Organs,’ is in Thelonious Monk and it’s in Debussy, too. It was a way of loosening up tonality without leading to complete chromaticism. It seems to me there’s a fork in the road: this way Wagner, that way Debussy. And I think that most Americans, consciously or unconsciously, have traveled one of these “roads (for example, Aaron Copland). It’s like saying “I want to stretch tonality but I’m not getting rid of it.” Of course, there are the Americans who did follow the German direction (Charles Ives is probably an exception, because you could probably argue that he was closer to the German tradition than not. But he is an odd case).

RK: Yeah, he sounds very German, particularly in, say, his Second Symphony.

SR: But, nevertheless, what we love about Ives, the quoting of the hymn tunes, the polytonality which is really not at all those techniques.

RK: And he struggled with it.

SR: Yeah, I think he did but I think that most of the other people didn’t, like Gershwin and Copland. If you take a look at “minimal” music — referring to Ravel in particular, you’ll see a lot of repeated material in the middle register with a different bass. It’s just modally re-harmonized. Well, you know, welcome to the club, man, just an offshoot of French impressionism!

RK: Do you still feel indifferent towards Mahler?

SR: Yeah, well, I don’t feel indifferent to him — I really have a hard time, I really want to turn the radio station off and leave the room or not go to the concert. It’s not just Mahler, I’m not interested in Brahms, either. There are pieces of Beethoven’s I really love.

RK: It’s a language that doesn’t speak to you?

SR: Basically, what happens, if you look in simple terms — Haydn has a regularity of beat, and a very clear triadic texture, with a few seasonings here and there, but as the music, particularly after Beethoven, gets more and more chromatic, it also gets less and less rhythmic. The two go together until the rhythm becomes gesture, and therefore the conductor becomes of paramount importance, (which is why in the nineteenth century the conductor became such a colossus). It’s hard to think of a Haydn conductor. With Haydn as your war horse, you don’t go very far! When the gesture of the music rather that its ictus became the dominant thing, you see this floating tonality which reaches its apotheosis somewhere between the end of Wagner and the beginning of Schoenberg.

RK: It’s interesting that Bernstein was a great conductor of Haydn.

SR: Well, I like Haydn. I like Haydn more than Mozart, but what can I say?

4. Music as Language

RK: Would you describe music as a language that requires study or experience in order to decode, in order to enjoy? One person sits down and listens to a slow movement of Bach and finds it to be extraordinarily beautiful and another person sits down and listens to it and hears nothing! Is it a language issue? Is it just a matter of what strikes you?

SR: Well, you’re asking a question that I don’t think anyone has answered satisfactorily since the dawn of…

RK: So then it’s a good question?

SR: It’s a good question. But you know that I’m not going to have an answer. When I was first giving concerts in Germany in the early to middle seventies, people attacked music as mechanical and said it didn’t have a language, in a sense of a discursive language. I remember a letter I wrote to this guy in Stuttgart about it. I said that I don’t think that (Beethoven’s 5th motive) “da da da daaa” is fate knocking at the door, I think that it’s an incredible four-note motive, that what’s remarkable is that it continues through the scherzo and into the last movement. It’s the motive; it’s not really a melody, it’s a beginning of motivic organization, as opposed to introducing an imaginary text into music, and saying “Well, what does it mean?” The opening motive in the Fifth Symphony is four notes followed by four more. That’s what it means. It doesn’t have a verbal translation. Some people would say that it had a philosophical idea which he then translated into music. I think that’s absurd.

There’s language of music in terms of “Do you have perfect pitch? Can you write down what you hear?” Those are very real skills. You have different degrees of it. I’m very moderately skilled in that direction. I don’t have perfect pitch, and I can write down slowly if it’s easy. That’s why I’ve worked all my life as a composer with real sound. I work with the instrument, and once I knew that Stravinsky composed at the piano I said “Okay, whatever my limits, I don’t have to be completely ashamed!” And therefore orchestration and composition are one and the same thing for me because I’ll just try it on this, try it on that. But certainly someone who has perfect pitch like Arthur Murphy — he literally could go to hear Bill Evans and immediately write what he heard down on the napkin. He had an enormous talent, and some people have this.

Vincent Persichetti, whom I studied with, was one of those musicians who you just felt could do anything. He’d look at your piece and immediately improvise in its style. One would like to think that the greatest composers will always have this. And I think in a sense that’s true. I imagine that Bach must’ve been this way and Beethoven must’ve been this way. But I don’t think Eric Satie was that way, and he made a real contribution. I know I’m not that way and I hope I make some small contribution. At the highest level that’s absolutely true that in terms of people perceiving music, well, musicians do hear more than non-musicians. There’s no question about it. And we know exactly what they hear and some people hear more and some people hear less.

RK: Does it lead to feeling?

SR: Well, we go back to Bach again. I have one book of Bach’s letters, “The Bach Reader,” which is probably one of the most boring books ever compiled on Earth. I love it! “This trumpet player is insufferable. I need more firewood. Can we get a new choir? I need more firewood. We need some more money. That trumpet player…” I enjoy this! This feels autobiographical; I can relate to this! And he said “What’s most important? “Das Effekt,” the effect. Now, if Bach can say that, then we can do no better. I think the effect of music on the human being is the most important thing about music, and the thing that is the most difficult to discuss. I think that at a certain point, while they’re mapping the genome, scientists may very well be able to play a piece of music and find out exactly what’s happening in various people’s hearts or minds. Also, there are people who are more sensitive to music and there are people who are less sensitive to music — sometimes it goes with their musicality and sometimes, in a funny way, it doesn’t. So, you’re either musically talented or you’re not. Arthur [Murphy] was very talented in certain ways and then he had certain personal problems which made it impossible for him to function as a musician. Other people, like me, have very minimal talents really, but somehow have an incredible ability to just burn-in, concentration-wise, and do the best with what little they have. It also depends on what you’re doing: I’m not that great a player, so there was no future for me as a performer in music, and some composers I admire are like that. And there are others who are really great musicians — again, people who have been a member of the “style of the month club” — who conduct orchestras and I think have perfect pitch and certainly can write things down rapidly. But they seem like a waste of time.

RK: Another take on the question: can you teach someone to like something?

SR: I don’t think so, no. I think you can teach people in general to understand music better. Copland’s book was a very good book in terms of how to listen to music, how to follow a sonata allegro form. That accomplishes something, but it doesn’t make someone who didn’t like the slow movement in the Bach that you mentioned like it.

5. Music and Technology

RK: How do you feel the new technologies are going to alter the way music is created, performed and accessed?

SR: It’s part of a continuum. First there was the perfection of the organ. And then a vast literature for organ music, then the invention of the piano created a whole new kind of keyboard literature. Electronics have had an enormous effect on popular music, it’s very clear to see. And by now almost every composer I know who’s my age or younger works with a computer in various ways. The possibility of playing back through midi, the possibility of orchestrating with that — I used to play everything on every instrument I was able to or have musicians down and try things out on instruments. Now, I find, with the proper samples of orchestral instruments, that I can actually do solid orchestration by trying it out on midi. My big problem that I could never solve is: does the oboe go over the clarinet or does the clarinet go over the oboe? The answer is “What’s the context?” I used to have a musician, who was a Broadway doubler, play English horn, oboe, all the clarinets, and flutes and we’d just record it multi-track. But now I’ve found that I can in fact go a long way working with some samples that came out of McGill University that are solo instruments well recorded. This is how I did the opening of “City Life”: there’s sort of a poor man’s “Symphony of Winds” in the beginning there. I figured, “If this works out in rehearsal, I’m with this program.” And it did.

RK: It’s very beautiful. It really is.

SR: So, I think the computer makes a difference, but it didn’t make anyone who wasn’t a good composer a good one. People say “Oh, now they’ve got this, they can do so and so.” Yeah, you can now have people churning out a lot of garbage faster and in a prettier looking score. You can definitely produce it quicker, but copy and paste ain’t gonna make you a good composer.

RK: What about the idea of music going directly into the Internet? A composer working in a room with midi or who knows what else, and literally, the performance venue is the Internet itself?

SR: I’m not even on the net because I feel that if I have one more means of communication, I will cease to be a composer and just be corresponding all day. I don’t know, but I think that will absolutely come to pass and would make a profound difference in what we now call the record industry.

6. New Works

RK: What are you currently working on?

SR: I’m working on the next collaboration with Beryl Korot, the video artist, after “The Cave.” And after “The Cave” I did “City Life” and I did “Nagoya Marimbas” and “Proverb.” And now I’m working on a piece called “Three Tales.” Specifically the first act and I’m rather late because of all the time spent with my sixtieth birthday and the 10 CD set and so on and so forth. The “Three Tales” are “Hindenburg,” “Bikini,” and “Dolly,” as in cloned sheep. So it’s a look at technology in the twentieth century from the first third of the century, to the middle of the century to the end.

RK: By “Bikini,” you mean the islands?

SR: I mean Bikini atoll, and the testing of the A-bomb, and maybe the bathing suit, too because it’s named after the island. That’s all anybody knows now. “Oh, you mean underwear.” “No, not entirely.”

RK: It took me a second to get it.

SR: I know. That’s why it’s good. It’s like “Oooh, I see.” Anyway, right now I’m working on “Hindenburg” and it’s quite different than “The Cave.” Musically, it’s different because in “The Cave” and in “Different Trains” I would record interviews with people about the holocaust and about my train trips as a child in the thirties and forties here in the States. And in “The Cave” I asked people about the biblical characters, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Hagar and Ishmael. As these people answered, so I wrote. Their speech melody became, literally, the melody that I wrote. Of course, I chose what I wanted to, but I would never change their speech melody. I felt that, because of the subject matter in “The Cave” being religious subject matter and in the “Different Trains” the piece being an homage to people dead and alive, it just had to be that way. I could pick what I wanted, but I had to leave it the way it was. And I did, and I think it served those pieces very well. In “Hindenburg” and in “Three Tales” in general the basic idea is “Okay, I want to be in three flats. I want to be at quarter note equals 144. And if you’re not there, I’m going to change you”. So, for instance, there’s a very famous radio announcer — when the Hindenburg crashed there was one guy with a microphone: “It flashed and it’s crashing! It’s crashing. Oh, terrible!”

RK: “Oh, the humanity,” was a cry of that radio announcer.

SR: Exactly. He wasn’t speaking in three flats. But I needed him that way! So I made a few little adjustments…The piece opens with a typed out headline in the New York Times: “Hindenberg Burns In Lakehurst Crash, 21 Known Dead Twelve Missing, 64 Escaped.” And then a quote from the German ambassador: ” It could not have been a technical matter.” Which is what the German ambassador said to the New York Times, when asked what had gone wrong.

So, the music is more characteristic of what I do. It sets up a tempo and you get a head of steam going, rhythmically, instead of the constant changes of key, constant changes of tempo in both “Different Trains” and “The Cave.” That’s what I’m working on now. “Hindenburg” is going to be premiered at Spoleto in South Carolina in May 1998, Munich in September 1998, and then it will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October 1998. The whole three act piece is slated for world premiere in 2001.

RK: This is kind of a weird question but, I figured I’d throw it at you anyway. You’re a giant in new music, there’s no doubt about it. How does it feel? Thirty years ago, you were out there driving a cab and doing social work . Thirty years later…

SR: Well, I feel I’ve been enormously fortunate. I think of Belá Bartók dying penniless in Mt. Sinai hospital. I was fortunate enough to join Boosey & Hawkes when Sylvia Goldstein was still there as their lawyer. And she told me “You know, we sent Bartók a hundred dollars in those days as extra money in the royalties.” And about a month later, they got a check for a hundred dollars back and a letter saying “You’ve made an error.” You hear that and it sends shivers up your spine. We think “Oh, Bart—k, he’s the staple of repertoire,” but he wasn’t in 1945 when he died. I’ve been very fortunate. John Cage was eating mushrooms until he was in his fifties, certainly. I just feel that God has been very good to me, and the musical public and the musical industry have been very, very good to me. I feel enormously fortunate. That’s really all I can say that makes any sense.

RK: I think it’s been music’s fortune.

SR: Thank you.

Thomas Hampson: Singing American Songs

[Ed. note: This conversation between American baritone Thomas Hampson and Richard Kessler, then the Executive Director of the American Music Center, was originally published on the American Music Center’s website on August 1, 1998. It was the second in a series of interviews entitled “Music In The First Person” published in the year before the launch of NewMusicBox on May 1, 1999. “In The First Person” served as the model for one of the primary components of NewMusicBox which still continues on the site as “Cover.”]

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1. American Song: A Diary of Experiences and Emotions

RICHARD KESSLER: What attracts you to American song?

THOMAS HAMPSON: I think the first thing is, really, what attracts me to song? Song is such a huge and fascinating world, and I never quite understand, especially with “art song,” why it seems to be such a “specialist” idea. To me, song is such a natural mix of thought and symbols expressed through words — poetry — encased in a musical framing that becomes something quite different from either music or a poem. I don’t know why people think that it’s so difficult to be “into” the world of song, or involved with it. Maybe they don’t. But the fascinating part of song — and this is especially true of American songs — is that it immediately becomes a diary of experiences and emotions.

American song especially fascinates me. I consider American song to be comprised not only of American poetry and American music; but it is also incredibly dependent on the social, historical, or literary issues of the epoch that has borne the music and poetry.

Sometimes there are great ironies between poetic sources and compositional sources. When I think of 19th-century poets in 20th-century musical hands, it’s really quite fascinating. Sometimes the music updates the poetry, but most often, it just goes to the heart of the emotion or intellectual effort of that poem, and it transcends time. That’s why I think song is somehow a diary that illuminates our own experiences as human beings, while at the same time reflecting particular times in our nation’s history where an awakening process, the maturation that we’ve been going through for the last couple of hundred years, is particularly poignant.

RK: What about the performer’s issues, the intimacy of performing song in recital? How is that different from being on-stage in front of one or two hundred people?

TH: Well, there is quite a difference, but it’s a difference of emphasis, really. One is macro, one is micro; one is the private thoughts of an individual, and the other is a portrait of the individual in a particular circumstance. I don’t see how you can separate them; it just depends on what you are articulating at that time as a performer.

The performance could portray, in a theatrical sense, the inside life of a character. For instance, if I sing the Winterreise, I may very well convey the kind of private emotion of, say, a character in a Wagner opera. Not the Wanderer, but any one of those characters. Or, conversely, if I’m doing songs that reflect personal thoughts and emotions, my character could turn around and take on a role more suited to a larger opera.

Singing songs would do well as a more substantial study for young opera singers. I think that ballad narration — telling a story or articulating specific emotions so that you almost have to set up your own drama — is an especially valuable and fascinating experience for singers in preparation for the theatrical experience. In the theatrical experience, you are just one part of a larger picture — you’re working in an ensemble situation with other artists, other colleagues, a conductor, and a producer. But in this type of experience, I’ve always found it interesting to define the private, personal story of the character I’m playing. If I’m singing Posa, I think: What sort of shoes does he have? What books has he read? What kind of schooling did he have? What kind of wife did he have? And that’s where background materials can become very interesting, especially for operas that are historically founded, like Don Carlos.

It’s a fun intertwining of both worlds, and, clearly in song, you have a greater expanse of emotion: very quiet; very loud; very dramatic; very personal. Sometimes you sing in the first person, sometimes in the third person, sometimes even in the second person; it can be quite interesting.

RK: I’m going to continue to ask you about American music, but first I’d like to say that I particularly enjoyed your Aaron Copland album with Dawn Upshaw and the SPCO. I love that album; I listen to it regularly.

TH: Well, I appreciate that. I love the album, too. We had a lot of fun doing it and unfortunately, we haven’t worked with Hugh Wolff since. But that was a wonderful experience, and they’re a great band. He had a deft touch. It was fun.

RK: And in your success with the music of Stephen Foster, you, in some ways, highlighted him toward the end of this century in ways that certainly no one else had, and sort of brought him back out to the forefront.

TH: Well, it’s funny; people like Deems Taylor, for instance, were really at the forefront — let’s not forget this guy. I think the fun thing about Foster is that if you say “Stephen Foster,” everybody sort of jumps to an immediate conclusion. He’s really — and I think I’ve used this metaphor before — the trunk of the tree. His life is interesting, and yet the most interesting thing about him is that he probably wasn’t very interesting. It’s really quite astounding what a strange personality this boy had, but he articulated for us a kind of naïve separation from reality, an escape. I think he was more of a musical genius-locus than people give him credit for. I don’t think it’s a huge genius, but there’s a genius in the directness of his music. I think the sentiments that he articulated are more endemic to the 19th century for all races, not only the “white salon balladeer.” He carried an enormous impact for the African-Americans, as well as the Irish immigrants and Scottish immigrants. In a lot of ways, he articulated the immigrant longing in this country as immigrants became citizens.

RK: Well, he offers an opportunity for people to begin to understand that particular time through song. The interesting thing is that people readily head towards books to begin to understand or examine history. They often don’t see that music can present that to them, as well. Foster stands for that. He’s such a potent entry point to that time.

TH: Absolutely.

RK: Which other American composers interest you?

TH: Well, I’ve come across so many interesting ones. I’m fascinated by Charles Griffes. He is still not very well known, but I think the quality of his songs is pretty spectacular. I know his German output better than anything else, but I think he had a lot of French influence. And again, here we come to the diary idea. The reasons why Griffes went from German expressionism into French orientalism were numerous. For one, we can’t forget the tremendous impact of Admiral Perry’s opening of the Far East. This had a huge influence on everyone from Mahler to Van Gogh. A new exotic atmosphere came into play. But also, when the war really hit, even World War I, it was a such nasty time. German was forbidden to be sung in the opera house. And the songs that Griffes had been writing up to that point were based on Heine, Uhland, and Goethe texts, as well as those of his colleagues, like MacDowell. MacDowell was dead by then, but Griffes just stopped in his tracks. There were no more German texts, so they shifted into English and Fiona MacLeod, and into French symbolist, Debussy-esque kind of music. I’m giving a general explanation here, but these things didn’t happen in isolation. Especially in American song, there are always contemporary social historical perspectives that are reflected either through the composer’s eyes, or through the text that the composer then sets. So, it always has sort of a diary feel about it, and Griffes is no different. I think Griffes is fascinating.

Of course, I adore Charles Ives, and I’m amused by him. I think the real study of Ives’s songs is still to be done. I think that it’s unfair, if not unwise, to simply treat him as a block. Although, I would probably say that about every composer. I get so tired, in talking about song in whatever country, of making reference only to the composer. I think it’s wrong, unfair, and limiting in terms of the musical language that the composer found. And Ives is no different. There are a lot of songs that Ives wrote to simply send out to people who didn’t know the difference. And that’s when I get interested in how that worked, because some of the songs are just complete bullshit. He would then write a note that basically said, “If you take this song seriously, then you’re probably stupider than I am.” It’s really quite funny. And there’s also a diary element there, because there are a lot of very personal and ironic remarks that Charles Ives, in his sort of self-deprecating and certainly cynical humor, is sending out in his publications. Rather than just having this 114 book of his, I think someone should just tear it apart and make Italienisches Liederbuch-style dialogues out of different subjects. I tried it once with Dawn Upshaw in a recital; we did and it worked very well. It was fun.

In other early 20th-century music, I think John Duke is a fantastic American composer, and all too unknown. I’m also very fond of John Alden Carpenter, as well as composers like Haggemann. I don’t want to get into a pyramid listing of American composers, but I think Virgil Thomson is a completely forgotten master of the song genre. There are so many songs out there, but the disparate quality is curious: there are a lot of composers who have written some good songs, but there are very few composers who have consistently written good songs. And some of that is not their fault. Some of it is endemic to the period that the composer belonged to. Ernst Bacon wrote some very good songs, and he wrote some very silly songs — silly meaning not great — though they might have been taken more seriously in their time.

There are a couple of wonderful female composers. Elinor Remick Warren is one of my favorites. She wrote fantastic oratorios that I’ve recorded, and also some terrific songs. “We Two” by Walt Whitman is a fantastic song. Also, Celius Dougherty .What was fascinating about doing the Walt Whitman album was going through all sorts of different composers. There are just all sorts of jewels out there. But I think they belong to a particular context, and that’s what I’ve been trying to concentrate on in my programming, and in how I look at American song. I look at it more through epochs and themes and literary circles than through any one composer’s eyes. Even as much as I love Samuel Barber and Charles Ives, I just don’t think that a whole evening of any one composer’s music would do them justice. I think an American composer is always more interesting in the context of either his or her own period, or when paired with a completely contrasting voice. But that’s part of the American spirit anyway — to show where the round side of the edge is, and vice versa. As a culture, we’re always sort of mesmerized by opposites.

2. The New Repertoire: A Paradigm Shift

RK: The core standard repertoire for opera has not expanded significantly since the early part of this century. The same could be said for the orchestral repertoire, where any consistent expansion seems to have ended in the 1950s. What strikes you most about this? Do you think that the coming years will see more new works fully embraced by artist organizations and, most importantly, audiences?

TH: I do. I think there’s a lot of good news out there right now. I actually think the avant-garde is something very exciting and accessible. I’ve certainly listened to a great deal of the avant-garde music and have had some experience as a singer. We’ve got some fantastic songwriters lurking out there. John Musto is fantastic. Ricky Ian Gordon, Stephen Paulus, Richard Danielpour, Mr. Brewbaker (Daniel), and John Adams — I’m so crazy about John Adams. I think the minimalists broke the mold. They were the first ones to really shake us up and say, “Yes, there is something completely different out here to be had.” Steve Reich started all of that, and then, of course, Philip Glass. If I have a wrong historical perspective, please forgive me — I’m just a stupid singer!

Something very exciting started happening in the late 1970s and early 1980s that broke us out of what seemed to me to be a backwards-looking, self-defeating academic fight. There just seemed to be such a huge exploration of theories, from about the 1930s to the 1960s, that broke the music scene down into polemics and schools. Sometimes some very interesting things happened, without a doubt, but most of it was probably brain food more than emotional food. And song probably belongs more to emotional substance than to intellectual substance. Now, that betrays a certain personal attitude. But what’s happened now, with breaking out of different schools of thought — with the polytonalities, polyrhythms, and even polymotivations of thoughts, and the way the poems are structured and set to music — reinstates the value of melody, which I think is inextricably linked to the life of song. And when I say melody, I mean that we have better ears now. We now recognize things as melody that we perhaps wouldn’t have recognized in the 1950s. It’s curious that Samuel Barber, who was so vehemently chastised as old-fashioned and unnecessarily romantic, is now recognized as an absolute genius for his melodic writing, and certainly for voice leading and counterpoint, as well. The man was just true to a different calling. He’s probably having a much stronger impact now than he did during his lifetime.

RK: You know, it’s interesting that you mention Steve Reich and Philip Glass. I interviewed Steve Reich just a couple of weeks ago.

TH: That must’ve been fascinating.

RK: It was! Steve’s career emerged not through the music world, but through the art world. He got his first breaks in the 1960s through art galleries, where, in some ways, the otherwise established music world was inaccessible to him. All of a sudden, he was able to key into another audience. The audience at the galleries seemed open to hearing something different.

TH: He also had a tremendous break, of course, with the electronic world as well.

RK: Absolutely.

TH: I’ve had a couple of long conversations with Luciano Berio about this subject, and also about Steve Reich, of whom he’s very fond.

RK: Yes, he was at one point a student of Berio’s. There’s a remarkable anecdote where Berio was looking over some of Reich’s work, and Reich was sort of struggling to write tonal music. He had still been experimenting with atonal work, and was just beginning to find his voice as a composer. Berio just looked at the score and said, “If you want to write tonal music, why don’t you just write tonal music?”

TH: Yeah, exactly! That’s sounds like Luciano. If it’s a good tune, write it!

RK: I’m going to ask a question that’s off the beaten path, but it’s been provoked by something you said. Earlier you spoke about melody. I think you are certainly correct that melody is emerging more than ever before in contemporary concert music, but in pop music, melody appears to be less important than ever before. In rap music and other forms like ska, it seems that melody and harmony take a back seat to rhythm.

TH: Well, I would have to agree with you. I find it in some ways amusing. What’s happened is that the musical structure of pop music has become infinitely less interesting than it was in the 1970s. Think of what Steely Dan was writing — Asia — and even Blood Sweat and Tears or Fleetwood Mac. Fleetwood Mac! I went to High School listening to Fleetwood Mac’s “Bare Trees,” which was one of those earth-shattering albums! It’s unbelievable! These guys were writing serious music. Even Eddy Gomez, the fantastic jazz drummer, is a Juilliard graduate; and a lot of these guys are Juilliard hacks — and I mean that in the best sense of the word.

RK: I understand that. I’m a Juilliard graduate.

TH: But what irritates me a little bit — or perhaps I find it curious — is that a lot of this music on Broadway which is getting raves and winning Tonys is just simply innocuous. People look at a Jerome Kern score and say, “What am I supposed to do with this heady music?” and I just find that absurd.

And then there is the whole rap movement. I mean, if you actually want to get to rap, then go back and look at the Monteverdi madrigals. Every generation probably thinks themselves a little too clever, and I do think one of the great challenges at the end of the 20th century is, in fact, to discover the humility of tradition. We take ourselves so seriously, and assume that everything that we come up with is really cutting-edge and has never been done before. That’s just not true. Maybe it’s because we haven’t paid attention to historical perspectives. We think that all of our political problems are so unique. Sometimes I wonder if we haven’t sort of thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Although, jazz has certainly gone its own way. I think that jazz has probably had the most significant effect on classical music over that last fifteen or twenty years of any type of music.

RK: It’s remarkable.

TH: I think it’s fascinating; it’s wonderful. And the Americans embrace it. Over here in Europe, they’re still fighting the battle of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. But it’s getting better. EMI is doing a huge competition to help contemporary composers, and there’s going to be big play-off in April. I’ll go sit on a jury and we’ll decide what piece works best. The fun part is that there are three CD’s with nine different composers and their works — some people I’ve never heard of, and some people I have. When I sit and listen to these different musical ideas, it is curious that with practically all of them, the thing that immediately grabs you — and this goes back to your point — is the manipulation of pulse. That manipulation either accents or “detoxifies” the harmonic ingenuity. But in some ways, it seems to grab people more, and it seems to be more accessible. We’re living in a time when that seems to be more relevant than harmony. I’m not sure what else we can do with harmony within the system that hasn’t already been done; there’s nothing shocking left.

RK: I agree.

TH: And maybe that’s actually good, because I think that audacity for the sake of audacity is pretty boring. It’s like Confucius saying that boredom is the endless search for novelty. It may very well be that we’ll finally give up on that and actually start trying to articulate the human experience through music again. Who knows?

3. Arts Education Programs and the Future of Music

RK: Well, some of these things run in cycles. But pop music is another story. There was an recent article in The New York Times about pop music and the recording industry. It said that kids who are purchasing albums today may purchase the debut album of an artist, but are not necessarily interested in becoming a fan; they won’t necessarily pick up the second or third CD of a given band or solo act. It also said that the promotion of pop music had become focused on individual songs, rather than on albums and the development of careers. Some of the reason that they believe this was happening is that the corporations that own the record companies are not willing to allow the companies to spend the resources necessary to develop the artist’s careers. In the case of a Bruce Springsteen, it took a number of albums for him to start to make it; that’s probably the case for most artists. This is a profound change in the pop world, but it also says something more general about people listening to music.

TH: Well, that’s a huge subject, and I think it’s endemic not just to the pop world, but also to the book world. I heard the exact same argument on “Book Span” — great authors saying, “Well, if I were under the same kind of stress that young authors are under today!” Investing in careers and talent is no longer interesting in the book industry or the pop industry, and that’s also exactly what is happening — what has already happened, to a great degree — in the classical industry.

A lot of it is due to an overriding belief that if someone is business-clever or understands the ebb and flow of bottom-line charts, that somehow that’s more important and responsible than any hobby they may be into, be it reading books or listening to music. I think we’re experiencing a flip of the needle kind of thing. We’ve gone to the drastic other side where the bean counters are suddenly dictating the form of the business. And yet those same bean counters wouldn’t even have a job if they hadn’t been inaugurated by people with a great romantic spirit of wanting to try to record music, write music, or write books. I do think that the needle is going to flip back a little bit; not because I’m such an optimist, because I’m probably not. I like to sort of grovel in melancholy like anyone else! But I honestly think that we’re in a very exciting time right now, a hot bed of innovation. With the “everything goes” mentality, someone is going to spring up with something very clever in terms of uniting interesting songwriters and music writers with publications and distributions.

We’re going to crack the paradigm problem. The old paradigm is certainly being shifted and it’s causing some tremendous pain, some of which you’ve already articulated. But at the same time, we are going push through it. We are going to do something new. We’re going to put something better together. We’re going to figure out a way to get record sales up by getting the prices to go down, and if the distribution is correct, we can do it. It is going to take a certain amount of readjustment to the notion of education and of normality, certainly.

And some of the great old sacred cows may have to go. You earlier referred to the lack of change in the symphonic and opera repertoire, which to some extent is true. But if there has been a change, a significant change or new breath, it has certainly happened in the last five or ten years. And that’s very exciting. One of the reasons that the time for innovation is so ripe is that we’ve actually had more new operas written now than fifteen or twenty years ago. I know of more new operas being written now, and they are truly operas in the American operatic sense.

RK: Well, one of the questions, especially for us at the American Music Center, is that there’s been a tremendous amount of commissioning, particularly over the last half of the century, yet the number of works that have entered the repertoire is remarkably small. Why?

TH: It is curious: I’ve been part of some interesting Uraufführungen (world premieres) and you sit there and say, “Well, is this going to become part of the repertoire?” I think everybody’s excited to have that first shot, to have that first listening, but it is similar to the Danielpour piece (Elegies): it’s a very good piece, but is it necessarily going to be something that someone else is going to want to do? Part of the problem is that the orchestra of the next organization has to say, “Aha! This is a great piece our public wants to hear.” Yet even if that’s the case, the organization has no bells and whistles to sell it with. So everything about the piece becomes more determined than the piece itself. That belies a marketing mentality cancer that we’ve got to break. That’s the paradigm that has to shift. Are we selling subscriptions series to people, or are we providing people with the repertoire they want to hear that season? There’s a big problem there.

RK: I went to a performance recently of Joseph Schwantner‘s Concerto for Percussion, which I believe is a remarkable piece of music. I immediately thought that this work could easily become standard repertoire. But you really hit the nail on the head: there are questions of marketing paradigms, of audiences vs. individuals. There are issues of audience development.

TH: Well, this is what happens when you take the guts out of a little arts education program, which is what America used to have; programs where free and open dialogue for elementary and high school music students was not only offered but also was considered viable, valuable, and interesting. You didn’t have to become a musician, and you didn’t have to be particularly intelligent, but you sang songs, you listened to things, you might have been taken to concerts and music programs. But now, all those programs have been cut. Nobody can afford them anymore.

In Spokane, WA, where I come from, I wonder if they bus kids in to afternoon rehearsals of the symphony. In whatever city it might be, I can imagine the two things that would happen. One: the schools can’t afford the gasoline for the buses. Two: the kids are so incredibly unruly that they honestly don’t know how to behave in a rehearsal. They think that the opera house or the symphony center is the same place as the cinema, where they can leave popcorn on the floor. Another problem is that the minute you say rehearsals, the orchestra unions come in and say, “Wait a minute. If you’re going to have kids listening to rehearsals, that means there has to be one extra rehearsal, because it has to be a real performance, as well, and it has to be top-quality.”

If we don’t have a radical shift in the basic attitude toward what a normal hearing experience is, and the intrinsic value of it, then it’s going to be the short road. And that does give me some concern. Arts education is no less valuable as a collective training than school sports. It’s just as important to explore the imagination through literature, poetry, and song as it is to develop young bodies, and develop attitudes of teamwork and a team mentality through sports. And I have absolutely no grind against sports.

RK: It’s not an either/or.

TH: Exactly, it’s not an either/or. But the people who are cutting the programs are making it into an either/or. It always comes down to the “bottom line” problem. But the real bottom line is that every major genius personality in the 20th century — even dear Stephen Hawking, who wasn’t always terrifically handicapped in his life — has been a romantic, liberal arts-dedicated, renaissance-thinking person. Einstein’s letters contain some of the most beautiful thoughts, not only on the intimate details of his very fascinating personal life, but also on the importance of humanity, great imagination — and that the only thing limiting us is how we limit ourselves. Yet, we take all of that away from students and say, “Oh, no. They have to learn the bytes and the bits, and run laps and play baseball. Other things like music and languages are just nonsense. That’s hobby time.”

Art history is, of course, the worst. We wonder why they need to be able to look at a painting and tell if it’s from the 15th or the 17th century. “Giotto was certainly an interesting guy, but how can he justify his existence for me in 1997?” Here is that societal conceit I was talking about. And this year, so many people are saying, “Well, what relevance does Franz Schubert have for me today?” To me, that is one of the most audaciously “respectless” questions!

RK: It’s a tremendous conceit of the times.

TH: Well, yes. My responsibility is to ask the question, “What relevance do I have to Franz Schubert?” And it’s not just because I have so much respect for him. I feel that we have a responsibility to understand those that have been here before us. We’re not experiencing anything new — the paradigm is different; the context is different, the tools are perhaps different — but the motivation is still there. You still get up and put one leg in your trousers first and whether it’s a toga or a pair of Calvin Klein jeans, it doesn’t matter. This is something Joseph Campbell was treating. All of these things find a tremendous fruition in music and literature. And then you get to the intimate, boiling down to song. And I think all of these huge things that we are talking about, are in fact, endemic to song in its final form. And that’s what poetry is. The language of that, and music is the context in which that dialogue and that manipulation of poetic context becomes so fascinating. Nothing, as far as I’m concerned, lives in isolation. It just doesn’t. But that’s the false mentality of academia. That’s exactly what the problem is. We keep thinking that, by grinding on things tighter, in marketing or otherwise, by defining it closer and getting more specific — even the critical world is doing this to us — that we’re going to come to a greater illumination. We’re not. We’re going to come into building neighborhoods with these ubiquitous cul-de-sacs of big houses. That’s what we’re getting into, and that’s very dangerous. That’s one of the most exciting things about the web, because the web has just blown that wide open.

RK: And it will continue.

TH: Absolutely. And, of course, there’s the problem of trusting what’s on the web, but that will weed itself out to some extent. Criticism will become more ubiquitous, which is very useful because it should then become a point of dialogue and not a point of polemic. That’s what criticism used to be. This sort of table-waving beckmesserian attitude that we have in general criticism today is so unhealthy.

RK: It’s less a part of a process helping to further define a field; it’s no longer a means to an end.

TH: No, it’s a means unto its own end.

RK: Absolutely. But I do want you to know that you’ve given us some tremendous quotes about arts education and the need for it. The good news about arts education today is that the support for it is growing tremendously. Programs are being restored in ways that are much better than what had been there before: the integrated curriculum approach, a liberal arts humanities-based approach to the arts where kids are exploring, learning, creating in music, in theater. There are many truly remarkable things taking place, such as the increasing number of artists are going into the classrooms, supporting and extending learning.

TH: Recently, I collaborated with the “I Hear America” singing tape. The idea is to get the video in schools and libraries across the country as back-up material. They said, “Yes, well, back-up material is fine, but we’d like to develop it with you as a teaching tool.” So, Carla Maria [Carla Maria Sullwold is Hampson’s personal assistant] and I are having those kinds of discussions with WNET and some other forums — similar to what you’ve been talking about.

RK: The best definition I ever heard of curriculum was: a way of life. And there’s always the question of how one enters the curriculum. What kind of entry points exist for students at various ages so that they can digest and incorporate this material, make it their own.

TH: Yes.

RK: I read that you had received an award over at the National Arts Club, and you had given a speech about the power of the imagination. At that point I knew that I had a book that I was going to send to you, written by Maxine Green, who is going to do an essay for the American Music: In The First Person. She’s a professor emeritus of Teachers College, one of the people who created the Lincoln Center Institute, and a true leader in exploring the role of the imagination in education and life: how the imagination is activated, how to connect with it. Maxine’s book is titled: Releasing The Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change

TH: I’d love to have it.

RK: I’ll send it off.

4. The New Audience: Visual + Aural

RK: Recent studies have indicated — and these studies have been widely disseminated — that audiences for opera are not only growing but getting younger. What do you attribute this to?

TH: Yes, isn’t that exciting news? Well, perhaps we are seeing some of the success of these arts programs taking hold. Talking completely as a lay person here, I get the feeling that, not only is there a general fascination in opera, with the circus attitude of it, or “phenominality” of it all — it’s a huge art form — but I honestly think that there is also a reinvigorated interest in the dramatic context and theatrical experience within the musical realm. In some ways, we may very well be seeing some of this rejuvenation in opera because of a boredom with the rather platitudinous works that have been happening in music theater lately. I would like to believe that there is an instinctual need for substance that goes in waves. There’s a group mentality that’s going on, especially in the States, that says, “No, there’s got to be something else that is more reflective, that is deeper, that is more intense, that has something more to offer.” And opera does offer a theatrical music experience so complex and enriching because, it requires you to think and feel on several different levels. I’ve never really understood why people have thought that opera was inaccessible. I don’t think it’s inaccessible — I think it is sometimes difficult to understand.

What is also curious is that the studies show that people who go to concerts are not necessarily likely to buy records, but that people who buy records probably will go to a concert. In other words, the souvenir buyer is not really of prime importance to the record industry. It also hints at the distinct difference between the electronic experience and the visual experience. To me, the only worthwhile-ness of all this media is that it highlights the visual experience: the orchestra tunes up, the lights go out, the curtain comes up, and you’re into it.

RK: Yes, well, audiophiles spend exorbitant amounts of money. There’s a particular adjective: palpable, the “palpability” issue. How palpable? How close is a recording, even though it can never be close enough? How close is it to the real thing? How palpable is it? And the continued quest to get the next digital to analog converter or the next set of speakers or sub-woofer that will make it closer…

TH: I go in the other direction. I’m still hooked on some of those great old LP’s. I know they’re collector’s items. I’m a huge old-time audio nut.

RK: There’s very little that sounds better, there’s no doubt about it.

TH: Exactly. What’s fun is to pit the best of the old against the best of the new. The best of the old always wins. The most extraordinary experience I’ve ever had in my life was with a fantastic 4-track stereo, with a reel-to-reel tape of some of those Chicago Symphony performances that then came out on living stereo. To hear them on 4-track tape, reel-to-reel tape — I think London put them out then — was unbelievable. You really heard the third cellist sniffling because he had a cold. They created an incredible stereo picture with that huge boom mike on top of the conductor — back when the conductors had to know something about balance.

RK: Well, those Mercury recordings, some of them, let’s say Kubelik and the Chicago Symphony, are absolutely remarkable. They are just now getting re-released on CD. This is what people continue to hope that the digital medium will become, something closer to the analog medium. But again, yesterday there was another article in The New York Times — it may have been the same article we were talking about earlier — that talked about the Lincoln Center Library removing its LP collection because things are now on CD.

TH: I think that’s a huge mistake. It’s not even a matter of the hiss; because most people don’t hear it. It’s just that a lot of people don’t think it’s valuable to hear the air of the hall. And that’s exactly what I want to hear; that’s what’s exciting to me! It’s kind of like what Mahler said about music. He said most of what music has to do with is not in the notes, and I just find that so absolutely revelatory.

RK: Unfortunately it’s something that many people are confused about.

TH: But I think we’re living in a time of a — God forbid the phrase — new age consciousness, because every generation is itself an inherently new age. I mean, I do happen to be very esoterically inclined, but I think there probably is a new age. I don’t know if you read the book Generations, but it discusses an interesting paradigm that comes back every few hundred years. We are now coming to a search for depth and context, a sort of “where’s the meat” attitude, that is splashing into the arts, and is certainly splashing into American music. I think we’re on the brink of some really interesting developments. All the horrifying numbers are pointing to something else we haven’t quite figured out yet.

RK: Yes, it’s hard to see what’s coming, but there are interesting things developing. How do you feel the new technologies will alter the way music is created, performed, and accessed?

TH: Well, I think this is an interesting take, because your question is actually more about how technology has affected the way that music is performed. And certainly technology, especially in the recording industry, has always been the saving grace of numbers. I mean, let’s not forget that the LP marketed in the 1970s, or actually the early 1980s, was just about to become extinct. There were huge problems, and then, all of a sudden, here came this digital process with these little silver disks, and of course, it was amazing. It made everybody’s systems sound fantastic. But as to how it has affected the creation of music, you would have thought that it would’ve given birth to more composers, because records theoretically should’ve become more ubiquitous. What is curious is that what the digital process and CDs have actually done is opened up the archives. A lot of things were simply not “hearable” anymore. There were radio programs and LP’s that would never have been listened to which suddenly turned into this great phenomenon of “never released, never heard before recordings from some Tuesday in 1944.” And that’s exciting.

Somehow, I feel that this, too, is part of this paradigm shift that I’m talking about. We’ve got to hook up all of these things to make them useful, not detrimental. In terms of record sales, why should Abaddo with a new Beethoven necessarily be a competition to Furtwängler or Mengelberg. It should be instead an extension, a dialogue. But criticism is still caught up in marketing and still caught up with, “What’s the best Beethoven cycle?” Part of the reason that they do that is to sell donuts, and another part is because nobody is really concentrating on what Beethoven was doing. They are instead concentrating on the performance of Beethoven. Again, it comes back to the question of what relevance Beethoven has for me in 1997, and we’ve got to shift that the other way around.

Technology should’ve had a liberating effect on composers, as well, but the problem with technology is that we’re still somewhat captivated by the event of the production, rather than what’s being produced. Then it’s back to the mentality of “the first performance of something in New York is not going to be interesting in Los Angeles,” because, God forbid, its already had it’s first performance in New York.

It seems that the new technologies have had an influence on electronic music, though I don’t know anything about it. I’m not particularly a friend of synthesizers. For me, electronic music is, for the most part, too accurate. I really like the plus-minus quotient of any note that’s being played. The electronic reproduction of music, either visually and aurally or just aurally, is something that cannot be underestimated. We will have to see.

The Internet and also Internet broadcasts with FM broadcasting are going to have a huge effect, no doubt, and probably a positive one. It’s most likely going to first have an amazing effect on licensing. What it also might very well do is reinvigorate radio across the country, which I think is vastly needed.

RK: Well, yes, a different form.

TH: Exactly. And then you also have something that’s a bit more ubiquitous, and I think that the more ubiquity you have, the greater the listening experience, which in turn, fortifies new composers.

5. The Internet: A Launching Pad for New Music

RK: I’ve been toying with the idea of launching a competition of music written for the Internet. I’ve mentioned it to people and they’ve said, “Well, what exactly does that mean?”

TH: My thoughts exactly.

RK: “What exactly does that mean?” Well, the funny thing is, I’m not sure. And maybe that’s good. Some of the bandwidth issues will begin to be solved so that we’ll be able to access more music in shorter amounts of time. Then all sorts of things will come into play. You’ll be able to access video and audio. There’ll be texts. Who knows what will come down the pike. And my feeling is that I’d like to sort of put this competition out there and leave it open. We would certainly work with some of the technology corporations, and see what composers would come up with. Who knows what it might mean. I don’t know whether we’ll move on this sooner or later, but I’ve been thinking that this is the vanguard of a new era. People will start to access music through their computer and their television, and will begin to create new sounds and merge text and audio and visual elements in ways that might never have been done before.

TH: Well, this is more down my path. To me, the big challenge is actually in reinvigorating what already exists. I’m not sure we need to create a new music, but reinvigorating the catalogue can be done simply through the Internet, with its immediate accessibility of audiovisual material, which connects the dots for people. This is really exciting that you’re able to do what you’re doing on the net; that there’s a whole new kind of cyber world out there. It’s amazing to be able to turn on a new television set and be able to pull up immediate screen information about what you’re listening to and why you’re listening to it. It all has a “connectibility.” You might even be able to also simultaneously pull up some sort of connective visual art, adding another element to the imaginative process. Although it sounds like bells and whistles, it actually could become a more integral renaissance experience. It’s what concert life should be about. It should be tied to any community’s basic connection to their museums and their symphonies. I find this very exciting.

And bandwidth is one thing, but quite frankly all of this can’t happen until we get enough support going from FM stations. I live at the Essex House and I have said to them, “Why can’t you people put together cable radio? When I turn on classical radio and walk around my room, putting my clothes away, why must the signal migrate? What am I supposed to do? Wear an aluminum hat so this doesn’t happen?” It’s absurd! And they agreed. Of course they need to do that, but it’s simply not a priority for them. They said that cost is the first problem since most people don’t even listen to the radio. Look at New York! We’ve got two stations, at best; actually, more like one and a half! What we’re talking about here, of course, when we talk about repertoire, is programming, accessibility, and ubiquity. And so, we’re obviously talking about programmers and radio stations who are just scared to death of anything but Vivaldi‘s Four Seasons. It would be interesting to do a study of some of the major classisal stations-simply to know how many of the symphonies of Mozart or the songs of Schubert they have actually ever played. I understand exactly the mentality and the problems involved; I’m just saying this is the challenge for me.

RK: For years, I have been involved in classical music. But, today I turn on the classical radio stations and recognize few of the pieces! I often marvel at that.

TH: Scary.

RK: They find the most banal pieces, the things that are really nothing but wallpaper music, because that music might be played in a restaurant as background music, or at a party. As a sort of extension of this subject, Marilyn Bergman is going to do a column for us. During a recent discussion about the nature of her column for In The First Person, she talked about living in an era where people are not hearing as wide a range of music as they did in previous times. Not too long ago, you might have been riding in a car and you’d turn the dial and come across all sorts of musical styles. And, all of a sudden, you might hit on a sound that you’d never heard before and discover something new. And who knows where that might lead you. But in this day and age, she talked about people having their radio stations preset for a lifetime, thus limiting or eliminating their musical discoveries.

TH: Oh, sure. Environmental control.

RK: She also wanted to write about what that means in terms of people perhaps going through a lifetime and never hearing Mozart. That returns to the issue of arts education and the vital importance of being exposed to and participating in many different forms of music, art, and literature.

6. Mentors and Collaborators

TH: Well, along these lines, if you want a great reinforcement to your argument about carrying forth traditions and yet going into the future, I wanted to ask if you’ve been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and been through the Degas collection.

RK: Yes, I have.

TH: The great artist is contemporary, yet also incorporates aspects of his great mentors. We tend to think that everybody lives in isolation, and should live in isolation. There’s an absolutely ridiculous notion in voice pedagogy that you shouldn’t listen to recordings of singers because, God forbid, you might imitate them! But this isn’t a joke; it’s the prevalent attitude of probably 80% of the voice teachers across the country. I’m about to write a huge scathing letter to the National Association of Teachers of Singing because I finally realize that this attitude is more pervasive than I thought it was. I thought it was just a couple of low-sided individuals, but apparently it’s just become a standard attitude. Have you ever heard of anything so absurd in your life?

RK: Many instrumental teachers deal with music and technique in way that is rigidly separate. They wouldn’t necessarily use a Bach piece to teach both technique and music. Some teachers don’t see technique for what it really is, nothing but a means to an end, the end being the music.

TH: These are the same people that don’t understand that, as fascinating as a triad in its manipulations can be, there’s always a bigger purpose for which a triad exists. And if you can’t play a triad properly, or understand it, then you probably won’t ever get to why it exists. And it’s the same thing with singing. Everybody wants to learn how to sing but why do you want to learn how to sing? What are you trying to say? “Well, uh…whatever I’m being paid for.” It’s crazy.

RK: Well, especially with young kids, children left to their own devices will create music spontaneously. They just start singing.

TH: Yes. People like Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin just fascinate me. I wish I had their kind of talent. I just marvel at what they can bring out of somebody, all of us actually, to help us realize what innate creative spirits we have.

RK: Last week, you premiered Elegies by Richard Danielpour. What was it like to work on that brand new song cycle?

TH: Well, I’ve had the privilege, at least four or five times, of being involved with composers as they’re writing something. It’s always illuminating to hear how different people hear music; to hear how the creator hears his own music. And, sort of an extension of that is working with people like Berio or Bernstein, who have such huge intellects. Especially someone like Berio, who, I think, actually sometimes hears the music as a composer and as a musician in his head — both subjectively in his imagination and objectively as far as what’s happening around him. This has a huge influence on him as a conductor, of course. It’s a fascinating process.

Also, to be around people like Stephen Paulus or Conrad Susa is inspiring. Conrad Susa’s operatic performances are especially fascinating because they really make you think about what it must’ve been like back then. Some of these guys were working with Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Verdi recording their works, and you realize what a fluid process it is. The longer something lives, the more importance it takes on — I mean, Mozart operas become something tantamount to the Bible or the Koran. God forbid you should manupulate an eighth note. Of course, now we have schools of thought on how eighth notes of Mozart should be pronounced versus eight notes of sombody else’s.

It seems to me, though, that the disciples of the prophets tend to screw things up a bit. Any creative intellect is essentially some kind of prophet, and it’s always the fluidity and the compromise, the accessibility and the functionality of their creation that seems to preoccupy them more than anything else. The creativity always seems to be part of the process of expression. And as that piece endures, it becomes more a part of the performance tradition, and the expression becomes something that is in juxtaposition to the last expression of that piece. But the first couple of times out, it’s whether or not you actually are playing the piece correctly; you’re simply trying to play what is written.

The process of working with a composer seems to be infinitely more flexible, more filled with dialogue, more loving, more interesting, than what we often do to pieces that are twenty-five years old or a hundred and fifty years old, where it’s more a matter of what school or style the piece belongs to. So, in working with Richard Danielpour, I saw some of the articulation of text and discovered what he was really after. It’s very frustrating for these guys; in fact, I can’t imagine anything worse. Can you imagine trying to articulate what these guys want to say about human experience with a bunch of sticks and dots inside of a bunch of lines? It’s absurd. And that’s why somebody like Mahler says, “Look, folks, it’s about what’s between the notes. That’s what’s interesting in music.”

It was interesting to have conversations with Richard about how I articulate text and use words, and especially the way I feel about language. A lot of our words are more beautiful than we give them credit for. And Richard actually changed some of the notation based upon that, not very much, but some. And that kind of creative dialogue, the flexibility of the search for expression is what rings my chime; is what’s so wonderful about working with contemporary composers.

RK: That’s a beautiful statement, really. I was at the opening night of the The Rake’s Progress, I remember you were also there. I was startled by the performance, it seemed so new and fresh. It seemed like a world premiere, as if it had just been written. I enjoyed it very much.

TH: I did too. I actually felt kind of the same way. Julius Rudel was sitting with me, and I said to him, “Why isn’t this better known?” Well, I know why it’s not better known, but it just seemed to be infinitely more accessible than it used to be. I think the problem has always been the book. As fascinating as it often is, there are some real stretches of the imagination, and some philosophical subjects that just don’t live innately in the piece. You have to know what he’s trying to say, and then see it in a metaphorical context on the stage. And that always involves more work than most opera audiences are willing to do.

RK: Without a doubt.

TH: So they always sort of giggle at the bread machine and chortle at the beard, you know. I thought John Miller’s production was fantastic. The asylum set was like a Hogarth painting come to life — it just drove me nuts.

7. The Sound of Music: Environmental Control and Toys

RK: What are you listening to today?

TH: Well, if I turn on the radio at the Essex House, I listen to whatever’s on. At night I like to listen to jazz. I probably won’t listen to radio performances of operas or symphonies. I tend to be more of an environmental control person in my apartment, meaning that I have CD’s around me all the time. And other than either searching for program ideas or “awaring” myself to a possibility, I don’t listen to very much vocal music. I tend to listen to, in the classical field, probably more piano music than anything. I’m a huge piano freak and have my favorite pianists. I’m wild about Friedrich Gulda which might seem to be a contradiction since I also think that Alfred Brendel is pretty amazing, and of course, the two hate each other.

RK: What stereo equipment are you using?

TH: It’s all very high-end. I’m using a Threshold ClassA pre-amp and amp, Vienna Acoustic speakers, Meridian CD player that is from Great Britian and a SME30 turntable also from Great Britain. What equipment are you using?

RK: Well, I don’t have a turntable. I’ve got a pair of speakers that you can’t buy anymore, called vortex screens that Albert Von Schweikert designed. He now has a new company company, and is hugely successful. I bought directly from him; I think he built them in his garage!

TH: Are these the panels, the tall panels?

RK: No, they’re big boxes — just big dynamic speakers. But they were a great bargain at the time and one of my first big purchases in the audio world. I’m also running a McCormick DNA-1 amp, and a McCormick TLC passive pre-amp. And I’ve got the Parasound DAC2000 — top of the line D/A converter, and the PS Audio Lambda CD transport. That’s the whole thing.

TH: That’s some pretty serious equipment.

RK: It’s nice, considering that when I was younger and couldn’t even afford a boom box. I had to sneak time on my roommate’s equipment!

TH: Well, we certainly support the old theorem: the only difference between men and boys is the cost of their toys.

RK: Absolutely. Well, I really do want to thank you. This has been an absolute pleasure!

TH: We certainly touched on so many subjects. What you’re doing is great and I hope I can help.

RK: Well, you already have. Thank you!

Paul Kellogg: Life Beyond Bohème, Carmen, and Traviata

[Ed. note: This conversation between Paul Kellogg, then Artistic Director of both Glimmerglass Opera (now the Glimmerglass Festival) and New York City Opera, and Richard Kessler, then the Executive Director of the American Music Center, was originally published on the American Music Center’s website on October 1, 1998. It was the third in a series of interviews entitled “Music In The First Person” that was published in the year before the launch of NewMusicBox on May 1, 1999. “In The First Person” served as the model for one of the primary components of NewMusicBox which still continues on the site as “Cover.”]

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RICHARD KESSLER: What it is like to lead two very different opera companies?

PAUL KELLOGG: I’m often asked this question, and I always have to correct the question itself because actually I’m leading the City Opera as general and artistic director, but serving Glimmerglass as artistic director only. I’m not handling the day to day business, which is fortunate. Frankly, I couldn’t possibly do both. But it’s a situation that’s unique, as far as I know — it offers opportunities for both companies that are in themselves fairly unique. For Glimmerglass, in rural, undeveloped, upstate New York, the cooperation between City Opera and Glimmerglass provides secure, reliable funding every year because we share production costs. For City Opera it provides the opportunity to bring well-developed productions to the State Theater stage. It’s very expensive and very difficult to rehearse at City Opera — we simply can’t get the stage enough. But Glimmerglass has a different situation where the stage is available. It’s a house that’s controlled by the company itself, and not shared with anyone else. So we have time to develop productions there, look at them on stage, decide what works and what doesn’t work, and make changes, and this results in a much tighter, better, more physical production. It also gives the director and cast an opportunity to get a work solidly in their minds and bodies by the time the work opens. All in all, it’s a very good cooperation between the two companies.

RK: How do you view the role of opera in contemporary society?

PK: It’s odd. Five years ago I might have said that the role of opera is decreasing in importance; that other things are coming along to capture the imagination of young people; that television has had a nearly fatal influence on the performing arts generally and on opera in particular; that the audience was aging. Now I see things quite differently. It has something to do with a real explosion of interest in opera among young people. I’m not entirely sure why this is happening, but it is clearly there — certainly at these two houses. It may have something to do with the fact that opera here is perceived as being presented in a contemporary, relevant way. It may also have to do with repertory choices. I have to say that at City Opera it is not contemporary music that draws young people most enthusiastically, but Bohème, Carmen, and Butterfly — the standard, traditional dating operas. The effect of getting people into an opera house for the first time is that very often — I won’t say inevitably, but certainly very often-they decide to come back. And overall, through all our repertory, there are more young people in this house now than I’ve seen over the years. So what does this say about the role of opera in contemporary society? I think that these people are seeing that opera presents ideas and feelings in a way that isn’t just intellectual, and that isn’t just abstract and that it has access to our deepest beings through both the intellect and the feelings, which delivers a kind of double force. Perhaps for that reason we’re seeing a more open and more receptive audience than a few years ago.

RK: In every one of these interviews we are asking a few questions that remain constant from interview to interview. For instance: what music are you listening to today? It’s interesting: Thomas Hampson started talking about Reba McEntire (although that never comment never made it into the final interview). Steve Reich mentioned Arvo Pärt. We’ve asked a variation of this question to every interviewee so far.

This next question has to do with the repertoire. For the most part the core stand of the opera repertoire has not expanded significantly since the early part of this century. For the orchestra, (for the symphonic form it’s a little bit later), what strikes you most about this? Do you think that in the years to come we will see more new works fully embraced by artists, organizations, and, most importantly, audiences?

PK: Of course opera lost its preeminence as an entertainment form in this century. There are other art forms: films, television (if it can be called an art form these days, although it has the potential to be)…

RK: It is on occasion…

PK: Theater, the musical comedy: all of these things compete, in a sense, for people’s time. I suppose something more or less moribund can’t be expected to grow. However, there has frequently been a lag between the creation of a work and wide public acceptance. One can’t really expect a new piece to jump into the core repertory immediately. I haven’t fathomed just why opera audiences in this century, particularly in this country, became so conservative unless it has to do with the growing aura of elitism surrounding opera, and its vast expense to produce which bred timidity in producers. This timidity seems to exist less where government funding is secure and generous, but the opera audience remains in large part tradition-bound even there.

Then too new music for a long time was associated with something dry and academic and tonal and foreign to the experience of most operagoers, and a wide suspiciousness developed. Happily a great deal of good contemporary composition is moving in the direction of accessibility, which will help. We hope to make the public aware of this direction and much of the fine work that’s already been written and neglected.

RK: The diversity among the writing is remarkable at this point.

PK: Absolutely.

RK: Although a gap still remains. The whole reason we at the Center have decided to create an Internet magazine for new music is because we feel that there’s a tremendous lack of communication sources specifically geared for new music. There are many people out there with negative perceptions of new music that were forged in the 1950s/60s; they still have a perception of new music and of opera — and I think that’s part of what you were talking about — a narrow perception of opera.

PK: Part of the problem is that new music grew into an intellectual ghetto and lost its popular audience. Like everybody else and every other activity in our society, people are nervous about intellectualizing; they’re uncomfortable in an atmosphere that seems heavily intellectualized. To break down that barrier is one of our many responsibilities now in producing opera.

RK: What are your plans here at City Opera for the next few years? I know that you have some very interesting plans afoot — with artists like Terence McNally and Michael Torke.

PK: Absolutely. Well, we have commissioned new works, and are talking to other composers about works in all sorts of compositional and dramatic styles. The new work that’s already underway involves three young-ish American composers, Michael Torke, Deborah Drattel, and Robert Beaser, each writing one-act operas to libretti by established American playwrights: Terence McNally, Wendy Wasserstein and A.R. Gurney, all centering around incidents in Central Park. I think that’s really a lovely project — we’re all having great fun with it. We’ll be producing a new work being written in another vein by Charles Wuorinen to a libretto by James Fenton based on the Salmon Rushdie novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories that will be coming along toward the end of the year 2000. I’m talking to other composers about work as well. Tobias Picker‘s Emmeline this season had a great success in this very large theater. One of the things that we face at the State Theater, which has 2700 seats and is expensive to operate in, is that it’s a major financial undertaking for us to put on a new work that has no built-in audience. We do it, however, because we believe it’s our obligation to, and because we like the work, and because we want the public to know what it is, and to get to learn to like it. How are they going to get to know what a new work is like unless they get the chance to hear it? Frankly it is a little impractical to be doing something that is considered experimental (I suppose) in a theater like this one. I’m hoping, in this little race we’re on, that we can convert large numbers of the public to this kind of music before we lose our shirts financially.

Another thing we’re very interested in doing at City Opera is establishing a kind of core repertory of American works. We’ve begun this, in fact. This season, 1998-99, will bring both Lizzie Borden by Jack Beeson and Of Mice and Men by Carlisle Floyd which I and many of us here consider core American repertory. It’s something that we should be doing in this house. I’m also glad to see the Met is also bringing Susannah into its season next year. Only if major companies take this kind of stand will a core repertory be introduced to this country.

RK: I went to see the premiere of The Rake’s Progress at the Met. It’s a fifty-year-old piece, at least. And it seemed that if someone had said: “This is brand-new,” or “This has just been written yesterday,” or “This is the premiere performance,” I would’ve believed it. I find this to be both positive and negative. Positive in regards to Stravinsky and his great work, and to the production itself, negative perhaps considering the repertory issue again — it hearkens back to the second question about the repertory slowing down its expansion. It makes one wonder about the state of a musical form when a work composed 50 years ago seems as if it was practically brand-new. Has this ever occurred to you?

PK: Well, it’s interesting. I had something of the same experience with Paul Bunyan when we first did it at Glimmerglass in 1995. I had the sense that this is a new work, that it’s something fresh, and surprising, and I think a lot of the audience did. Now Britten, for whatever reason, even the Britten of 1940 written in a kind of operetta vein, is hard for some people today to understand and grasp. I do not understand that, but it’s there. There’s a prejudice against works by Britten. I’m passionate about Britten — I think he’s one of the great opera composers of all time and we’re hoping to do an Albert Herring in the State Theater in two years. We’ve already done Turn of The Screw and I want to do one day A Midsummer’s Nights Dream, although the Met now has done it (and very well too, I must say). We have an obligation to a composer of our time who is one of the great composers of all time. We have to fulfill that obligation by presenting his work. But the audience has got to come along with us sooner or later!

RK: Again, it’s a perception/actuality question — there’s a game there. At any rate it’s clear that you’re trying to create a certain image for City Opera. And I might ask you later to address that more specifically. But first: what do you think about new technologies? How do you think that they will alter the way music is created, performed, and (perhaps most importantly) accessed?

PK: Well, there are technologies not yet dreamt of that will undoubtedly make enormous changes in the field itself — in composition, in performance, in public perception. Certainly the most important thing that’s happened to opera in the last 100 years, perhaps, (or that takes us back to the turn of the century, which was our start-off date here) has been surtitles. Surtitles have increased the audience’s understanding and involvement in a work not only dramatically, but also in what the music is doing at a given moment, because opera is, after all, words and music — and if you don’t understand the words, what the music is doing is irrelevant and pointless. So why should anyone come to the opera who doesn’t know what’s happening? That may be a radical thing to say.

RK: No, I think it makes perfect sense.

PK: But surtitles have certainly increased audiences, I think they’re responsible for the younger audiences we’re seeing, and responsible for the enthusiasm that people have about opera today, and a new sense of its relevance.

RK: When you get home, and you think to yourself, “Oh, I don’t want to spend time thinking about Glimmerglass, City Opera, or this baritone or that piece”, what music do you listen to?

PK: Well, it’s always business in the sense that what I listen to (except very rarely, when I have time to listen for pleasure) in the car when I have long stretches of time on the road driving back and forth between Cooperstown and New York is opera that we may want to do in years to come — I’m always scouting the repertory. I’m doing that at something of a disadvantage, because it does help to have the libretto in front of you when you’re planning work.

I do listen for pleasure, it’s frankly another kind of music altogether. It tends to be lieder — Tom Hampson, actually, quite a lot — artsong forms which create a very different atmosphere. They provide a kind of relief from opera’s rather large demands. I listen to some contemporary song composers. I think there are several of them now who are writing beautiful songs. Robert Beaser is one, John Musto, Ricky Ian Gordon. Composers are increasingly writing for the voice, and doing it with great understanding, in ways that are expanding the form.

RK: What other works have you been looking at that you’re interested in? You talked about Carlisle Floyd, and there are others. What other works do you think have not had their due?

PK: Well, we’re reviving Virgil Thomson‘s The Mother of Us All, which is a perfectly charming, very moving American work of intelligence and distinction. It hasn’t had its due. There are many people now writing operas that don’t get performed and won’t ever get known, and your heart breaks for them, because companies (even a company that’s as well-disposed to contemporary music as we are at City Opera) just don’t have time in schedules that need to be balanced and can’t afford to produce new works, much less commission and produce new works. So a lot of very, very good writing is not being heard today. I do think that once a work gets produced, it does at least exist out there somehow. And the chance of its being done again is much greater. Composers feel (increasingly, I think) that having a work performed once is not of much use to them because they’ve spent all this time and have worked to do something that, by its very nature, will disappear once the curtain comes down. But the work does exist, nevertheless, and other companies will come back to it in time, I believe, if it’s worth something. There are many people — I’m one of them — who do look at work that has been produced and for which there is no subsequent performance planned. Emmeline was an example this year, and Paul Bunyan was another example of a work that had very little life before we did it at Glimmerglass in 1995. Now it’s been produced at Covent Garden, and it’s being considered by other companies, not because we did it at Glimmerglass, but just because its time seems to have come.

RK: You obviously have come up with an image of what City Opera is. You are obviously shaping that, and heading in a certain direction. How would you describe it? How would you invite someone to come to the City Opera? What would you say?

PK: A question like this I think is almost best answered by people’s experience with the company once they’ve gotten here. They see what’s happening, they get a sense of the company. (Let me start this answer again, because I was just talking about this at lunch with someone today when we were talking about what City Opera really is…)

RK: Perfect!

PK: An opera company establishes its image in people’s minds through its repertory, through its artists, and also interestingly, through its audience, apart from the kind of PR spin that a publicity department puts on its press releases that describe the company. But quite apart from that, a repertory speaks most loudly about what a company is doing. If a company like City Opera produces five or six 20th-century works in a season of sixteen operas, there is an interest being expressed in the music of our time. Now, opera has been around for 400 years, so a well-balanced repertory is going to include other periods as well as the contemporary. When a third of a company’s works are contemporary, then it says something about the interest that a company has. Other veins that we explore here are unusual repertory pieces that haven’t been done in New York particularly often, if at all. Iphigénie en Tauride was an example of that. Next season we’re doing Intermezzo by Strauss, a 20th century work that’s seldom performed. It’s certainly not new — it’s almost seventy-five years old and has not been given a fully staged performance in New York, interestingly enough. It’s a great, wonderfully involving theatrical evening.

We want to show people that there is life beyond Bohème, Carmen, and Traviata, however wonderful those three operas are (and they certainly are extraordinary pieces). But there is an operatic world to be explored beyond that, and we’re going to do that exploration, and do it in ways that first of all, are first-quality musically and involving dramatically and theatrically. Does that answer your question?

RK: Yes, absolutely. That’s great. Is there anything else you’d like to say? Anything you’ve missed?

PK: I’d like to get back to an earlier question: The second element that people look at when they decide what an opera company really is, is who the artists are. In our case, our artists are for the most part young and American, and this in and of itself makes a statement about a company’s image. We hire stage directors, conductors, and designers who work together as a team before a production opens, and we try as much as possible to build an ensemble out of the cast, and give lots and lots of rehearsal time, so that what one hears and sees on stage is cohesive, and that’s something we want City Opera to be known for: a company whose productions have a kind of polish and finish, a cohesive and immediately recognizable dramatic style.

Dave Liebman: Unabashed Eclectic

[Ed. note: This conversation between saxophonist, composer, band leader and one-time Miles Davis sideman Dave Liebman and Richard Kessler, then the Executive Director of the American Music Center, was originally published on the American Music Center’s website on January 1, 1999. It was the fourth in a series of interviews entitled “Music In The First Person” that was published in the year before the launch of NewMusicBox on May 1, 1999. “In The First Person” served as the model for one of the primary components of NewMusicBox which still continues on the site as “Cover.”]

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1. Jazz in the 1990s

RICHARD KESSLER: How do you feel about the recent growth and interest in jazz?

DAVE LIEBMAN: It’s a double-sided coin. By appealing to the wider public, jazz gets watered down by necessity. What people consider jazz — which ranges from the commercial type you hear on easy listening stations to a lot of nostalgia-type jazz — is not, for the most part, the jazz I consider artistic.

In order to have more people like something, the language has to become more common, and in that watering down, you’re going to lose a certain depth of what was there in the first place. It’s funny in a way, because when jazz started out it was entertainment. The reason jazz was popular in the ’30s was that it happened to fit with what people wanted to do: dance and listen to the radio and so forth. That changed, of course, and became much more of an esoteric thing in the ’60s and into the ’70s. Now it’s swung around the other way to become another arm of the entertainment business.

The positive side is that more people are aware of it, the negative side of it is that what they’re getting isn’t the real deal. On the other hand, there’s always the potential for those who are getting into it to go further and become more educated and more sophisticated in their tastes, and that’s the hope we hold out for as musicians.

RK: I read with great interest your thoughts about the pressures that commercial entertainment interests can have on art. What are your thoughts and concerns about the growth of corporate sponsors and global entertainment in jazz?

DL: I think it’s a terrible thing. I mean, most jazz musicians’ lifestyles in the early days, if anything, were not part of ordinary middle-class life, and for them to be controlled financially by the system is probably the worst thing that can happen to the art. And it’s going on even in the education system. We’re having a big debate now in some of our journals about the record business getting in on the International Association of Jazz Educators (I.A.J.E.) convention, and how they’ve taken over a couple of the evening’s performances. But we’re just catching up with the rest of the world. This is happening everywhere. It’s an unfortunate by-product of the age we live in.

RK: I think to some extent what you’re talking about is deeper than some people even see. It’s the issue of for-profit education, of a financial market seeing education as one of the next great frontiers of investment and earnings, and that’s a potent force that can change things. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, but a lot of people find it disconcerting at least.

DL: Well, definitely some of us middle-aged dinosaurs remember jazz not being institutionalized at all. I’m one of the last of a generation that didn’t have jazz education in the school system as a matter of course. From the ’70s on, everybody had it, and for the last 30 years we’ve accepted it. But we all need to be part of the education system. All the musicians you talk to are teachers somehow, and many of us are making a good part of our living by doing it, so we can’t debunk what we’ve become. The thing we need to consider is that when it gets into the institution, it becomes academized. And once that happens someone says, “Oh it’s a package, let’s just take it over.” One thing definitely leads to another. It’s an inevitable cost and I don’t see how we can get away from it.

RK: Do you think it’s changing the way people play, the fact that there’s sort of a jazz education institution as opposed to let’s say, a Charlie Parker learning to play jazz in the Jay McShann band?

DL: I talk about this all the time, this question is usually put this way: What do you think of the so-called “Young Lions” movement that occurred in the ’90? The recording industry took these guys and raised them up to the pinnacle of fame (and often to the detriment of people of my generation, who were right in the middle – not old enough and not young enough). My answer is: You can’t blame these guys because they’re a product of the conformist society we’ve been living in since the ’70s and ’80s. It used to be when you recorded on Blue Note or any of those labels in the ’60s and you had your first record, the unspoken pressure was to do something different. And now the unspoken pressure — and even spoken — is to do something like. So therefore, in that respect, it’s obvious that younger musicians are attempting to join the crowd rather than fight it in order to be whatever they have to be.

This whole institutionalization has resulted in conformity, which in an art form that especially prides itself on its individuality is probably the worst thing that can happen. Individuality is the most important aspect of jazz; to be yourself is the whole point. From the first note, you’re supposed to be able to tell that it’s John Jones rather than John Henry. And now, with that not being the value system, we kind of lost the whole essence of jazz in a certain way.

2. The Historical Continuum in Jazz

RK: In your writings you have covered the idea of a historical continuum in jazz. You certainly see things from that historical continuum.

DL: I was an American history major, and I tell you it really influenced my thinking.

RK: How do you characterize today, the late ’90s, as part of this continuum?

DL: Well, it’s the retro-cycle, the cycle of recollection: looking back and reassessing all that happened.

Jazz seems to move in 10-year cycles. The ’40s were kind of innovative; the ’50s (really until the end) were not. I mean, it was what Bird [Ed.: Charlie Parker] put down being explored in various tentacles. And then the ’60s were quite, quite heavy, while then the ’70s were a retrenchment period. Unfortunately the ’80s went back to the other side, which should have been a rebellion. In a sense, it was a rebellion against the ’70s, against the fusion part of the ’70s. It was about: “Let’s get back to the roots.”

I can’t really say much has happened in the ’90s. The one really positive thing (…and this may be come to light in a few years as a reaction to the ’80s…) is this incredible influx of world music influences not just upon jazz, but also pop. To me, the only recourse that music has is to look outside of its borders. I don’t see any other future except to look to the other parts of the world beyond the western axis. They learn our language; we learn their language. It’s intermarriage physically, musically and culturally. That’s the hope. And this has been the first time that it’s been so prevalent. The ’60s was the beginning of that kind of thing, but now it’s become a kind of fad, this intercultural musical thing. And I think it’s very positive. Maybe the ’90s will be looked upon as a bit of rebellion against the retrenchment of the ’80s. I’m not sure.

3. Unique Voices in Jazz

RK: Many people believe or feel that there are fewer unique voices in jazz today, that the days of instant recognition for new artists — in a way that you hear Coltrane, you instantly know it’s Coltrane — are over. Do you agree? What do you think about that perception?

DL: Well, that’s exactly what we’re talking about, the institutionalization of it, being taught by rote. That’s the negative side of it. You come out sounding like whatever the norm is, in whatever style. And the search for individuality…let’s put it this way: It becomes a longer process to find individuality. Whereas when you didn’t have a school system and the books and the how-to stuff so prevalent, you had no choice but to be yourself and to carry through whatever you heard around you. If you were in New York or Chicago, you heard certain people, they influenced you, but you basically were a combination of yourself and what you heard.

Now with the whole oral tradition being put down on paper and video and so forth it becomes much more difficult at the beginning. But my contention (and this is what I teach to those who get to the level where I can really speak about aesthetics) is that there’s a lot of water under the bridge. It might be more difficult to come up with unique trumpet or saxophone tones because there’ve been, let’s say, 20 or 30 styles, whereas 15 years ago, there were only 10. That might be true, but if you look hard within yourself, and you look outside of your own little world and go a little further, there’s no reason why you can’t turn out something that is you. It might just take longer these days.

So I’m always optimistic that someone will, but my problem is that most of them go in there not wanting that. And that’s part of the attitude of, “Well, let’s be a jazz major in school,” like English literature or psychology in the ’60s. It has some positive things, because it does teach you a lot about a lot of music, but it’s not about having an original voice. It’s about vocation, not art. And the whole thing is really the difference between craft and art. We’re in that age where craft is being touted and elevated to the level of art, and it’s just not.

RK: Many people believe or feel that there are fewer unique voices in jazz today, that the days of instant recognition for new artists — in a way that you hear Coltrane, you instantly know it’s Coltrane — are over. Do you agree? What do you think about that perception?

DL: Well, that’s exactly what we’re talking about, the institutionalization of it, being taught by rote. That’s the negative side of it. You come out sounding like whatever the norm is, in whatever style. And the search for individuality…let’s put it this way: It becomes a longer process to find individuality. Whereas when you didn’t have a school system and the books and the how-to stuff so prevalent, you had no choice but to be yourself and to carry through whatever you heard around you. If you were in New York or Chicago, you heard certain people, they influenced you, but you basically were a combination of yourself and what you heard.

Now with the whole oral tradition being put down on paper and video and so forth it becomes much more difficult at the beginning. But my contention (and this is what I teach to those who get to the level where I can really speak about aesthetics) is that there’s a lot of water under the bridge. It might be more difficult to come up with unique trumpet or saxophone tones because there’ve been, let’s say, 20 or 30 styles, whereas 15 years ago, there were only 10. That might be true, but if you look hard within yourself, and you look outside of your own little world and go a little further, there’s no reason why you can’t turn out something that is you. It might just take longer these days.

So I’m always optimistic that someone will, but my problem is that most of them go in there not wanting that. And that’s part of the attitude of, “Well, let’s be a jazz major in school,” like English literature or psychology in the ’60s. It has some positive things, because it does teach you a lot about a lot of music, but it’s not about having an original voice. It’s about vocation, not art. And the whole thing is really the difference between craft and art. We’re in that age where craft is being touted and elevated to the level of art, and it’s just not.

4. Changing Audiences

RK: Well, let’s turn it around from the performer to the listener, to the audience. You’re a musical creator. How do you think audiences are changing? There’s a noticeable shift in the pop world towards rhythm much less than melody and harmony. If you listen to rap (although rap is starting to evolve), the harmony’s becoming more complex and the melody’s probably becoming a little more complex. There’s a lot of pop becoming dominated by rhythm in ways we haven’t seen in this century. Do you perceive a difference in the audience?

DL: No question about it. I mean, when I started out in the late ’60s, and into the ’70s, it used to be (…well, it’s always been…) musicians, fellow artists, intellectual-type people and their cronies who you played for. And of course, a certain sprinkling of nightlife people. The audience I’m talking about was there to really hear the advancement, the evolution, the intricacies of the music. I mean, musicians and non-musicians alike were still interested in how it was changing, and they were probably seeing it through the eyes of their art or their intellectual interests.

Now, as we slowly turn into a non-intellectual culture, your audience’s attention span is quite small and you have an audience that can’t really listen to this music for the most part, except the musicians. That’s basically who I’m playing for, because it’s really gone into the entertainment thing. It’s not the people’s fault. It’s the culture. I mean, nobody’s sitting down listening to a full record anymore. First of all, 60 minutes is impossible — nobody has time — and jazz absolutely demands rapt attention and intensity of listening.

That’s completely the opposite of what’s going on. I always say to my students, “Listen, the people don’t know anything. In fact, most of the musicians hardly know, so you cannot play to them, you have to make a decision at some point in your life who you’re playing for because in fact, that is probably the most important decision you will make which will determine your career. Or what you would like you career to be.” If you’re playing for the people, that’s definitely the decision you make. Now, I have no problem with entertainment. It is, after all, entertainment that people are paying for. But if you’re playing for the art then you’ve also made a decision and you’d better be in for the long run, and you’d better learn how to make a living some other way for a while. It’s really black-and-white; it’s not gray anymore.

RK: When do you think it will occur that jazz players will start having light shows and concerts that look like rock concerts?

DL: Well, it has occurred. I mean, Pat Metheny does it. Weather Report did it in kind of an antique way in the ’70s. With the technology, that’s just part of getting out on stage in front of 10,000 people. You have to do that.

See, here’s the real problem: it’s gotten too big. And the question is, did it have to? Well, of course, society took it that way. Should it? is the real question, and in my very strong opinion, jazz is not meant for many people. It is not supposed to be a popular music. It’s supposed to be played for a few hundred at the most. It is absolutely an esoteric art form, and you know, I get into discussions, because everyone says “Oh, what a terrible view to have,” but I have no problem with that because that’s what I, and probably several other people and certainly some musicians, are interested in. I have no problem playing for those few people around the world and being in contact with them like a small and private club. It’s not to be excluding or prejudicial, but it’s the way it is. And I’m not against those who look further. You want to play in a style that attracts 5,000 — or even 50,000 — I have no problem with that.

My point is, make a very clear decision somewhere along the line for yourself as an artist about whom you want to play for. It’s almost a number. You can almost say, “I wish to play for 5,000-plus people” and that determines almost exactly how you’re going to play. In a sense, I could put a line between that and link it on a piece of paper to style and music: what you have to wear, who you have to talk to, how you have to talk. I mean it could almost go down like that. So, really, by determining that, you have determined your stance. And there’s enough around for everybody. That’s the good thing about our age. There is room for specialization. You can get a shoe made that’s one of a kind, and there are probably five people who’ll wear it. And you can have music for five people, or 50, or 500, and probably make a living at it. I don’t have a problem with that, I just think it should be clear.

RK: Yeah, although how can anybody who has a halfway deep understanding about jazz compare going to the Vanguard to going to Alice Tully Hall or Avery Fisher?

DL: I don’t see it as a problem. It’s what’s relative and what’s proper in proportion. It’s music that doesn’t speak to everybody, and I don’t see it as a problem. I think there are people who are very interested in the intricacies of what I do or what Coltrane was doing in ’66 or ’67, let’s say. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And now with the media, with the technology and communication, we can reach those people in Indonesia or eight people in Chicago, so really that’s the problem of our time: how to link up to those who want that specialized need? How do you find your audience? And that’s not unlike any other business. I think they’re out there, I’m just not sure they’re at the North Sea Festival or reading Downbeat Magazine anymore, that’s all.

5. Miles

RK: When you look back on your time with Miles, what stands out in your memory?

DL: I’m doing a clinic tomorrow out here in Allentown (Pennsylvania) that’s called the Dark Magnus Workshop. And this guy here that runs a school for kids thought it would be great to run something about that period of Miles I was involved in which has gotten a lot of attention nowadays because of re-releases and the rappers and people discovering the early ’70s and Miles.

RK: Rappers discovering Bitches Brew?

DL: Well, Bitches Brew and on. Especially the stage I was in was even more chaotic than Bitches Brew. Get Up With It and On the Corner and all that and they’re discovering this and seeing it as a harbinger of what they’ve been doing. Not only rap, but let’s say acid jazz and all that. I was just thinking that probably the one thing that I remember most or that I got out of it besides musical things was that Miles couldn’t care less. You have to keep in proportion the fact that he did change mid-course from pure jazz to rock-fusion, but he didn’t seem to really give a shit about the audience.

RK: At that point, he used to turn his back on the audience.

DL: He really didn’t care. I mean, he really played for the musicians. He was a very canny and sly kind of guy, and in the back of his mind, he knew what was gettin’ over, and what wasn’t. But I got to tell you, my time with him wasn’t a very popular period. It wasn’t like people were standing, clapping, and cheering. No standing ovations; no encores. I mean, we went on, did our fifty, or hour, or hour-and-ten depending on the night, and walked off and people were mostly like dribbling or dragging out of the place. They were hardly applauding even. The music was a shock.

RK: Some of them must’ve been resentful.

DL: Well, it was a shock. Some of it was incoherent. Technologically, it wasn’t refined. It was loud and raucous. And it was not really organized very tightly, which is probably what the charm of it is now, in a certain way. But in that period, it was very off-putting. I mean, he just kept doing it. Personally, I would’ve been hard-pressed to keep going out night after night and not let that passive reaction have an effect upon what I would present as an artist. And I must say that was an amazing lesson to me. Of course, he was Miles, with 30 years behind him; he didn’t have to care anymore what people thought. But to see somebody go out and just do what he wanted to, regardless of the reaction, was amazing. And it made me think very differently about it. This is Miles Davis, after all. This isn’t somebody on my corner. This is Miles Davis who’s playing for himself and a few people. And I guess that’s one of the kind of ways my vision has been formed.

6. Younger Artists & Underappreciated Artists

RK: Who are some of the younger artists that you find interesting?

DL: I enjoy a young saxophone player — well, I guess he’s not so young anymore, Ellery Eskelin, who’s been around quite a bit. He took some lessons from me years ago; he uses an accordionist and is kind of into free things. There’s a fine saxophone player named Tony Malaby who’s been around. A good writer named Joey Sellars has also been around. I mean, New York is full of interesting music; I just don’t get down and hear a lot of people. Paris is full of interesting music, mixtures of African and Vietnamese, and rock stuff. There’s a lot of great stuff going on… and there’s a lot of hype going on. They’re all trying to find their niche. I think there’s a place for all of that stuff.

The thing about jazz I hope will always be there is that a guy goes out on a tightrope with maybe a safety net below him… which you hope is a drummer and bass and piano… but he’s basically balancing himself. He’s taking chances; he’s taking a step. He may fall, but he comes back. And it’s that process you don’t hear in world music in the same way. You don’t hear (…certainly in classical or pop music…) that chance, that bravery, that courage. The good ones are those who know what they’re doing and their next step isn’t going to be off the tightrope. To witness that live (…because records, forget about it, it’s over now with digital editing; nothing’s real anymore…) is an amazing, existential experience that I hope will not be lost. That spirit of questing, of looking, of searching, of not being afraid to miss the note, miss the chord, get lost, play out of tune, whatever. Because you know you’re searching; you’re not afraid to fall because you know you have enough musicianship to recover. I hope that will still exist.

RK: Who were some of the great jazz artists of the past that go unappreciated, unrecognized? Or have just become lost through history?

DL: There’s a guy who’s unappreciated named Tisziji Muñoz, a guitar player who kinds plays out of a Santana/Sonny Sharrock vibe. On an historical level, Hank Mobley, an incredible improviser who played with Miles, did a lot of great records and was really a deep improviser who never got the accolades. Paul Bley is another great who is known primarily in Europe. He works a lot and he’s famous in Europe. He has a real revolutionary approach, but I think he hasn’t gotten his due respect. Lennie Tristano is another for sure, due to maybe the school of thought he was attached to. Being blind, it wasn’t easy for him to get around. But I studied with him, and I have to say he was a genius. He was unbelievable… the things he did in the’50s.

There are so many people who don’t get recognition. I just came across a guy named Bob Graetinger who wrote for Stan Kenton and died very young from a drug overdose. In 1947, he wrote music that is still unapproachable as far as complexity with the Stan Kenton Orchestra, with strings and woodwinds and so forth. There are unknown guys that come along. (It’s true in classical music too, guys come along like Mompou.) Guys come along that you never heard about who just didn’t hit the imagination or didn’t take care of business or whatever. There are so many of them. And in music like jazz, it’s really great when you find a guy who’s undiscovered and you say, “God, what a body of work!” and you go into it, and it becomes a source that’s not known. That’s one of the ways that you can try to find an original and personal voice, to find some sources that are not so standardized and not so well known. And of course this doesn’t mean that Charlie Parker should not be studied, but it means that when you find someone who’s not so obvious… my God, you have a gold mine of influences to dig into. That’s something we all try to look out for. In fact, if there’s anything that musicians talk about, it’s probably “Did you hear this thing by this guy?” or “I just heard a tape, I never heard of it before.”

7. Liebman as Composer & Listener

RK: I’ve known your work for years and admired it as a performing artist. I also (from one particular album) know your work as a straight composer because bass trombonist Dave Taylor is an old friend of mine. I used to do a lot of playing with him. Where does your work as a composer fit in with your career right now?

DL: I am an unabashed eclectic. The ’60s was a period when someone like myself, without much looking, could find music from everywhere without having to go to Bali to do it. In the same day you could listen to Ravi Shankar, John Coltrane and Buddhist music. Coltrane took me first. But then I was exposed by friends and the kind of people I was referring to earlier who said, “Man you gotta get this Tibetan chant, you gotta get this gamelan music, or check out Bartók’s violin concerto, etc.” I learned about things that normally wouldn’t have come down the pike 10 years earlier, not to somebody like myself of my generation. So that affected me and made me really like all this music and find that I could (or would like to) express myself in various idioms. And they range of course from straight jazz (from be-bop to all styles) to free jazz to classical (I mean contemporary 20th-century classical) to pop and world music.

The thing you’re talking about with Dave is one of those aspects (trombone with string quartet); I just love the sound of quartets. I haven’t done brass yet because I don’t know the instruments that well, but I’ve done several things for three or four woodwinds and strings. Especially in jazz, three to four voices intrigue me. It’s the string quartet in essence. I’m not a classical music expert, but when you talk to guys they say, “Look, in the end, the string quartet will tell you the whole thing anyway.” It’s a cut-down version of the real deal, and in the final analysis I feel that three or four voices is really what you want to hear. It takes into account the whole scene: you’ve got your chord, you’ve got your harmony, and so forth, taking the rhythm out of the question here. And that’s why I was very interested in Dave Taylor: he heard a string quartet I did and he approached me. That’s how that particular piece, “Remembrance” [Ed: published by Advance Music], came about.

I’ve done several things in that genre, and I’ll tell you, next week, I’m going to Dublin doing three very nice nights. One is a concerto (written for me by Bill Pobbins); the next night, I’m doing string quartets (several of mine and a new one by a composer); and then the third night, we’re playing jazz in a club. So that is exactly what I would like to do. That is for me a perfect week artistically, because it allows me to manifest myself in all those various ways. And I think the challenge, for any artist, is to be yourself within various genres and backgrounds. Coltrane did it for 15 years; Miles did it for 30 or 40. And to me, that’s really the challenge: to be yourself; to have your voice; to have something of worth to say; and to surround yourself in (hopefully) interesting and challenging backgrounds that are different and changeable. In some ways it has been bad: it has diffused my audience and my critical appeal, because there are those who like one aspect of my music.

RK: So you haven’t focused on a market?

DL: If you look at my recording discography, I am among maybe three or four other people (like Steve Lacy or David Murray) who are on literally dozens of labels. It’s because one producer likes one aspect of your work, another guy likes another. If you work on it enough, you can spread yourself out. And that’s been the bad part from the business standpoint. On the other hand, I know that in the long run, doing what I’m doing is going to be OK as far as the public is concerned. It’s just that you’ve got to add on another 10-to-15 years because you didn’t stay in one style, and because you weren’t in one clique. I’ve really made sure of that now that I can see it. I don’t belong to any school of thinking. I wasn’t part of M-Base or part of this or that. We started out together in the late ’60s in a kind of situation a lot of guys together playing free jazz, but then I just found my own voice. I can’t compare myself to anybody else, and I feel very proud of that. And now it’s too late to change.

RK: What are you listening to today?

DL: Well, to be realistic, with the little time I have, I’m usually listening to my own stuff, or editing, or trying to catch up with what I have to do. Like right now, I’m sitting downstairs about to listen to the string quartet that I have to play next week. I mean, people like us have very little time to listen to things of choice. The second area I usually listen to is tapes of students or people who send me their stuff to check out. If I just turned off the hose and said, “No tapes, no CDs,” I would probably have time to listen. I’d love to get back into Mompou and this Graetinger-thing with Kenton because it has been on my mind, or something that’s apropos to a mixed project I’m doing, and so forth.

But being a teacher and an educator is part of my personality, and I feel a debt to it. I answer everybody. They send me tapes and I might write three or four words quite quickly, but I’m in connection with a lot of people — student types or musicians who want me to hear their music. So that takes a lot of time, and it keeps piling up. Every couple of months I leaf through and just listen and make comments when necessary when I feel it has to be. So sometimes I can’t even listen to the things I want to. For example: yesterday I talked to the guy over at Verve, and he’s going to send me something called 20th Century Genius (Art Tatum) that he says is unbelievable. I have the box that came out last year, Coltrane Live at the Vanguard, but I still haven’t listened to the outtakes. Because I’m so busy and involved, I just don’t have the time to concentrate, and I haven’t had it for probably 10 or 15 years. It’s a terrible, unfortunate part of being an artist today, because so much time is spent on business and logistics and the mechanical aspects of getting your stuff out there. That’s just the way it goes. I don’t have a manager; I do it myself.

8. Upcoming Projects

RK: What are some other projects you have on the back burner?

DL: The next release is on a label called Arkadia. It’s with Pat Metheny and it’s called Water, Giver of Life. I’m portraying the element of water in various manifestations and writing programmatically, which I like to do. So I want to complete the cycle of the four elements over the years on some label or another somehow and the next one I’m looking into is Earth. I have some themes that I have used for a ballet a couple of years ago called The Stones. I don’t know what’s really going on in general, maybe it’s living out in the country (…I’ve been here in the Poconos for about 10 years…). I see my perspective changing towards outside of me as I mature. But I’m also a very subject-literal minded person. I mean I like a subject. Give me a subject; say “blue” and I paint blue. I see my interests moving away from the personal view, the personal theme which was so much of the first ten, twenty years. It’s more of what’s around you.

And I’ve done a record lately called The Tree, a record called Time Immemorial, this water thing, and then Earth and Fire and so forth. I’m trying just to paint the things that are around me in music. If I have a subject, it makes it much easier for me to get to the heart of the matter rather than just perform a musical exercise (which other guys do very well and I respect that). I like a subject. It could be very literal or figurative, but it really helps me out. So right now I’m going to try and produce a cycle over the next three years.

RK: Great. I have no more questions, but you know it’s a funny thing you mentioned Dave Taylor. You remind me of Dave Taylor. You know Dave’s from Brooklyn, by the way…

DL: You’re Jewish too, right?

RK: I am.

DL: Happy New Year!

RK: Yes, Happy New Year.

DL: Happy year 5,000-something.

RK: Happy 5,734-something. Anything else you want to talk about?

9. The International Scene

DL: I’m at a point where I’ve been around for a while. I’m an “established” artist, at least among those who know, and you have to be careful not to be sour grapes on anything that comes after your time. It’s like your father’s stuff: “Well, you know the good old days.” You start talking to your kids like that: It’s not the same, therefore it’s less. I think about that all the time when I get these kind of questions, about the way it’s changing, and the demographics and the corporate stuff and all that which we spoke about. It’s terribly negative from the standpoint of what this art form purports to be, of what people like us are trying to do.

On the other hand, I really have to try to come up with the positive side, which as I mentioned, is influencing the world. The education thing has to be good in the end. People knowing something have to turn out better than not knowing something. So I’m always tempering my remarks about the loss of individuality and of standardization and everything with the fact that we live in an incredible period of openness and communication and availability of knowledge. Maybe things aren’t right now, but someday the scales will balance the negative side of this period we’re living in. And I think that’s important to everyone. When we get negative and say, “Where are the good old days?” or “Nobody’s really playing it like that anymore,” we gotta remember that the other side of that is an incredible explosion of knowledge and opportunity. I must say the most positive thing I’ve done has been the teaching.

In 1989, I founded an organization that we named International Association of Schools of Jazz. (It’s on my web site.) After all my traveling and teaching (…I did so much of it in the ’80s…), I saw that so many people were doing the same thing, especially in Europe, and the boundaries, borders, were really separating people. It was amazing that they didn’t know each other two hours away from Germany to France. And I took it upon myself to put these people I knew together. In 1989, we organized, and 10 years later we have this wonderful association. We have schools from 35 countries — I mean Slovakia, Lithuania, Japan, etc. — that meet once a year. We have a meeting where students come. We have a newsletter, a magazine. My point is that by my exposure to these teachers and students from all these countries I really see that the future of jazz is outside of America. It truly lies in those places where it’s still considered a new thing. That what’s going to revitalize (or let’s say continue to vitalize), this music: input from cultures that you would never think would have anything to do with jazz or western music as we know it. It’s happening in pop a little bit, and I really believe that in jazz it’s going to be a little purer, on a higher level. I really think that that’s the future.

It’s not that America is over, or finished, but the truth is that the birthplace of the music has had its time. It had its hundred years, or whatever, and the innovators were here and are done. But for this music to exist and go on, it had to get infusions from other cultures and other peoples, and it’s happening. A lot of people in America are not aware of it because they’re insulated and they don’t get out, but people like myself, and people who travel to a lot of countries and teach, are. There are young people who are really for the most part optimistic because they are bringing something to it. It may be a Danish folk song in a jazz style, but it’s an attempt to bring what they have to the music they’re learning. And I think that’s a very positive thing.

RK: I’ll tell you, I was in Vienna last week at a conference for the International Association of Music Information Centers and we went for a day trip to Bratislava where the mayor had us to lunch. We got to the town square and a jazz band was playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” I mean there’s a trip: you’re looking at a place where Liszt lived and all of a sudden you walk into the square and hear this. And it’s a good band too!

DL: And probably in a school down the street, somebody’s talking about Charlie Parker. This thing is happening. People here are just not aware of it because America is a fortress. But this is happening, I see it through this organization. There’s attention towards internationalization of this music. I mean, we’re working with UNICEF. In the mid-’80s I was so blue about the business that I was applying to law schools to get out of the whole scene. But I realized that what would make me personally feel good was not so much just the music (…’cause I’d already understood that music was a very personal, egotistical self-entertaining thing…), but something that could be international and that could use the power and energy of the music for communication. It’s very simple. And that’s really what propelled me into this teaching thing in the ’80s. If there’s one thing that makes me feel optimistic about this situation we discussed earlier, it’s the internationalization of jazz on a level so unprecedented that you have no idea how much is going on. It’s really incredible.

RK: These are terrific sentiments. Thank you for your time and the candid thoughts.

Libby Larsen: Communicating Through Music

[Ed. note: This conversation between composer and American Composers Forum co-founder Libby Larsen and Richard Kessler, then the Executive Director of the American Music Center, was originally published on the American Music Center’s website on February 1, 1999. It was the fifth in a series of interviews entitled “Music In The First Person” that was published in the year before the launch of NewMusicBox on May 1, 1999. “In The First Person” served as the model for one of the primary components of NewMusicBox which still continues on the site as “Cover.”]

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1. A Musical Upbringing

RICHARD KESSLER: What led you to become a composer?

LIBBY LARSEN: A long and deep-seeded desire to communicate through sound. It’s my own sense of (…I don’t want this to sound corny…) just being alive. That’s really what led me to it. The path that led me was a series of lucky self-discoveries, actually, because no one ever encouraged me to be a composer (which is not unusual for composers). Most composers find themselves on their paths. But I’ve always had great desires to just tell everybody what I see and what I feel, and what’s going on. To do that through music seemed to me the most elegant and most deeply communicative way.

I had a very typical Midwestern kid upbringing in terms of music, which means playing an instrument (in my case, piano) and singing in a choir. When I was young, it seemed that all Midwestern kids sang in choirs! It’s part of this region’s Scandinavian heritage. I also was very lucky in that I learned to read and write music in first grade as did everybody in my grade school. I went to a Catholic grade school before the Vatican II Council, and we all learned to read and write so that we could sing Gregorian chant for daily services.

It didn’t really occur to me that not everybody in the world could read and write music for quite some time. Composing for me was very natural, as natural as drawing pictures and writing essays. It was natural for every kid in our school . . . Isn’t that interesting?

I had a natural interest in rhythm. When I began to hear rhythms and words that caught my attention, I started writing them down and manipulating them on paper. I had no thought about writing love songs. Some of the more typical paths to composition come through songwriting, through piano playing, or being in a garage band. Mine really came through an interest in words and rhythm and the ability to notate those. It developed really from age 7-on. But it never occurred to me that to be a composer had a definition, or a root, or a path, or a profession until college, when I began to study music theory and just found true beauty in theory. And then the connection was made. I became aware of many, many, ways of constructing pieces to express emotion and energy. And once that happened for me, I knew I was a composer.

RK: So this predisposition towards rhythm was there, right from the very beginning.

LL: From the very beginning, and I think it has to do with the fact that I learned Gregorian Chant which is free of meter. The rhythm has everything to with the flow of the Chant, as it exists in the space in which it is being performed. So I had a very solid grounding in timeless flow — does that make sense?

RK: Sure — without bar lines.

LL: Yes. At the same time, when I was 7, I started taking piano. I became really fascinated with real theoretical questions derived from Western notation: How does time function in a finite section called a measure and given a meter? So I became fascinated with rhythm through a natural grounding in Chant.

RK: So, in some sense, the freedom was the first thing that you became immersed in and then the rigor emerged as you started studying the piano. Does that make sense?

LL: That’s perfect, thank you!

2. Being a Good Citizen for Music

RK: I’d like to move on to what we’re calling “The Good Citizen” question. Among composers, you are considered to be a good citizen, and that’s something that we’re very interested in at The American Music Center. The Center was founded by six composers who were good citizens. In order to create a community for new American music, they formed the Center in 1939. You’ve also served on a number of Boards of musical organizations and co-founded the Minnesota Composers Forum (now the American Composers Forum). At this time, with some years to look back on (and certainly to look forward to), how do you see your role as a composer within a larger community?

LL: It hasn’t changed very much since the early 1970s. I was puzzled then because I knew that the art form I was pursuing was monastic and was challenged by its own need for creative solitude. After all, notation as we know it developed in the monasteries. The academic university system is a natural evolution of the monasteries.

I was puzzled that a composer like myself was actually faced with a choice in the 1970s… a choice of language… musical language. In fact, a trained composer can chose any language she or he likes. It’s not an instinctual thing. While instincts inform voice, you choose to write 12-tone, or aleatoric, or like Wagner, etc. What bothered me is that the choice of language also seemed to determine a choice of place in community and society. A rigorous academic language carries incredible and profound beauty in its mechanics. But choosing it also means a serious challenge in reaching a person who’s naturally curious about music but has no technical training to understand the language. I said to myself, “Well, now, that is an investigation worth spending your life on.” Composers who are so well trained and have such a deep desire to communicate through writing music ought to be able to communicate in many different venues. If they have a voice and a passion and a desire, they ought to be able to find venues ranging from the most sophisticated professional orchestra to the community choir in the smallest of communities. All those venues are available, and yet there seems to be a definite artificial choice that has been struck here.

I decided that part of the challenge was that we composers ourselves aren’t very skilled in telling people how beautiful the art form is. The actual process of composing is a different way of thinking than many other professions. I felt that composers needed to articulate our art form in a way that we weren’t addressing. It seemed to me that the way to do this was to just get out and walk around where people were producing music, to be on boards of directors of organizations that produce concerts. They seem to be having real trouble producing the music of living composers. The only way to solve the problem is to go to the root of the problem and learn what the thinking is so that we can articulate the value of the composer in the culture.

RK: Then you’re not just making a comment from the outside, you’re a part of it. This is a particularly interesting discussion to me because we’re trying to position the Center as a place to facilitate and provoke discussion, a place that examines the perceptions and misconceptions of this art form. That’s why we’re heading towards an Internet magazine; that’s what we hope to do with it. We even (in some ways) view it as a guerrilla action.

LL: Richard, I like your thinking.

RK: We’ll see how it goes, we have a long way to go before we get there, but when I hear you speak about this, I can say I’m 100% with you. In part, this is what I hope to see the American Music Center become. It’s really the promotion or advocacy part, and then there’s a support part that’s about grants and helping people with direct services and workshops.

LL: Right — the tools create an advocacy structure and help composers to write their best music.

3. Radio and the Music Business

RK: How has the music business changed? You, I know, started in the early 70s?

LL: Yes. It’s changed tremendously, I think. In public concerts (concerts produced outside the university system), I have witnessed the growth of the concert industry from 1960 to the present. It’s an interesting matrix of concert production, the recording industry, public radio, and music conservatory educational approaches. I think it’s a natural evolution and an interesting challenge for composers. In 1960, the concert industry was not a year-round business that it is now. Certain ways of doing business, certain ways of thinking about concerts, and certain ways of thinking about marketing concerts have developed in the last 30 years and have, I think, become overly concerned with commercial marketing in an effort to apply commercial marketing techniques to a non-commercial endeavor.

The result of this kind of thinking and its aftermath are things like the Denver Project. Have you heard about it? The Denver Project was a marketing research effort directed by WCFR-FM, a classical radio station in Denver, Colorado, which was trying to determine the listening habits and preferences of its perceived market. Using typical commercial market research methods, they determined that the general population prefers classical music to be light and buoyant and played in the background as an accompaniment to everyday life activities. Rather than broadcasting an entire piece of music, such as a symphony, the Report suggested that audiences prefer pieces to be broken up into smaller doses. It went further to recommend what kinds of music should be played at what hours of the day, and made recommendations about the nature of dissonance in music. They “discovered” that people don’t want dissonance before 9 o’clock in the morning and that people don’t like to listen to the singing voice broadcast over the radio.

All this is based on a fundamental shift in public radio’s perception of how its listeners actually listen to music. Many radio stations throughout the country have adopted some of the findings of the Denver Project in various configurations. Have you noticed your radio station changing in the last ten years? They’re no longer broadcasting full symphonies… There is a new perception of audience preference which developed without in-depth psychological research and resulted in a new programming strategy called “modal music.”

RK: Three-minute pieces…?

LL: And single movements…

It’s a direct outgrowth of this commercial marketing research venture. All based on the belief that public radio wants a mass audience. Why? To sell ads? They’re not selling things. They’re getting grants and what have you. In recent years, the classical music industry became convinced that counting the number of people receiving their product (…they call it product now…) is a way of measuring success. And when this happens, it entirely changes the role of the composer in the concert community.

This kind of thinking has permeated the non-profit concert world. We now use marketing techniques to support salaries based on for-profit values at non-profit organizations.

RK: I was wondering, by any chance, if you’re familiar with Frank Oteri’s speech at the public radio conference last year where he got up and talked about the need and success of programming new music. He even had a list — The Century List of pieces that could be played — new music that could be played on the radio of varying lengths.

Frank is the Editor and Publisher of our new magazine.

LL: Oh fabulous!

RK: You’ve really been taking a look, focusing on a particular element (of how the music’s changed) and it’s the pressures of mass audiences, commercialization…

LL: Right, and the confusion of marketplace with community, which is a very serious, and I think very contemporary, issue. As more and more organizations seek to find community and define community, there is a temptation to confuse community with marketplace. I’m quite concerned at the moment about the National Endowment for the Arts. Not for the usual reasons, but I’m concerned that in fact the issue of confusing marketplace with community is going to be central very soon.

If success is measured in quantitative terms, it may happen that the Endowment and attendant foundations and some of the organizations begin to talk about artistic and commercial partnerships as a way of reaching community. This can be interesting, but it’s also very dangerous. If, let’s say, the New York Philharmonic puts in a grant to the NEA to become the orchestra for six Paramount films, that’s a commercial venture which can be viewed as an artistic venture for the Philharmonic. The New York Philharmonic would not consider this venture central to its mission, but it could confuse the monetary and quantitative success with its own artistic goals. Do you see what I’m saying?

RK: Absolutely, and the implications of it. If organizations continue to have more non-musician types in influential positions who are heading towards nothing but bottom-line financial issues, it begins to change the direction, the goal, the sort of prime reason that the orchestra has existed for 150 some-odd years.

LL: Yes, that’s true, and I think that the prime directive for many arts organizations is very subtly in jeopardy right now because of exactly what you said. If the central definition of success for the people running the organizations is quantifiable and statistical more than it is conceptual and qualitative…if that balance is tipped too far towards short-term profit strategies, then artists will probably cease to work in those organizations, and a whole new era will dawn. It will be the next thing, whatever it is.

4. How to Measure Success

RK: And we’ve already seen groups of artists who have left those arenas. Steve Reich isn’t writing for orchestra. There are all sorts of people who have absolutely left. One thing I think is particularly interesting about this conversation is how to measure success. If you are measuring success, that means that you’re also measuring failure or different levels of success. It also has great implications on the grand psyche of this field.

LL: You’re right, Richard.

RK: If this is being used as any kind of measure of success, then it means that people in some ways are viewing themselves as failures or the field as a failure. What does it mean to create a piece of music if it’s not commercially successful?

LL: Exactly, and do you feel that (back to this question of language), the language has changed quite a bit since the 1970s, even again, but most of the rhetoric being written about what composers are working on today is in relation to commercial success? Composers are increasingly faced with the issue of commercial success. Which is of course an oxymoron in the non-profit world.

RK: Absolutely! Without a doubt.

LL: If we don’t compose pieces of music that fit right into the format of orchestras or opera companies, where the most successful operas are masterpieces of 19th century convention (production convention), then are we failures as artists? Right now, arts organizations are telling us, in fact, we are.

RK: Well, you can imagine how prime this is to the Center, and how key this is to the Center. This has been an issue of the Center that concerns all kinds of composers, a Center that has a library where there are pieces that haven’t been performed, where people are regularly depositing their scores. What validates whether or not they’re composers? These are tremendous issues in terms of the history of new American music.

LL: And in fact that may be the central issue to the America Music Center: the whole question of whether or not a piece of music is successful by its public deliverance; or whether or not the compositional process constitutes the success of the piece. And then, what value is musical process alone in the culture? The American Music Center has always been a place where anybody who declares “I am a composer” feels an amount of success if a score can be received for the library.

RK: But this particular discussion somehow has to be broadened. It has to include more people. It is this issue that is dogging the everyday composer. It’s this issue that’s dogging the people who are wondering how to measure success, and it’s rarely spoken about, in fact.

LL: No, but maybe this is a dialogue we should really try to foster. It hurts a little everyday when you think the music you’re writing has no meaning, or is not successful. It hurts a little everyday. And too many months of hurting a little everyday, and too many years is very unhealthy personally, for the art form, and for the culture.

RK: I think people certainly have to look inside and think about the reasons they compose. Composers also have to work at getting people to hear their music and networking to find people who will be interesting in presenting their work.

LL: Yes, right, I agree.

5. Women in Music

RK: I want to get onto another very big question. Basically, if you look at the statistics concerning performance of concert music, the statistics clearly prove that there are remarkably fewer performances of works by women composers than men. It’s staggering, the numbers, and it’s been this way for decades.

LL: Which set of concert statistics are you looking at?

RK: Take a look at the data put out in the last five or ten years by the American Symphony Orchestra League. I believe also, some things you see about chamber music. Take a look at catalogs. Take a look at our membership. You’ll see that there are more men than women. It used to be this way in many fields. But you’re seeing some remarkable changes in rock. You’re seeing remarkable changes in country music. I know many talented young-to-mid career women composers, but we’re still looking at a predominant number of performances coming from male composers. You’re probably still looking at a predominant number of teaching positions held by men. What do you think of all this? To what do you attribute this imbalance, and do you perceive any changes taking place for women concert composers?

LL: The statistics that I’ve studied show the same thing you described. When people ask the question — “How is it for women composers?” — you’ll hear many people saying, “Oh, it’s hardly a question anymore. Things have gotten so good for women composers; there’s a lot of representation for women composers.” And in fact, the statistics don’t bear that out at all. I accept an average of four residencies in colleges every year. I’ve noticed over the past twelve years that there is a definite pattern. In the graduate schools, you have a handful of graduate composers, maybe one or two are women, and maybe ten or twelve are men. The questions that I hear from women composers are quite different than the questions I get from men. Once we move beyond the technical and aesthetic questions of composing, the personal questions are quite different.

RK: How so?

LL: Generally the men ask about the business of composing and the young women ask about the lifestyle. Because of a thousand years of history, I think it’s easier for young men to envision themselves as composers. Even if they don’t know what that means, there has been a thousand years and a very long list of role models to emulate. Young women find it more difficult for them to envision their whole lives as composers, even though we have a few models. There are only a few models. There isn’t a critical mass of these adventurers (…which is what composers are, adventurers…). I ask the young women, “Well, look around you, how is it for the people around you?” And most of them describe rather traditional gender models that are available to them in the universities. Hardly any of them envision a professional life outside the universities. It’s difficult for a composer anyway, but for some reason, women seem to have a harder time visualizing surviving on their own. That’s part of it. Another part is that the art of performance is really a social art. To succeed you have to strike up good working relationships with performers and conductors, and it’s very difficult to do with integrity…very difficult.

RK: Well, it makes sense – with performers, there’s mixing going on. They know each other. They freelance. They get together. They join groups, any number of things.

LL: Right, and a composer can mix with performers with some regularity. But to try to mix with conductors, it is difficult. You have to meet them in social situations which often are dominated by ingrained gender stereotypes. And so to establish yourself as an intellectual partner to the conductor is a difficult task.

RK: Do you see any changes brewing? Do you see anything occurring with younger women. Do you see any signs, or does this thing continue to roll?

LL: While I see great artistry and vigor with many young women composers, I think it’s going to continue to roll until there is a critical mass of women who are also in administration positions and the power positions. We’ve got to see many more women on the podium. There are a number of really fine women conductors who ought to be considered for major positions. And do you see that happening?

RK: Well, Jo Ann Falletta got appointed at the Buffalo Philharmonic, and Marin Alsop has the Colorado Symphony, but otherwise women conductors rarely move up the ladder. Even the ones that everyone thought were even heading towards those positions, like Catherine Comet or Gisèle Ben-Dor. It’s the most capricious, hard-to-understand ladder I’ve ever seen. It’s very bizarre, almost mystical. What a system!

LL: In composition, we have two Pulitzer Prize winners, and there ought to be more. I don’t think it’s malicious. I think it’s ingrained.

RK: What do you attribute that to? In terms of kids studying music, for instance, there are more and more music education programs and more teachers being hired. More and more partnerships between schools and musical organizations are emerging, such as the SPCO Connect Program. That’s one where during the early grades, the curriculum is very heavy with basic composition: using basic sounds and letting kids manipulate these sounds. And when you look at that you think it should be an absolute even playing field, there should be no predetermining factor. These kids are collecting sounds. They have this thing called the Sound Museum. They collect their sounds and they draw pictures of them. They have any number of composers and musicians going into the classrooms, helping them understand how they can put together and create all sorts of things. So you look at that, and it’s dead even gender-wise. Now, these are kids today. What kids were doing, if they were even doing that, ten or 15 years ago, that’s another story.

LL: Right. Kind of like my grade school experience where everybody wrote music.

RK: So where do you think the trigger and the filter occur?

LL: In lower school, things tend not to be gender biased at all. But the kids are still taught that Beethoven is the best composer who ever lived. And the canon of composers’ names that they’re still being given already sets the thing in motion, because they’re all men. Nowadays people may add Hildegaard von Bingen, but Hildegaard is so distant from anybody’s current life experience. It is very difficult to equate a visionary abbess who composed chant with a modern young girl’s life path! Then you move into instruments, and the gender stereotyping that goes on in assigning kids instruments is unbelievable. The boys are headed towards brass and percussion; the girls are steered towards flutes, clarinets, a little percussion, and maybe one or two saxophones. Maybe some brave girl tries the double bass. And then the kids start to learn jazz and the girls are often filtered out by senior high school. If they go on in orchestra, then they’ll head into their school orchestras or into their youth orchestras where the compositional canon is overwhelmingly male again.

6. Advice for Younger Composers

RK: What advice would you give to younger composers? (This could lead directly from what we were just discussing in terms of gender issues, or it could be just for younger composers, period.)

LL: The best advice I have to offer is to establish wonderful relationships with great performers. And to nurture those relationships and always work towards and with performance, work with performance.

RK: But you know what a young composer will say… How do you do that? I’m just starting out. I just got out of school. I just had a couple of performances in school with some of the student groups. I’ll keep in touch with my colleagues, hopefully their careers will expand, but how do I make new contacts? How do I get to meet the Juilliard Quartet? How do I get to meet the Kronos Quartet? How do I get to meet Dawn Upshaw? What do I do now?

LL: I know how difficult this is. You have to become part of the musical community in which you live and work. It’s a matter of developing relationships, and that takes many acts of courage. Each new relationship really is an act of courage. If you admire particular performers, and you’d like to work with them at some point, it may take years, but the ability to develop and maintain good respectful working relationships is really what the art of music is about in the performing world. Don’t you think?

RK: I do. I think it’s the most difficult thing, however.

LL: It is, it’s very frightening and there’s no formula for it, but if you believe in your own music, then others will too.

RK: No, there’s no formula, and in addition to that, you’re looking at all sorts of subsets, and people who clearly see the subsets. The other day, I was speaking to a composer (who shall go nameless) about the academic world. (The university world is separate to a great degree.) She said to me that she and her friends had formed a little community of younger composers and had kind of given up on the university world. And so the issue is not for us to discuss necessarily how to change that, but the fact that that does exist, even. Not only are composers faced with just simply having to get out there, having to meet people, having to be confident in their work, asking someone to listen to their tape, or to look at the score, or to play it. In addition to all that, they’re looking at minefields that have to do with subsets and sub-communities; it’s almost a tribal culture in a way.

LL: It really is. You just have to be able to hang out in that world. And there are some worlds that you just can’t hang out in, no matter how hard you try. It takes time. I think the big mistake for a young composer is to think that (…getting back to the question of when are you successful…) you ought to be successful by the time you’re thirty. But we get and give a lot of messages: the BMI Awards, the ASCAP awards. Even within our own very well meaning fields, we create a definition of failure.

RK: Without a doubt. The person I was talking about had a similar discussion with me and she felt that the awards are really misunderstood.

LL: There should just be awards for good work. So why is there an age limit to them? It’s a double standard. But the young composer can feel a pressure to succeed defined by prizes and milestones and reinforced by well-meaning people. It’s self-imposed, but the pressure is definitely within the field.

RK: Often these competitions are an affirmation. This gets back to what we were talking about before. I played in this quintet for 15 years and we won all sorts of competitions. But the thing we were looking for was a Naumburg Award, which we finally won in 1990. We were only the second brass quintet ever to have won that. That did something: we felt like we had arrived, we felt as if we now had a right to talk to whomever we wanted to talk to, or to try. Was our work any better after the Naumburg? Did we play any better at the Naumburg Concert than we did a year-and-a-half before that? The most important thing is about the internal voice, the inner voice, and what the Naumburg did for our inner voices and our image of ourselves. But what if someone doesn’t win these things? Does that mean their inner voice is going to be shaky for a while? There are tremendous questions of confidence. There are tremendous questions for trying to wade through waters, especially in an emerging period.

LL: That’s right. I avoided entering any competitions. I didn’t even apply for most of the programs we created at the Forum. I didn’t want the pressure of the prize undermining my own path to finding music that affirmed my reason for writing it. Although, at the same time, a prize can be affirming.

RK: Well, it can be, but it can be false too; it’s a trap. You’ve got to feel comfortable with what you’re doing. You’ve got to build that somehow. If that means finding some way to make that happen, that may work for some people. You saw it as a tool, and you probably understood that it’s double-edged.

LL: Yes, it is double-edged, because you may begin to believe it. And more than that, other people begin to believe that the prize is a measure of your success. And that’s really dangerous because expectation can threaten your creative voice. Then you’ve got some real problems. For a young composer, it’s important to feel very comfortable that your own voice is growing, and that you’ve mastered the techniques to help it grow, and that you’re finding the performers who believe in your voice and want to grow with you. That’s real success.

RK: Well, it’s understanding the process. Someone has to help you see the process and understand your place in it, or the point at which you’re in that process.

LL: Yes, we need to re-discover how to teach composing as a process of personal growth as well as technical mastery.

7. Music and Spoken American English

RK: In describing your music, you were once quoted as saying that, “It can be recognized by its rhythm more than anything else.” You also described how music in general can be derived from the rhythms and pitches of spoken American English. How does this play out in your process, and eventually in your work?

LL: Let me discuss the piece I’m composing right now. These questions are in the front of my mind. I’m working on a string symphony, a piece I’ve wanted to compose for a long time. The Minnesota Orchestra commissioned it.

I believe that the music that grows over time in a culture grows out of the language those people speak. Instruments evolve out of a culture in order to express the culture through sound.

With the exception of the violin becoming a fiddle and the contrabass becoming a plucked bass, I see that the core of the orchestra (the strings) are instruments which have not naturally, found their way into the ensembles that have developed American Musics (…ragtime, gospel, big-band, country-western, rock-and-roll…). And these are the ensembles that accompany the singing of words in American English. And so I’m wondering what, if anything, a string orchestra has to do with American English? American English is more rhythmic than melodic. It’s truncated and full of body language punctuation. I’m not sure that we have a sense of what is lyrical in this culture we’re forming other than moments of nostalgia.

My string symphony asks the question: What is the lyricism of American life and American English, and what, if anything, does this have to do with a European evolved string section?

RK: I’ve often wondered about contemporary opera, and its lack of that sort of “killer aria.” I went to see Emmeline, which I enjoyed very much. I walked away from it thinking that it had, certainly in the story itself, very dramatic moments where the story almost brought down the house, where there were just tremendous moments. But when you compare that to Tosca, there isn’t the moment for the audience to stop and break out into applause and say “Aaahh!” and embrace the performers or throw things at the performers if they didn’t like what they did. And you’re exactly right. You do hear works that try to reach for melodic high points — “killer arias” — and they wind up sounding like Hollywood, or old-fashioned. What does that mean? What impact does that have on the form itself? What does that say about the form? You’ve articulated that in a very different way. What are you finding about writing the piece, from this being one of the questions about the lyricism of strings in our age?

LL: I’ve been finding that it’s very difficult to find an original lyricism for orchestral strings that flows naturally out of American English. You know, I was thinking, where in our concerts do we wildly break out into applause? Where the music starts, and everybody breaks out into applause? Where is it for you?

RK: Well, it happens in jazz concerts all the time. I mean, they don’t break out wildly, but sometimes it’s polite applause for a performer.

LL: A really great solo, and everybody’s just going crazy…

RK: It happened at the end of Joseph Schwantner‘s Percussion Concerto. There’s no doubt that the audience went crazy. It’s an incredible piece of music. When I was in Vienna for a conference, I went to see Tosca, and people burst out. There was this incredible reaction when they sing particular arias. And it happens at rock concerts, absolutely — the popular form has retained that.

LL: Yes, they have retained it. I was thinking of Springsteen concerts. You know, the band strikes up and everybody just goes, “YES!” But it’s not about words; it’s about something else. Schwantner’s Concerto is not about words.

RK: Although rap music is about words. It’s about words and rhythm and not about lyricism.

LL: Isn’t that curious?

RK: So why is it, you can have a popular piece (…these questions apply to other forms as well, I think, to a certain extent, they apply to musical theater…) that there are all sorts of questions about. You know, people say, well, why don’t they write something like Guys and Dolls? Well, if you try to write something like Guys and Dolls, it sounds like it’s completely out of place and corny. But a lot of the popular forms are able to retain this. They’re able to retain soaring melodies.

LL: Well a lot of the popular composers (Hank Williams, for instance) create from instruments that aren’t approached through classical performance tradition. When Hank Williams sings “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” the guitars accompanying him speak and enhance the language that he sings, the way he sings it. So, in his songs, the instruments, the language, and the melodies evolved symbiotically. It’s worth talking about.

RK: It is, it’s actually another very complicated and deep discussion, and we’ll have to do a “Part Two” one day.

From California to Alaska: Lou Harrison in Conversation with John Luther Adams

[Ed. note: This telephone conversation between composers Lou Harrison and John Luther Adams was originally published on the American Music Center’s website on April 1, 1999. It was the last in a series of interviews entitled “Music In The First Person” that was published before the launch of NewMusicBox on May 1, 1999. “In The First Person” served as the model for one of the primary components of NewMusicBox which still continues on the site as “Cover.”]

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1. Overture

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: In a mesostic written in your honor, John Cage compared your music to a river opening into its delta. He wrote: “Listening to it, we become ocean.” I think John was right, your music is absolutely extraordinary for its breadth, its diversity, its sheer quantity, and its constantly exquisite quality. You’re an American master with a remarkable body of work. Last year, your 80th birthday was celebrated with performances all over the world. Some major new pieces, including the Pi’pa Concerto, were premiered. Moving into your ninth decade, you’re still going strong!

LOU HARRISON: Yes, and we just had two more performances of the concerto. One in Seattle, and one with the California Symphony, in the Bay region. There were 2 different virtuosi, and they both went very well. You know I’m a slowpoke — I have a difficult time with things like bowing, metronome marks, and all sorts of decisions. Fortunately, most musicians are kind to me and help, which is a good thing.

JLA: Well, the collaborative relationship with performers is part of the fun, isn’t it?

LH: I’m dependent on it. . . I absolutely need my musicians to help me, and thank heavens they do.

JLA: What are you working on right now?

LH: Well, right now, I’m attempting a revision of my second opera for a possible performance at a SummerFest in New York in ’99 or 2000. It’s a major revision, because the last time, it jumped from being a puppet opera to a full-stage one, and having done that, I discovered it needed arias! So I’m singing arias to myself at this point. We also have to perk up the orchestra a little bit. . . It needs a little bit stronger bass. So we’re changing a lot, and there are a couple of scenes that need to be revised. It’s really a major project. I’ve started on it, and will continue, because I want to leave that opera in pretty good shape.

JLA: So this is Young Caesar.

LH: Yes. There has been the shocking proposal that both (puppet and full-stage) versions be done in this new revision. That’s going pretty far.

JLA: What a delightful proposition!

LH: Yes, it’s something, and we hope it works. So that’s what I’m working on. In the meantime, we’re building a getaway house in Joshua Tree, so I can take a project such as this and very much concentrate on it. What are you working on?

JLA: I just recently completed a wonderful collaboration with Percussion Group — Cincinnati on a concert-length work called Strange and Sacred Noise. It’s been a real peak experience for me, working with musicians who perform at such a high level. (I know you’ve worked with them before, so you know what I’m talking about.) They’ve now given two performances of the entire work, and have just recorded it for New World Records. At Oberlin, Tim Weiss recently conducted the premiere of In The White Silence — a 75-minute landscape for harp, celesta, two vibraphones, string quartet and string orchestra. JoAnn Falletta will give the second performance, next year. And we’re trying to pull together a recording of that work, too.

LH: I think we ought to write into all of our contracts that as composers, we are entitled to at least archival tape. It seems to be a normal thing that should be written in, because it’s sometimes hard to get them. And it shouldn’t be, it should be a natural thing.

JLA: Yes, it’s so important to all of us (especially younger composers), but also to those of us who are not as young.

LH: Especially to me who is aged! And in fact, it may be more important to me because I get absent-minded as I get older, and a tape reminds me of what directions I should put in.

JLA: It’s absolutely true. After all, we’re involved in an oral and an aural tradition. Yes, it has a literature, we do have notation, and some of us work in that way. But I think recordings are an increasingly vital part of what we do — and not only as a documentation.

LH: It’s oral evidence of what we’ve done.

JLA: Absolutely, it helps us establish a performance practice.

LH: That’s what Carlos Chavez said. You know a long time ago, I had a tizzy before one of my premieres. And Carlos looked at me and said, “Lou, for heavens sake, this is only the first performance. AFTER that, you can get tizzy, if you want to.” And I haven’t had a tizzy since.

JLA: You know, I often remember the story you told me once about your Fugue for Percussion.

LH: Well, having read Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources and the advertisement for the Overtone Series, and knowing that a traditional fugue has tonal levels, I wanted to write a fugue in which that could be expressed rhythmically. So I wrote a theme, but I didn’t know how to do the “is-to’s” and “as-to’s”. John Cage and I were working in San Francisco at that time. We had gone to the beach where there was a wonderful pie shop. So we sat down and had a splendid apple pie, while he explained how to do the math. And that’s how I was able to write it. Still, percussionists have found my slippage occasionally, when I did it incorrectly, and have helped. It’s mostly a problem of crossing the bars. (Which reminds me of when John and I were rehearsing in Mills College, and there was a problem about that. We both said: “Let there be no moaning when we cross the bars.”)

JLA: You know, one of the things that impressed me so much about that story was that initially Stokowski looked at it and said, “This is all very interesting, but it’s not yet playable.”

LH: Yes, that was the word he used: can’t be done yet. And then, by the next year, Tony Cirrone was doing it at San Jose State and invited me over to hear it. Very shortly afterwards, it became a sort of contest-piece, and now, it’s back into ordinary repertoire. People do develop techniques for doing things (It’s quite astonishing, one can confidently write for the oboe above E now. And instrument builders extend things frequently). So things do change, and it sometimes surprises one — happily.

JLA: And very quickly too, in terms of performance practice, and even our own ability as listeners and composers to hear things-our perceptions, you might say.

LH: Oh yes, we have them in spades in our ears. We are as virtual users: audio-visceral.

2. The Twentieth Century

JLA: We’re in a time of extremely rapid change and growth in music, and I remember you once observed that all good things must come to an end… even the 20th century. We’re almost there, and I wonder if now (from the vantage point of the eve of the millennium), you might offer some observations on what you feel have been some of the most significant musical developments of the 20th century.

LH: Well, it’s been a long century, for one thing. And Bill [Colvig] and I were just thinking the other day (he’s 82 now, and I’m going to be next month) that it’s extraordinary what’s happened during our lifetime. We both remembered hearing the first crystal sets on our block. Now both of our names are on Mars, and that’s quite a trajectory from 82 years. We also figured out that during the past 30 years, the population of the Earth has doubled, and we wondered what had happened in the 50 years before our lifetime. Well, it doubled then. So it has had two big doublings since we were born, and that’s quite a lot. And what that means is there are that many more composers and that many more ideas, which makes a happy riot of a party, making it ever more fascinating.

Because of that, plus advances in technology, we are in communication all around the planet, which means that we have musical facilities and ideas which would not have occurred to us before. And now they’re right here in our laps, which is a very good thing. I think Henry Cowell was right: in order to be a 20th-century composer, or even a future one, you have to know at least one other culture well, other than the one you were raised in. So it’s not enough to know just European tradition, or those raised in that tradition, or the Japanese tradition, or whatever. And I think that’s very good advice.

JLA: Certainly a uniquely 20th-century perspective.

LH: Well, to a degree. One does remember, of course, that there were exchanges between the Ottoman Empire and Europeans. After all, they told the people that Mozart wrote Turkish marches. Why? Because the advanced part of the Ottoman Empire was at the gates of Vienna.

JLA: I guess it’s deep within human nature that we are basically inquisitive and acculturating animals. But it is unprecedented that just in the past 50 years, for the first time, we have had the entire world, and the entire history of human cultures at our fingertips.

LH: Yes, and almost all of it! Of course, new discoveries are happening all the time, and they’re utterly fascinating. Theology and archaeology are showing us so much and I absorb as much as I can. Of course, it has dangers, too. We get more dangerous as we accumulate knowledge, and that’s both a sadness and something to control, try to learn to live with, make terms with.

JLA: So, relativity, quantum physics, the science of ecology, mass media electronic technology, two World Wars, all of these things in the mix in the 20th century…?

LH: They do affect us. And I think one of the major items has been the discovery that we can, and indeed are, destroying the planet. That’s quite a problem. I’m a terrible pessimist… I really don’t think we’re going to make it. But every so often, there’s some little ray of hope. Have you read, for example, about the Colombian village Gaviotas? Isn’t that amazing?

JLA: It is indeed.

LH: It’s just astonishing to realize that in a country that is most difficult in terms of militaries, paramilitaries, governments, deaths and murders, etc., there is a little village which no one will touch because it’s done things right! It’s as though some country (I’ve always thought we could do it) just simply totally disarmed and said: “Here we are, come look!” But there they are, totally disarmed, no one touches them, and they’ve developed all sorts of useful things for us around the planet. It’s astonishing and amazing to realize that some people have got it right. It almost brings tears to my eyes to realize that. Particularly to someone who is so old and grounded in pessimism.

JLA: Well, so perhaps there is hope, after all.

LH: Yes, there is. Let’s hope that there’s hope!

JLA: So what about the future (assuming there is a future for the human race)? Do you have any predictions to offer about the music of the 21st century? Are there any trends or any composers whose work has a particular significance that you feel will have importance in the next 50 years in shaping the future of the art?

LH: Well, I can’t say that, because I think Virgil Thomson was very wise in observing that music changes in movement every 30 years. There’s a new kind of music, at least in Western world. I don’t think that’s true in more stable traditions, such as the Javanese. But it’s like an amoebae: it has moving walls that reach out a little bit, crack here, expand there, and so on. Whereas Western music tends to want to do that awful business of destroying before it creates, which I think is ridiculous. I think the Japanese have it right; instead of tearing down something to put up a skyscraper, just put it here-beside the other thing. Just like we managed to save Walt Whitman‘s birthplace — it was going to be a service station! I’m certainly opposed to the notion that you have to destroy in order to create-that’s ridiculous. Just go about creating.

JLA: And that seems to you to be a particularly Western idea?

LH: I think it is. It’s all mixed up with that love and death Business resurrection, afterlife and all that sort of nonsense at least it seems so to me. I don’t really know where that came from, but you’ll recall that the Romantic period in Europe certainly stressed that sort of thing. And I think we’re growing out of that — (I HOPE SO) — even in the Western world. And that hasn’t even bothered most of the people on the planet, thank heavens.

3. Balancing Two Worlds

JLA: You know, almost as much as your music, your life itself is an inspiration. You’ve been a mentor and a role model for many younger composers — myself included. You’ve done so many different things over the years to support your art, without ever compromising its integrity. I wonder if you have any advice to young composers about that very difficult balance between economic and artistic survival?

LH: Well, I was raised in the era of…let us say, Charles Ives. And that kind of balance when I was growing up was very common. There were practically no foundations in those days. There was no public support. But what you did was to get some sort of job which would support you so that you could do your music. That was the whole point of working! I think that model may survive a little longer than sitting down to write a grant – versus writing a piece. But I do think a certain independence along those lines is a very good thing, and I have no objections to the idea that man is willing to pay for his pleasures. Music is a pleasure, and so is composing and playing it. And anyone ought to have the feeling that they can support that activity rather than insisting that it support them.

JLA: In your Music Primer, you gave a bit of advice which I’ve often come back to over the years, as a sort of touchstone in my own life. The idea was; “Don’t allow yourself to become indebted to the silliness of society. Decide what you can afford to do with your art, and do only that.”

LH: Yes, I think that’s a very sensible notion, even today (and I’m still doing it, by the way). I have many requests, a lot of them are commissions, but I have an increasing need to find new tunings. I would like to build a new gamelan, and I’m having my harps repaired so I can play them more. I don’t necessary have a drive towards doing another symphony, but there are still things I want to do musically and non-musically. I’ve always drawn, painted, and written poetry. I have another book I want to put out, perhaps several of them, and I have some musicological studies that I never finished, which I want very much to do.

And so there’re a lot of things. I don’t feel bound to sit at a desk writing notes all the time (besides, it’s easier to write numbers), so I stick with gamelan for the most part. But I’ll tell you, my hand is getting sufficiently shaky, so I have to use two hands sometimes, to be sure I’m getting it on A instead of G.

JLA: Wow. Are you using larger staff paper?

LH: Yes I am, as a matter of fact. Not quite like Carl Ruggles, who used to have to put it on butcher paper across the room, but I’m getting there.

JLA: Because of the change in your hands, have you changed the computer fonts of your calligraphy?

LH: Yes, because I can’t really do calligraphy anymore. My hand won’t obey me. I do like my letters to look well, so I’ve designed fonts. I just finished another one with Carter Schultz, who is my helper and friend along with these things. We just finished a Roman Rustica which is almost the last of the Roman forms that we hadn’t done. And it looks surprisingly readable. It’s supposed to be the least readable of all Roman fonts, but it isn’t, as it turns out. That was fun to do. I still have a little teasing idea that I want to do another font, and that’ll be my sixth or seventh with Carter. He made a beautiful font out of the letters I used to use when I would address an envelope. A beautiful font called “Lou Casual” out of just those letters. It has the most beautiful letter “U” that I have ever seen; it’s exquisite.

JLA: Well, this is very exciting to those of us who have admired the elegance of your hand over the years to know that it will endure, and that some of us may be able to write in “Lou casual”. How does one get hold of those?

LH: You can get the whole set through Frog Peak, and it’s available for both Mac and IBM.

4. The Future of Music

JLA: I have one more big question that I want to try and ask if I can articulate it, and it has to do with audience and community. My experiences over the last several years have convinced me that there is an audience for new music.

LH: Oh, I agree completely there is.

JLA: I’m glad to hear that I believe that audience is growing in number and sophistication, and that younger people today are especially open to new musical experiences.

LH: I agree with that.

JLA: So that’s cause for hope?

LH: You bet.

JLA: Do you have any thoughts about how we, as composers and performers of new music, can better reach that audience, and strengthen our own sense of community? How do you view the present and future roles of new music ensembles, orchestras, record companies, radios, and the Internet?

LH: Well, I’m not privy to the secrets of the Internet. But certainly the technology is advancing and much can be used from it. I’m sorry that micro-radio stations aren’t yet widely available (unless you have a fast card) through which you could, for example, promulgate your own music. Now you can make CDs for practically nothing (though I don’t prefer them at all over the audiocassette, which I think is an excellent instrument), but those parts of technology are fine. I have never learned Finale, (though people now can do it easily, I never could), and I have no intention of learning it. But that’s another way that people can present the written aspect of music well. It’s not as good as a good hand, but still…

JLA: Because it’s not as sophisticated, is it?

LH: No it isn’t. There’s still a new program called Sibelius, I think? It’s from England and you have to buy a whole lot of machinery to go with it, but apparently it starts from zero, and you can do anything. So that sounds OK, but I myself am much too old to do all this.

JLA: Yes, but the possibilities for self-publishing, for desktop publishing for younger composers are very exciting.

LH: Yes, all that is very good, and the technology is a help. Of course, as for the social aspect of music, I still am old-fashioned enough to think that every community, even the small ones, ought to have a gamelan, because you sit on the floor and play your part, and have a grand time. In fact, you should be able to play every part in the orchestra, which is more than you could say in a Western-style orchestra. I think that’s one of the reasons that the gamelan world is spreading so rapidly everywhere. In fact, not too long ago, I was having coffee with Wen Ten down at CalArts, and he said, “I have to go to Egypt next month.” I said, “Egypt?” He said, “Yes, Cairo.” I asked him why, and he said, “Well, the embassy has got a new gamelan.” And I looked him square in the eye and said, “One more nation falls.” He looks me right back and says, “Yes.” We joke about the cultural imperialism of Indonesia, but who can resist a good gamelan, after all? And the idea that any of us can play it is marvelous!

JLA: I remember with pleasure your coming up here with Bill and several others. You brought the first gamelan to Alaska.

LH: I think so. That was wonderful and we enjoyed that trip so much, John. It was just marvelous.

JLA: This is a bit of a loaded question, but what do you see as the role, in all of this, of an organization such as the American Music Center?

LH: Well, I think of it as a Central information booth. I used to speak of Henry Cowell as American Music’s central information booth; if you had a question, you could ask Henry, and if he didn’t know the answer immediately, he knew who did know it, and a telephone number. I think that sort of role is an important function of the Center. It also serves as a library and a research facility for those trying to find out about what’s new in American composition.

JLA: You know, Cowell was involved in the founding of the Center, and we carry on his tradition of the walking encyclopedia in the form of Eero Richmond, who is truly astounding in terms of the breadth and depth of his knowledge of American music; ask him a question and stand back.

LH: That’s good. I hope it continues with flying colors and lots of success.

JLA: I’m very excited about the future of the organization.

LH: Keep working on those wonderful things you do. And I hope you have many great successes.

What makes you attend a music event? Dean Stein



Dean Stein
Photo © Peter Schaaf

Executive Director, Chamber Music America

I’ve always been a bit of a history buff — not so much academically as romantically. For example, I love the theater and try to see the off-off, off and Broadway productions that crowd a typical New York season – experimental works, revivals, classics, “star” vehicles. When I’m at the theater, I feel that I’m part of a vast continuum of emotions. Lately, I’ve been thinking about hearing live, new music concerts in a similar way.

Music written now is also part of a continuum, only the “medium” is different. Beckett’s spare plays challenge audiences (and actors) as the works of Morton Feldman challenge listeners and performers. Writing music, like writing plays, has been happening for centuries. The history buff in me wants to hear what writers and composers have to say about my own time.

The Who and Why of Bang on a Can

Bang on a Can

Wednesday, March 24, 1999 from 5:00 – 7:30 p.m.
at the New York Offices of ASCAP

David Lang – Co-Director, Bang On A Can
Michael Gordon – Co-Director, Bang On A Can
Julia Wolfe – Co-Director, Bang On A Can
Frances Richard – VP Symphonic & Concert Department ASCAP
Richard Kessler – Executive Director, American Music Center
Frank J. Oteri – Editor, NewMusicBox @ the American Music Center

Interview co-produced and recorded by Nathan Michel – Program Associate, American Music Center
Interview transcribed by Karyn Joaquino

1. What is Bang On A Can?

 

FRANK J. OTERI: On behalf of NewMusicBox, the American Music Center‘s new web magazine, I’d like to welcome you all here at ASCAP today. I think it’s very symbolic that we’re meeting with you to launch this, because this year is the 60th Anniversary of the founding of the American Music Center which was an organization founded by 6 composer/advocates of new music back in 1939 just as the three of you are composers and advocates of new music now. I guess for all of us the most obvious question that a lot of us are still asking and people who are going to visit the site will ask is: What exactly is Bang On A Can? Is it a presenter, an ensemble, a style of music or a way of life?

MICHAEL GORDON: Everything but the last one. [laughs]

JULIA WOLFE: I thought it was only the last one. [laughs]

DAVID LANG: Am I supposed to say something witty now? [laughs]

RICHARD KESSLER: Not now. [laughs]

FRAN RICHARD: Profound. [laughs]

DAVID LANG: Basically, Bang On A Can started because we were three young composers. We got out of school. We came to New York. We looked around, and there were 5 million things that just off the top of our heads we thought we could change. Most of them are really obvious things.

MICHAEL GORDON: Wait a second. The first thing is,…

DAVID LANG: Oh yeah . . .

MICHAEL GORDON: …before that…

DAVID LANG: I’m sorry.

MICHAEL GORDON: . . .is that we liked each other…

DAVID LANG: We were all friends.

MICHAEL GORDON: …and we all wanted to get together.

DAVID LANG: Well, we were already getting together every day and we were just wasting our time. We would get together every day and we would talk all day about how, you know, the world wasn’t set up to do a lot of the things that we wanted to do. Basically, a lot of what we were doing was. . . we got out of school, we’d sit around, we’d meet every day for breakfast or coffee or whatever, we’d show each other our music and we’d complain about how the world sucked, basically. And then you go, well, it’s easy to identify lots of things that need to get changed in order to make sure that, you know, interesting music always gets played, and the right audience knows about it, that music actually can mean something large in society, that young composers get treated well…

MICHAEL GORDON: The people who are interested in dance and theater and poetry, you would know who you are. . . I think fifteen or twenty years ago, it was not inconceivable — it’s not inconceivable now — that an intellectually curious person would think that the contemporary equivalent of Bach was Stevie Wonder, or someone like that. Not to take anything away from Stevie Wonder, but. . .

JULIA WOLFE: I mean, the point about Stevie Wonder isn’t that he isn’t a great artist, but that in other areas of the arts people are pushing boundaries. . . I think more of the equivalent would be the Talking Heads; they’re kind of experimental in a rock band. . . but that’s as far as many people would go, and, you know, these are our good friends, college friends, who go to see very avant-garde art films, and really “out there” dance, and really strange exhibits of new sculpture, but there’s no relationship to music. So that’s something that really bugged us. And, actually, the first year, the very first year, Bang On A Can, to answer your question, initially, was only a one-day festival. It was a sort of like a marathon, and since, of course, it’s expanded…

FRAN RICHARD: Mother’s Day.

JULIA WOLFE: Mother’s Day, right… [laughs] But that very first year one of the things we did was get mailing lists from the dance workshop, get some lists, get the dance list. I don’t even think we took a music list.

DAVID LANG: No, we didn’t do it on that year. And we did it in an art gallery in SoHo. The whole point, was basically, I mean… The people that we know, our friends in other disciplines, the people who are in the arts, it’s just part of their life to go, “I want to know what’s exciting, what’s new, what’s fresh,” and all these different things. They want to read the most difficult book. They want to see, you know, the really strange foreign film, you know, they really want to be able to read the totally incomprehensible poetry. There are people who sort of have a circuit of knowledge that’s important, and music wasn’t even on that circuit.

MICHAEL GORDON: That’s really the whole thing. [laughs]

2. Who are the Household Name Composers in America?

 

FRANK J. OTERI: So the one question is, why, before Bang On A Can (. . .and I guess we’ll get into the issue of has it changed since Bang On A Can has been on the scene. . .), why aren’t people going to new music concerts?

MICHAEL GORDON: Why weren’t people?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah. Why weren’t, or why aren’t?

MICHAEL GORDON: You know, new music, I don’t know, post-World War II, I think, the place of contemporary music in society retreated. Post-World War II modernist music was incomprehensible in America. But you find in Europe that that’s not true. In Europe the equivalent of Carter and Babbitt, you know, the Ligetis and Stockhausens are like gods. And there is an audience – and they are revered. But here, I think, maybe, for whatever reason, that famous stance by Milton Babbitt — “Who cares if you listen” — I think, signaled retreat from the audience.

FRANK J. OTERI: Was there ever a time that an American composer was ever put up there and was revered like a god the way Stockhausen or Ligeti is?

MICHAEL GORDON: Copland. . .

JULIA WOLFE: Leonard Bernstein.

MICHAEL GORDON: . . .and Gershwin.

FRANK J. OTERI: Gershwin was certainly breaking boundaries but he was a success in popular music before he wrote for the concert hall.

MICHAEL GORDON: That’s true.

RICHARD KESSLER: Bernstein’s another story, though, had it not been for West Side Story and On the Town. In fact, he was constantly disappointed, it was one of the great disappointments of his life not to feel that he had succeeded as a classical contemporary composer.

FRAN RICHARD: Gershwin, too.

RICHARD KESSLER: And to some extent I think Copland is really now emerging more than ever before. I’m not sure what it was like in the 60’s. I wonder.

DAVID LANG: Well, the 60’s were a hard time for him. You know, certainly the 40’s. That was a real heyday for him. The 60’s were real difficult because he sort of lived long enough to see what he pioneered go out of fashion.

RICHARD KESSLER: But in terms of him being a household name, in terms of him being a major figure in the 40’s, a major artist of the period?

DAVID LANG: I don’t know. It seems to me that the political situation would make him much more prevalent than in the 40’s, when there was a tremendous attempt to find national musical figures who had the same stature that European figures did. That meant something the way that Shostakovich meant something to World War II Russia, the way that Roy Harris’s symphony took on political significance in this country, and Copland certainly was held up that way.

FRAN RICHARD: There were so many important figures who were heroes because they ran from fascists. And there was an engulfing and swamping of what was becoming an American tradition which started with a classical tradition coming from another place. But you’ll also find that there’s resistance in the traditional classical music community to what’s new rather than what’s American.

MICHAEL GORDON: That’s historically true. Ives, you know, printed his own music and sent it to all these people who didn’t want it, basically. They only really accepted him years later. He understood that. He didn’t show when his Third Symphony was finally premiered.

3. The First Bang On A Can Festival

 

FRAN RICHARD: But you guys, when you started, in that day marathon, Mother’s Day downtown, you also juxtaposed many styles, you did not allow yourselves to be “uptown” or “downtown.” You put things together that were very unlikely in the program. I think you should talk a little bit about that because that defines what you believe in and what you like.

JULIA WOLFE: I think part of it when we were starting, the question was, to break down barriers within music, not just “uptown” and “downtown,” but all kinds of stylistic differences, and what we were aiming for was what the three of us considered “innovation” and an “adventurous spirit.” So regardless of what the language was, that was the criteria and that still is the criteria, although I’ve been having some really interesting evolutions over the years in terms of programming and where our thinking is at. But the initial spark was, first of all, we don’t fit in anywhere. So it’s somewhat self-serving in the sense that we’re not in back of this real formal concept like uptown and we weren’t improvisationally oriented which was the basic downtown scene at that time in ’87. Aside from Glass and Reich who had already emerged out of downtown; they were all over town! So we built this festival. Part of it was to make a declaration about our idea about the lack of stylistic approaches, but also to make a new home for a whole new generation of composers. And there really were these composers out there like us, who were sort of around and, you know, started on their own to make things happen.

MICHAEL GORDON: When we started in 1987, one of the ways the world looked to us was that there was a war going on. The “uptown/downtown” thing which now, you know, appears less and less. Back then, it was really in the air. The problem with that for us, is first of all, you know, we were too young to be involved, you know, we were not Milton Babbitt, and we weren’t Philip Glass, and, you know, it was like we like Milton Babbitt’s music and we like Philip Glass’s music so what, what was the battle? [laughs] Right. And the other problem for us was the ideological confinement of this music. We’d go to a concert at Carnegie Recital Hall and there’d be a piece by Elliott Carter, which would be amazing, and four pieces by his students that would be people attempting to do something like it but they weren’t amazing. But they were classed ideologically instead of being classed by interest or by how good the music was. So when we put that first concert together, we put on music that we wanted to hear, music that we thought was revolutionary. And we also made some statements. We focused early on the Babbitt piece, Vision and Prayer from 1961 or something like that, you know, that is on the edge, pushing the boundaries. It’s really funky; it uses these electronics that had gone out of style. Electronics became very sophisticated and now these sounds are actually back in style because of the low-tech sound, the really rock quality and you know, it’s a very powerful piece. It’s from when he was young, when he was our age…

DAVID LANG: Well, how revolutionary for him to say, okay, here’s this new RCA synthesizer that’s really crummy and only makes these really ugly square tones and I’m going to make a great piece of music out of this really exalted machine and put a singer in front of it … I mean, it’s this really revolutionary concept.

MICHAEL GORDON: You put that back to back with Four Organs by Steve Reich which is equally revolutionary. It was also for me personally a piece that I had never heard live. It had a huge impact on me. By the time we did it, which was ’87, Steve hadn’t played it for 10 years. He came and we called him up and said, “Please come to the concert. We put these pieces back to back.” We decided not to have any program notes, because our view was that program notes tell the audience member whether or not to like a piece, whether the person is a genius or unknown. So we decided, no program notes and we asked composers to talk about their music and we told them, “Look, don’t talk about your music; tell a joke or something.”

JULIA WOLFE: Because the audience wasn’t trained in any sense. As we all know, you just can’t underestimate the impact on an audience who hears something from the artist before they hear the piece. It’s not like you have to tell them what to listen for but you just say well, I was thinking of this kind of image, or I was looking at a painting, whatever the spark was that keeps the piece up, it’s like an open door. You know, look, my mom was there and she was totally into it. It just opens up the door, oh, okay, maybe they don’t see everything or they like everything and get everything, but it was tremendous, really, the impact on the audience… I think all the composers were there.

MICHAEL GORDON: I think there were 23 pieces and 21 of the composers were there. They all spoke. But the real thing that was amazing was that there was an audience. It was packed. There were over 400 people there, which was unheard of in 1987 for this type of concert, and none out of them were composers or new music specialists. It was really an audience, people who were attracted by the 12-hour concert and were going to go check this out. So they did not know if they liked Milton Babbitt, they were not supposed to like Steve Reich. And they did not know that if they liked Steve Reich, they were not supposed to like Milton Babbitt. And you know, Milton Babbitt came in and he talked, and his piece was played and there was this huge ovation. And then he walked out the back because he didn’t want to hear Steve Reich’s piece. [laughs] Steve Reich, who did not want to hear Milton’s piece and had been waiting outside the building until it was over came in, and then he talked, and there was a huge ovation and then Steve left. And they didn’t ever meet. I mean, we didn’t fix anything. We didn’t try to create a ruckus but what we did was we proved this incredible thing for ourselves. The performances were great. These pieces were incredibly revolutionary, hard core, you know, from the complete opposite ends of the experimental music spectrum. But this audience went wild for them. And that was really a good lesson.

DAVID LANG: In a way the lesson was that people who already know something about music in a way are lost. The way that music is taught, and the way musical knowledge comes to you is, on one hand, knowledge, and on the other hand it’s an inculcation of a certain kind of value. And that value tells you how to interpret the world and that interpretation is very narrow. . . It was kind of shocking to us, actually. I think we really saw this battle as happening to people who were, you know, from some other world, who were really older than we were. And as younger composers, we had already had enough outside experiences. Most people our age grew up with pop music or playing in bands or other experiences that were sort of outside the traditional classical music value system. And it was very difficult for us and for the composers our age to actually believe those battles that were being fought by people above us because it just seemed obvious that a good idea is a good idea. And wouldn’t people hope to have concerts that organized itself around plain good music?

JULIA WOLFE: I have to say, that part of it – that part of what David is representing is basic lessons of what we all emerged from. We say young composers, I think that was not completely widespread with all young composers, but we were all at Yale. I was a little later than Michael, maybe, but basically overlapping for a period of about 5 or 6 years, studying with Martin Bresnick and there was something very special about coming out of that atmosphere. It was a very open place. It still was – you know, classically oriented. It wasn’t like we were listening to rap or funk in class but still, there was no dogma. It wasn’t like you had to write like Martin, and I think that was somewhat unique at the time. There were some other schools like that, but it was a very special place and in fact, the marathon idea itself came from an all-night marathon. Ours was an all-day marathon, but an all-night marathon took place at Yale that was started by Martin Bresnick called “Sheep’s Clothing” that we’d all seen and David was actually really in it. It was a really wild extravaganza and everyone brought pillows and sleeping bags. So there was a kind of spirit that preceded this that set the tone for us.

FRANK J. OTERI: Wouldn’t it be great to do a “Sheep’s Clothing” here in New York — an all-nighter?

JULIA WOLFE: You know, they actually just had a reunion.

DAVID LANG: We did a “Sheep’s Clothing” in 1980 in New York… 1980-uh, oh when was it, actually? I don’t remember, I think 1982. We did a concert here in an art gallery in Soho in 1983 and it was very successful, we had a really good audience, and it was really fun. We went back to New Haven all charged up; we had this great feeling. It was such a successful thing that the only thing that we could do would be disband the organization. [laughs]

FRAN RICHARD: I wish you’d do one New Year’s Eve 2000.

4. What are the Boundaries of Bang On A Can?

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Oh, what a great idea! Let’s get to the issue of boundaries, because, of course, there always are boundaries. You mentioned Stevie Wonder before and we talked about – we’ve been name-dropping people like Milton Babbitt and Steve Reich on the programs. I know you incorporate a lot of jazz musicians. What doesn’t get included? Is there anything that’s outside of this domain?

JULIA WOLFE: It’s been getting broader and broader over the years, I have to say, especially in terms of instrumentation. There have been some amazing ensembles that we wouldn’t have imagined including in 1987 — anything from large gamelan orchestras to huge bagpipe ensembles. I mean it’s just amazing that people are writing new music for that. The general idea is anything that’s innovative. It’s broader than that, but I think it has to have a spark, something’s being pushed. It can be alternative rock and it’s not out of our realm. As long as it’s not catering to history, it’s not music where composers are saying: “I know what this is. I know how music goes, I’m going to be part of that. I’m going to make music too, because I know how music goes.” It’s when we listen to tapes, and we all go “What? Wow, what is that?”

FRANK J. OTERI: So have you presented alternative rock bands?

MICHAEL GORDON: We have.

JULIA WOLFE: We had one this year.

MICHAEL GORDON: Well, on our marathon concert this year we had this group called Ne Ne. They’re three Japanese women from Brooklyn. They’re vague in their promotion; they describe themselves saying: “Imagine if Steve Reich grew up on Mount Fuji listening to BBC Radio on a transistor radio that had melted” or something. [laughs] That’s how they described their music. They’ve played a few rock concerts. I think what’s happened over the years is, you know, what doesn’t get included. I think what happened really, is that when we started we were out of school, we looked at our world, and our world was Steve Reich and Milton Babbitt. That was the spectrum, and our aim was let’s put these things together. Let’s do a concert where it’s not stylistically confined to one. And that just became broader. We started including people from the experimental jazz tradition, then we started including people writing new music for classical instruments from other traditions, or new music for Chinese instruments or so forth, and then we started including people doing alternative rock that was experimental. And now we’re starting to include the kind of experimental fringe of the whole DJ scene, D.J. Spooky and stuff like that. On our benefit concert which we just had, Thurston Moore played, and Cecil Taylor played, and D.J. Spooky, and there were excerpts from John Duffy’s opera, and Pamela Z, a young composer working with electronics. . .

FRAN RICHARD: Totalism? Is that your concept?

DAVID LANG: That was never our word.

FRAN RICHARD: You didn’t coin that term?

DAVID LANG: We didn’t make that word up.

FRAN RICHARD: Do you think it makes sense.

MICHAEL GORDON: We don’t think of it in that way. The way we think of it is that. . .this is an analogy that we can use: you walk into a record store, and don’t care what kind of music you want to listen to. Want to go to the jazz department, the world music department, the classical department with the double doors. . .

FRANK J. OTERI: . . .hermetically sealed. . .[laughs]

MICHAEL GORDON: …or do you want to stay in the store which is basically the pop department? In each of those departments, there is experimental music. Most of the music in every one of those places is not experimental, but you can categorize music in different ways. You can go, well, I want to go to the store that only has that music that’s, you know, that’s not categorized like jazz or pop or classical or whatever, but it’s categorized by experimental or unusual or strange or something I’ve never heard before.

FRANK J. OTERI: We do have stores like that here in New York City. You know, Downtown Music Gallery or Other Music. . . Amoeba in Berkeley…

DAVID LANG: Amoeba is fantastic. But Other Music is really great, ’cause that’s the definition of what it is. Music that doesn’t really belong comfortably in any of the bins that commercial industry tries to push it into. Other Music is the only store that you can go into and regularly find Stockhausen’s own CD’s; he bought back all the masters back from D.G., and he’s released them himself, and it’s the only place where you can find them. They have a complete set at Other Music. They have Xenakis at Other Music, but they have it there not because, oh, we have an earnest commitment to new music, but they have it there because people who like sort of the general category of “weirdos” like that kind of music. That’s why they’ve got it there. The other thing, to continue Michael’s analogy about, you know, music stores… We like the people who live in between rooms, the music that we want to be with are the people who are lodged in the wall between pop and classical music, or in the stairway between DJ’s and jazz. There are people… it seems to me that if you want a composer who’s really trying to do something interesting, you’re not trying to fit into a bin that has an easy location. You’re trying to find something that actually hovers around. We just did Music for Airports by Brian Eno. Brian Eno has bins in three different places in Tower Records, because his output is too diverse to be categorized.

FRANK J. OTERI: And you listen to those albums themselves – an album like Another Green World — is it a rock album, is it an ambient record, is it an experimental record?

DAVID LANG: Right. And that’s what’s interesting about him. You actually aren’t able to locate himself in one place.

FRAN RICHARD: I’ll make you a proposition – that you do something for “Between the Rooms,” and you do some kind of showcase.

JULIA WOLFE: Great.

DAVID LANG: Sign us up.

FRAN RICHARD: Okay, you’re on.

5. Audiences and Venues

 

FRANK J. OTERI: We mentioned Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. I went to their show at the Hammerstein Ballroom; it was fantastic. A huge crowd was lined up around the block, getting frisked for tape recorders because everyone wants to bootleg the show. It was this amazing energy. Here they are playing this really complex music, really “out there” chords, screeching guitars, big extended microtonal harmonies, and everyone is listening to this. And it’s young people. Why can’t we get this audience for a new music concert?

JULIA WOLFE: You can.

FRANK J. OTERI: So twelve years into Bang On A Can, I guess the question really is: What is your audience? Who is attending your events? Are you getting the people who are going to the Sonic Youth concert? Are you getting the people who are going to the Gerhard Richter exhibition?

JULIA WOLFE: I think every project we do attaches us to a different audience. The move to Lincoln Center was our biggest jump in audience numbers. Every concert was sold out. That was probably due to the location of the facility. Some of the audience came from that area. When we did Brian Eno, there were a lot of Brian Eno fans there that we

FRANK J. OTERI: I would daresay probably you got people to Lincoln Center who haven’t been to Lincoln Center before. Lincoln Center doesn’t play Brian Eno’s music generally!

JULIA WOLFE: I think that with all our different activities, we’re actually trying consciously to tap into this audience.

FRANK J. OTERI: Let’s take it out of New York City for a second, because all these terms are New York: “uptown,” “downtown,” Lincoln Center vs. the Kitchen, or Cooper Union, or the Knitting Factory. The Bang On A Can All Stars travel a lot. They were headliners in Atlanta and are appearing in Northfield Minnesota and Burlington Vermont. Talk a little bit more about you three versus the All-Stars and what that represents. What are the receptions like in the rest of America? Then we’ll talk internationally. It’s interesting, there’s this other audience for music that’s out there, and then there’s the mainstream classical music audience, and you get booked in a town outside of New York. Where are you getting booked outside of New York? Where are these concerts happening?

DAVID LANG: Colleges and clubs.

MICHAEL GORDON: Mostly colleges.

FRAN RICHARD: When you go to colleges, what part of the student population attends?

JULIA WOLFE: I think it’s not only the student population, but a lot of the colleges have intellectual centers and art center. They get also get people from the town, the community of people who go to all the art events in that town, because that’s where they happen – at the university. There are some places where they are particularly enthusiastic about music.

DAVID LANG: We played at a rock club in Los Angeles, and we played in a club in Vancouver. I think one difference between New York and the rest of America, is that in New York, there’s so much happening that it’s really possible to be jaded. You go: “Well, there are 10 things happening tonight that I want to go to so I’m not going to do anything, I’m going to watch TV.” [laughs] And the rest of the country, you go someplace, you know, it’s an event when somebody comes in, it’s an event when somebody plays any kind of contemporary music, good or bad. So I think we have very good responses in these places, people are really hungry for different kinds of things. You go to San Francisco, people know us from our records. That concert was crazy, there were two very well attended concerts and people seem to know everything we have done. And they were hungry for it.

RICHARD KESSLER: Who else do you think they listen to?

MICHAEL GORDON: I think the audience is really really diverse. We were talking about Sonic Youth. That music is really amazing and it’s really difficult to listen to, but if you took that music and put it in an album that said “new music” and had a bunch of people wearing jackets and ties holding a pair of bassoons no one would buy it.

RICHARD KESSLER: They’d never see it.

DAVID LANG: So our Symphonic Sonic Youth record isn’t coming out? [laughs]

MICHAEL GORDON: Part of the reason these people are hits – they have cool haircuts and they hung out in New York in the East Village…

DAVID LANG: . . .And they get really hip artists to do their record jackets. They’re totally connected to the alternative, kind of dangerous art scene – I mean, they’ve really insinuated themselves into a circuit which is the way it has to be. It’s kind of, you know, the blood is flowing a different way in that world, which is really kind of cool. And that’s the problem with what you’re saying, Michael. The problem is that music got stuck over here someplace, and all the people who want it to be over there weren’t people we want over there, and the rest of the people are over here, and how do you figure out how to tie into all these things which went together naturally. I don’t think of it in terms of marketing. I think we can ask questions about who comes to these concerts. Maybe we should be thinking about…maybe we can break down the demographic and find out which people buy which kind of toothpaste. I think what it really is that all people are hungry for interesting things. All people are hungry for something that makes them feel like their life is worthwhile. And people create these other vast mechanisms of things that allow information to pass through them that help them feel that they’re grounded in the world and that their life has purpose and that their little corner of the world is not a little corner of the world but it’s connected to all the other little corners of the world. So I think that’s really what we’re trying to do. I don’t really care where the Kronos Quartet plays. I don’t really care where any other music group plays.

RICHARD KESSLER: It’s more an issue that there are certain forms, classical forms, that have become disconnected. . .

DAVID LANG: Right.

RICHARD KESSLER: …and that are searching for ways to make connections, that are dealing with all sorts of issues having to do with labels, having to do with perception. It seems that so clearly in this issue that I have talked briefly to Steve Reich about. You can go to Philip Glass, you can go hear the Philip Glass Ensemble at Avery Fisher and you can go hear a Philip Glass piece with the ACO, and you will see two distinctly different audiences. What does that tell you about the people, and also the ACO and the Philharmonic? How do they reach out? How do they break down those barriers? Why do those barriers even exist? These are some of the questions – the larger institutional questions – they may have very little to do with individual artists, or composers and ensembles, but in the industry, they are big questions.

JULIA WOLFE: I think I can answer some of that. I guess that the audience that comes to Bang on a Can is a mix. It’s not a Kronos audience. It’s not like everybody who runs to Kronos comes here. What they’re doing is they’re reaching a string quartet audience and I think there’s crossover, but I think that what Bang on a Can is speaking to is a kind of art crowd. It has to do with how we present ourselves. It’s very informal. It has to do with what the flyer looks like. These things sound superficial but they are visuals that are conveying a philosophy. I mean, we are so picky, we are so tied to our copy and our art design, it’s ridiculous…

RICHARD KESSLER: That says something. As ridiculous as it may seem, you pick up that flyer, for that second, it represents you. Nobody is listening to the music at that second – that picture is you.

JULIA WOLFE: And it all has to go together. I mean, there are some groups that are, let’s say, more formal, and they have a cool flyer, but it all has to be organic. That’s what I am saying. A symphony, if they are a symphony and they are wearing tuxes it’s great if they still have a certain audience.

RICHARD KESSLER: The interesting part is to describe this music. I’ve had this discussion with Fran many times, but I can tell you that I have so many times bitten my tongue, bitten my tongue saying “contemporary classical,” or “new music,” “new American music,” “American new music,” none of these terms work very well, “classical music,” “contemporary classical composer.”

JULIA WOLFE: Whenever someone asks you, what kind of music do you write?

RICHARD KESSLER: Other music. [laughs]

DAVID LANG: I always used to say, “I write post-ugly music.” [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: Getting back to the Kronos, for a second. They are an interesting example. Everyone said; “You play new music and that’s death in the concert music community.” They said: “We’re going to play nothing but music written since 1900.” Then they dressed a certain way, they took music to certain venues, they did transcriptions of Hendrix, and they did a lot of really successful things, they did things that weren’t as successful, but they had an audience. People attend those concerts and people buy those recordings, and they’re very visible, and they look like a rock band, they look like an alternative rock band. We’ve all heard the clichZþs about them, but we’re living in a post-Kronos world.

MICHAEL GORDON: They don’t look like a rock band. They look like the closest, hippest thing in the classical music world.

DAVID LANG: I think so, too.

MICHAEL GORDON: I mean, just, they’re taking their marketing cue from the way rock bands are marketed. They were maybe the first people ever to have a good picture on the cover of their album which was amazing and revolutionary. I think if you are someone who is interested in rock music, you don’t look at that album and go, “Oh, this is a rock band.” But if you walk into the classical department and you’re looking for something hip or something new or something different, you can look at that CD and go, “Oh, this is cool.”

RICHARD KESSLER: Why dress up a group like a rock band and then play Beethoven?

JULIA WOLFE: I think Richard is saying that it has to be organic. In other words, I think it is really fascinating to see a group playing Beethoven with some rock energy. Maybe if there are things about their performance of Beethoven that are really brash, really edgy, if it’s miked really closely, whatever. All kinds of stuff like that but, it’s got to be in the product (. . .I hate to say product. . .); it’s got to be in the art, no matter what you look like. Everybody does that now. We’ve got sexy, nymphet, rock-star looking violinists, you know.

FRANK J. OTERI: I think that, if anything, that stuff has hurt classical music because people listen to it, and it’s just a lackluster performances of standard repertoire. You might have gotten a larger audience to buy this stuff and then they hear it and they say “Gee, this is really boring. Yeah, classical music is boring. Goodbye.” And you’ve lost them.

MICHAEL GORDON: The thing is, when you say “hurt classical music,” when you talk about the recording industry and you talk about music, you know, you’re really talking about basically two different things. Everybody knows that classical music no longer sells. Every single thing on the classical Billboard chart is a packaged, marketed thing. It’s either Bach with your cereal or it’s the latest tenor…

FRANK J. OTERI: Even those don’t sell anywhere near compared to a pop recording. They’re not real numbers. You can sell like 300 copies of a recording a week and get on the Billboard chart so it doesn’t really mean anything…

MICHAEL GORDON: The Three Tenors, though, was a major…

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, that actually sold…

MICHAEL GORDON: But that’s also generic.

FRANK J. OTERI: Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 was a piece of repertoire that sold…

FRAN RICHARD: The third time it was recorded! People want to know what made it successful, and they can’t help trying to make it a formula. And you’re right, it has to be organic, but they can’t help trying to figure out why and if they want to be different, how can they make it?

6. The Success of Bang On A Can

 

FRAN RICHARD: Do you think you’re a success?

JULIA WOLFE: I think we’ve been thrilled about the growth of our organization. I guess that’s success in a certain sense. I mean, there are things we still want to do, there are things that haven’t worked. If you take an average day what happens in that office – it’s really unbelievable — we’re getting faxes and phone calls, the group is traveling worldwide, and…

FRAN RICHARD: What is really exciting about going there and playing another season or going in there another day and not finishing a piece you have a deadline for? What is it that keeps you so charged up?

JULIA WOLFE: That’s a really good question…

MICHAEL GORDON: We’re just getting our publicity for our festival coming up, and we were just working on it and we were looking at the marathon concert. There are still 10 or 12 composers that we’ve never done music by before. A couple who just got their tapes in the mail…

DAVID LANG: The reason why Bang On A Can is successful is that we are incredibly romantic about it, you know. We are really good friends, and we are all very different people but we have some things that we share in common and we are best friends and we see each other every day, and we have also very high standards. So, every day we meet and every day we talk to each other and we figure out how to get each other excited about different things. And we have very high standards about it and we only do things that are interesting to us and are exciting and charge us up and that make us feel very excited and feel good. And that’s, I think, how everything’s made honest. When we get together and we have a conversation, if we can’t get excited we have to stop. Today a composer called me out of the blue, who is somebody who sent us in a score blind, and we listened to it and we programmed it. The guy called me up on the phone and he was almost in tears on the phone that we were playing his piece. It’s just so amazing. Essentially, we didn’t know who he was, we put on his music, we liked it, we programmed it. You know, it seems so obvious that the world should work like that.

FRAN RICHARD: So the politics that usually predestine what will be played here or there or in that venue, you don’t think that you have that. . .

DAVID LANG: The pressures are there.

FRAN RICHARD: Oh, I’m sure there’s pressure.

JULIA WOLFE: We do consciously want to reach a very broad spectrum of the community. So I think there are things that push us to look in different areas. There are issues pushing us around, but the basic thing is you just have to like it. It’s definitely there. When we listen to these several hundred tapes that come in, we’ll listen quietly, and afterwards we’ll know who it is, and for at least half of them, I go “Oh,” if they’re a really nice person, and I love them personally. But it’s totally about whether it was something that was written with integrity and creativity and if we’re interested in the piece; that’s the bottom line.

MICHAEL GORDON: I don’t think that we’re saying anything about this music except that there’s something of interest about it. In other words, I don’t really feel like we’re saying that this is the great music of our time or these are the great composers. But what we’re really interested in is: “Is this is a fresh idea, or is this a new sound I haven’t heard before, or does this have something that makes it worth listening to, because there’s something I’ve never heard before in this?” But that doesn’t mean that it’s good. I always get charged because I go to a marathon and I listen to all this music – I designed it for myself to go and get charged!

FRANK J. OTERI: So do all three of you have to be into it for it to get on? Can one of you hate it?

DAVID LANG: It’s something we have done from the very beginning which I think is also one of the reasons why I think we’ve been successful, is that if that one person does not want something to happen, it’s not happening.

FRANK J. OTERI: And that’s happened with you?

JULIA WOLFE: Yes. It’s not really that…

DAVID LANG: It’s not like it’s a war…

JULIA WOLFE: It’s not a fight, but it has to be unanimous. But somebody will always like some stuff more or less than the others. Maybe someone loves one piece, and one likes it okay, and the other really likes it… Usually we listen to all 200 or 300 tapes and it’s cut down to maybe 40. In that initial listening, I would say that most of those 40 affected all of us in some way, whether or not it then makes it to the next round. I don’t know why, maybe we hang around each other too much, I think there is a common art that jumps out at you.

RICHARD KESSLER: Throughout the new music community, there’s a question about audiences. In the orchestra community, there are apologists who say: “Where are we going to put that new piece – the second to last piece in the first half right before the intermission?” You know, in their heart they support the music but they’re afraid. They know they have some people in the institution who don’t like it. They can’t sell it and they worry about what’s going to happen to the seats. I’m concerned about that morale, that sort of psychological impairment. I have this sense that none of that exists for you. My question would be, has it always been that way? When you guys first started out, did you just sort of blindly go into it and say: “We’re just going to do what we want and we’re going to have some fun and we have something to accomplish”?

DAVID LANG: Okay, I’m going to answer that first. My answer – I don’t know if my answer is the same as yours…

MICHAEL GORDON: If it is, I’ll think of a different one. [laughs]

DAVID LANG: I personally don’t feel that there’s anything wrong with having a concert for a smaller audience. And I personally feel like I never imagined doing something with Bang On A Can that I didn’t believe in strictly because I felt like it was important for us to have x number of people at a concert. The only thing that’s tragic is if you don’t have the audience you want. I think what’s beautiful about Milton Babbitt’s article “Who Cares If You Listen?” is that he says, you know, we are like scientists and we’ve discovered this incredibly beautiful thing and there are only 10 people in the world who are smart enough to know it. And what are we supposed to do, I mean, this is an incredibly beautiful gift for those 10 people. And I think that’s great; I think that’s fine. The tragedy is that if you think you would rather have 1000 people and you only have 10 people. I guess the reason I got a little touchy when we were talking earlier about demographics is I don’t care if 100 people come. I mean, I’m really happy if lots of people come, and I think it’s great. But I really care mostly about making the concert that I want to go to. And if there are a lot of people who are like me, then there will be a lot of people there. And if there aren’t a lot of people who are like me, I’ll still be happy!

MICHAEL GORDON: I feel like we’re not burdened by having to perform classical music. We’re classically trained musicians and we work mostly with classically trained musicians. We’re basically coming out of the classical tradition. But we’re not burdened with having to perform classical music; we’re only performing contemporary music. And the big problem with putting that piece of contemporary music on a classical music program is the audience doesn’t want to hear that piece of contemporary music. So the question is, are you really doing something for the world by having that piece of contemporary music there or not? The traditional idea is we are doing our duty and a service to contemporary music by commissioning this piece for this group that doesn’t want to play it and by performing it for this group that doesn’t want to listen to it. But I propose, and this is my personal view, that we’re not doing any service of any kind by doing that. Who else in the world would go: “Oh, you’re going to a country music concert? Well, I’m going to put aside 15 minutes of this country music concert so you can hear music you don’t want to hear!” Or, you know: “I’m going to put aside 15 minutes of this rock concert aside so you can hear…”

RICHARD KESSLER: The Monkees did it, though. Jimi Hendrix opened up for them. . .

MICHAEL GORDON: When you’re talking about the rock world that’s a whole different thing because those opening spots are sold. Those are spots that record companies buy to promote their acts. There’s a story that Frank Zappa, when he first played in Vienna, got this really known quartet to come out, and he put them all in robes and hoods, and they went out and played a Beethoven string quartet. The audience, you know, sat there for a while and then they started booing, by the time the string quartet was over, the entire audience was throwing things and booing. The quartet bowed and walked off the stage, and then Frank Zappa’s band put on these hoods and took the violins and went back out to take a bow, as if they were the quartet, and the whole audience was sitting there booing and throwing things, and Zappa just pulls off the hood, his whole band pulls off the hoods. . . I think the success of the Kronos Quartet, the success of the Philip Glass Ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, and you know, what we’re doing, is basically when someone comes to hear a Bang On A Can concert, they know that they’re going to get weird music. They know they’re not going to get country music. They know they’re not going to get classical music. We don’t have to deal with people who don’t want to be there. It’s really simple. We don’t have anyone at our concerts who doesn’t want to be there. I mean, it happens that people don’t know what it is, but they’re not there thinking, you know, well, it’s a classical music concert and I came here to hear beautiful music. I personally, I’m against it, you know, I think that the orchestra. . . classical music. . . is a beautiful thing. But if I’m going to an exhibit of Rembrandts, I don’t want to see, you know…

JULIA WOLFE: I don’t think it’s that simple. I think that, what really matters is the intentionality. What are they trying to do, what’s the ensemble or the orchestra presenter trying to do. I think it’s great if a classical music has some new music; I think it’s totally fine. I think that what matters is that the orchestra, or the administration of the orchestra, knows what they’re about. You know the Kronos, and that’s great. All these people who have listened to Kronos records all this time and all the records they’ve made suddenly hear this very strange music and they’re really open to it and that’s fantastic. The Brooklyn Philharmonic plays new music. They played Stravinsky, and Bach, and Reich. What got the huge ovation? The Reich. And I think that that’s because the Brooklyn Philharmonic gives that concert – that was their intention, and they’re committed to it, and they’re behind it, and that’s what they’re about. I think the problem is when you have something, like the Philadelphia Orchestra, who are a fantastic orchestra, and they’re kind of trying to do this duty or they’re trying to add something to their programming, but their audience is very staid. They’re all going out to a very fancy dinner and a social phenomenon, which is really the case with most orchestras that it’s a whole class or milieu that goes to it for a very particular reason. It’s like a hammer, a slam in their faces. I don’t think that’s going to work but I think it could work, if that’s what they’re about. I think the problem is when it’s not coming from the community of music makers or listeners.

7. Is the Orchestra Dead?

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Then here comes the loaded question. . . What happens when you want to write for a big ensemble or an orchestra? Is that form something that we shouldn’t think about anymore? Is the orchestra dead?

MICHAEL GORDON: No, it’s not dead. It’s a museum.

RICHARD KESSLER: What may happen is that all of a sudden the repertoire has ended. And that as an industry, that’s where they’re going nuts. It’s about, has it in fact ended? Is it going to grow to add another piece?

DAVID LANG: I want to jump in here, because I really disagree. I mean, I agree with everything that both of you said, about the audience – I feel that it goes back to what I said earlier. It’s really important to have the audience you want. To create the environment so you get the audience that you need in order to create the opportunity for people to listen to everything openly and to listen to everything constructively. But I don’t think that the orchestra is, by definition, dead, or, by definition, a museum. I think it is a museum now, but I do not believe that that’s the way it has to be.

MICHAEL GORDON: Well, no, it doesn’t have to be and I want to tell you this story. Julia and I are walking down the street and we see posters plastered on the street. There’s this like cool looking guy, about 20 years old, green hair and blue goatee and he’s sitting on the sidewalk, he’s wearing jeans, he’s got this little sign saying “I’m going to the opera.” And I looked at it and said, “Wow, look at that — could that be like an ad for City Opera? That would be so cool.” And Julia goes, “Yeah, that would be so cool. They’re not cool enough to do that ad.” We get closer and closer, and finally we get right up to it and there’s this little tag that says “Levis.” [laughs] And that’s what this ad is for.

FRANK J. OTERI: I was walking to the American Music Center a couple of weeks ago and I was just livid. There was a sign at a bank for retirement plans, and it said, “Do you have a classical IRA? Well, maybe it’s time to rock and roll.” So the implication was that a “classical” was boring and staid and not where it’s at now. And that’s the perception — it’s this word, “classical.” I was really excited when the Ensemble Modern came here a few years ago. Here’s this chamber orchestra playing all new music, big audience, an orchestra version of the Kronos, let’s say. Or, even what Esa Pekka Salonen’s doing in Los Angeles. I heard the new John Adams piece [“Naïve and Sentimental Music”] — the audience loved it. They flipped out. They gave it such a huge ovation. They changed the order of the program, even. The original order of the program was Adams first and Prokofiev after intermission. Usually they’re afraid to put new music on the second half, they’re afraid people will leave at intermission. But even pairing Adams and Prokofiev was atypical; it was an all-20th century program. It wasn’t sold out, but there were lots of people there and the audience was ecstatic. They brought Adams out twice. It can happen. And I would dare say you program this new music with an orchestra, chances are, you’re going to get more of the type of crowd that is interested in otherness in other arenas coming to the orchestra than you would if you were playing a whole program of Mozart symphonies. That is the way to save the orchestra.

MICHAEL GORDON: The type of programming that you’re talking about goes back to what I was trying to say about record companies. Record companies realized five years ago that classical music is dead. They were never going to sell another copy of a Beethoven Symphony; they’re never going to sell another copy of the Brandenburg Concertos. They can’t survive anymore selling classical music. So all of these records now are gimmicks. I am going to sell classical music with, you know, a beautiful tenor that we market, a gimmick, or this or that. There is a label, or there is someone at one label, maybe, or there are certain people who can go, “I know that if I have great performances and I package this right, I can put out a quality product that is even challenging and sellable.” Let’s take the Kronos Quartet for example. But most people at most labels don’t have that kind of vision, or they won’t try new ideas. And my feeling is that the orchestra is going downhill. The audience is going down; they’re running out of money. And ten years from now, the orchestras that survive. . . There will be a San Francisco Symphony, let’s say, that will do daring programs and will have an audience. But more and more, classical music concerts are going to be marketed exactly like these, you know, it’ll be classical music and breakfast, or classical music with the forty tenors, so, like, giveaways at a baseball game, come to this concert and…

RICHARD KESSLER: Lincoln Center has these rush hour concerts…

MICHAEL GORDON: But what they’re not doing is they’re not going: “Look, how can I do innovative programming, do something that’s of quality, and market it in a way that I can get an audience?” And that is possible, you see. But the ingenuity is not there.

RICHARD KESSLER: It’s a cultural issue and it’s an institutional issue. What you were not burdened with, what led you directly to it is in your hearts and your minds – the work. Let’s say you had hired someone to run the operation who knew nothing about music and nothing about what you did. The fact of the matter is in orchestras, the music director is given the music responsibilities, the executive director is given the administrative responsibilities. In the museum field, the executive directors were once curators. In the music business, the executive director had nothing to do with the music. In addition, they have marketing people who may not even know anything about music. So you didn’t have this other side, this other half, this other side of the coin that you would have had to commit, that you would have had to move, to convince to whatever. You were simply able to take a look at, as I said, what was in your hearts and minds and just go in that direction. And you said as much earlier, essentially. With some of these institutions, it’s really complex.

JULIA WOLFE: It’s harder.

DAVID LANG: I’d just like to add one thing. It’s not just contemporary music which has the problem in the orchestra world. You shouldn’t expect to hear an orchestra play a subscription series with a Beethoven symphony either. That’s not the right environment to bring to any of those pieces. It’s not just contemporary music that has the problem. I feel like those orchestras are doomed for many more reasons.

8. Radio and the Sound of Classical Music

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Part of the thing is the flip side of the coin of what you were saying before, Michael. You go to a Bang On A Can concert and you’re expecting to hear other music; you go to a country music concert you’re expecting to hear country music. Part of the problem with this term “classical music” is we pigeon hole what we can and accept into the canon and we say, “What sounds like classical music?” This is a real problem with classical radio. They’ll say: “Well, I can’t tell you what it is but I know what it sounds like.” I’ve been going to the public radio conference now for five years in a row, and they’re starting to open to new music. But when I first started going, there’d be people who bragged about censoring orchestra broadcasts whenever there was a contemporary piece. They’d say: “My audiences won’t listen to that stuff. They’ll turn the dial!” And it’s that mentality out there. How are you going to keep listeners? And they’re all afraid they’re losing their listeners, so they’ll only play the standard stuff. Which leads me 180 degrees around. . .feel free to jump in here. . .to talking about the All-Stars and the formation of the lineup of the All-Stars. You have an orchestra; an orchestra has a certain kind of sound, a symphony orchestra. You have a string quartet that has a certain kind of sound. The All-Stars is a very decidedly not classical-sounding ensemble. There’s a percussionist, there’s an electric guitarist, and it’s amplified, it’s not the sound that you expect from this music. So that was clearly the decision. What led to the decision of choosing that sound, that combination?

JULIA WOLFE: First of all, the formation of the group came in kind of a mutual way because they were hand-picked by three of us, and not because of their instruments. Every one of those performers had been on the festival as soloists. Most of them in repeated performances. And we thought they were amazing. So part of it was people jumping out at us, and that was part of the inspiration. And another thing that inspired us to start the group was that we kept getting calls from all over, from California, or from Europe, asking: “Can you bring Bang On A Can to Amsterdam?” Well, 24 pieces and 10 groups and, I mean, it was an unwieldy thing to relocate. And just little by little it dawned on us that if we had an ensemble, we could take the aesthetic on the road. And even though obviously the marathon is much more diverse than this ensemble, it really is the voice of Bang on a Can on the road. But as far as the instrumentation goes… There was some thought to the fact that, well, some lows, some highs; we definitely wanted that electric sound and the electric guitar. But it really was the top, phenomenal players that got us excited, that’s why they’re a group, and it’s really odd to put 6 soloists together; it’s like fire in the room!

MICHAEL GORDON: It’s also, you know, there’s a cello and a bass, and an electric guitar, which are basically the same, you know, the cello and the electric guitar are basically the same range, and there’s percussion…

JULIA WOLFE: It happens that Maya Beiser plays way up in the violin register on the cello…

DAVID LANG: …because of the oddness of the instrumentation. They were chosen because, we, year after year, started depending on some of these people who were really the equivalents in the music performance world. Composers that we were interested in were people who were incredibly great, incredibly passionate and giving their lives to this, you know, totally weird world, and we started depending on these soloists. Some of them played on the first marathon. They’ve played on every marathon since. And we thought, okay, well, these are the people that we know, that we work with, the soloists. What would it be like to take these, you know, incredibly dynamic, egomaniacal, monster players and put them all in an ensemble together and say: “you’ve got to work together”? [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: To bring it back to that ‘radio’ thing: “Well, it doesn’t sound like classical music so we’re not going to play it on our classical radio station because people are going to turn the dial.” I remember the first radio conference I attended 5 years back in Nashville, the All-Stars came out there, and, you know, I loved it, but I was at a table with a bunch of people who were ducking for cover. They were afraid of it. How do you reach people via radio?

JULIA WOLFE: We used to get a lot of radio — we’re not experts about radio. I don’t know who the major stations are that are playing our records. It would be a great thing to know. Sometimes we get feedback from records that are played. We get calls from friends: “Yeah, I just heard your last record on radio.” So somebody’s playing it somewhere; probably the bulk are alternative college stations…

FRANK J. OTERI: We’re at a real impasse now. There are commercial classical radio stations that have a mandate to play “classical music,” and when you’re entering the marketplace, there are certain expectations. It’s like, you go to a country music concert and you’re not going to listen to 15 minutes of a rap concert thrown in the middle, and say, well, this is also country. But at the public radio stations, there was always, in the past, a different mandate. The public radio station is something that serves the public; it’s something that is beyond the realm of the marketplace and should open people’s minds and educate people and bring them to something new.

RICHARD KESSLER: And public debate.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, that’s a corollary of that. And that has fundamentally changed.

FRAN RICHARD: Their mandate. Their mission…

FRANK J. OTERI: Their mission…I don’t think they know what their mission is.

MICHAEL GORDON: As money gets tight, and everybody has to support themselves, you’re going to see a shift, I mean, you can see it in New York, WNYC, is incredibly progressive, but that’s in New York City, and here there is an audience.

JULIA WOLFE: Well, they’ve improved a lot …

MICHAEL GORDON: But the second the money becomes tight …

JULIA WOLFE: … It goes in waves. Like no new music on certain times. They’ve had cutbacks and stuff…sometimes you sort of have to relax about it. But there are waves that come and go and suddenly everyone wants to hear new music.

FRAN RICHARD: Well, it definitely is interesting, because, we’re looking at orchestras, and how they’re handling the huge fiscal problems they have. Is it smart to do the same old thing? Or is it smarter to do something in addition, or more or different? The same thing happened in public radio with the huge cutback in the Corporation in Public Broadcasting and also an attack. So they have less fire. You have a financial shift and that is fundraising, continuously on the air. How do we respond to that? That’s why I asked you before if you are concerned about the selling of tickets. Now, you have to fund-raise. I remember when the NEA pulled away the grant, and we came and helped you that year, remember? Well, the point is, money is needed to fuel your vision. And sometimes maybe your vision isn’t fueled only by what will sell tickets. But it’s a reality, you go back to the radio thing, and the orchestras. They’ve forgotten what their mission is or why they’re not-for-profit or why they’re not a commercial rock band, why they’re doing something, radio particularly. It’s our only medium so it’s very key for us, because we don’t have a lot of play on the major networks. So now what do we do – and they have a lot of discussion about whether to play classical music at all or be all talk. The Bang On A Can All-Stars, particularly Maya and what she did there, was a little disconcerting for a lot of them. But we also heard this year some very bad playing of standard repertory. [laughs] They had this guy, and we don’t want to mention any names, playing lousy Chopin, the performances were abominable and the thing that I noticed, these guys will give standing ovations to everybody, whether they’re good or bad…

FRANK J. OTERI: As long as it’s safe repertoire, then, you know, if they hear something that’s unfamiliar they run away …

MICHAEL GORDON: I just want to say that this is the same thing as the orchestras. We get radio play on college stations and we’re, you know, like we’re doing a concert Saturday night at Alice Tully Hall, we’re doing ticket giveaways on WFMU, not on WQXR, not on the classical stations.

FRAN RICHARD: Any broadcasts of the concerts?

JULIA WOLFE: No.

MICHAEL GORDON: Nothing at Lincoln Center.

FRANK J. OTERI: But what we’ve been saying before is that there is an audience. So these public stations – forget the commercial, forget QXR. These public stations should be looking. They certainly are there in terms of their news program, for the “other” listener, the person who goes to the new art gallery, who reads the complex book, who wants to be out there in the vanguard for stuff, yet it isn’t there for music. Why not?

DAVID LANG: Well, these stations were really good for our music. It’s not necessarily in what they play during the day as part of their normal rotation, but, as far as special features go, I think that radio has been very kind to us. And, again, I see that it’s a special interest to all of us that this music gets on the radio. But I don’t want to really obsess about it, because I feel there’s this giant shift going on about where people get their information and how people get their information. And I think that what’s really happening is that people who are interested in the new and fresh, have begun, for many different reasons, to write radio out of the equation of how they get their information.

RICHARD KESSLER: The use of radio and what people listen to on it is a psychological historical issue. But, we’re thinking, after we get the magazine up and running, about creating an internet radio station for new music. We’ve been thinking about a place where people can go. It’s natural that it would be on the internet…

FRAN RICHARD: On the radio — at the conference, they talked about having different streams. You have the local NPR station but it has set up the streams on their web sites to do the music I don’t think is in the modules of the Arbitron, which is also fascinating. . . Radio has been good to you, want to tell WNYC you’ll do something to help them.

DAVID LANG: Give them $60.

FRAN RICHARD: The other thing is with NPR, I mean, we used to have these kid DJ’s at 2 and 4 in the morning that could play anything. But what Richard Kessler is saying. . .and this is the dilemma that they know they have with All Things Considered. . . they have people who want to hear more in-depth news and not just a thirty-second sound bite. These are intelligent listeners of a certain ilk for every age and they’re trying to hold them on that station, that they not switch them off the air, and that’s what’s so interesting. Why would somebody be so interested in all the things you’re saying, and you come back again to why they’re not interested in some really innovative music.

JULIA WOLFE: Well, I think they could be. I think that maybe the bridge hasn’t been made completely. It’s still evolving, we did a spot for the Eno disc on All Things Considered at the airport, and what that means, and the whole philosophy behind it.

FRAN RICHARD: That’s right. Make news.

JULIA WOLFE: …they’re open to it. They’re not closed to it. They may not be purely musical or purely anything, but I think if there’s a story, there are roads in there.

FRAN RICHARD: Absolutely.

9. How to Promote American Composers

 

FRANK J. OTERI: To connect all the dots: the discussion of orchestras, the discussion of radio. . . To take it back to what we were saying at the very beginning of this discussion about Stockhausen and Ligeti being heroes in Europe. . . Do we have any composers we can look to here that same way? We mentioned Copland, whom I would argue is largely out there because he was such an advocate for music and the field in general. He was an excellent politician. He founded the American Music Center. He saw the need for this outreach. We don’t, as a country, unlike other countries in the world who have public radio, who have non-profit orchestras, give percentages of funding based on bolstering national artists. We don’t say a percentage of the music you’re playing in America has to be by American composers in the orchestra, a percentage of what you broadcast on an American public radio station if you want NEA dollars should be American music. Now that sounds terribly xenophobic. . .

DAVID LANG: It does.

FRANK J. OTERI: …but in Canada they do that, in Finland they do that.

DAVID LANG: How many great composers does Canada really have? I’m against this 100%, I have to say. I feel like good music is good music. It could very well be that one year, every American composer is terrible, and to play their music on the radio you’re not doing anybody any favors. You know, I think it’s really good if you can create the environment where people want what is new, they’ll want what you have. And I absolutely, 100%, with every fiber in my body, reject something that says that an American should get paid for work because he is an American. Music which is good should be supported by whoever, by the most despicable human being in the worst country in the world. If it’s good enough, I want to know about it.

FRANK J. OTERI: Who determines what’s good?

DAVID LANG: I have no idea. But I know that a committee going and measuring my blood is not going to be able to make that determination.

MICHAEL GORDON: When we lived in Amsterdam, it was interesting because just about every year, European countries, they have a huge amount of money, you know, I think that it’s, I mean, right now, it’s about 5 or 6 times the amount of the NEA budget in this country. And I think it’s fine. They can do whatever they want. So we were there, and it’s great. You register, and after a year and a half you are considered Dutch, and then you can get funding. So what happens is a wonderful retirement place for every bad young composer in the world. If you can’t have a career anywhere else, you can move to Amsterdam and after 2 years you get an orchestra commission and an opera commission and so forth and you live the rest of your life. There’s never a question of quality; there’s never a question of, well, what are you doing? Is it good or bad? Because they have this feeling in Holland that everyone should get supported and no one is better than anyone else.

RICHARD KESSLER: As executive director of the American Music Center, I might be expected to say certain things about the issue of mandating American. But for me the more important issue is the lack of federal and state funding for individual artists. The NEA, for a number of well-known reasons, ended its funding of individual artists. Rather than spend my time on the quota issue, I think it’s more important to figure out how to increase the funding that goes directly to artists. This is particularly important when you compare the US to countries overseas. When you recognize the level of support available for European artists.

{I’m afraid I have to say goodnight, because I have tickets tonight to hear Lizzie Borden! Again, I would like to thank you all for taking part in something that is extremely important to us at the AMC. It is incredibly important to me personally as well, so thank you! I also want to say, if there’s anything we can do to help at the Center, please call. As I ask everyone to remember, it’s your American Music Center. We’re there for you, so call if we can do anything.}

FRAN RICHARD: The state arts council by law is politically unable to support individual artists. We don’t consider that artist in the same way because in order to get around those things they have created more arms-length projects which are not government controlled. There was funding for individual artists through the Endowment, but it was taken away because of terrible political pressure from one particular part of the spectrum that holds us all as perverts and whatever. I’m concerned that the American music dominates the world. The pop music has engulfed the world, all over. In some cases, in film as well. And in France if you own a cinema house you have to play three French films before you play one American film because of that domination. We are usually fighting in our field alone. Some work hard in our music field where Americans are not valued, here, as much as they may be valued elsewhere, which is an interesting twist in the state of affairs.

FRANK J. OTERI: To counter what David was saying, I don’t think there’d be a year when there wasn’t any good American music. I’m hearing tons of great American music all of the time. And the fact that we have funding for non-profit orchestras and radio stations to play classical music, and we define classical music in such a way that we define America away from it. Classical music does not include American music, it does not include music of our time. We’re doing our own musical culture a great disservice.

DAVID LANG: You said two different things. One thing is that it’s terrible these people get public funding and they don’t play American music or deal with the music of our time. Well, you know, those are two separate issues. I feel like, if there were a climate to support a listenership for music of our time, American composers would profit greatly. I don’t think that one could create a climate for that by mandating they play music of our time. And I don’t think that they would profit by mandating that they play American music. I feel like the general question is not how to make people do those things but how to change the culture so that those things become viable. And I believe that it is possible – I don’t exactly know how, but I believe that it is possible.

FRANK J. OTERI: Let’s take it one step further. I’m going to really, totally play devil’s advocate here, because, you know, we’re funding orchestras. Why even fund classical music? Why are we funding classical music in this country?

DAVID LANG: That’s a really good question. I don’t know.

FRANK J. OTERI: Maybe we shouldn’t be.

DAVID LANG: I don’t want to say anything that takes money away from anyone, that takes a dollar away from anyone. I don’t want to do anything that impinges on anyone’s abilities. I know that in years when fund-raising was very bad for Bang On A Can, we still had a festival. When the NEA pulled money away from us, we still had a festival. We did a smaller festival, but we still did it.

FRAN RICHARD: So part of it is you have a commitment and a mission and necessary values. But it’s more important to put the show on, not so much where and not so much all these things. We sit here near Carnegie Hall and we see when the Finnish orchestra comes to play, they play Sibelius. We respect when the Czech orchestra comes and plays Dvorak or Janacek. What is so hurtful for so many Americans who devote their lives to this field is that we don’t have any equivalent pride and self-confidence in the culture that is created indigenously here, and that’s what Frank is talking about. And there isn’t an argument, it’s just an issue of what we do to encourage it and he is saying force the issue. It doesn’t necessarily mean a quota, but if something doesn’t become indigenous in the pride, it cannot take hold.

JULIA WOLFE: I also think that it’s not so black and white, necessarily. You can do interesting and strange things and find a way to get them to people. I guess that’s what we’re trying to do. I guess I agree with David that you don’t want to force someone to do things, but you can find those pockets where people are out there pioneering through, when you find a radio station that does that, when you find that record company that does that…

FRANK J. OTERI: And there certainly are plenty of new music ensembles that do that. Other groups around the country like the California EAR Unit in L.A., Common Sense in San Francisco, Present Music in Milwaukee, or Relâche in Philadelphia. . . And there are a lot of people doing a lot of really worthwhile things out there. I’m disturbed about the “museum pieces” part of our culture where people are playing music that they don’t want to play, and people are not wanting to hear it and there’s this divide. Maybe the orchestra is a museum piece, maybe there’s no future for the repertoire for the orchestra, but there certainly is new repertoire for the orchestra in other parts of the world. And there are plenty of good orchestral pieces by Americans. Why haven’t these entered the repertory?

MICHAEL GORDON: Well, I’m not saying there aren’t any good pieces.

FRAN RICHARD: Well, when we started with the residencies and the orchestras, the composers didn’t want to write because it was so difficult to get the work played. These are very practical people, you know, they don’t see a purpose. I’m thinking about all the record companies, see, without recording and multiple performances nothing can come into the repertory. So we come now to a place where all these recording companies go to this radio conference with their product, and ask them: “How come you’re not playing this?” And those guys are saying: “We can’t pronounce the name — there’s not one vowel in this conductor’s name. We’ll be embarrassed if we say it.” What if we couldn’t say Beethoven?

DAVID LANG: An embarrassing thing happened today, it’s an unrelated topic.

FRAN RICHARD: Okay, good.

DAVID LANG: This conductor from a tiny, tiny orchestra, in a tiny, tiny town calls me up about a piece of mine, and he found it kind of by mistake.

FRAN RICHARD: In America?

DAVID LANG: In America. And he’s asking me all these questions, as if he’s discovered me. And this is a piece that’s been played by the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic and the St. Louis Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony. And, this guy’s asking me these questions like, you know, like I dropped from the moon. And I think that that was really interesting to me. There’s not really a way that information gets passed from here without recordings.

FRAN RICHARD: The orchestra league is working on a millennium project. Without going into all the details about this fiasco so far, they finally agreed that they want to do something to promote American music as the purpose of this project. And they’re saying that all these people nominated pieces by American composers and blah, blah, blah. There’s lists for however long it is or whatever goes on it or not on it. We’re saying what we’ll do is promote it. Every record store will have bins with this music. And I said these pieces have not been recorded, don’t you understand? Out of this whole list you realize how few? And the marketing director of the league is stunned! And there comes the forces that you can control with the All-Stars or whatever, that you write, you can record, you can tour with them.

MICHAEL GORDON: Basically, we are a mom and pop store. We have found that we carry the products we like and we don’t carry the products we don’t like. We don’t owe anybody. We are not being controlled by a corporate entity, and we have figured out how to survive. You can survive, and you can do better than survive. I think it’s very hard within the classical music world to create that energy, very hard for orchestras and record companies and radio stations. You’ve got an established way. You have a way of doing things. You know, 6 years at Lincoln Center, as successful as our concerts were, in terms of our relationship with the structure, which means the marketing director, the P.R. person, we were always on the fringe. The last time we talked to the Marketing Director he looked at me and said, “I’ve got 3 concerts of Elgar in Avery Fisher Hall to sell. I can’t worry about you.”

JULIA WOLFE: And he’s talking to us because we feel we made a contribution there, you know, to move into that space and sell out those concerts…

FRAN RICHARD: You brought them something they didn’t have.

JULIA WOLFE: Yeah.

DAVID LANG: But how can you argue with him? I mean, he’s got 3 concerts of Elgar to sell – I feel sorry for him! [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: A loaded statement… but maybe it’s a mistake for him to be promoting these 3 concerts of Elgar if they’re not selling.

DAVID LANG: Well, I believe an orchestra playing classical music can survive. And I really believe that a radio station playing classical music, can survive, too. I think there are lots of reasons, which have to do with, you know, lack of courage, about why these things don’t happen. But I don’t believe that they’re fundamentally impossible.

10. The Identity of BOAC vs. the Identity of its 3 Directors

 

FRANK J. OTERI: One of the things that’s so amazing about the Bang On A Can Festival, is, in a way, it’s like a radio show.

DAVID LANG: Well, yeah. It’s a variety act.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah — it’s sitting and listening, or it’s sitting with a bunch of friends together and listening to a bunch of really interesting records. “These are the records that I bought this week.” And, you know, that’s the energy that should be on the radio and there are people who do this stuff on college radio stations. But that’s not what’s happening straight across the board. I want to turn to a whole other area completely 180 from where we’ve been so far, because each of you are composers of significance in your own rights and you each have separate careers and are doing separate things. It’s this amazing juggling act having Bang On A Can and then having your own individual projects, a lot of which are really starting to blossom. How do you separate the two? How do you work on your own individual projects and shepherd this entity, Bang On A Can?

JULIA WOLFE: The question is, how do we survive every day? [laughs] It’s pretty tricky. I think that we’re all very giving, and that helps a lot. Whenever someone’s really busy, they don’t go to every meeting. When someone’s got a workshop, or a deadline, or a record, or whatever’s going on, two of us meet.

FRANK J. OTERI: So the everyday meetings aren’t all three of you.

JULIA WOLFE: No. Pretty much most days we see each other, just mostly out of friendship. But it’s definitely a juggling act. The nice thing about it is the organization has evolved to where we’re not running the logistical things – we’re very close to it, we’re talking to the two guys in the office every day. We do have a two-person office for that, it has been a three-person office and it will become a three-person office again. In the past, we’ve just had some great, great people who are totally just music nuts, like they have more records than any of us, more CDs than any of us. So we’ve been at least weaned off that part of it, you know, we still do a lot of stuff, we’re always doing copy, you know, all the words for everything, and all the press releases and the grants. We’re sort of overseeing stuff and a lot of fund-raising stuff, not necessarily grant-writing now, which is great…

DAVID LANG: We oversee it.

JULIA WOLFE: We oversee it. We’ve moved closer and closer to being true artistic directors, which means of chunk of your energy here, and not 2/3rds of your day, I mean, I know David can talk on the phone, but I won’t. Both Michael and I turn the ringers off, and that’s it, you know, check the machine a certain time of the day and that’s it. Otherwise you’re not getting anything done. You have to certainly be vigilant about guarding that space out for yourself. But all of us plan and project in all kinds of worlds.

FRANK J. OTERI: How do you feel when you have a work presented, a major piece, and it’ll say “David Lang, one of the co-directors of Bang On A Can,” and Bang On A Can is always there with your name?

DAVID LANG: I love it. Because it’s a really beautiful thing that we made.

MICHAEL GORDON: If I can jump in, we have a very fortunate situation. It’s not so much the time or work we put into it. It’s all here. I have Julia, David and Evan who’s also a composer, my three closest friends, and the rest of the Bang On A Can All-Stars. We talk about music all the time. Every single day one of them will call me, or I will call them or see them and say, “Oh, what do you think about this, that I’m working on.” And I’ll play them something I’m working on. So we have a really active musical exchange and it’s something that’s really rare, because as artists get older, you get more and more isolated. They have developed their style and they are surrounded by a group of people who are fans and supporters, and they’re never challenged. It was funny, when I first met Ligeti back when I was in school, I said to him really naively, “So, what’s your relationship with Stockhausen?” “Oh, I’ve never met Stockhausen.” [laughs] “So, how do you know, since when do you know Boulez?” “Oh yes, Boulez, he has conducted a couple of my pieces.” And you realize, these people don’t talk to each other. And Philip Glass and Steve Reich don’t talk to each other, and they don’t talk to Elliott Carter or Milton Babbitt, and they don’t talk to each other. So people are very isolated and you go through this world by yourself, and I feel like we have this very warm life where we’re constantly exchanging musical ideas. And then we have this incredible group of musicians. It’s amazing to be writing for some group, to be writing for Ensemble Modern and you have a problem and you call up an advisor and say: “Oh, is this possible.” You call Steve Schick and you say “Can you do this?”

FRANK J. OTERI: It really is about having a new music community. And this is really striking a chord — back 60 years, to what Copland was doing when he founded the Center with Otto Luening, Howard Hanson, Marion Bauer, Harrison Kerr and Quincy Porter.

FRAN RICHARD: It’s one of the problems when you go to any isolated place and hear a piece of music whether it’s for orchestra or whatever. . .

FRANK J. OTERI: Right, because each one’s trying to push their own agenda.

FRAN RICHARD: The issue of professionalism makes very bad propaganda. You need leadership. You need people to make choices. They have made a choice [Fran points at all three composers], which is a fascinating one, and it’s not just gratuitous, it’s well deserved because it was against the grain of what anybody expected. Now I’m sure it’s difficult trying to figure out how to juggle teaching and writing music… You know, then you stand for each other and you put on events which feature other people. Which is why this thing is so credible. But you don’t go around saying: “Oh, let’s just do each other” because you need to be able to be free to express yourself. And that’s the leadership: if we had some more of that, people could make up their own minds if they like it or not.

FRANK J. OTERI: None of you teach. Each of you makes a living from writing music.

DAVID LANG: That’s correct.

FRANK J. OTERI: Talking about balancing your career as a composer with this whole Bang On A Can thing, David, you have an opera that’s premiering this weekend…

DAVID LANG: I’ve got this opera called Falling and Waving. The workshop premiere is tonight, it’s designed to be a high-tech situation where there are monitors and video projection and the music is actually a soundtrack which accompanies the action on stage. There are all sorts of incredible things, the technology for the workshop is a bit rudimentary but the eventual program for it is really ambitious. And next week I have a workshop of an opera I just finished with the Kronos Quartet.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now to turn back on an audience question. . . In terms of the audience for these non-Bang On A Can events, when you’re doing an opera, what sort of audiences are you finding there?

DAVID LANG: I wrote a traditional opera for Santa Fe, Modern Painters, which was for a very normal audience and was really fun, I’m really proud of it. These are specifically designed for theater audiences. They’re done with theater singers, not opera singers, and the presenters are theater presenters, not opera presenters. . . not that I have anything against opera presenters. . . I’m composer-in-residence at ACT, so a large part of what I do is for the theater. That friction is really interesting for me. I think it’s more interesting than to go into the traditional opera world and try to blow it up.

FRANK J. OTERI: Just like you have the All-Stars; you have this ensemble that’s amplified and doesn’t sound like a classical music ensemble. You’re not writing something that sounds like opera.

DAVID LANG: Right.

FRANK J. OTERI: You’re inventing a new thing that is opera in the sense that it’s this tradition, but you’re not playing into the stereotypes.

DAVID LANG: Well, it’s an interesting negotiation you always make with the singers in this situation because most of them are theater singers. You’re writing something and you actually sort of go through this weird process of trying to figure out how close you can get. How can you change things to take advantage of what it is they can put across? Their theater skills put things across that their music skills don’t necessarily put across. I think that’s one of the things that makes it fun for me; it’s calling on something I don’t necessarily know how to do.

JULIA WOLFE: I’m working on figuring out a second record, I have a record contract with Point. The first record came out a couple of years ago, and just today I had a discussion to try to figure out what to do. It’s really an exciting way of working because in a certain sense I’m writing for the record. It’s a very different head to get into, I just think of who the players are going to be…

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s not going to be a collection of other music…

JULIA WOLFE: It’s going to be one piece. It may be sectional, but really, it’s, I don’t know. I don’t really want to go into all details about it because I just talked to them. The thing I’m excited about is it’s very political and it uses voices. For me it’s a new thing, samples, it’s a concerto of car skids and glass breaking, so this piece is basically going to be made up of political material taken from interviews with political figures, music for ensemble.

FRAN RICHARD: What time, our era, this century?

JULIA WOLFE: It’s right now. It’s people alive today. It’s very current. I’m excited about it.

FRANK J. OTERI: Looking forward to hearing it. Maybe we can get a sneak audio preview that we can put up on the website before the album gets released.

JULIA WOLFE: Yeah. I’d love that.

FRANK J. OTERI: That’d be great. Michael, I know you have a recording of a major piece on Nonesuch.

MICHAEL GORDON: It’s a string orchestra piece. it’s a collaboration with this artist, Elliott Kaplan. He got the idea that the orchestra should be vertical, because that was the best thing for video. I told him it wasn’t possible, because you can’t stack the orchestra on top of each other. But he said: “Oh, you’ve gotta do it, and so they did.” I just wrote the music and then when we went to rehearse. In every rehearsal they turned around and faced the wall so they couldn’t see each other. So they got used to it over a period of 6 months. They got used to playing without seeing each other, then we finally did it, and it’s great. We did 16 performances in Germany. We recorded it after the tour for the British division of Warner, and that record company actually folded, and Nonesuch decided to release it. The record, I think, was 63 minutes, the piece was actually 75 minutes.

FRAN RICHARD: Did they cut it?

MICHAEL GORDON: You know, I worked with a pop producer. I worked with this guy, Gregg Jackman, who produced the Sex Pistols, and all these rock records. He actually was also classically trained. He comes from a whole family of trained musicians, and he makes his living producing pop records.

FRAN RICHARD: Do you have a video of it?

MICHAEL GORDON: I have pictures.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah. That’s another way. That’s how alternative rock music really got off the ground is video. Well, the question I wanted to ask everybody but I may as well ask you, this whole question of the canon and forebearers — doing Music for Airports was such an interesting project. I know, for me as a listener it was amazing to hear the music live and I’ve gotten to hear the All-Stars do it twice and it’s extremely exciting. I was at a concert that you did which was combining Music for Airports with Terry Riley’s In C. And In C sounded more like rock than Brian Eno, and it was more aggressive and more confrontational and certainly part of it was the instrumentation you chose.

MICHAEL GORDON: It was a great performance. It was really fantastic.

FRANK J. OTERI: But a very different reconceiving of that piece than any performance that I’d ever heard, whereas the Brian Eno was really almost pure. Certainly things had to be changed, but it sounded like a Brian Eno record that I’ve known and loved for 20 years. I guess the question is, down the line do you see yourselves doing more projects like this? Are there other transcriptions of unnotated music that you’d like to do?

MICHAEL GORDON: I think the reason for transcribing the Eno exactly is because the point basically was, the point was really questioning what is rock music, what is classical music? So for us to play with it and be free with it, in a sense, would not be making the same point. The point was to do it exactly the way he did it, to treat it like a composition.

FRANK J. OTERI: And also, what’s so interesting is, it’s not just the classical and rock divide, but he was creating a piece that was talking about the issue of passive listening versus active listening. You took a piece that he designed for passive listening and made it active listening, by making it a live experience, by having people focus on it in a concert format in real time, not as background. . . it was no longer background. . . but as foreground.

MICHAEL GORDON: In C‘s really related to a lot of pieces from the 60’s. It’s part of a whole school of music where you can choose what the instruments are or choose the length of time; all these factors are open. We tried to take a more aggressive stance on that than what is traditionally done. Our performance of Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet on Saturday night isn’t going to be aggressive, but I think it’s something that Gavin Bryars would not necessarily have originally conceived. I don’t know if Terry Riley would feel like In C was too aggressive or if Gavin Bryars would feel that our version of Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet is too ambient. We’re trying to reinterpret the spirit of that music.

JULIA WOLFE: I think we’re making it up.

MICHAEL GORDON: We’re making it up.

JULIA WOLFE: That’s what we’re doing with all this stuff. That was the really fun thing about working with Meredith Monk. It’s the first time she worked with an outside ensemble. She’s doesn’t get near anybody except for her own players so it was really a radical introduction. And a couple of the All Stars are really great singers. It really sounds like Bang On A Can meets Meredith Monk. And she has this incredibly beautiful solo music, generally soft, the performers are soft, and suddenly we have Evan and Mark doing these contrapuntal singing lines, it has this kind of maniacal feel to it. I think it is a matter of taking this music because it had a huge impact on all of us and making it our own.

FRANK J. OTERI: Do you ever see doing this with older music? Where is the line?

MICHAEL GORDON: We’ve thought about it. We thought about it for a long time… A Beethoven symphony or something like that. Who knows?

FRANK J. OTERI: There are lots of other people out there playing Beethoven. No one’s out there playing Music for Airports.

11. Free Time

 

FRANK J. OTERI: You say you design this program for people like you. What kinds of events do you all go to? What do you go see? What turns you on? What records do you buy? What records have you bought recently, what concerts have you gone to?

DAVID LANG: Records?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, let’s start with records.

JULIA WOLFE: So much has been the stuff for the festival, like for festival planning…

DAVID LANG: I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan. But he’s never been on the festival.

FRANK J. OTERI: Would he ever be on the festival?

DAVID LANG: I think that’s more for him to decide. [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: Okay, but if he said, “Okay, I want to be on the Bang On A Can festival.”

DAVID LANG: I could imagine something he could do that would fit

FRANK J. OTERI: He’s definitely redefined genres. . .

JULIA WOLFE: I’ve had very little else in my head, because I’m putting together this concert Saturday night. I’m re-orchestrating this piece, and I’m performing in it.

FRANK J. OTERI: And you’re singing a piece by Meredith Monk.

JULIA WOLFE: Well, yeah. I’m clapping and dancing. I’ve been really immersed in it…

FRANK J. OTERI: That sounds so exciting to me…

MICHAEL GORDON: He [points at David] just had his third kid, we have two kids…

FRAN RICHARD: Do these kids all like each other?

DAVID LANG: Our daughters are best friends.

JULIA WOLFE: They play together every day. We share a babysitter.

FRANK J. OTERI: How old are they?

DAVID LANG: Mine are 4, 3 and 3 months.

JULIA WOLFE: 3 and 1.

DAVID LANG: Five kids are being babysat together at this very moment.

FRAN RICHARD: Where would you go, if you had a night out?

DAVID LANG: The New Jersey Nets!

MICHAEL GORDON: We go to a lot of concerts.

JULIA WOLFE: We do go to a lot of concerts.

FRANK J. OTERI: Would you go to a concert of Brahms symphonies?

MICHAEL GORDON: No. [laughs]

DAVID LANG: I would. Michael says NO. I say yeah.

JULIA WOLFE: Brahms, yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: Without naming names, Orchestra X concert that plays overture, concerto with a soloist, and a standard rep symphony – that program. Would you go to that concert?

JULIA WOLFE: Probably not.

DAVID LANG: You didn’t make it sound very good.

FRANK J. OTERI: I’m sorry.

DAVID LANG: You didn’t sell it.