Name: Dory Hayley
Nationality: Canadian
Occupation: Vocalist, performer improviser, teacher
Current release: Dory Hayley's new double album i love evil is out via Redshift. Next to Morton Feldman's “Three Voices,” it includes performances of recent pieces by Jordan Nobles, Katerina Gimon, Rodney Sharman, and Cassandra Miller.
Recommendation for Vancouver, Canada: Vancouver is all about the natural setting. I live near the beach and run on the seawall almost every morning. My favourite thing is that you can get around town on these little False Creek Ferries. The boats are really tiny, so it doesn’t feel like public transportation, it feels like you’re going off on adventure. Even if you’re just commuting to rehearsal, for a few minutes it feels like you’re living a different life.

If you enjoyed this Dory Hayley interview and would like to stay up to date with her music, and upcoming live performances visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, and Facebook.



When did you first start getting interested in musical interpretation?  

I really had to mull this question over, because “interpretation” doesn’t strike me as quite the right word for what I do. “Interpretation” seems to suggest something fixed, whereas for me, musicmaking is more fluid than fixed, more verb than noun, more collaborative than individualistic.

I don’t feel I’m consciously coming up with My Interpretation™. I look at the score and do my best to perform what’s there. Of course, this involves making many, many decisions; however, most are not really conscious, but simply a consequence of my personality, my teachers, my experience, my understanding of the style, my collaborators, the performance situation, and the idiosyncrasies of my voice.

In fact, maybe “decisions” isn’t even quite the right word: it’s more like a response in good faith to the information or clues I’m given. It’s impossible to perform a piece without interpretation. It’s not like you add it; it’s just the truth of how you understand it. In that sense, I’ve been interpreting since my earliest performances.

My 4-year-old already plays the violin (open strings only!) with a bunch of unconscious micro-decisions—about the length of bow, articulation, sound quality, rhythmic consistency, etc.—based on his personality, his technical attainment, the limitations of his 1/32nd-sized instrument, his teacher’s aesthetics, the music he’s heard, his mood that day …

I don’t think our processes are fundamentally different; I just have more refined technique and more understanding of context.

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances captured your imagination in the beginning when it comes to the art of interpretation?

There were definitely musicians I idolized growing up. My parents are classical music likers but not lovers, so our music collection was somewhat limited, but we had some funny emphases:

the DG Beethoven Bicentennial Collection (I was obsessed with the quartets played by the Amadeus Quartet), the complete works of Bach, and a 20-CD set of Itzhak Perlman recordings (at one time, I could sing you just about every note).

The only vocal album we had was Kathleen Battle’s Saltzburg recital, which defined my childhood understanding of beautiful singing.



As an undergrad, I sat in the library and listened to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s complete Schubert, Brahms, and Strauss recordings on dusty vinyl *multiple* times. I heard Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg’s gutsy performance of the Shostakovich first concerto live and was so mesmerized that I recorded the CBC broadcast onto a cassette and carried it around everywhere until the tape wore right through.

I was drawn to Maria Callas’ completely uncompromising, often ugly, but undeniably exciting singing, and especially struck by a story: she was rehearsing La Traviata, and her voice kept cracking on the final pianissimo high A of “Addio del passato.” Serafin, the conductor, suggested she sing it just a little louder, but she refused, saying Violetta was dying and would only be able to whisper.

In the performance the note cracked. I’m still inspired by that idea of sticking with your understanding of the piece, not just doing what’s technically expedient but striving for something that is maybe beyond possibility.

Still, I think I was first captivated by music more from the inside out than as a listener. I sang in a serious children’s choir that often performed with the Vancouver Symphony, and I played in youth orchestras as a kid, which gave me the chance to experience great—or at least professional--interpretations of masterworks from the inside.

I think I was most excited by the community aspect of music—participating in a performance and sort of both influencing and being carried along inside this vast structure.

Are there examples for interpretations that were entirely surprising to you personally and yet completely convincing?

When I heard Patricia Kopatchinskaja had a new recording of Pierrot Lunaire, I thought maybe she was conducting? Or her violin playing was so iconoclastic she was listed as a soloist? Or maybe it was an instrumental transcription like the trumpet version of Kurtag’s Mysteries of the Macabre?



When I realized she was performing the voice part I was extremely sceptical. But her version, while undoubtedly over-the-top, is entertaining and impressive.

What do you personally enjoy about the act of interpretation? Are you finding that this sense of enjoyment is changing over time?

I love the sense of discovery, and the feeling of partnership: entering into communion with the piece, and by extension, the composer.

By asking “Why did the composer write this like this?” you learn something about them as people. Composers I perform a lot—like Bach, Schubert, Brahms—begin to feel like friends.

Of course, when I commission and perform new music, the composers often are—or become through the process—my actual friends. And in that case it’s nice to understand something new about them through their music.

How much creativity is there in the act of interpretation? How much of your own personality enters the process?

A lot of personality is involved, but that’s an inescapable consequence of making music while human.

On the other hand, interpretation doesn’t exactly feel creative to me. It’s more like remaining alert and attending to the needs of the moment. Planning bigger projects and programs feels more like a creative act to me.

Could you describe your approach to interpretation on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

With new music, every piece requires a new approach.

The first disc of “I love evil” features Morton Feldman’s “Three Voices.” This was an unusual process of interpretation for me for two reasons:

First, it was my first time recording music that had been recorded before. Since Joan LaBarbara’s recording is iconic, and Juliet Fraser’s is absolutely pristine and beautiful, I really had to think about whether I had anything to add. But I strongly felt there was something different I wanted to say about the pacing and overall atmosphere of the music.



Second, due to the nature of the piece many interpretive details had to be decided in advance. The normal process is to learn a piece, practice it, feel your voice through it, then rehearse it, then hopefully give a couple of performances, and *then* record it.

As familiarity grows, things like tempo, phrasing, structure, and colour naturally begin to fall into place. But because Three Voices has two pre-recorded tape parts I had to make major choices before I really felt I knew the piece.  

As soon as I finished the recording and postproduction, I wished I could do it all again, because I learned so much about the piece through the process.

What was your own learning curve/creative development like when it comes to interpretation - what were challenges and breakthroughs?

I was a violinist as a kid, and I was often praised as “musical,” which I think really meant I couldn’t play my instrument all that well. But maybe because of that reinforcement I felt quite confident and free about phrasing and style. When I started studying singing, I learned music quite effortlessly, so I didn’t spend too much time with the score.

It wasn’t until my graduate studies that a coach said to me, “well that’s quite beautiful, but you know you have to have a pulse ...” That set me on a path of treating the score as more than an impression.

One of the key phrases often used with regards to interpretation are the “composer's intentions”. What is your own perspective on this topic and its relevance for your own interpretations?

I think the tension between responding faithfully to the composer’s intentions and the inevitable expression of individuality is what makes music meaningful.

I recently had a conversation with the composer Cassandra Miller in which I was surprised to hear her claim that composing is a service profession—providing music for performers to express their artistry.

I feel exactly the opposite. Maybe that’s why we enjoy working together … we’re just in an endless service loop!



I am infinitely fascinated by radically different or even “wrong” interpretations – the tempi of Toscanini, Kempff's Goldberg Variations. Are there extreme interpretations that you enjoy as well? Do you personally draw a line – and if so, what happens when we cross it?

As a teenager I heard a pretty wild Nigel Kennedy recital where he alternated movements of Bartok with Jimi Hendrix transcriptions while bouncing around the stage.

At the time I found it completely perplexing and even off-putting, but in retrospect I think it shaped my concept of programming quite a bit.

When you have the score in front of you, what's your take on taking things literally, correcting possible mistakes, taking into account historical aspects etc?

It depends on the composer. Some composers really mean every detail they indicate.

For example, the first time we performed Helmut Lachenmann’s Got Lost, my duo partner Manuel Laufer and I went to work with him for a couple of days, and he “inspected” every sound we made. He was able to demonstrate every single piano and vocal effect he desired with absolute precision.

Funnily enough, another example I would give is John Cage, whose works I’ve performed a lot. Naturally, Cage leaves a lot of latitude to the performer, but I think it’s crucial to take every indication he gives as absolute gospel.

Other composers are more about the broad strokes, and it’s apparent in their scores. To take a very contrasting example, I’ve been working on an edition of a gorgeous piece for soprano, clarinet and piano by Friedrich Kücken and his phrase marks are quite odd and inconsistent. I went through every single phrase mark in every one of his songs I could find, and really there was no rhyme or reason. So I feel quite comfortable phrasing the way it feels most natural.

With regards to the live situation, what role do the audience and the performance space play for your interpretation?

Performing for an audience feels like giving a guided tour of a city.

It’s not enough to just sing the notes beautifully, you have to lead the audience through it—articulate the form, point out important moments, highlight the emotional arc, etc. It’s always the same city, but no two citizens would give quite the same tour.

There’s something about the exchange of energy and the sense of being received that I can’t quite explain but feels vital.

If there’s anything the pandemic proved, it’s how essential the audience and the shared space for gathering are. Covid gave us the opportunity to develop new skills and experiment with so many new ideas, but in the end the cognitive dissonance of pretending that making videos was performing was excruciating.

Some works seem to attract more artists to add their interpretation to it than others; some seem to even encourage wildly different interpretations. From your experience, what is it about these works that gives them this magnetic pull?

I think there are two factors.

First: they are simply great works of art and there’s a natural desire to commune with them. Second might be that they’re canonical works that represent sort of traditional rites of passage for performers.

Then we can question why these and maybe not other pieces are included in the canon.

Artists can return to a work several times throughout the course of their career, with different results. Tell me about a work where this has been the case for you, please.

As a new music performer, I only wish I could perform the same piece several times!