Name: Alyssa Weinberg
Nationality: American
Occupation: Composer
Current release: Alyssa Weinberg's new album Pieces of Light, performed by Gabriel Cabezas, is out via MASS MoCA.
Hometown Recommendations: Well, I moved to Austin, TX just two short weeks ago now, so I can’t say I’m the best tour guide for knowing where to go quite yet! But I can definitely recommend a visit to the James Turrell Skyspace, “The Color Inside,” on the UT Austin Campus.  

[Read our Gabriel Cabezas interview]

If you enjoyed this Alyssa Weinberg interview and would like to know more about her music, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram.



For Pieces of Light, where, would you say, did the impulse to create something come from for you? What role did often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

Well, from the very beginning it came from wanting to compose an album length work for my dear friend and close collaborator of many years, Gabriel Cabezas.

We started together with that intention, and sought out a residency opportunity at Avaloch Farm Music Institute to begin workshopping and testing out bits of material, planting the initial seeds of how the work might take shape.

On the tail end of that residency we decided on a whim to stop by MASS MoCA on our way back home to New York. It was there that I first encountered James Turrell’s work and immediately knew our album would be tied to that experience.

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

I always need to visualize the work in order to get started.

Ideas for a piece for me are often tied to other experiences, whether they are encounters with other works of art, experiences in nature, or more personal experiences being expressed.

When I am struck by one of these encounters, I’ll attempt to document and take note of my own visceral reaction and associations with that experience, and then reimagine a translation of that reaction in my body through a sonic contour which I will usually map out through graphic representation and a lot of “journaling” before I attempt figure out what the actual musical materials might be to serve the idea.

I try to imagine the sonic world and the gestural expression of the piece with as much detail as possible before setting out to write - although that stage of brainstorming and imagining is very much part of the “writing,” in my opinion!

What did you start with? If there were conceptual considerations, what were they?

I started really with two initial seeds for the work: spectral explorations and techniques I was experimenting with on the cello, very much collaboratively with Gabe; and my intense reaction to encountering James Turrell’s work with light and the play of perception.

The way Turrell manipulates perception and plays with the intangibility of light as a primary artistic medium so perfectly parallels the way I organically think about the manipulation of sound and the things that excite me most about composing.

So it really was a perfect pairing just as Gabe and I were testing out some new techniques together.

Tell me a bit about the way the new material developed and gradually took its final form, please.

From the initial concept, I mapped out a list of properties of light or aspects of the experience of Turrell’s work with light that resonated with me or that seemed to invite musical parallels to explore. Each movement is its own tiny distillation or meditation on a different personal experience in relation to each of these concepts.

In terms of the development of musical material itself, there was a tremendous amount of exchange throughout the process, testing out bits of material, reworking notation, refining the concept and execution quite collaboratively.
 
Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

I don’t feel compelled to be locked in by my initial choices by any means, but I find it essential to always have a plan I am *trying* to follow, and if the music takes me in another direction it prompts me to take a step back, consider why and out, and chart out a new map to match this new turn of events.

I wanted to go a little deeper into some of the aspects of your approach mentioned in your biography: texture, colour, and gesture. Can you talk a bit about the role that texture holds in your compositions and how you shape it?

I think of musical texture (along with timbre) as one of the most important ways I relate to feeling, embodying in a viscerally connected way, what the music has the ability to express. Melodies may or may not emerge out of or float on top of a musical texture, but it’s the textural depth of sound that contains the emotional core for me.

In that way too, it can be quite liberating in terms of chosen harmonic language, as I can have large sections of music that essentially just sits on an open fifth if one were to attempt a “piano reduction” of the material, but it is by no means musically static.

I have found this prioritization quite organically allows for an open and expansive harmonic palette, even within the same piece, if textural relationships otherwise create structural consistencies or hierarchies in the language.

What does the word “colour” mean in relation to sound, for you?
    
When speaking of color in music I am often referring to timbre, although I do connect strongly with the sensations and sounds I perceive in relation to visual color as well!

Gesture is an intriguing connecting link between the visual senses and sound, but it's not a term that gets mentioned a lot. Could you share your perspective on it a bit, please, in connection to the new collection of compositions?

Gesture is everything! It’s the literal shape of the music, the contour of the sound and the expression.

In my own process, a piece starts with a visual mapping out of the gestures, sketching out shapes and squiggles and such on paper, along with time codes and other detailed markings, which then reveal the form of the work.

One track from Pieces of Light in particular, “phosphenes,“ prioritizes gesture at the expense of other types of traditional specifications in notation, and as a result I chose to let this movement exist as a graphic score in the end.



Throughout the composition process for this work, I tried countless iterations of hyperspecific and detailed notation to control every incremental movement of bow pressure, speed and direction to get at the desired effect and gestural expression, all of which actually proved to interfere with a truly organic interpretation of the gesture I cared most about.

But Gabe knew my sketching process and what those early representations look like in my process of development, and at one point in these notation attempts he simply asked to see my sketchbook instead.

We realized together that for the particular ideas in “phosphenes,” codifying the sketch itself as score, rather than forcing it into the limited confines of traditional notation, allowed for a much clearer and truer realization of the gestures and sonic shapes.

Christopher Rothko demonstrated how much his father thought about getting the exact relationships between his fields right. Is that something you recognise in how you work with sound? What determines how you sculpt your compositions in this regard?
    
I try to constantly zoom in and out of focus with the work, making sure I spend just as much time standing back and taking in the piece from a distance as I do in the weeds in the tiny little details of notation of each localized moment.

To make sure I’m getting the pacing just right, I’ll often close my eyes and conduct or pantomime my way through a gesture, so I can really imagine how it will be embodied in performance, using a stop watch to keep track.
 
Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on? How much improvement and refinement do you personally allow until you're satisfied with a piece? What does this process look like in practise?

It’s different for every piece! I’ll often make many adjustments in the context of the first rehearsals of a new piece, or even just immediately after the first performance if I didn’t have sufficient opportunity to test things out leading up to the premiere.

I don’t often mess with much after that, although there are certainly a few instances of much older pieces (from my student days!) being revived and pulled off the back of the shelf, and I feel compelled to rewrite bits and pieces of those before letting them be performed again.

After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Did you experience something similar after concluding Pieces of Light – and how do you return to the state of creativity?

I experience this all the time. The bigger the project, the bigger the depression that waits for me on the other side.

It can be incredibly disorienting once you get past a finish line that you’ve been working for with such intensity for a prolonged period, like you don’t quite know what to do with yourself afterwards.

To snap myself out of it I try to let myself take at least a day as a “reset” between projects, take long walks, and try to get excited about what’s next rather than letting myself get washed away in overwhelm.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?  

To write music is to make something from nothing, to imagine what doesn’t yet exist, and to translate and sculpt it into an inherently intangible medium - it couldn’t possibly be farther from something like making a cup of coffee for me.

Writing music is a translation of my most intense, visceral sensations and personal experiences in life, abstracted and drastically amplified through the process of translation into sound.