~ ESSAYS, INTERVIEWS, THOUGHTS ~
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INTERVIEW WITH GEORGIA STRAIGHT (March 7-24)
Without resorting to labels like postmodern or crossover, how would you describe your personal voice as a composer?
I think my music is weird but with a sense of humor, bright, colorful but slightly twisted. The word "Psychedelic" comes to mind, which makes sense given that my musical roots are as a guitar player in rock bands in Northern California in the late sixties and early seventies. The material in my music––the tunes, chords and textures––tend to explore fringe modes of consciousness rather than brand-name emotion or logical thought. Generally speaking, these fringe modes are alert and lucid as opposed to trance-like. Often it is the unlikely combination of otherwise simple elements that transcends and confounds familiar patterns.
Do you have a separate vision for works you compose for orchestral and traditional chamber ensembles from what you would write for yourself as a solo guitarist?
I believe that the activities one engages in to make music heavily influence the work created. When composing for other instruments I work to cultivate a "vision" by sitting at a desk, taking walks, making charts and diagrams, and generally trying to imagine what the whole work will be. On the other hand, I never sit down with the express purpose to compose for the guitar. Solo guitar music just falls out of me when I practice or improvise. I "make up" solo guitar pieces the way I made up music when I was playing in rock bands, before I knew how to read music. In fact, I rarely even write solo pieces down, to remember them I make a recording. As a result, I think my solo guitar works have a more improvisational flow to them and they change vastly from performance to performance.
You have had quite a long relationship with the Kronos Quartet, and more recently with the Borromeo Quartet. What draws you in particular to writing for the string quartet? Do you respect the canon of string writing, or does your background as a rock musician tempt you to subvert the sound of this traditional ensemble?
Many things appeal to me about string quartets: The four instruments of a string quartet can blend to form a solitary voice or be completely heterogeneous with the use of pizzicato, harmonics, glissandi, ponticello and other bowing techniques. As an ensemble, the string quartet is equally capable of projecting a dark and gravely serious attitude to light hearted, even joyous on. Also, in my experience, string quartets seem to be fully committed to what they are doing. In orchestral music or even other mixed chamber ensembles one has to work with the understanding that you’ll get ‘x’ many rehearsals. Quartet’s work on the music until they internalize it the way they internalize Beethoven. Part of this is due to the fact that it is possible to be a full time string quartet, without a day job. The same could not be said of many other groups that play contemporary music.
I have tremendous respect for the canon of the string quartet, which is the main reason that I write so much for that ensemble. One aspect of the canon that I find so inspiring is that the string quartets tend to be a medium where composers explore new ideas and new continuities. Beethoven’s quartets, for example are far more complex and probing than his more public symphonies. I like to think that I am expanding the expressive and sonic palette of the quartet not subverting it and I regard my efforts to do so as consistent with the tradition of the quartet as a catalyst and ideal vehicle for innovation.
What approach do you take to integrating the sound of the electric guitar in a classical music ensemble like the string quartet? What can we expect from the performance of your Troubadour Songs, with the Borromeo Quartet?
It depends on the piece: I have another piece for guitar and quartet called "Physical Property" in which the guitar unabashedly thrusts its rock and roll roots at the quartet and the quartet responds with virtuoso fiddling from within its own tradition. That is actually the easy way out. Troubadour Songs is much more complex and subtle. In Troubadour Songs I try to create a musical universe that is equally fresh and exotic to both the guitar and the quartet. A fantasy landscape where neither can rely on familiar devices. They must find ways to work together. Of course, one still tries to give each job to the appropriate personality. So, when the time comes to be plaintive and introspective the sound of the viola gets the nod, and when the story calls for boisterous the guitar is hard to beat.
From a technical point of view, I have started using a spherical speaker which radiates the sound more similarly to the way acoustic instruments project their sound as opposed to the laser beam projection of traditional guitar amplifiers.
How did the string octet commission come about? Is the official title Gaggle and Flock, as is says in your bio, or Inside Out, as it says in the program? Without giving away too much about the piece, did the combined Borromeo and Brentano Quartets ask for any specific kind of composition?
The official title is Gaggle and Flock. Inside Out was the working title and the only one available at the time the brochure went to press. Such is the risks of presenting world premieres.
The impetus for the Joseph Haydn Society to commission Gaggle and Flock was to celebrate the excellence of the Borromeo and Brentano string quartets and to confirm the collegial bonds between them. In addition to finding themselves at the same festivals, mixing and matching to form quintets and sextets, at the time of the commission, the two violists were married. Due to a personnel change, not divorce, I’m happy to report, the two quartets are no longer matrimonially joined at the viola, but the idea of featuring the two violas and creating a strong musical bond between them continued to intrigue me. Violas have such a distinctive, soulful sound and represent the inner voice of the quartet literally, psychologically and metaphorically. It was my intention to explore the dialectic of inside versus outside, within the community of the octet, the two quartets, the violins, violas and cellos (hence the working title). The quartets never made any specific requests but Nick Kitchen asked me if I was going to seat the octet in any unusual way to delineate the two quartets or would they be in more of an orchestral seating arrangement (ie. violins together, violas together, and cellos together). It was an innocent question but it got me thinking and so my first compositional act was to devise a seating plan which looks something like "flying-V" formation of migrating geese.
The electric guitar is receiving a certain amount of respectability as an instrument for art music, with the efforts of composer/performers like yourself, Mark Stewart, Glenn Branca, Tim Brady in Canada; and Bill Frisells collaboration with many new music composers. What role do you see the electric guitar taking in classical composition? Is it just another tone colour for contemporary composers to integrate, or do you think it carries too much context as an instrument of popular music? Can it be used to bridge the sound worlds of pop and classical musics?
The electric guitar is both "just another tone colour" and carries "too much context as an instrument of popular music." In my work alone, I have pieces (like Physical Property) where the baggage of the rock and roll electric guitar is being explicitly used as a compositional feature and other pieces (like Troubadour Songs) treat with the guitar in a more abstract way. As a result I think the guitar does have a future in concert music as both a new timbre and, post-modern icon.
The musicians you mentioned are all from roughly the same generation: the first generation to grow up with electric guitar driven rock music and have access to recorded classical music, jazz and world music for that matter. Only time will tell if the trend that we are part of is a blip on the radar of musical history or a long lasting movement toward the obliteration of limiting categories and labels.
Your own musical development has been somewhat non-traditional, and yet you are now a composition teacher at a major institution. How has your work in an academic setting affected the way you write?
One good thing about joining the faculty of a "major institution" is that you are surrounded by fabulous musicians and brilliant musical thinkers. It was my colleagues at Princeton that helped me realize that the only prayer I had to make a contribution to music was to be myself and do what only I could do. There is no need for warmed over versions of other people's visions of how music should go. My colleagues inspired me to reconnect with my electric guitar/rock music past which I had repressed in graduate school.
Also, I am constantly challenged by the bright students who are doing their part to find out what comes next for music after my generation is done.
I also thrive knowing that as part of a research institution it is my job to explore new areas. Around here, interesting failures are as valuable as routine successes. There is the hidden spectre of the ivory tower syndrome, of getting disconnected from anything outside of academia. But, I feel that my active schedule as a performer puts me on the front lines and provides me with plenty of opportunities to walk the high wire without a net. I would not change anything about my situation.
How do you perceive your relationship to your audience, as a composer of contemporary music? Do you write purely for yourself, or do you consider your compositions to be part of a dialogue between you and your audience? How do you feel about the current public reception of contemporary composed art music?
I think of the audience and consider a dialogue with them except the only audience I can possibly imagine is made up of people with musical tastes similar…, no, exactly like mine – musical omnivores. So, maybe I am writing for myself.
I expect my pieces to be received with enthusiasm and I’m surprised and disappointed when they are not, therefore, it would be incorrect to say that I don’t care about the audience. Since, I encounter so many audiences as an improvisor, as a composer of orchestral music, chamber music, electric guitar music etc., that I realize that the only audience member that I can consistently satisfy is me, and even that is tough.
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