Published
Part 2
It is my impression that adding a conceptual, non-musical dimension to one's work is almost a prerequisite for commissions and grants. How do you view this tendency and how “conceptual” is your own approach to writing?
I haven’t been asked for concepts when I’ve been commissioned. Maybe that’s because I haven’t had a standard composing career, taking me to the big places where a concept might be required. Or maybe it’s because, as I’ve explained, my pieces often have concepts behind them.
My concepts sometimes stretch the musicians I work with. I’ve written a string trio, Cooperation, in which musical phrases might not sound complex, but, inside them, the instruments keep changing roles, shifting between inner voices and the melody. For the musicians to hear and feel that takes some time.
In an opera based on A Christmas Carol (written in the 1970s and performed several times), I made Scrooge a speaking role. He should — as seemed obvious to me — be played by a professional actor, but opera companies didn’t always understand that, and cast singers whose acting they liked, or (as happened once) a member of their board.
At the end, when on Christmas morning Scrooge wakes up transformed, the music stops, and the transformation plays just as an acting scene. I found that moving (the music reinforcing joy with an extended silence), but some people thought Scrooge should burst into song. Which to me, not that I would have used this word in the ‘70s, seems just a bit cringe. (This work isn’t on my website yet; I’ll need to digitize a fragile cassette tape, and scan the vocal score, published by Theodore Presser.)
Working with long forms, complex concepts or new vocabulary is potentially more challenging today because they require us to remember things that happened perhaps minutes ago – while most of us are finding it hard to focus even on what's happening right now. Both as a composer and as a listener yourself, how do you deal with this?
I'm 83, so I come from an era when focus might have been easier. Maybe that’s why I don't find it hard to follow music over long spans of time, either as composer or listener. A friend of mine, a music business veteran, told me (after hearing my string quartets) that control over long spans was one of my strengths. I hope that’s true!
If I really am good at this, it’ll show in the longest of my string quartets, Mahler Variations, which on the new recording unfolds over 27 minutes. Its climax (as, it just struck me, also in my Christmas Carol opera) is a silence, which in live performance should last at least a minute, the exact length being up to the musicians, who can sense the flow of time at each performance.
From that silence the last section of the piece emerges, and there I think the flow of time is almost tangible. (As we edited the recording, we found that — without the musicians as a visual focus — a long silence dies. So we made it shorter, made it last just 20 seconds, which felt long enough for the silence still to feel almost physical, while the flow of time still stayed alive.)
For many artists, life-changing musical experiences take place live. Few works these days, however, are performed beyond their premiere. What, do you feel, does this mean for composers, and the music they write, and how does this reality influence your own work?
I wonder how many pieces, during the long sweep of classical music history, ever had second performances. Or at least after the 18th century, since up to then concerts mainly featured premieres, and so even the greatest works, apart from operas, might only be performed once.
The masterworks from the 19th century and beyond were of course played often, which is how they entered the repertoire. But what about the composers and pieces that weren’t so successful? Maybe a lot of them, didn’t get second performances, so what happens today might not be as anomalous as we might think. How many films, going back generations, ever had second runs in movie theaters?
But to me there really is something new today, which is that there’s no wide ecosystem for new classical music, no audience that’s looking for new pieces, and is informed and curious enough to know about them. I don’t even see how there could be that audience, since there isn’t information to fuel it — widely circulated news of premieres, and recordings, also widely circulated.
I wish that were different, but at least for now it doesn’t oppress me in any personal way. Since I’m newly emerged as a composer, my main goal simply is to be more widely known. And while I need live performances, recordings, if they’re properly promoted, can do more for me, because more people might hear them than will hear my music live.
And I can target them to individuals, sending them to particular people whom I’d like to hear my work.
How, would you say are live performances of your music and your recording projects connected at the moment? How do they mutually influence and feed off each other?
My answer here is linked to my last one. I’ve emerged as a composer with a recording, my first, the recording of my string quartets. But of course they were written for live performance (and have been performed live), and everything I have lined up for the future is also live music project, a piece to be written for a live premiere.
So you could say I’m a live-music composer. But again, having recordings is crucial, even if they’re just live recordings of my premieres. Recordings can give them an ongoing life, even if they’re not performed live again.
And I've been lucky so far, because the studio recording of my string quartets was a special experience. The Terra String Quartet reached great heights in the studio, and the recorded sound is warm and natural, giving the music a special glow (or so people tell me, and I found myself, when one of the quartets was played a few times on classical radio, and I could compare the sound with other recordings that were played).
I couldn't ask for a better calling card, and the response to the album has been heartening.
To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?
I don't have any plans to use AI, but I don't mind if others do. What matters to me, with AI or any other way of composing, are the results.
I was fascinated to read of an AI-composed song that, in a Latino community, became a political rallying cry. People blasted the song on their car radios. If the song spoke to them, who am I to say it shouldn't?
Are there approaches, artists, festivals, labels, spaces or anyone/-thing else out there who you feel deserve a shout out for taking composition into the future?
I'd give a shout to all of us, to everyone creating music. We’re all creating the future together.
Sometimes I think about musical revolutions I’ve been near. Dancing to rock & roll when I was 12 years old, in the 1950s, when grownups I knew thought Elvis was evil. Also in the 1950s, hearing folk music, as crowds gathered to hear it in Washington Square Park in New York. In the ‘60s, like many others, I played the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper over and over again. I loved disco in the 1970s, and, astonished at the wild freedom of the bands, bought punk albums.
In the 1980s, as a prominent critic, I wrote about minimalism and the whole downtown NY music scene. I heard hiphop live before it hit the pop charts, and as a pop critic wrote about it, covering the emergence of gangsta rap in LA. While at the same time I covered indie rock, before it was called that, when it was surging from college radio into the pop mainstream.
One takeaway for me is not to look for the next revolution. Change will erupt on its own, and surprise me.
The Montreux Festival intends to preserve its archive of recordings for future generations. Do you personally feels it's important that everything should remain available forever - or is there something to be said for letting beautiful moments pass and linger in the memories of those that experienced them?
There's so much already available, more than anyone could listen to, or even know about. And we all have lingering memories, had them long before the Internet. We can cherish them, and still be glad so much is preserved. And because there’s so much in the archives, we can discover things we didn’t know, and add them to our memories, creating our own garden of things we love.
In my garden might be the film of David Tudor playing the first performance of John Cage’s 4’33,” so quietly opening and closing the piano lid, to separate the three movements. Also videos of obscure bel canto operas, in live performances. Recordings of Schoenberg's 3d and 4th string quartets and his String Trio, by the people who premiered them.
Bob Dylan live performances, especially of single songs from different performances on his most recent tours, radically changed from one night to the next. Old Delta blues recordings! I could spend half my life with those. And (similar in their authenticity) recordings of Italian tenors from generations ago.
A New York Times pop critic once told me that when he retired, he’d joyfully play all his old blues and R&B records. I’m not retiring, but I feel just as joyful about what’s available for me. So much music, music I love, or will come to love.
