In conversation with Erin Jorgensen, composer Orlando Jacinto Garcia talks about his artistic approach to time and sound, his mentor Morton Feldman, musical references, and how working with violist Melia Watras came to be.
EJ: I have some specific questions for you that we can try to get into a little bit. One is – when I was listening to a lot of your music and reading some of the stuff that you wrote – your music brings you into a different time zone, definitely. It kind of expands it. And Melia [Watras, violist] talked about that a little bit as well. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about the philosophy behind that and how much of it is deliberate? How much comes from your personality and how you view the world? How much is deliberate when you’re writing music?
OJG: Yeah, it’s probably deliberate. I mean, the aesthetic world that I’ve been writing music in I’ve been involved in for a long time. It’s something that interested me way back when I was a graduate student, going back more than 30 years ago. I was very interested in composers whose music had that impact on the listener. You’d be caught up in that moment and in some ways it would obliterate your perception of chronological or objective time. Minimalist composers, the composers coming out of the New York school, John Cage — Feldman was my mentor, he was probably one of the best at doing that – were of great interest to me. And I even had a mentor a composer who was not as well known, but he was a fantastic teacher here in Miami named Dennis Kam, a Chinese-American composer who was very involved in that world at that time, going back to the early 80s. So that’s something that I explored quite a bit during my studies. Then I had the good fortune to spend about three weeks with Morton Feldman in an artist residency with just him and another composer. It was an incredible experience for those three weeks. And we talked a lot about this whole idea of freezing time and the perception of time. But it was interesting, because most of the time what he would talk about when I would bring that up is liberating sound. He would say, “what you really want to do is liberate sound.” And the other stuff takes care of itself, so to speak. So when I’m writing, yes, I’m very aware that it’s a different time frame, a different perception of time. And there’s different techniques that allow me to get into that world. A lot of compositional techniques. Something as simple as just restricting the material that you hear. And working on how that material is presented. When do you make a move? When do you have more activity? When is it very static? And a lot of that is very intuitive. It’s created in an intuitive way, I don’t have a formula for that necessarily. It’s very intuitive. What’s been a challenge is — it’s always been challenging, but even more of late because I’ve been doing a lot of it — is writing these pieces for soloists and ensemble. Because when I write for a soloist and ensemble, I’m not writing a million notes for the soloist to play like you would expect in a kind of “romantic concerto” idea. But hopefully trying to make it timbre wise sensual enough that people will get drawn into it, and by the time the piece is over they don’t know whether it was two minutes or two hours long.
EJ: Yeah – I definitely had that experience listening to your music, which is great, it’s my favorite. It’s like being on drugs but you don’t have to, like, have a hangover. [laughter]
OJG: Don’t take the risk!
EJ: Exactly. When you’re talking about liberating sound, or Feldman was talking about it as well… can you just talk a little bit more about your philosophy behind that and what that means?
OJG: Right. Well, if the emphasis is on the timbral world, the spectral world, then in some ways you are liberating sound. If the emphasis is on rhythms and pitches, on the more traditional parameters of the music, then you’re kind of pushing the sound around. Feldman would say that. Because he never liked to push the sounds around. He wanted the sounds to evolve on their own. So there’s that whole idea – I mean, of course pitches and rhythms are important, they’re still there, but in this type of world often times they are somewhat secondary to the spectral aspect, the sonic aspect, the timbrel aspect. The focus should be the timbre as opposed to the notes.
EJ: Ah, that makes sense. I mean – it kind of allows you to not judge what you are hearing, I read a paper that you wrote on references: Why References? I think it was called. I worked a lot in music, but also in theater, and dance and contemporary arts, basically. And that was kind of a trick that sometimes artists would use to almost confuse people at the beginning. To take away the frame of reference so people can just experience something.
OJG: Yeah, I don’t remember if it’s in the article or not, because I wrote the article so long ago, but I have a piece in my catalog, in fact it was just recorded a few years ago, called Auschwitz. It’s for choir and orchestra. And the piece was written because our choir at the university where I teach was going to Poland. This was back in the mid-90s. They were going to Poland on a short tour, and the conductor of the choir said “listen, we’re going to be doing a concert with the chamber orchestra there in a few of the cities, would you write us a piece?” And so I thought well, I’ve always been really concerned about the Holocaust. I couldn’t believe it – I first learned about it when I was in middle school. I couldn’t believe it that something like that could happen, that human beings could do that. So when this choir was going to Poland I thought this would be an opportunity to make some sort of statement about the Holocaust. So I wrote this piece that basically has no text. The only text is in a spot in the middle of the piece, in Spanish, where they sing nunca se olvidarán, which means “they will never be forgotten.“ It’s whispered in the middle of the piece. There’s no real text, it’s all vocalise, stuff like that. So the tour winds up getting cancelled but by chance the piece gets performed on Miami Beach where there is a large Jewish population by the New World Symphony, and many of the people in the audience afterwards – came up to me crying. They said “you captured the sounds of the Holocaust, you captured all this…” and they heard all this stuff that I didn’t hear. Because I wasn’t in the Holocaust. Plus, I wasn’t trying to evoke anything. It was a statement, a statement “they will never be forgotten,” ok. And then you can take it from there. Because when I write I deal with material, with physical material. It’s not a film score. I’m not dealing with a film score.
EJ: You’re not telling people what to think.
OJG: Yeah. So that was like, wow, the impact that the title gave! A few years later I tested this by taking a recording of that piece, and I played it for my students and I changed the name of the piece. And I said it was called, like, X Equals Y Squared and the title referred to a formula I used to create the piece. They heard the piece and they said, “oh, it’s a very attractive piece, Dr. Garcia, it’s very beautiful, it’s a really nice piece.” But no one heard anything about the Holocaust. They didn’t hear, you know, the Gestapo, or machine guns, or whatever — all these things that people had heard before, simply because of the context of the title. So for me, referentiality, the lack thereof, or creating one, is something I try to be very cognizant about. It doesn’t bother me if people hear that in the Auschwitz piece. It’s fine. It’s kind of interesting. Another friend of mine who’s a conductor, fantastic conductor, did the piece and he had this whole other interpretation. He thought that the allusions to – there are parts in the piece that have these very short melodic fragments that are very quasi-serial, quasi-atonal, quasi-Webern-like, Schoenberg-like – those composers. He felt that that was a reference to Germans and the Germanic tradition but obviously that’s not what I was thinking when I wrote the piece.
EJ: Oh wow, really?
OJG: And I felt really like– that’s great, you can hear it that way, it’s fine, but it didn’t really come into my mind. I did that because I was using those materials, that’s what came to me, to mind, and then I used those techniques to create those materials. Feldman used to say he was a closet serialist composer. And so I don’t mind sneaking in a bit of serialism here and there. But again, that comes back to the whole idea of referentiality. So when I pick my titles, I pick them very carefully.
EJ: Yeah, I was curious – I wanted to ask you about that. It seems like some of them – I mean some of them are very straightforward. I listened to one this morning that was for bass…it was called Bass and Orchestra or something. And then some of them were more evocative, like The Glass Cathedral. It seemed like you had both types. I guess I’m wondering – do you often start with a title? Or does that often come to you? Or are you like “man, I have to call it something….”
OJG: No, usually they come towards the end of the piece. It’s rare that I have a title at the beginning. It just depends on the situation. Like the Auschwitz piece came at the beginning because the choir was going to Poland, so I thought, Auschwitz. It’s interesting, because I called it Auschwitz and in parentheses nunca se olvidarán, which in Spanish means, “they will never be forgotten,” and I didn’t realize that that’s the slogan or the theme that’s used when you talk about the Holocaust. I was thinking of it in Spanish, and in Spanish, you know, at least from my experience it doesn’t really correlate to that. It just was what I was thinking, “they will never be forgotten,” so it’s kind of a memorial. The piece is kind of in memory of. And then afterwards people were saying, well you know that’s the slogan in English. They’ll never be forgotten. To remember those who perished in the Holocaust. So I thought, what an interesting coincidence, because I really hadn’t thought of it in that way.
EJ: Yeah. It’s amazing when you put those things in front of people and all that stuff kind of starts to coalesce. It’s pretty cool.
OJG: Definitely. So I try to choose the titles pretty carefully. I just finished a piece for Sarah Cahill In San Francisco, she’s a wonderful pianist. She’s been doing lots of things with Lou Harrison, in memory of Lou Harrison. So I wrote this piece in memory of Lou Harrison, and it’s called A Gamelan in the Distance. Because Lou Harrison wrote for gamelan all the time. So this piece has lots of things inside the piano where I create metallic sounds. And the gamelan was something that the sound suggested to me. So I put it in the title. So that’s how the titles get generated.
EJ: It kind of gives people a way in, because you don’t want total abstraction. You know what I mean? Your brain wants to catch onto something. And I wonder…this is something that always bothered me about going to theater, going to ballet, going to hear a music concert even. The aesthetics of the environment that you’re in, and how you’re sitting, and what the chairs are like, and what the lighting is like – all that contributes so much to your experience before you can even start listening. So I’m interested in creating environments that do away with that a little bit. But I’m just wondering if that’s something you think about, or does that bother you?
OJG: It’s kind of interesting – I just had a piece premiere here in Miami, at this place called Vizcaya. Vizcaya is this old home with beautiful gardens, a beautiful mansion – it’s a museum. It was built by James Deering, a very wealthy man at the turn of the century. And he brought everything from Europe that you can imagine there. It’s very European. And as part of this place there’s a pool that’s covered with a grotto and it has a mural of all kinds of sea life. Because it’s right on the bay. You walk outside and the bay is there. It’s really a gorgeous place. They had a commissioning program and they commissioned me to do first an installation bringing musical instruments to life. They have a music room — the instruments are so old that if you touched them, they would fall apart. They had like an old harpsichord, an old harp, there’s an old dulcimer. And I made samples that were triggered as people walked through or by this room. You could hear the harpsichord again, and you could hear the harp, and a little dulcimer. Of course they were very abstract samples. So that was one part of the idea, of the commission. And the other part was to do a performance piece in the pool. These are things that I selected. I went there and they brought me through and they said, “we want you to do something, what speaks to you?” And I said, “well, the music room needs to be heard. The instruments haven’t been heard in who knows how long”. And then the pool was like, I had do something in the pool because the acoustics are so resonant and so beautiful that I thought, I have to write something for the pool. So I kept going back there – this was the summer – I kept going back there and one time the pool was half drained. And I said, why don’t we put the audience in the pool and have the performers up on the deck? And they bought into it! So last Friday, and the Thursday before that we had two performances of this piece. It’s almost 40 minutes long. It’s called those at peace shall see their wake, which is actually a line from an old Procol Harum rock tune. [laughter] I guess that shows you how old I am. Anyway, the piece is for a string trio, so violin, viola, cello, and it has wind chimes and wine glasses. And electronics. And it’s made to be heard there. It’s very site specific. And the performances were great – I mean they were packed with people, the members and the donors, and all that – it was a special show for them. And I had really great players, which was really nice. But I can’t imagine doing it anywhere else. And it was outside, so you could hear the jets going by, the airliners going by, and you could hear all the sounds of the outdoors. And that was fine. It made it very environmental, very connected to nature. And in the electronics – I had some sea mammal sounds because they’re up in the mural. I tried to integrate that into the sound of the strings. Because sea mammals have kind of a glissando, and the string instruments can do that. And I always tried to integrate that a little bit in the piece. So yeah – where the pieces are being played, that always comes into play depending on the situation. Of course sometimes it’s just going to be in a concert hall and that’s OK as well.
EJ: Yeah. I mean, you can replicate that.
OJG: Yeah. But that’s always been of interest to me, the site-specific aspect of music.
EJ: Yeah, it changes everything for sure. Can you talk a little bit about writing this piece? Melia and I talked a little bit about the viola sound and what it sounds like to her, and when I was listening to some of your pieces, especially for a solo instrument, you kind of can’t even tell what it is sometimes. It’s pretty abstract, which is great. So maybe you can just talk a little bit about how you hear the viola in this piece?
OJG: Right. Well, what happened with Melia was, I was there in October of 2015 for a premiere with Seattle Modern Orchestra with Cristina Valdes. I wrote a piece for her for piano and chamber ensemble. I had known Cristina for a while. And I knew Melia a little bit through Cristina. And on that concert, with Cristina playing my piece, Melia played Feldman’s The Viola in My Life, and it was just gorgeous. We happened to all go out afterwards and we started talking about it, and I said we should do a collaboration. And she was very into it, she said yeah, let’s see what we can come up with. So I came back to Miami, and a few months later I got this great idea of maybe doing something with Seattle Modern Orchestra, who she had already played with. And so I proposed it to Jeremy and Julia and they were very interested. And that’s how it kind of evolved. And as soon as that was in place I started checking out Melia’s playing. She has recordings and she has her playing on her webpage, she has all kinds of stuff. She’s just a great player. She has a beautiful sound. And so by listening to what she was doing on her webpage and some other recordings that I came across, I had some ideas that I wanted to explore with her. So that’s kind of the connection with Melia. And then the next thing is, I was fortunate enough to get a residency in Wyoming last summer at a place near Saratoga in Wyoming called Brush Creek Ranch. It’s a ranch, and part of it is set aside for artists, there’s an artist foundation set up. All the different arts – there are painters and writers and everything else. There was actually another composer, a jazz composer. It was fantastic. And it’s incredibly beautiful because you’re in the mountains. So right away – and I don’t need a lot of inspiration because I’m always writing anyway – but it was really inspiring to see these beautiful mountains and these clouds that kept receding. And so, since my music kind of recedes –most of it – anyway, it made sense to use that image of the clouds receding into the mountains – that’s the title [The Clouds Receding into the mountains] and in many ways it’s conceptually related to a lot of things that go on in the piece. So that’s a little bit about the piece. It’s a large piece, it’s twenty minutes long. Melia gets to play a lot, so that’s good. And she gets to show the control that she has. There’s a lot of surprises actually in this piece. There’s at least one big surprise, which I’ll try not to give away too much. But what happens at the very end of the piece has been trying to happen throughout the piece. I’ll leave it at that! [laughter] For little fragments it’s been happening, and at the end it finally happens.
EJ: You finally get to have it.
OJG: Yeah.
EJ: I’m looking forward to hearing it.
OJG: So that’s a little teaser there.
EJ: Awesome. We’ll see if people find it.
OJG: I think they will. I think it’s pretty obvious. That’s just me – but I think it’s pretty obvious. It’s pretty different for me in some ways for me to do that. I don’t usually do that. I do give hints of stuff and then it happens, but this is really – It happens at the end, and it’s very different from the rest of the piece, except you have these little fragments. I won’t say anymore, because I already gave away too much! [laughter]. If you look at the score you can figure it out. If you read music, you can figure it out.
EJ: Well, we won’t give it to people before they go to the concert. But that actually reminds me of another question I wanted to ask you. I read that you or Feldman (or both of you) said that a composer was only as good as his or her notation. Can you talk a little bit about your notation, maybe to someone who is not “in the club” already, about what that means for new music?
OJG: That was Feldman who would say that. When I worked with Feldman, he would say things and then it would take a while to figure out what he meant. That’s the way he was. It was great because it kept you engaged for sure. And what he meant by “you’re only as good as your notation” was you’re only as good as your ability to convey what you’re hearing in your head to the performers. And how do you do that? So the notation, what you put on a piece of paper or whatever, has to somehow render that sonic image that you have in your head. It has to render it so that in some way the performer can interpret it. To create what you’re hearing. That’s really what he’s talking about. He wasn’t talking necessarily about one type of notation. His whole career, early on he was experimenting with lots of different types of graphs, different graphic notation, I mean, he was in a group with John Cage. John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, and David Tudor, and experimenting with notation was a big part of what they did early on. But then at some point he became very specific with what he was writing because he didn’t like how his music was being interpreted. When you have notation that’s pretty open-ended and there’s a lot of liberties for the performer to take, then you might get what you don’t want. Although he was – at least in public – he was very kind about it. [laughter] Of course privately it was different! I mean, if you write a graph and you keep it kind of open-ended, you can do all kinds of things. If the performers are really musical and have a great ear and a great talent, they can make something great out of it. And if they aren’t, it may not be so good. So later in his career it became very specific notation. And my notation is similar to his later notation. The meter changes are very clear, very specific. Even though it doesn’t sound like a meter change almost every bar. It sounds like it’s flowing along, right? But if you’re – if you watch Julia conduct, she’s going to be going one, two, one-two-three, one…two…three…onetwothreefourfive – she’s going to be doing that. Because almost every bar – not every bar, but a lot – there’s a change in meter. It’s sustained and elongated, it doesn’t feel like Stravinsky –
EJ: Right, they’re not really obvious rhythmic changes.
OJG: No. So that’s really what he was talking about, what Feldman was talking about in notation. So for him, he got to a point where he had to be very precise because he wasn’t getting the result he wanted with some of the notation that he had been experimenting with. My scores are little bit connected to his. My approach to time and how it unfolds is similar to his. The gestures are all very different. He is probably rolling over in his grave. [laughter] I’m sure he’s rolling over in his grave! Because I use consonant material, I use octaves, and he was very much coming out of a – for the most part – coming out of a very dissonant world. Even though it was very quiet dissonance, it was still very dissonant. And I’ll use anything. I can use anything I want right now. From that standpoint I become somewhat eclectic, as long as I can remove or reduce the references. And if I can remove or reduce the references by stretching it out in time, by composing material in different ways, then I’m ok with using just about anything. Whereas when I was working with him – he would hear an octave and he would say, oh, no octaves!
EJ: That’s not allowed!
OJG: You can’t use that! So I would say, ok. That’s fine. When I was working with him, that’s what I did. And later on – he passed away, I started using octaves. [laughter] And the same thing with extended techniques.
EJ: He didn’t use them?
OJG: He was interested in the timbre. So he would say no, you can’t use a sul ponticello, you can’t do any of that stuff. Just notes and that’s it. That’s what you had to do. Work with the twelve notes. And try to figure out what the best twelve notes are for the gesture that you want. And what register they’re in, and all that kind of stuff. That was his approach. My approach is a little different. I’ll use any kind of extended technique, as long as I feel it’s in the service of the sound world, the spectral world of the piece. I’m not adverse to using sul ponticello, or scratching or pizzicato inside the piano, or any of those sort of typical contemporary techniques, as long as they’re used in the service of the sound world of the piece.
EJ: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That was probably a good education to have, that very specific structure, but now you can do what you like.
OJG: It was very restrictive back then. It’s not so restrictive now. When you hear the last part of the piece, you’ll know!
EJ: [laughing] I’m looking forward to it! Let me just ask you one more question, because I know you’re busy, and then I’ll let you go. So you studied philosophy as well, when you were younger, or maybe your whole life. That’s a huge topic and a huge question, but maybe you can touch a little bit on how you think those things are important musically or how they influence each other?
OJG: Well yeah – I have a couple of undergraduate degrees and one of them is in philosophy and one of them is in Spanish literature. And then I have music too, that was a BA degree that I got in a small college in Western Maryland when I was much younger. The philosophy degree was very important because it helped me think. It trained me to think. It trained me to question, it trained me to think critically. And that applies to everything, whether it’s music or art or life. So I feel pretty indebted, and kind of fortunate and grateful to be able to do that. Because people say “oh, why did you get a philosophy degree? You can’t get a job with it!” I didn’t do it to get a job. I did it because, as I said, it helped me to think analytically, to think critically, while gaining lots of information. I mean I studied everything from Eastern religions to all the Christian religions – Judeo-Christian, I should say, to Islam, to atheism. The guy who taught me atheism was a guy who was almost a priest.
EJ: Really?
OGJ: It was the best! Because he was very Catholic. He was part of the Seminary and then he decided he didn’t want to – he got married, I think. But he was so good, he was so clear about teaching atheism. I remember seeing him after class and saying, “I don’t get it. You were almost a priest! How do you still believe?” And he said, “there’s no wrong angle, there’s no way to prove, it’s just faith.” I said “yeah, I get it, it’s faith, I can’t question faith. But at the same time, you’re so logical!” And he said, “well, if I have to point at something, and again, it’s very loose and flimsy – there was this event in history when Jesus came.” So that was kind of what he hung his hat on. But it was really just faith. But this was a guy that was so convincing in atheism. He must have converted his whole class into atheism. Because it was just so well done. And there were people in the class that tried to come up with arguments and no one had a chance. So anyway, that’s kind of a long answer to a short question, but like I say, philosophy just helped me think. And that’s involved when I write music, it’s involved when I teach. It’s involved when I do just about anything. I try to impart some of that to my students. As much as I can. I mean I teach them about being a composer, and being a professional. But I also try to get them to think critically as much as possible. I think part of anyone’s existence should be thinking critically.
EJ: Great. I have a million more questions I could ask you, but I will let you go.
OJG: Great! I’ll see you in April.
Seattle Modern Orchestra is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike.