Category: Uncategorized

The composer, pedagogue, conductor, and international flutist is both esteemed and prolific—with no end apparent in his varied schedule. His longtime friend contributes both a full oral history, available at the Library of Congress, and this profile.

Were it only for Robert Aitken’s more than 60 recordings, ranging from the complete concerti of C.P.E. Bach to all the flute solos and flute chamber music of Toru Takemitsu, there would be no question that his impact on the world of music is significant and meaningful. The recordings reveal not only the singular musical voice of the flutist, composer, and conductor, but also the wide-ranging interests of a man whose musical journeys have taken him from chant to Bach to the music of the most creative and influential composers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

But the recordings are only the most obvious documentation of Aitken as an artist and individual. Two years ago, I set out to discover the “essence” of Robert Aitken and his 60-year career through the NFA Archives and Oral History Committee’s continuing project chronicling significant flutists, including all recipients of the NFA’s Lifetime Achievement Award, which Aitken received in 2003.

My long-time friendship with Bob helped guide my approach to our interviews, conducted in November 2016 in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia (close to his hometown of Kentville) and in May 2018 at his current home in Toronto. The full oral history is now housed in the Library of Congress, available to all. Here is a distillation of 10-plus hours of talking together at the kitchen table at a mid-19th-century house in Lunenburg.

Early Days

Robert Aitken has had—and continues to have—a career quite different from that of most top flute soloists. In addition to a rich life as a touring soloist and chamber musician that followed his early career in the Vancouver Symphony and as principal flutist in the Toronto Symphony under Seiji Ozawa for six years in his 20s, Aitken has been internationally prominent as a composer, educator, conductor, advocate for new music (by both the world’s greatest living composers and young, emerging composers), director of a major and long-lived new music series, founder of important music programs in different parts of Canada, and—speaking of Canada—international artist who happens to be Canadian.

Naturally, with the interview venue so close to his hometown of Kentville, we started off by talking about his childhood, where his first flute teacher was actually not a flutist at all —there weren’t any flutists for miles around! Latvian immigrant violinist Janis Kalejs, a teacher at Acadia University in nearby Wolfville, recognized Bob’s talent and gave him musical coaching as a child. In addition to the lessons, the young Aitken played in the university orchestra and also in the Kentville Fireman’s Band.

The Aitken family moved often during their son’s early childhood. During a short time living in Pennsylvania, Bob had his first flute teacher, Ray Kauffman, who played in the Harrisburg Symphony. The Aitkens lived not far from where John Wummer had his summer home, and Bob  has fond memories of going to Wummer’s house and listening to him play duos, trios, and quartets with his wife Mildred Hunt Wummer and his teacher.

But the family soon moved back to Nova Scotia and, once again, Bob was without a teacher. However, Kauffman had set him up with Berbiguier etudes and Bach sonatas, and Bob had lots to study and learn on his own. The family finally relocated to Toronto and, at age 15, Bob had his first major flute teacher, Nick Fiori, then principal of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

As a teenager, Bob started playing extra with the orchestra and, at 19, won the audition for principal flutist in Vancouver—the youngest player in a professional symphony anywhere in Canada. Bob actually turned down an offer from Julius Baker to attend Juilliard and study with him, opting instead for the Vancouver job.

Early Career

Bob stayed very close to Fiori through those days. When he decided to leave Vancouver—despite the hiking, golfing, and invaluable musical experience, Bob couldn’t see himself staying in that job, away from his family, for his entire career—he returned to school in Toronto to get a degree in composition. Fiori was very supportive and welcomed him back to the flute world, and Bob supported himself with a dizzying amount of freelance work while getting his degree (in composition!) at the University of Toronto with John Weinzweig.

Bob received a Canada Council grant and spent a year in Europe (1964–65) studying with Gazzeloni, Graf, Rampal, and others. He became principal flutist of the Toronto Symphony under Seiji Ozawa in 1965 and stayed in that position for six seasons. He became a student of Marcel Moyse, along with his teacher Nick Fiori, driving to Vermont for lessons and becoming a regular at the Marlboro Music Festival.

All the time he was incredibly busy as a soloist and chamber musician around Canada. He related that several times he flew to Montréal twice in one day to fulfill rehearsal and concert commitments there and in Toronto, and once played the Ibert Concerto in a Boise, Idaho, matinee concert and made it back to Toronto the same night to the second half of the Toronto Symphony’s evening concert. During one two-year period in the late ’60s, Bob flew more than 200 flights—and has the records in his archives to prove it.

Bob worked with Stravinsky at the CBC Radio Symphony; with Glenn Gould, Oscar Shumsky, and Leonard Rose at the Stratford International Festival; and with Moyse in Vermont at the Marlboro Festival. He also composed, studied electronic music, taught at the University of Toronto, attended many music festivals across Canada, and received invitations from all over Europe (he took more than 30 trips to Iceland alone) and eventually throughout Asia as well.

Maturing Artist

After six frenetic years, Bob decided to leave the Toronto Symphony in 1970 to pursue the rest of his career full time—but not until he came back from a six-month trip around the world, a trip undertaken to “clear my head, to clear everything.” He traveled by bus and train—“like a hippie with money”—to Japan, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India, and Turkey.

The trip had a profound influence on Bob as a person and particularly as a composer. His early works were especially influenced by the sounds and music he heard on this trip. His early solos, Icicle and Plainsong, are widely played. His catalogue includes music for flute and orchestra, wind quintet, mixed ensemble, and flute orchestra—the latter, Solemsis and Tsunami, commissioned by the NFA. His body of compositions would fill an article unto itself.

As a teacher, Bob was profoundly influenced by Moyse. And, in his own professorship at the Hochshule in Freiberg, at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta and Music at Shawnigan in British Columbia, and in hundreds of masterclasses given all over the world from Iceland to Korea to Slovenia to Seattle, Bob has profoundly influenced many others.

Collaborator

Much of our conversation had to do with the many significant composers and performers with whom Bob had close relationships, from Elliott Carter to Toru Takemitsu, Seiji Ozawa to Glenn Gould, Pierre Boulez to Henry Brant to Heinz Holliger. Of course, Bob was close to a large array of Canadian artists, from harpsichordist Greta Kraus to R. Murray Schafer.

Together with soprano Mary Morrison and Bob’s wife Marion, he founded the Lyric Arts Trio early in his career. The trio commissioned dozens of Canadian composers among the hundreds of composers whose works he championed through the 48-year-old series, New Music Concerts, that he co-founded in Toronto with composer Norma Beecroft in 1971.

Aitken met Takemitsu in the early 1970s. Starting with his playing and recording of the early Takemitsu duos for two flutes and a memorable performance of November Steps with the Toronto Symphony, Bob received many invitations to Japan for concerts and festivals. Among his dozens of recordings, one of the highlights is the double CD of all of Takemitsu’s solo and chamber music with flute. Takemitsu, Bob related, was an excellent cook, a world traveler, and a generous host. Bob treasured him greatly as an inspiration and as a friend.

Bob met and played with Glenn Gould in his early professional days in Toronto. At the Stratford International Festival, they rehearsed and performed—together with the “best players” from all over Canada—the fourth and fifth Brandenburg concerti and the entire Musical Offering. Aitken told me that although Gould loved to rehearse in fine detail, when it came to the performance, “Just forget it! One for one, it was every man for himself!”

One of Bob’s longtime friends and colleagues is the great Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer. Bob premiered the 1984 Schafer Flute Concerto with the Montréal Symphony under Charles Dutoit. It was a bit of a fluke that he was even hired; Montréal had a fine principal flutist at that time in Tim Hutchins, and it was in an era in which solo flutists—especially Canadian ones—were rarely engaged by major orchestras.

Schafer had previously written music for Aitken, including a very early Sonatina for flute and harpsichord. But the Concerto was a major piece, its premiere a major event. Aitken calls it “certainly the most successful concerto of our time, without any doubt.” He said that although it sounds brilliant and difficult, “it’s not, because it’s idiomatic; it is written very well for the flute.” Aitken has performed the Schafer 18 times throughout Canada, in European cities, and at the 2003 NFA Convention in Las Vegas, the year of his Lifetime Achievement Award.

Lesser-known but equally important as a mentor and friend was harpsichordist Greta Kraus. Viennese-born and a schoolmate of Rudolf Serkin, Kraus began her career as a pianist but early on became a harpsichordist. For quite a few years, Aitken met with her once a week and “we would play the whole afternoon, playing Bach Sonatas and all the Baroque repertoire.”

They started performing with just a concert here, a concert there, but then began offering a regular series that sold out each time. When other career demands necessitated an end to this collaboration, Aitken passed his role on to his flutist daughter Dianne Aitken, who continued the Thursday afternoon tradition and the family relationship.

Toronto’s New Music Concert series is a testament to Aitken’s ability to create and sustain an important cultural institution which, since its founding in 1971, has presented nearly 400 concerts, commissioned more than 130 Canadian and international works, and performed 700 Canadian and world premieres.

Into the Future

Robert Aitken turned 79 last August and is as busy as ever. The most recent premiere of his music was in summer 2017 in Nova Scotia, a work entitled “Lunenburg (Shadows VII)” for flute, soprano, and string quartet. And there is a new solo flute piece on its way.

His last formal teaching job, in Freiberg, ended after 14 years because of a mandatory age-65 retirement, but his current annual flute classes take place in Nova Scotia and Italy. He plays concerts in Myanmar in November and is putting the final touches on the 49th New Music Concert season.

I look forward to welcoming him to Seattle in March 2019 to work with the Seattle Modern Orchestra and the Seattle Flute Society as a composer, flutist, conductor, and teacher—and to continuing our long friendship.

Paul Taub is a Seattle flutist who recently retired from Cornish College of the Arts after 39 years on the faculty. He has served two terms on the board of directors of the NFA and is president of the Seattle Flute Society.

This  article first appeared in the winter 2019 issue of The Flutist Quarterly, the member magazine of the National Flute Association, and is reprinted here with permission. nfaonline.org.

Seattle Modern Orchestra is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike.

The first piece of Seattle Modern Orchestra’s first concert will be a haunting piece – Yiğit Kolat’s “Echoes of Tinder.” Kolat is a Seattle resident who earned his Doctorate of Musical Arts at the University of Washington. The music he composes explores the liminal frontiers of musical activity and potentialities in (mis)translating data into musical information. His work is complicated in sounds (including acoustic, electro-acoustic, and electronic works) and themes (often politically focused and socially charged based on his native Turkey). His work has been performed by the likes of the Tokyo Philharmonic, The Black Pencil Ensemble, the Talea Ensemble, the Athelas Ensemble, amongst many other groups.

He recently sat down to talk to freelance writer Jonathan Shipley about “Echoes of Tinder,” empathy, and the vastness of expression.

JS: How did you come by the name “Echoes of Tinder” for the piece?

YK: The title stems from a poem written by Turkish poet Metin Altıok, which might read something like this with my amateur translation:

With serpent
Symbols on my saddlebag
With the poison hemlock
In my collet
And with the tinder I carry;
To you I am the one who is eerie
The one who is ought to be scorched
As an example for posterity

The poem carries an uncanny premonition: Altıok was one of the victims of the massacre.

JS: What are your ties to the Sivas massacre? What spoke to you about those events that made you considering writing music inspired by it?

YK: The victims of the massacre were mainly Alevi artists and intellectuals who came to the city to attend a festival named after Pir Sultan Abdal, a Turkish Alevi poet who lived in 16th century. The Alevi tradition can be considered as an Anatolian interpretation of Islam, and it is noted with its open-minded and progressive stance. It is not difficult to imagine that within a power structure governed by the orthodoxy, followers of such a tradition have often been subjected to discrimination and violence throughout history.

I grew up in an environment where the Alevi tradition was not observed, but highly revered. When the massacre happened I was nine-years-old, but I could feel the shockwave it created in my immediate social circle. It took years for me to see the actual magnitude of the trauma; the scar it left on the social fabric of the country. It made me (and many others) realize that given right conditions and enough motivation, “normal” people can turn off their faculties of empathy and perform the most heinous acts of violence. We realized that this can easily happen again and that there are people who are eager to use this possibility as a tool of political intimidation: you better be nice, or we might consider to let this happen again.

I consider any artistic output on the Sivas massacre as a stance against this intimidation. So, I decided to contribute to the collection of works related to the tragedy. Realized that at some point the creative act ceases being just a reaction, it becomes a vessel that carries the echoes of the destructive act to the future. It becomes a museum of sorts. Politicians are absolutely powerless against this: their tools of intimidation cannot reach that far.

JS: How did the composition take shape? Were their images/sounds/words that came to mind before you sat down to compose? How did those images/sounds/words make their way into the music?

YK: Since the core ingredient of any act of violence is lack of empathy, I decided to build the piece around representations of a spectrum of empathy, ranging from “rational empathy”—acknowledging other’s pain with a distance— to hyper-empathic reaction. One of these representations is a recurring pattern that appears early in the piece. The pattern displays a gradual build of tension and a sudden retract, stemming from a reaction I remember having as a nine-year-old. I remember holding my hand above a candle flame, attempting to endure the pain, and, naturally, retracting it back when it becomes unbearable. It was a hyper-empathical reaction: I was trying to connect with the pain experienced by the victims. Other than the theme of empathy, the piece carries many other allusions to the tragedy: representations of certain images, characters, as well as facts and data.

JS:  Have you performed the piece in Turkey? If so, how has it been received?

YK: It hasn’t been performed in Turkey—considering that the ideological allies of the perpetrators of the massacre holding almost absolute power today in Turkey, one might assume that a Turkish premiere would cause certain “issues”.

JS: In “Messenger of Sorrows” you incorporated a rocket hitting a Kurdish house. How do you shift current events into music? How political is your music? How conscious is that decision?

YK: I often incorporate extra-musical topics into my works and the nature of the topics, as well as the way they are utilized, differ greatly from piece to piece. In each case, I try to avoid an explicitly narrative approach and try to find interesting—sometimes convoluted—ways to use the source material in the music. Almost half of the works in my catalog are “politically-informed.” What makes such a work a different workspace than other music with extra-musical topics is that it requires the artist to be very clear about what they are intending to do. You might be blamed for exploiting a sensitive issue to receive some publicity; your work might be considered as a conformist act since you decided to react to something by filling a piece of music with metaphors rather than by getting out and taking action (not that these two acts are mutually exclusive). Recently I began taking on subjects that allow a rather direct, non-metaphorical approach. My most recent project, DARN., exhibits a series of horrible reactions to Kendrick Lamar’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Music achievement, collected from various online sources. The piece offers its audience a glimpse into a bubbling pit of hatred that is nurtured by people who are not too far away from our seemingly safe and civil social, cultural, and intellectual circles. In a sense both DARN. and Echoes of Tinder address the same thing in two different social settings: in the former, the pit of hatred is still bubbling; in the latter, it becomes a violent geyser.

JS: With a piece like “Echoes of Tinder” how do you step back and say, “Yes, it’s done”?

YK: I guess you just know it. A piece concluded too early or too late is like an awkwardly-cut or artificially-extended conversation.

JS: Do you work pen and paper? Or is your work all on the computer?

YK: I use the computer in all phases of a project, from planning to engraving. Pen and paper are used only to take some notes and to jot down the ideas.

JS: As a classical performer, how did that/does that inform your composing?

YK: In my experience, being “classically-trained” in performance or composition prompts one to come to terms with certain artistic constraints that might have influenced one’s thinking for years. You can’t just get rid of all of them, there will always be residues. In fact, these constraints might help you to hone your technique and make you a better problem-solver, or they might block your creativity and blind you to the multitudes of new expressions available around you. I have experienced both of these situations in different contexts, and am hoping to find better ways to work with these constraints in the future.

Seattle Modern Orchestra is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike.

In conversation with Erin Jorgensen, conductor and SMO co-Artistic Director Julia Tai talks about Jonathan Harvey‘s Bhakti and working with the composer, conducting and contemporary music.

EJ: How did you and Jeremy decide on doing Jonathan Harvey’s Bhakti?

JT: I think Harvey has been an interest of both of us for a long time. There are quite a few pieces of his we’ve considered but we have to see which ones we can realistically put together and bring to our audience. This piece is just the right size for us, and we have a wonderful sound technician whom we can work with to realize the electroacoustic part the composer had in mind.

EJ: So what is the technology part of the piece? Is it surround sound?

JT: Yeah it’s a quadraphonic tape for four speakers that we will set up in four corners of the room. There’s no live mixing between the instruments and the tape, but the tape often contains computer-processed sounds, and at times the same musical materials played by live instruments. This is a piece commissioned by IRCAM in Paris, which is famous for their work in electronic music and audio processing. Harvey composed this piece while he was working there.

EJ: So how are you conducting the piece? Are you timing it to match with the tape?

JT: Yes, this is actually a very challenging piece to conduct, having to match up with the tape, which has preset sounds and tempi. There’s no room for forgiveness. The computer is basically one voice in the ensemble who doesn’t follow me! I have to be very exact in the marked tempi. Some sections are marked 9 seconds or 18 seconds, and I have to bring the ensemble in at exactly the right time. The tape is very much a part of the ensemble.

EJ: Are you just listening to the tape live with everyone else, or do you have something in your ear?

JT: No, I won’t have a click track. I’ll hear the tape just like everyone in the audience. But because I know the tape part very well, I’ll be able to anticipate what it’ll do next.   

EJ: Are you rehearsing with the tape as well?

JT: Yes we’ll need to have the tape part and the sound technician at every rehearsal. The tape is very much another member of the ensemble. The players need to learn how to play with the tape and blend their sounds with what they hear from the speakers.

EJ: So, you’ve worked with Jonathan Harvey in the past?

JT: Yes, I went to a new music festival in Boston back in 2009 called the Summer Institute of Contemporary Performance Practice. The acronym is SICPP, sick puppy [laughs], and our final marathon concert is called Iditarod. There’s a different resident composer at the festival every year, and that year happened to be Jonathan Harvey. We played a lot of his music that year, and we went to masterclasses and he would coach our rehearsals. It was fun to work with him, to have those firsthand experiences with a composer.

EJ: What is he like?

JT: He was a very soft spoken and quiet guy. He’s extremely philosophical, and he’s really into Hinduism and Spirituality. He would talk about the deeper meaning of music as opposed to just the technique of it. Sometimes you don’t see the immediate connection, and wonder, “What does that have to do with the music?” But it’s a different perspective. It’s about how to listen.

EJ: Well, in this piece it really seems like it makes sense. It’s a 50-minute piece, straight through, right?

JT: Right, although it’s broken up into 12 movements so in a way each movement is kind of short. It’s not as overwhelming as you thought. Each movement has a quote from the Rigveda, which helps to understand what Harvey is trying to portray. I think one of the things that could have drawn him to composing with electronic sounds is that computers have the capability of producing sounds that are beyond what we’re familiar with, and that gives a new dimension of music. So when you listen to music like this, you have to be very patient and have a different mindset. You have to be open to sound itself. It’s almost meditative, it’s not goal oriented, it’s more like reflection, to let the sound sit with you, instead of saying “oh, where’s this point going and when are we going to get to the next point?”

EJ: Yeah… it’s like life [chuckles]

JT: Right! Some people just go from one thing to the next, and never stop to reflect. But this piece forces you to slow down. That’s why contemporary music is so interesting, because traditionally, you listen to tonal music and it’s all about getting to the next goal, how to get from point A to point B. But this is the complete opposite of that, it’s just about sound itself.

EJ: So how do these quotes infiltrate your conducting, or the way you’re thinking about it?

JT: I think when we’re starting out on a new piece, it’s all about the technical aspects, the fingering, the bowing, how to produce a sound that actually sounds good, but that’s only half of the story. After you’ve kind of mastered the technique, you start to think about the bigger picture and what this music is supposed to portray, and that’s the more interesting part. So for me as a conductor, I have to study all the details to see how the little pieces are put together – who plays what, what notes they play, what sound they create, and so on, but at the same time I need to meditate about the message in mind, to think about how to best bring out the mood, the atmosphere of the music. That is always the hardest step but also the most rewarding. When things go well, you feel like you are in the zone. People talk about transcendental experiences, and I try not to use that word because it seems cliché (Julia and interviewer laugh together), but it’s true, you feel when music gets to that point when you are performing it, you are immersed in it, you are in a completely different world and you don’t even remember who you are.

EJ: It’s so much responsibility to be the conductor, I’m sure the musicians have these notes as well, and they’re playing, but you’re a little bit corralling everyone into how you interpret it, you know?

JT: Right, conducting is such an interesting job because you don’t make any sound. Your job is to persuade people to make the sound you want (laughs).

EJ: It’s like a psychology degree (Julia and interviewer laugh together)

JT: Yes totally, I mean in the beginning it can be frustrating because you are completely dependent on other people. People may think “Oh conductors have a lot of power. You get to tell people what to do,” but no, you depend on the players to make the final product, and if you can’t convince them then the performance won’t be good. So yeah, it’s a lot of psychology in how to do it, but with really good musicians I think when you’re clear about the big picture you’re trying to paint, like this is what we’re going to do with the music, then everybody can connect with you on that. It’s really awesome when it happens.

EJ: It seems like a lot of pieces this year have had that quality of being very present and very in the moment, kind of like the idea of liberating sound. I’m curious to ask if that was deliberate because of the times that we’re in right now, which I feel like I’m seeing a lot of these ideas almost like a counterpoint to the crazy hectic time we’re living in. I’m seeing a lot of this stuff not just in music but in philosophy or just in conversations.

JT: I think this is exactly why it’s fun to work on contemporary music, music of our time, because music is always a reaction to life or whatever is happening around us. And even though this piece is forty years old, the struggles, the chaos is the same. When all this crazy stuff is happening in the world, I personally feel very anxious because I think that music is not relevant, and I want to do more than just to perform music. But at the same time what we’re doing as musicians is to create a space for people to come and listen, and to heal oneself with music. It’s a different kind of social work…

EJ: Right, I don’t think those things are separate, but I totally understand what you mean.

JT: As a musician or artist you can’t really live separate from the world. Everything you do is a statement, it is a reaction. So, to answer your question, no we didn’t sit down and say, this is what we are programming because it represents our time. But it just happened that we chose these pieces that resonate with us.

EJ: It seems like something people need. I wonder how we can… Sounds like you have to give people a guidebook or kind of instructions on how to listen to this, or how to calm down, you know? For forty-five minutes… sometimes I find it easy, but sometimes I find it hard to do, and I would barely be getting into it at like 40 minutes and I’d be like ok, now I’m here… oh man (Laughs) because you’re so used to living in the opposite way, you know, that’s not a question but I guess maybe people can just prepare themselves mentally a little bit.

JT: I think one thing people can keep in mind when they come to listen is, first of all, I don’t think you need to read a hundred philosophy books to be able to understand what we’re playing… a lot of people shy away from contemporary music because they think “I don’t understand it.” But good music should bring you in, it can still affect you even though it’s written with different compositional technique. What we really want people to feel is a real reaction to the music they hear. And if there’s any prerequisite to listening, it’s to come with an open mind to receive what is around you. After listening to a piece like this, you may be more sensitive to sound itself. For example, in the first movement of the piece, we play just a G, with different instrumentation and timbre, mixed with computer-generated sound, eventually we move gradually to a G#, but it happens very slowly. It brings you in, making you notice the slightest difference in color on the same note. That’s the great part of what contemporary music brings to the table: it is about hearing what you can connect with emotionally, to see things from a different angle. You know, plain sound is not just a noise, it has beauty, and then you become more sensitive to colors. You are not just hearing the pitch, but color. And then if we can change you to listen in that way, then we have succeeded in what we do. Just come with an open mind, without prejudging.

EJ: That’s what I was thinking when you were talking, the word judgment and kind of like letting go of that. It could apply to so many things but especially music, you know when you’re hearing that G and you’re like “Oh, its gonna go to D major!” But yeah, just like, ok you don’t judge it as anything you just experience that sound as it is, and I was thinking of that and relating it to the electronics that he uses, like you were saying before, there may be sounds that you can’t place, you know what I mean, you just have to be like I guess this is what I’m hearing right now!

JT: Just be open to receiving, and open to what you feel, what your own gut reaction to the sound is. Part of music is bringing back some of your own life experiences, and that’s why the same musical performance can be different for every person, because music is a very personal experience. It may bring back a feeling or an idea that you have not thought of for a while, or that exists in you but you didn’t realize. To be immersed in deep thoughts or a piece like this is like traveling to a different world. It’ll put you in a totally different rhythm than your everyday life. So just come and be with the music.

EJ: That’s a great way to put it. That’s exciting!

Seattle Modern Orchestra is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike.

In conversation with Erin Jorgensen, composer/sound artist James Borchers  talks about his new installation I am the shadow of the image of my person created in collaboration with composer Jérémy Jolley. 

For details of the installation and performance dates visit: I am the shadow of the image of my person

Erin Jorgensen: Can you break down exactly what it is that you’re doing? [laughter]

EJ: There’s a bunch of ways we could get into it, I’m definitely interested in the philosophical aspect – about the Milan Kundera book, and I read that on your website as well.

EJ: I’m also curious about the technological aspect of it, and I’m curious about the logistics of it, because I don’t understand exactly. Maybe you can give kind of an overview.

JB: Sure. Well, I’ll tell you – I’ll give you some background, perhaps. I’ve been doing this kind of work for some time, installation and interactive music. So I come from a compositional background and studied composition in graduate school, as well as music performance. I’ve been doing more sound art the last few years. I still think of the recent work I’ve been doing as a piece, in that I’m making a musical piece often times, but it functions in sort of an algorithmic or variable process, using some game logic and other parameters. There are sets of possibilities of things that can happen when one experiences the installation.

Part of my approach stems from doing so much electroacoustic music, and taking music technology/computer music classes where the tendency was to focus on creating these fixed media pieces, or concert pieces that are typically multi-channel playback. And my experience with those pieces was that oftentimes a lot of composers are trying to create a different kind of environment. Like messing around with the space and pitch and the way we perceive sounds moving in space. But yet we sit in a concert hall and we experience that. So it seems to me – if you’re sort of recreating an environment, then why not make it like an environment that you can walk around in, and where things change and move in a more natural way? It seems strange to make something that’s re-creating an environment, but is presented as a concert piece of music, where you sit in the audience and listen to it. So part of it was my frustration with that traditional approach in electroacoustic pieces. So I still think I’m trying to create an electro-acoustic music piece, but I’m presenting it in a way that has some sort of a more natural environmental function. A few years ago I did a workshop in Toronto, and I worked with some other visual artists and designers. We were all there to program patches, work on light coding exercises – an interactive art/music workshop. And there was another artist there who was trying to get a video of a person to interact with them. Almost like a mirror – if you were going to stand in front of a mirror and have the thing move and react to you in real time. So we spent a lot of time thinking about that and talking about it and how you – if you wanted to program something like that, how would you do it? And it’s kind of similar to – I’ve done some work with video games, and that kind of stuff too. So it’s similar – because you’re creating a bunch of animations, and then depending on what the player does, those animations either play or don’t play or whatever. So there is that similarity. I’m creating a bunch of video files, and then they might play or not play, depending on what the function is – it could be the way a person is moving, or the way it’s programmed to play at certain intervals, there are multiple video frames that are fading in and out from one another to give that impression or that effect of something still, and then something that’s changing or reacting in some kind of way. So that’s where the impetus of thinking about making a piece that would do something like that came from. I have tried to create a few pieces that incorporate video but this piece at Oxbow is my first attempt to try to do a big piece where there’s interactive or processed videos. So the gallery is going to have five different videos of five different musicians. And they’re playing in different locations, which we filmed around the city.

EJ: I saw some of it – I mean, I saw Rose [Bellini, cellist] on Instagram at the beach. And she was like “6am at the beach!” or something. So that was part of your piece?

JB: Right, right. We did that, we did in the middle of the forest in Seward Park with Bonnie [Whiting, percussionist]…we did another really early morning one with a trombonist who is kind of up on a ledge looking out over the water. We wanted sort of different environmental spaces, so the same idea of a certain combining or juxtaposing these different environments on top of each other, so you’re supposed to hear part of the environmental sound, but linked with the instrumental sound. So we have the live players, in the piece that will play, (in a live concert) and then these videos that will also play around them. And then when the installation is up, it’ll be the videos playing on the outside, and then on the inside there’s sort of – the idea of an interior space. Whether you want that to be like an interior mental space, or a psychological space, or whatever, with similar videos of the musicians. But some of them, we have some where the musicians are wearing masks, or they have – they’ll be sort of changed or abstracted more so in this inner space. And there’s five screens in there, five tiny screens inside of this dodecahedron-shaped small room.

EJ: No. I mean I read about it and I was trying to picture it, but…

JB: I have a picture on my phone.

EJ: Oh wow.

EJ: How big is that?

JB: This is 6’10”. So it’s – but you have to kind of crouch down to get into it. And then there’ll be little video screens interspersed in there, and speakers –

EJ: Wow. And they’re slightly different videos inside here than the ones that are playing outside? Those are the ones that have masks…

JB: Right. So we’re still kind of playing around with what to do with this space, but – it’s pretty big. And some of the projections might be quite big.

EJ: So the projections are around the walls of the space …

JB: Yeah.

EJ: And the music – the music is in the videos as well? So you can hear that also?

JB: Well, there’s sort of snippets of people playing when we filmed them at these locations. And then there’ll be some other kinds of sampled sounds that get layered in here and there. So it will run on a – right now I’m making it 30 minutes, it’s like a 30 minute piece that’ll cycle through. And all these different things will sort of change over the course of the piece, but it’s – you know, depending on what you do in the space and where you are will depend on what you hear of that. So it’s like a game, there are sets of possibilities that happen every so often, and it’ll shift to another section over time. We’re using infrared sensors and camera sensors that will take information – maybe movement, or light sensitivity, so how much you’re saturating the light in a given space. It’ll take that data and that could affect the pitch, or the way the video looks, or where the sound plays back from, etc. So as you move around the video and the sound should be altered in some way. We still have to test that out a little bit.

EJ: But it will shift depending on who’s there, and whatever parameters you set.

JB: Yeah. We’re trying to make it so it’s really minimal, or almost nothing if you were to go in there and just stand – it would be just like, five people with environmental sound and no music or anything playing. But as you move around the piece sort of unfolds as you interact with it. And if there are more people there, you will hear more of it. If you were there by yourself, you would only hear a part of it perhaps.

EJ: And the live music? How does that relate to the – are you writing that as well?

JB: Jérémy is focusing on the concert piece. We’re probably going to – the concert piece will be more of a fixed, presented piece in terms of how the videos play. Since we have – since there’s sensors and stuff there, we can’t predict what people will do in the concert. [laughter] They could totally mess up whatever we’re trying to present. Like if somebody is standing on a sensor during the entire concert.

EJ: “Well, that was unexpected.”

JB: Right! But we’ll have it so you see the five musicians sort of interacting with their live selves.

EJ: How does the visual of the masks relate to being inside that smaller space? Does that correlate at all?

JB: Well, I guess – I mean I’m thinking of it as the most abstracted part of the individual self. Your subconscious self, or something like that. Or a subconscious human that maybe exists in some kind of animal form. But I’m also using – the mask videos are overlaid with the other video. So it kind of creates this weird aura around the people. That’s some of the flyer image that we already sent out, with the picture of Rose. It looks like there’s some weird kind of moving image around her, which is really just the video of her with the mask, that’s sort of vibrating around the unmasked video. But you can’t really see the mask, you’re just seeing sort of the vibration of that interlaced video.

EJ: Can you talk a little bit about the conceptual part of it? I read the – not the artist statement, but I read what you wrote on the website and talked a little bit to Jérémy about – what is the self? And what you think your self is, and how other people perceive you, especially in this vast social media landscape. And that other people’s perceptions of your self – like in the Milan Kundera book – it’s like, actually, that is your real self, because that’s the one that people think it is. I don’t know – you don’t have to explain that, but maybe you could just talk about why that is interesting to you?

JB: It’s hard – well – mostly, Jérémy and I have had too many conversations about it [laughter], trying to think about it. And what I kept trying to express to him was that it doesn’t have to mean anything, it’s just there to raise questions about what’s real. Or when you’re juxtaposing a real player against a sort of weird version of them, what does that mean? How does that relate to the composer/performer/audience experience. I guess there is a little bit, for me – some kind of commentary on social media, and how there’s these kinds of digital representations of ourselves. And how people – just as an example – go on Facebook or Instagram and post their vacation pictures, or pictures of them in different places, in this kind of idyllic version of themselves. Like “all I do is travel!” I mean, I probably do it just as much as anyone else.

EJ: I totally do it. No judgment!

JB: Of course! But people don’t post like “oh, I went to work today.” Well, I guess some people do. But the mundane, or perhaps the most human or universally shared aspects of their lives. You’re kind of presenting this idyllic version, as opposed to a more prosaic or unromantic version perhaps, and it depends on how one defines what that is. So we were thinking about that. Shooting the videos of people in different locations, and just the role of musicians. Musicians, you’re practicing all the time, you’re maybe not thinking about the concert space when you’re practicing, but you’re thinking about –  you might be practicing in your studio, or elsewhere, and have different kinds of internal reflections or versions of what you play and how you play. I was even just interested in exploring if the same players would play differently outside at 6 o’clock in the morning, as opposed to night in a concert space.

EJ: Do you think they did?

JB: Well, yeah, I think there is something about – even asking people to wear masks, some people kind of get into it and some people might think it’s weird. Like, for the percussionist, being in the forest with an animal mask on is sort of a ritualistic kind of experience perhaps. So yeah, we were trying to capture interesting material visually, and in the audio, and juxtapose that.

EJ: Did you write material for them to play?

JB: Jérémy had some ideas about what he wanted to put in the piece, so we had some of those kinds of gestures, but we mostly just gave them direction: play these kinds of notes, play this kind of phrase, etc. I was interested in capturing some kind of unique thing. So I want to get their personality, and what they feel comfortable doing. And some people just want to get it done, or try to be really literal in what you’re asking them to do. So that was a little bit challenging, I guess. But we’re cutting up this stuff in an extreme way, so everything is just single notes or gestures and then we’re recombining those. So what they played is not what you hear exactly – we’re using it in a lot of different ways, just like you’d make an electro-acoustic piece. I’m sort of sampling them. But I’m taking that material and doing all kinds of other things with it. And then it’s – the patch is live-sampling their stuff, too. Or it’s feeding the audio from that recording, but it’s doing all kinds of other manipulations to it, like changing the pitch, or delay, etc. – all kinds of things that will run through that audio and change it in different ways in real time.

EJ: What other instruments are in it, besides percussion and cello?

JB: Percussion, cello, violin, trombone, and clarinet.

EJ: Well it looks amazing, actually. I’m excited to see what it looks like because I don’t quite understand the back end of all that stuff.

JB: And it is supposed to be a residency at Oxbow, I am working while I am there for the month so it will probably change a lot over the whole course of the residency.

EJ: Right, how long are you guys there?

JB: Till June 3rd.

EJ: When does it open?

JB: This Friday. [May 4] Hopefully it’ll be functional by Friday! And then by June 3rd –

EJ: It’ll be like, “that’s what we wanted to do.”

JB: Yeah, probably.

EJ: Do you do a lot of – is this your main focus when you’re writing music, is it electro-acoustic music, or –

JB: No – more so lately, I’ve done interactive pieces and electronic pieces. I wrote a piece for myself that I played a few times for percussion and computer. I’ve written a handful of computer and mostly single instrument pieces, since that’s an easier thing to do, just logistically. But I’ve written a lot of acoustic pieces too. Probably more of those are older pieces, I would say.

EJ: Did you study electronics as well, or you just kind of got into it?

JB: I did a lot of music technology classes, computer music, and sound art. I took a sound art course, and I’ve done other workshops and things like that. There’s this place in Toronto that I mentioned called NAISA, New Adventures in Sound Art, which is – they have a studio there, and they do workshops and present pieces. I went to a workshop in Mexico at CMMAS, a center for electro-acoustic music research. They do the same sort of thing, they have symposiums, and they invite composers to write different pieces, and people give lectures on this kind of stuff. So I learned a lot of it from that. And it’s good, because people go, and trade patches, or trade ideas. It’s so vast, what you can do with technology just in terms of an art practice. So many people have different ideas, and different approaches to what they do, and its great to share ideas from different perspectives.

EJ: I was talking to Julia [Tai, SMO conductor] a little bit about the concert they have coming up and how to kind of prepare people who aren’t in the new music club already, to – not even to enjoy it, but just to be present and listen when you don’t have a background in listening to, like, Morton Feldman or whatever. People are like “what the hell? This isn’t music!” And she had some interesting ideas about that, but I wonder if that’s something you ever think about. Because this realm is a little esoteric, and you’re in an art space, and people also have preconceptions about that. You know what I mean?

JB: For this piece?

EJ: Yeah. And in general.

JB: Well, I think a lot about how people approach a piece, any piece. I think it’s getting harder for people to go to a concert and just sit. Like the idea of sitting in a concert and listening to something super weird or foreign is hard. And it seems like in general, people go to concerts less. Especially if you’re not used to that, or grow up with that experience – I guess not a lot of people go to art galleries too perhaps. Although I think the gallery experience is more common. People certainly seem to be more – I don’t know what I want to say – maybe tolerant of art that is super weird when it’s in a gallery.

EJ: You’re right, that is interesting. You don’t have to be so involved with it somehow, I guess.

JB: Well, I’ve had a lot of conversations with composers about this too. I had a friend who was like, “concert music is like you’re in prison!” [laughter] Because you’re forced to sit there, you can’t just like get up and leave. Once the piece starts, you can’t just walk out of the room. I mean, you can, but it’s almost a form of torture or imprisonment because you’re forced to be in a space. You’re forced to stay there for a certain duration, and that’s difficult for some people. Which is – I don’t know if I’d go that far to say that it’s like prison, but –

EJ: Yeah, it’s kind of a catch-22 in a way. I’m having this specific memory, I used to work in a theater here, a contemporary theater for performing arts. And there was a piece on stage that had some similar elements to what you are doing, actually. But a lot of people were really mad, because they were like, “this should be an installation! I shouldn’t have to sit here and listen to this!” There was only a person on stage for the first ten minutes, and the rest was all algorithms. It was material from Hamlet, I think. And the lights, everything – nothing was pre-set, either. I don’t understand how that stuff works but I really loved it because I was like “I don’t know what’s going to happen! And no one is telling me what to do!” And I don’t think I would have taken it as seriously if I were in a gallery because you can just watch for like five minutes. And I was like, “no, I’m in it for an hour, I’m going to take this seriously.” So I had a completely different experience.

JB: Yeah, that’s something that is absolutely valuable about the concert experience too, in that respect. It’s a kind of focused attention. That’s true. So maybe it requires more thoughtfulness from the composer to create something— that you can get away with more in an art context.

EJ: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s a challenge.

JB: I remember I did a sound art piece where it was a small room, and it had a small pool of water, like a table in the room, so it had interactive sound moving around as you moved the water around in this table. So in order to experience anything you really had to interact. Probably part of the Oxbow piece will be similar – people walk into the gallery and might be like “oh, it’s this” and then just walk out. So it takes some initiative to really experience it, which perhaps is in some way similar to a concert piece. If you’re going to make something which has duration, which a lot of gallery pieces don’t have duration in that sense – it’s hard to get people to experience it in a way that would be the most desirable. I mean, I’m allowing for some variability, so it’s different, it’s changing each time, which I like, but you still would have to spend some time there to get some sense of what the piece is. I guess I kind of like that – people can sort of discover or explore the piece in that way.

EJ: Yeah. So you’re not going to, like, tell them. Like give them a little card when they walk in or something.

JB: Yeah. Well, people are invited – we have this dodecahedron thing/room and hopefully it’s obvious that people can go inside.

EJ: Yeah. People will want to go in!

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.

In conversation with Erin Jorgensen, violist Melia Watras talks about work as a performer and composer, Orlando Jacinto Garcia’s new work written for her and SMO, improvisation, the viola and her musical interests. 

EJ: So, where did you grow up?

MW: I was born in Hawaii, but I moved all over. I spent a lot of time going to school at Indiana University, because I did my undergrad and I did my masters’. I think now I’ve lived longer in Seattle than I did in Bloomington. But these are the two places I’ve lived for most of my life. My husband and I, we had the [Corigliano] quartet, we went to New York after Indiana. So we were at Julliard, we were concertizing, so we just stayed in New York and then moved out here.

EJ: Did you study composition as well?

MW: I took it as my cognate when I was in school, but when I was at Indiana I was more inspired by my teacher Atar [Atar Arad], who was a performer who was composing. So that really opened my eyes. He had finished his first string quartet while we were there, and I was in a quartet coached by him, and playing his piece. And seeing that process from his perspective really influenced me. I call myself a performer/composer.

EJ: Do you think you do equal amounts of performing and composing now?

MW: It’s been a balance I work on. So I’m trying different ways. I am enjoying composing so much that I am composing more, and I have a lot of great colleagues who are very kind to play my pieces.

EJ: I watched a bunch of them online – is it mostly for strings?

MW: Yes. I did write a piece for percussion and viola. Everything has a string instrument somehow associated so far. Yeah, that’s just my world…Nobody has heard them yet, but I wrote some vocal things. But yeah, I’m from that string world.

EJ: Have you worked with composer Orlando Jacinto Garcia before?

MW: I have not worked with him one on one – I became aware of him when Cristina [Valdes] and the Seattle Modern Orchestra brought him out to play. And I was playing on that concert too. And I was playing a piece by Feldman, and he studied with Feldman.

EJ: I listened to some of his music online and it’s really – I have a real affinity for that kind of – I haven’t listened to all of it obviously – kind of like looping, a little bit – not repetitive – but you know, it kind of expands –

MW: Yes! He expands time. It slows down from our daily lives for sure.

EJ: I really like that. I had that experience actually listening to one of your pieces today.

MW: Oh cool!

EJ: Yeah. It was great actually. I just noticed how, sometimes when you listen to music – I was having a very anxious day, and when I went back to practice I was like, “oh, I feel so much better!”. They were really beautiful – I was curious about some of the improvisatory [pieces]. I didn’t do a ton of improvisation, so can you talk a little bit about where your head goes and what kind of parameters you have?

MW: Yeah. I think improvisation is so important for performers, especially if you want to be a composer/performer. For composers, you get a lot of material that way. But I use improvisation for my students in many different ways. So one thing I did this quarter that we were experimenting with was, traditional scales can become – you get locked in. So you see it in a piece, and you use that fingering, you use the sound, but it doesn’t always fit the piece. So my teacher, Atar, had us play scales from pieces. So I had them choose a scale from the piece they were working on. And then they took that scale and they did an improvisation where that scale appeared three times. And that it could have some reflection of the way it was in the piece, and it also could just go off into its own thing. And it was pretty amazing what they came up with. I find it so helpful to then go back and play the written piece, because then you have the different angle to think about that same scale.

EJ: So did he [Garcia] write it [the clouds receding into the mountains] for you?

MW: Mm-hmm.

EJ: Cool! So…how is that process going?

MW: It’s great! I mean – every composer/performer relationship is different. Some people like to give you a finished piece, some people want to work on it with you…He basically gave me a finished piece, and asked for some thoughts, just little things here and there. It’s a beautiful piece.

EJ: Can you just talk a little bit about the viola and what you love about it? And why you played it?

MW: Yes! I love all sorts of things about the viola. I’m happy to talk about it. I love the viola for its tone. It’s the instrument that doesn’t fit in the violin/viola/cello/bass sort of world.  I guess bass also kind of had its own thing. But what I mean to say is, in the creation of the history of the string family, violin and cello were with set parameters. Violin especially. It’s going to be a certain size. The viola, when it first came out in the Baroque, there were actually two. There was an alto viola that you played on your chin, and there was a tenor viola that you played like a cello. And those two instruments existed for a while, and it caused the viola to not have a set size. So we can go from 15” up to 17”.

EJ: Still?

MW: Still. We don’t have – like violin – the exact parameters. But that means that we have a lot of variation. We have a lot of variation in the sound production as well.

EJ: I mean, not the viola [vs the violin] but  – different sizes of the viola, within the viola that exists now? There is a difference in sound?

MW: Yes, a lot. Really different. Because not only do they vary the length, they vary the width. And then people are coming up with all sorts of shapes and stuff. But yes, mine for example is 16” because I can’t really play bigger. But it’s wide. So it sounds like a bigger instrument. But you can have nasal, you can have metallic, you can have woody, you can have all these sorts of sound possibilities in the viola. And I liked that it’s not set. And violin used to not be so set as it is now. But it got set from great performers, you know…Lots of people talk about when Heifetz was king of violin, Heifetz had a sound, Szigeti had a sound, Francescatti had a sound, Oistrakh had a sound. You would hear it and you would know, oh, that’s Oistrakh. And then it became more codified after that. Well, luckily viola is not codified!

EJ: Can you talk a little bit – it’s hard to choose a favorite, but I mean – what kind of music are you, for playing, what kind of music are you most drawn to? Is there a genre, or maybe even like favorite pieces, or a feeling, or…?

MW: Well, yeah, I could list quite a few things I love. I’ll name some. You know, when you’re playing a concerto, one of the best things – I love the Martinu Rhapsody because he just put that in our wheelhouse. So he put it in a place on the instrument that we can just crank and sound amazing. And it’s fun. It’s amazing, soulful music. So I love playing that. I was just working on improvisation with a chamber group right before I was teaching Alessandra [Alessandra Barrett], and I was telling them to listen to Lutosławski ’s String Quartet, so I had Lutosławski on my brain. And I adore Lutosławski. He’s one of my favorites. I think he just sort of broke things open. As a violist I have to give a nod to Hindemith. I feel like he was pivotal. He was also a composer and performer and he gave us so many sonatas that, again, it’s like he knew what he wanted to draw out of the instrument. So – they’re amazing. But really I love so many things. Mozart Sinfonia Concertante – that’s classically perfect in a way.

EJ: Do you prefer playing contemporary over classical? Or are they both just like…

MW: I play more contemporary. If you’re a violist and you don’t like contemporary music, you’re playing the wrong instrument. Our repertoire is heavy in contemporary and 20th century.

EJ: Is that when people kind of started taking it seriously? As like, “Hey, this is a solo instrument.”

MW: Yeah! Like, we were the neglected one for so long that we would play the new composer’s work. So they were like, “Oh! Let’s write for that! Because they’ll play it!” I’m sure there were other reasons, but that was part of it. So I do heavily play contemporary music, but I love playing any good piece of music.

EJ: So it doesn’t really matter. Do you feel like there’s a different way that you approach music that’s contemporary versus classical?

MW: One hundred percent. And I talk to my students about it all the time. We must approach classical differently than contemporary. The bows were different, the instruments were different, the strings were different…it doesn’t mean we have to play it in a period style, but we should acknowledge what was happening there.  Alessandra just had her lesson, she’s playing two contrasting pieces, Stamitz and Bartók. So 20th century and a classical piece. So we’re looking for elegance and refinement in the Stamitz, and then the Bartók  – the sound can be post-Romantic, so there are Romantic moments, but Bartók obviously is heavily influenced by folk music, so searching for that folk quality with the more laser sound as opposed to the lifted, clipped sort of sound of a Stamitz concerto.

EJ: This kind of gets into the next question that I wanted to ask you, I’m very interested in the body, especially in playing percussion, but I’m wondering – first of all, when you’re talking about grace and elegance versus more attack – obviously you think about it mentally, but you’re probably thinking about it physically as well?

MW: One hundred percent. Yeah. You have to change your bow arm, you have to lay into the instrument. I personally feel that even Schumann, even though it’s Romantic, it still requires more caressing of the instrument. Whereas you need to have a sharper start – well, it depends on what you’re playing – but yeah the bow arm, the vibrato, the weight of the bow, the attacks of the notes, all of these things change. And in contemporary music, it changes for the composer…I’m going to approach Orlando’s piece with no attacks. I’ve just started learning, so this may change, but this is my initial feeling. But going for the timeless aspect by not having such abrupt starts, but having long lines that evolve as he shapes – you know, he sort of morphs these long lines.

EJ: That makes a lot of sense. It kind of connects with – I feel like when I was in school, there was almost kind of like a disconnect between your body and your brain. I mean, it’s everywhere, in life! But I’m kind of curious if there is anything you do outside of playing to stay healthy or stay more in flow, or like – what are your tricks?

MW: I take Pilates, and I walk. But 100%, I have to – the viola is big to have on your neck. We often get TMJ. So I do stretches. I know some gentlemen who are just naturally strong. They don’t have to do anything. But I think that’s unusual. For people my size, I think you have to be in shape.

EJ: It’s a serious thing, I was thinking! To be like this [imitates playing a viola] all the time.

MW: And your body is contorted, you know. Because we’re approaching the instrument this way, so the right side of your body is slightly forward. Yeah.

EJ: Ok, I’m going to just ask you one more question: what other kinds of art do you like? Just so people can kind of go down a little rabbit hole and learn about other stuff, it doesn’t have to be music.

MW: I love all art. I love books, I love literature, I love paintings, I love the ballet. I love everything. So, whatever is inspiring to me.

EJ: For your pieces, do you feel like there is anything specific that you are inspired by, that you specifically notice?

MW: I’ve written pieces based off of literature, I’ve been inspired by photographs –

EJ: I saw that Tolstoy one, was that –

MW: Yeah, the Kreutzer. That one is super cool because it has a lineage. Not just from the book, but music. So Beethoven wrote the sonata, and then Tolstoy wrote his novella based off of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. And then Janáček took Tolstoy’s book and wrote a response, basically, in response to Tolstoy’s novella. And then there are films…so, those are the first three, and then I think it just splintered. That was super cool, because I took the two pieces, the Janáček and the Beethoven, and took the themes that were morphed, and then I made third morph of those themes.

EJ: Is that what was happening? Was there a live improvisation in that piece?

MW: The piece I wrote was not improvised. But Mike [Michael Jinsoo Lim] and I did do an improvisation based on Tolstoy at that same concert. – Edited by Jeremy Jolley and Michelle Cheng

Melia Watras will perform on Orlando Jacinto Garcia’s the clouds receding into the mountains for solo viola and ensemble on April 14, 8 PM – GET YOUR TICKETS ONLINE

Seattle Modern Orchestra is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike.

George Crumb (b. 1929) is one of the most frequently performed composers in today’s musical world. Crumb is the winner of Grammy and Pulitzer Prizes, and continues to compose new scores that enrich the lives of all who come in contact with his profoundly humanistic art. Crumb’s music often juxtaposes contrasting musical styles, ranging from music of the western art-music tradition, to hymns and folk music, to non-Western musics. Many of Crumb’s works include programmatic, symbolic, mystical and theatrical elements, which are often reflected in his beautiful and meticulously notated scores.

A shy, yet warmly eloquent personality, Crumb retired from his teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania after more than 30 years of service. Honored by numerous institutions with honorary Doctorates, and the recipient of dozens of awards and prizes, Crumb makes his home in Pennsylvania, in the same house where he and his wife of more than 60 years raised their three children. George Crumb’s music is published by C.F. Peters and an ongoing series of “Complete Crumb” recordings, supervised by the composer, is being issued on Bridge Records. – http://www.georgecrumb.net/

In 1976, Crumb was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and completed Dream Sequence (for violin, cello, piano, percussion and offstage “glass-harmonica”), the second of his works to be premiered by the Aeolian Chamber Players (Ocober, 1976). The work is a study in stasis and fragility and its subtitle “Images II” recalls the delicate and evocative timbral shadings of certain passages in Black Angels (“Images I”). – David Cope, extract from Biography from George Crumb Profile of a Composer

George Crumb on Black Angels, Thirtheen Images From The Dark Land for Electric String Quartet

“‘Black Angels’ was conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world. The work portrays a voyage of the soul. The three stages of this voyage are Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation), and Return (redemption). “The numerological symbolism of ‘Black Angels,’ while perhaps not immediately perceptible to the ear, is nonetheless quite faithfully reflected in the musical structure. These ‘magical’ relationships are variously expressed, e.g., in terms of length, groupings of single tones, durations, patterns of repetition, etc. . . . There are several allusions to tonal music: a quotation from Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ quartet, an original ‘Sarabanda,’ the sustained B-major tonality of ‘God-music,’ and several references to the Latin sequence ‘Dies irae’ (Day of Wrath). The work abounds in conventional musical symbolisms such as the ‘Diabolus in musica’ (the interval of the tritone) and the ‘Trillo del diavolo’ (the Devil’s Trill, after Tartini).”

Julius Eastman was born in New York City and raised in Ithaca, New York. He studied piano and composition at the Curtis Institute of Music, graduating in 1963. In the late sixties, he moved to Buffalo, New York, where he was invited by composer-conductor Lukas Foss to join the prestigious university-based new music group, the Creative Associates, eventually becoming a member of the University of Buffalo music faculty. In Buffalo, his colleagues at the new music center included Petr Kotik, Gwendolin Sims, James Fulkerson, Jan Williams, and Morton Feldman. During his highly productive years in Buffalo, he composed Thruway; a ballet score, The Moon’s Silent Modulation; Macle; Trumpet; Colors; and Stay On It; among other pieces. In the summer of 1976, Eastman moved to New York City where he became part of the “downtown” New York music scene. During this period he performed with Arthur Russell, Meredith Monk, Peter Zummo, and others in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall and the Brooklyn Academy of Music to downtown lofts and disco clubs. From 1976 until his death in 1990, Eastman’s “model of musicianship,” as music historian Ryan Dohoney terms it, “expanded to include free Jazz, improvisation, new wave rock, disco, as well as his own composed music that is marked by intense repetition and political aggressiveness.” This “political aggressiveness” is evident in the series of multi-piano pieces that Eastman wrote with provocative titles such as Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla. Following a series of personal struggles and misfortunes such as eviction from his apartment for non-payment of rent and the confiscation of his possessions including his musical scores, Eastman returned to Buffalo, where he died in 1990 at age 49. -Renée Levine Packer, Co-editor (with Mary Jane Leach) and contributor, Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music (University of Rochester Press, 2015.)

Among the Eastman scores we have left, Gay Guerrilla is possibly the finest example of what Eastman himself called organic music: a sort of large-scale additive process of accumulation of harmonic materials that proliferates and grows organically across considerable time spans. Unlike Philip Glass’s additive minimalism, a process based on lines that rhythmically expand and contract, Eastman’s organic music is based on the piling up of pitch over pitch, harmony over harmony, in curves of decreasing and increasing harmonic density and harmonic rhythm. This process really makes these compositions breath as if they were living organisms.

[…] Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla is loosely structured like a Choralphantasie (chorale phantasia). The chorale fantasia is a music composition based on a Lutheran chorale, whose characteristic feature is that the presentation of the choral melody is delayed via an “edging”, often constituted by an extended fugue-like section that prepares the stage for the rhetorical climax: the entrance of the chorale as a cantus firmus to accompany and complete the contrapuntal splendor of the fugal devices already deployed, and which typically leads the piece, triumphantly, to its end. Chorale fantasias were the opening movement of many Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chorale Cantatas and are among the most thrilling participatory moments of the entire Lutheran liturgy. Chorale melodies in general can be conducive to militancy: they are constructed so as to be easy to memorize; some look and function as a “call to arms”; they are a powerful tool to unify a group, as every-one in the congregation is familiar with the melody; and as a chorale is first heard, the congregation is typically frenzied with enthusiasm and tends to participate in the singing. In “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” by Martin Luther, images of warfare are conjured up already in the title, and the text is a call for fortitude and strength (pride!) to overcome oppression […] – Extract form the essay Gay Guerrilla, A Minimalist Choralphantasie by Luciano Chessa.

GET YOUR TICKETS ONLINE!

Seattle Modern Orchestra is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike.

Join us for an exciting season featuring amazing works by George Crumb, Julius Eastman, Beat Furrer, György Ligeti, and a world premiere by Orlando Jacinto Garcia written for violist Melia Watras and Seattle Modern Orchestra. We’ll finish the season with a transcendental 50 minutes piece by Jonathan Harvey.

SUBSCRIBE NOW TO SAVE ON SINGLE TICKETS PRICE!

CONCERT I: IN TIME OF WAR…

THURS. | OCT. 12 | 8 PM
Pre-concert presentation at 7:30 PM with SMO co-Artistic Director Jérémy Jolley
@ The Chapel Performance Space in the Good Shepherd Center (4th Floor)

PROGRAM:
George Crumb – Dream Sequence (Images II) for violin, cello, piano and percussion (1976)
George Crumb – Black Angels (Images I) for electric string quartet (1969)
Julius Eastman – Gay Guerrilla (1979) – Version for 13 strings

Seattle Modern Orchestra opens its 2017-18 season with a concert featuring American music from the 1970s. Composers George Crumb and Julius Eastman responded to the cultural and political turmoil of the ’70s with works that resonate with today’s conflicts. Crumb described his Black Angels, inspired by the Vietnam war, as a “parable on our troubled contemporary world,” portraying a “voyage of the soul” in three stages: Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation), and Return (redemption). Eastman viewed his minimalist work Gay Guerrilla as an “organic” work which “glorifies Gay” as a guerrilla – “someone, in any case, that is sacrificing his life for a point of view.”

CONCERT II: THE CLOUDS RECEDING

SAT. | APRIL 14 | 8 PM
Pre-concert conversation at 7:30 PM with guest composer Orlando Jacinto Garcia and SMO co-Artistic Director Jérémy Jolley
@The Chapel Performance Space in the Good Shepherd Center (4th Floor)

PROGRAM:
Beat Furrer – Aria for soprano and six instruments (1999) – West Coast Premiere
Orlando J. Garcia – the clouds receding into the mountains for viola and ensemble (2017) – World Premiere
György Ligeti – Melodien for chamber orchestra (1971) – Seattle Premiere

Seattle Modern Orchestra is pleased to host composer Orlando Jacinto Garcia with a new piece, the clouds receding into the mountains, written for violist and University of Washington faculty Melia Watras and SMO. The title refers to both the spectacular cloud formations as well as the continually receding aural materials heard throughout the work. The concert also features Swiss composer Beat Furrer‘s Aria and Melodien for chamber orchestra by the 20th century master, György Ligeti.

CONCERT III: IN QUEST OF SPIRIT – HARVEY’S BHAKTI
SAT. | JUNE 9 | 8 PM
Pre-concert presentation at 7:30 PM with SMO co-Artistic Director Jérémy Jolley
@The Chapel Performance Space in the Good Shepherd Center (4th Floor)

PROGRAM:
Jonathan Harvey: Bhakti for chamber ensemble and quadraphonic tape (1982) – West Coast Premiere

For its season finale concert, Seattle Modern Orchestra is thrilled to perform British composer Jonathan Harvey’s 50 minutes epic work Bhakti (devotion), centered around Sanskrit hymns from the Rigveda toward a transcendent consciousness. The ensemble and tape are engaged in “dialogue, transformation, memory, anticipation, simultaneous translation, and reaching beyond the instrumental scale to a more universal dimension.”

Seattle Modern Orchestra is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike.

by Rachel Yoder

Paris-based clarinetist and composer Carol Robinson is a contemporary specialist known for her work with the music of Giacinto Scelsi, Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono, and Eliane Radigue. Here she discusses her background, current work, and her upcoming performance with Seattle Modern Orchestra on Mystic Clarinet, a program featuring works by Scelsi, William O. Smith and Jeremy Jolley:

Can you tell us a little about where you grew up and your early musical training?

I lived in many places as a child, but it was in the public school system of Rapid City, South Dakota that I received my initial musical training. This included group lessons, choir and playing in various school bands. Being first chair in the junior high band gave me the opportunity to play with the all-city band and later experience playing in an orchestra. My family moved back to Los Angeles when I was fifteen, and it was there that I began private lessons, working first with John Gates and then most importantly with the great performer and pedagogue Gary Gray. We lived in a neighborhood with a high concentration of people in “the industry” which brought me into contact with all sorts of talented people. The cultural environment was rich and stimulating. When I was sixteen, I went to a music camp called USC-ISOMATA. Once again, I was first clarinet, allowing me to play in the orchestra, chamber music groups and faculty ensembles. That summer, much to the bewilderment of my family, I decided to become a musician.

After graduating from Oberlin, you went to Paris to study contemporary music – what led to your interest in contemporary music?

I have always been interested in unusual sounds, even before I knew what “contemporary music” was. From an early age I played and listened to as much new music as possible. It was IRCAM and a desire to further expand my musical horizons that drew me to Paris.

Was there a particular teacher or mentor in clarinet or composition that you sought out in Paris? Did you train at a conservatory or in another setting?

Before arriving in Paris I spent the summer in Siena, Italy studying at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana. The French clarinetist Michel Portal happened to play a concert there, and hearing him was an inspiration because his approach to the instrument was very different from what I had known until then. I came to Paris just to see what was going on, and upon discovering a vibrant scene, decided to leave the master’s program at USC and stay in the city a while. I was awarded a Harriet Hale Wooley scholarship to study with privately with Portal. Another chance meeting brought me into contact with Maurice Gabai, the principal clarinetist of the Paris Opera. In addition to having brilliant technique, he had a particularly expressive vocal way of playing. I took lessons from him at a regional conservatory off and on for a year and received an advanced performance diploma. These French musicians offered another vision of clarinet playing, and were both important to my musical development.

I understand that you worked with Giacinto Scelsi on his music for clarinet. Can you describe this experience and the performance insights you gained?

If I were to name a master, Giacinto Scelsi would be mine. After visiting him in Rome, a friend brought some clarinet scores back to Paris and gave them to me. The music spoke to me immediately. I soon played the three pieces for E-flat clarinet (Tre Pezzi) in concert. The same friend recorded the concert and sent the tape to Scelsi. He subsequently invited me to work with him in Rome. Sessions with him were intense, not only because he was very exacting regarding the scores, but also for the degree of concentration and raw power required. He demanded total involvement, settling for nothing less. Every instant of every note mattered. Those lessons have never left me.

You’ve recorded an album of Scelsi’s music, and two of his works are programmed on the upcoming concert with Seattle Modern Orchestra. What drew you to his music, and can you describe some of your favorite aspects of these works?

I’ll be performing Kya, and coaching two SMO musicians on the stunning Ko-Lho duet for flute and clarinet. I love the power of this music, its urgency and gripping emotional impact. I have always been fascinated by how it sounds simultaneously archaic and ultra-modern.

One of my favorite things about Scelsi is his use of microtones, intervals smaller than the half-steps we typically find in Western music. How do you think this technique affects the listener, and what challenges does it create for the performer(s)?

Microtones, like glissandi, create shifts in the perception of time. They help us slip into another listening reality. Modern orchestral wind instruments were designed with elaborate key mechanisms to play diatonically. These mechanical systems for an instrument like the clarinet can be ill-adapted to producing smaller intervals, and in addition to being imprecise, are often plagued by timbral differences.

On the SMO concert, you’ll also be performing a work by Seattle-based clarinetist and composer William O. (Bill) Smith, who is widely known both as a jazz musician who performed with Dave Brubeck and as a pioneer of extended techniques for the clarinet. What do you see as Smith’s legacy to clarinetists?

Bill Smith’s lasting legacy will be his pioneering work with clarinet multiphonics [multiple notes at once]. His diligence in defining and cataloguing these sounds has opened untold possibilities for generations of clarinetists and composers. Though perhaps less widely known, his compositional exploration of the demi-clarinet, double-clarinet, “prepared” clarinet [using assorted accessories and modifications] and integrated electronics has likewise left its mark. His personal performance practice also includes the use of projections, hand gestures, texts and simple staging. He is a truly inventive and generous person.

Why did you choose to perform this particular Smith piece (Rites for clarinet and tape)?

Rites was written for me, commissioned by the CCMIX (formerly Xenakis’ UPIC studio) in Paris, as part of an multi-composition project for clarinet and electronics. Playing it in Seattle with the composer present is a real honor.

What other composers have you worked with closely?

Though I have worked with many composers over the years, perhaps most important is my ongoing collaboration with the French electronic master Eliane Radigue.

Your mesmerizing album Billows for clarinet and live electronics strikes me as exploring the visceral, mystical territory of Scelsi but with the slower pace and simplicity of Morton Feldman, another composer whose works you’ve performed and recorded. Then there’s the birbyne, a Lithuanian single-reed instrument you use on the album. Can you speak to how your musical influences and interests play out in your compositions?

I suppose that it is normal for there to be parallels between what I prefer to play, and the music I write, though there is no intentional overlap. There is something so physical in the perception and creation of sound, something almost integrated into the psyche. How could they not be mutually influential?

Billows grew out of the quiet section of long, very contrasted work for basset horn and electronics. The idea for it came from a record producer who, fascinated by that slow, floating section, wanted to release a complete CD with only that. The special open timbre of the birbyne was especially well-suited to the live electronic treatment I was working with.

What current or upcoming compositional and performing projects are you working on?

Upcoming compositional projects include a 13-minute piece for solo percussion and electronics, a duet for birbyne and voice, and a piece for string trio and electronics which will be part of my cycle THE WEATHER PIECES, inspired by meteorological phenomena.

In addition to performances of my own music, there will be a premiere of a new opera by Wandelweiser composer Jürg Frey in Ireland, and a new work for birbyne and harp by Eliane Radigue for the Venice biennial.

A longer-term project is recording a CD of new works for birbyne by various wonderful composers.

Anything else you’d like to add?

I’m very happy to be playing this program in Seattle!

Hear Carol Robinson perform works of Scelsi, Smith and Jolley with Seattle Modern Orchestra on June 3 at the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle, WA (more info/tickets). To learn more about Robinson, visit her website.

Seattle Modern Orchestra is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike.