Kenton Coe Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Composer Kenton Coe

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

Kenton Coe began his musical training at the Cadek Conservatory in Chattanooga and continued studies in Knoxville before attending Sewanee Academy. He attended Hobart College in upstate New York for two years before entering Yale University, from which he graduated as a History of Music major. He studied composition at Yale with Paul Hindemith and Quincy Porter. He worked privately for three years in Paris with Nadia Boulanger both at the Paris Conservatory and the Fontainebleau School, and received two French Government scholarships at her request. Sponsored by Aaron Copland, Kenton Coe received two fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, where he began his first full-length opera, South, which was premiered in 1965 by the Opera of Marseilles under the direction of conductor Jean-Pierre Marty. A new production of South was given by the Paris Opera with an opening night Gala in the presence of President and Madame Georges Pompidou. A studio recording by the French Radio of this opera was given as a part of their American Bi-Centennial celebration. He has written a one-act comedy, Le Grand Siècle, on a text of Eugène Ionesco, which was premiered by the Opera of Nantes and later recorded for broadcast by the French Radio. Kenton Coe has sketched a second full-length opera, The White Devil, based on the Jacobean play by John Webster and is collaborating with Allen Cargile on a chamber opera based on James Agee's The Morning Watch. In 1989, the Knoxville Opera Company gave, in both Knoxville and Nashville, the highly successful world premiere performances of his third opera, Rachel, based on the tragic love story of Andrew and Rachel Jackson. The libretto was created by fellow-Tennessean and Emmy-Award-winning TV writer, Anne Howard Bailey.

== The biography (above) is from the website of the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony (2013)
== The material (below) is from a variety of other sources

Kenton Summers Coe was born on November 11, 1930 in Johnson City, TN, the younger of two sons born to Cleveland Beach Coe (1893-1945) and Margaret Rebecca (Summers) Coe (1893-1981). He spent the first five years of his life in Johnson City, after which he moved with his family to Knoxville and Chattanooga, where they lived from 1935-1945 while Coe’s father worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority and served in WWII. It was during that time, around 1936, that Coe first began his musical training at the Cadek Conservatory in Chattanooga. He attended Sewanee Military Academy from 1946-1947 and then returned to Johnson City with his mother (his father died in 1945 while serving in WWII) where he graduated from Science Hill High School in 1948. He attended Hobart College in New York for two years before transferring to Yale University in 1950 to study composition with Paul Hindemith and Quincy Porter. Coe graduated from Yale in May 1953 and left that summer for Paris, France to study music composition with Nadia Boulanger at the Paris Conservatory and the American School at Fontainebleau. What was initially a six-week summer program evolved into three years of private composition study, sponsored by two scholarships through the French government for which Boulanger advocated.

It was during this time that Coe first met Jean-Pierre Marty, a pianist and conductor with whom Coe would share a romantic partnership for most of his life. Coe remained in France until 1957, when he and Marty moved to New York City, where they would remain until Coe returned to Johnson City in 1974 and Marty moved back to France. Aside from a five-year period living in Lake Summit, NC (2007-2012), Coe would stay in Johnson City for the next 43 years, until 2017. He spent his final years in Easley, SC and Asheville, NC, where he died on December 29, 2021.

While Coe’s student compositions date to the 1940s, he considered his first mature piece to be the opera “South,” which he began composing in 1960 and worked on until its premiere in 1965 by the Opera of Marseilles, under the direction of Marty. The work, based on Julien Green’s three-act play “Sud” from 1953, would be performed again in 1972 by the Paris Opera, making Coe the first American to have an opera produced by the organization. Coe went on to write a number of stage works (operas, one-act musical plays, and ballets), including the opera “Rachel” on which he collaborated with librettist Anne Howard Bailey and which was premiered by the Knoxville Opera Company in 1989.

Coe wrote extensively for piano and organ, including “Sonata for Piano” which was given its American premiere by Kenneth Huber at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1977, and “Fantasy for Organ” (1991) which was commissioned by Stephen Hamilton and served as the focus of Hamilton’s 1992 DMA Thesis. He composed orchestral pieces, works for various chamber ensembles, and various pieces for chorus and vocal soloists. As an active member of the Episcopal Church, Coe also composed numerous anthems and other sacred pieces. Coe also composed over a half dozen film scores, first working with Romain Gary on “Birds in Peru” in 1968, and going on to collaborate with documentarian Ross Spears on a number of films from the late 1970s through the 2010s, including "Agee" (1980) which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary.

Many of Coe’s pieces were written in response to specific commissions, including “Concerto for Organ, Strings, and Percussion” commissioned by the Festival du Commings in 1980; “Scherzo for Clarinet, Brass, and Strings” by the Johnson City Symphony in 1986; “Ischiana” by the Baton Rouge Symphony in 1989; “Purcellular” by the City of London in 1995; and “Architects of Heaven” by the Carolina Concert Choir in Hendersonville, NC around 2008, which Coe once described as “probably the best work I have ever written.”

Coe’s work was also supported by various grants, awards, and fellowships throughout the years. This included two ten-week fellowships in 1960 and 1963 from the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ residency and workshop in Peterborough, NH, where he worked on the opera “South” under the sponsorship of composer Aaron Copland; a $75,000 award from the Lyndhurst Foundation in 1985; and various grants from state and federal arts organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Tennessee Arts Commission.

Coe received a number of awards and accolades throughout his life, including the Samuel Doak Award from Tusculum College in 1980, a Governor’s Award in the Arts from the state of Tennessee in 1990, Composer of the Year from the Tennessee Music Teachers’ Association in 1998, and an honorary doctorate degree from East Tennessee State University in 2007.

In late September of 1995, Kenton Coe was in the Windy City, where the Chicago Symphony was performing his Ischiana. Being a brief introductory piece, the program also included the Haydn Trumpet Concerto featuring Adolph Herseth, and A London Symphony (Symphony #2) of Vaughan Williams. James Paul was the guest conductor. [Names which are links refer to my interviews elsewhere on this website.]

During Kenton’s visit, he graciously took a bit of time to sit down with me for an interview. His southern charm and easy-going manner belied the solid musicianship he had developed over the years. He was about to turn 65, and the discussion showcased his experience in many areas of the artistic realm.

As we were setting up, he mentioned being a bit tired . . . . .

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Bruce Duffie:   Is composing too tiring?

Kenton Coe: [Has a huge laugh] No!

BD:   It’s just the traveling?

Coe: The traveling is tiring, I must say. Composing is stressful, but it’s not something that you have to share with others.

BD:   I assume you work to the point where you can eventually share the music with others.

Coe: Yes. That’s the fun part. This performance by the Chicago Symphony is a great treat for me, as you can imagine. I’m overawed. I am a little tired because I just finished a project that has absolutely drained me, and I’ve just sent the music off. So this visit to Chicago comes as a real vacation for me.

BD:   Your piece here has already been done? [Ischiana was written for the Baton Rouge Symphony in 1989.]

Coe: It’s already been done, so I’ve been through the nerve-wracking part. This performance will be fun. It’s just a very great treat to hear it again.

BD:   Is there something special about coming back to a piece that you might not have heard in a year or two, or ten or twenty years?

Coe: It’s been about four years since I’ve heard it. The piece was premiered in 1989. It was a commission, and the guest conductor here, James Paul, was the one who commissioned the work in the first place. He has played it quite a bit including with the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra. He’s the conductor of the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, which is a wonderful symphony orchestra. I was pleasantly surprised when I got that commission because he told me exactly what he wanted, and I tried to give it to him. I always try to please. He said he wanted an eight-minute overture for a big orchestra, and a work that is very easy for the public, and is fun. He really wanted a fun piece, and it’s nice to have those kinds of parameters to work in because it makes it a lot easier.

BD:   If someone came to you and wanted a forty-minute piece that was slow, you’d be able to tailor it to that?

Coe: [Laughs] I’m sure if we could work out the times, I’d be delighted, yes.

BD:   When you get a commission, do you immediately have ideas starting in your head, or does it take a while to force them out?

Coe: People are shocked when you talk about that side of it, but in all sincerity and practicality, there’s nothing more inspiring than a deadline, and a contract to do something. There’s a certain business side of music that shows you that somebody is taking you seriously. People say it’s wonderful to be a composer, but it is a profession, and there’s nothing that proves their interest in you more than asking me to write a piece, and including some money. That really makes you take it seriously yourself.

BD:   Are all your works on commission, or are there some pieces which you just have to get out?

Coe: I have been very lucky in a very modest career that I’m in. Ever since I started and took the plunge, I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve never not worked, and I find that rather amazing. I’ve always been asked to do things that I really enjoyed doing. I’ve come up with projects that I wanted to do, then ultimately they get funded, and I was able to get to produce most of them. I also steadily work on some smaller things. I do a lot of church music, for example, and that’s a very nice feel for me. I love doing it, and I love that immediate kind of work with other people, and with your own friends and your own religion. That’s very important. [Wistfully] I can go on for hours on my theories about regional composing, and regional arts in general.

BD:   You are a Southerner. Is your music Southern?

Coe: It’s not. I have had a checkered career because I lived a very long time in Paris, and I lived a long time in New York before I moved back to Tennessee. I’m a native Tennessean, and I moved back to my home town. I went away to school, amounting from Prep School through college, and then eventually went to Paris and studied there for four years. I’ve lived there at least for one month of the year ever since. I feel almost more at home there than anywhere else. But I lived a number of years in New York, and then I did go back to Tennessee for various family reasons. It was a very good point in my life when I decided to do that. I had had enough of being poor in New York. [Laughs] Having made contacts in France, and I’m really much more performed there than I am here, which is weird.

BD:   Is that satisfying, or just work?

Coe: It’s sort of perverse, more than anything. I wrote the only American opera that the Paris Opera ever produced.

BD:   Have you tried to interest them in something else, or get a commission from them to do something specifically for them?

Coe: No, I’m totally out of it. I’m sure you appreciate as much as anybody can, the difficulty in dealing with an organization like that. [Laughs] Once burned, twice shy! It was an absolutely fluke that it was ever picked up at the Paris Opera in the first place. It had been done in Marseilles. They had given the world premiere at a time when they were doing a lot of premieres, and they made a very special effort to do new works, or very exotic productions of standard works. They did wonderful things, some absolutely stunning works, very much like the St. Louis Opera does, and Chicago Opera Theater, of which I’m a great admirer. They’re not on a huge glamorous scale, but they do things in a very serious and very musical way. They are not dull, sort of chi-chi types of things.

BD:   Just good solid productions?

Coe: Very good solid productions with wonderful designs and wonderful directors. They were very innovative. It’s very strange how opera companies go through periods of that. It depends on the people, and the backing. In the case of Marseilles, it was the backing of the city government. For about ten years it was like the Louisville Orchestra. Remember all those wonderful works from that period when they were being funded?

BD:   Yes, with all the commissions which were recorded and issued on LP.

Coe: It was an incredible list of pieces that they were able to do. It was a wonderful moment.

* * * * *

BD:   You had a good cachet through studying with Nadia Boulanger.

Coe: It certainly helped a lot, and it was one of those things where, when you get into that kind of networking, that’s normal. You get into a group of people, and little by little, things do happen. Most often they don’t happen without that kind of connection.

BD:   What did you learn from Boulanger?

Coe: I hesitate to say everything I know I learned from her, but in a sense, I really did. I had studied with Paul Hindemith before her. I went to him with some thoughts, and because he was very influential. I was very sympathetic to his ideas about the practicality of music, and the essential, down-to-earth, unglamorous, unromantic view of things which I was very attuned to it at the time. I was impressed, but he was not a very good teacher as far as trying to draw you out as a pupil. Then, as a fluke, I went after was given the opportunity to go to the School of Fontainebleau, where Boulanger was the reigning queen. This was supposed to be for two months after graduation from college, and I stayed four years. It’s just one of those things. She liked me, much to my surprise, because she was the only person that ever really showed some kind of interest in what I could do, or gave me the confidence to do it. She wanted me to stay, and she managed financially for me to stay. She got me French government scholarships, so I stayed with her. Especially in retrospect, it was unforgettable, and I think about her more now than I did fifteen years ago. It’s strange... every time I do something, I ask myself what she would have said. I know the answer, because she was able to instill it in me. That was her great secret about dealing with pupils. She was able to instill in you a seriousness about your craft. I’m so tired of this sort of show-offy-side of music, and the faddish side of music, and people grabbing at any idea that’s going to sell at any given moment. She was a very tolerant woman about musical tastes, and she had that wonderful gift that few teachers have of being able to look at the work you do through your viewpoint, and not though a pre-judged idea like Hindemith. He just wanted you to write like he wrote, and he didn’t accept anybody else’s theories but his own. So he would never look at your creative things, and say to do it this way. He would just rewrite it! Everybody who studied with him knows that, and it is interesting that he produced very few well-known figures. Lukas Foss went through a very long period of not doing anything, but he survived.

BD:   He didn’t produce creative composers, but he also didn’t even produce duplicates of him.

Coe: No, that’s true. He was a very strong, very special talent, with a very unique personality. He wrote some absolutely wonderful music. He wrote a lot of music which showed that the technique was so easy for him that he would just toss off a symphony in a week. Everybody knows that he was able to do that. Some things he rewrote, but nothing compared with Stravinsky, who just labored over every single note, and banged it out at the piano, which is a great shock to every teacher. Nadia always hated that, even though she worshiped Stravinsky. She was in love with him, and made no bones about it. He was the passion of her life. To me, everything that Stravinsky wrote is interesting, and he wrote maybe half as much as Hindemith actually wrote.

BD:   Let’s come back to you. Is the music of Kenton Coe interesting?

Coe: It’s fun for me, and I hope other people think so. I don’t know how I will be remembered, and I don’t know how to answer this question. I’ve been accused of being too easy, and the piece that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is going to play is very rambunctious. It’s very lively and it’s sort of one tune, but it’s very easy on the ear. I don’t know how the Chicago audience will respond, but everybody else loves it. It’s a sort of virtuoso piece. It’s very difficult... but certainly not for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra!

BD:   If the commission had come from the Chicago Symphony, would you have written it any differently?

Coe: No, not if it had been posed in the terms that it was. It was meant to be a celebratory piece. It was written for the Baton Rouge’s fortieth anniversary, and they specifically wanted a joyous piece. The terms that were given to me were something joyous and fun, and sort of loud and fast, and difficult for them to play. It was to show off the orchestra as far as being virtuoso writing for the players. So it is very flamboyant and, it has a big tune. I do like that. I feel that there is too much music written where people indulge themselves in the writing. They take it so seriously that you cannot afford to have fun with it. You should have fun with it. In a way, art in general is so important that one shouldn’t fool around with it, but who shouldn’t make pretense about painting? I don’t have the energy level to keep up with the kind of PR stuff that’s necessary.

* * * * *

BD: Let me ask the big question...

Coe: Please do, yes!

BD: What is the purpose of music?
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Coe: I’ve had sixty years of thinking about this more or less. I think it is to communicate, I really do. It is basically a way of communication between human beings, and also it’s a reflection of what is good in man. I wouldn’t say I was very pretentious, but that’s what art really is. It’s a distillation of everything that is physically and spiritually good about people. It is what civilization is all about. One could get very deep in this, and I don’t know how to curb my definitions, but music is very important. It’s so important that it ought to be taken as something necessary. I don’t think it’s something to be fooled around with and made jokes of, as I think a lot of composers do. I have terrible feelings about the great gap between the audience and the professional musician nowadays. It’s very sad, and I don’t think it was intended to be so. It’s despairing that people don’t play more contemporary music, but the reason audiences are shy of trying contemporary things is because they’re not used to it. Something happened at the beginning of the twentieth century where people got stuck. Orchestras and opera companies got stuck doing nineteenth century works, and that’s a shame. I don’t know how to explain it, because there is an obvious side of music production that happened at the beginning of the twentieth century which became very, very cut off from what audiences obviously wanted to hear, or what they were ready to hear. There is a distinction between early and late Schoenberg, as an example. Now we’re approaching the twenty-first century, and I don’t think it has become any more appealing, and I find that sad. It was a mistake to shift the attitude towards music into something which is calculated. That is not the way it should be approached. One of the things Boulanger said was never to write anything that you haven’t heard in your head! She was very much against that school of music that said you could program it, and you could sit down and figure out a plan, and write your music according to this plan. That is all cerebral, and that is a mistake. Music is something which is meant to be heard. It’s not something that’s meant to be calculated like a puzzle. As intriguing as it might seem to be, I still defy anybody to say they can hear the calculations of the twelve-tone system. You can’t hear the melody. You can’t hear a series being played backwards. You can hear it if it goes up and down, but you don’t really hear those intervals. You don’t appreciate the calculation that’s involved.

BD:   Then where is the balance between the inspiration and the technique that you need?

Coe: To me it’s exactly like wanting to be an architect. You’re trying to build a building, but you need other people to build it. You do the idea, and are going to give the ground work. You will put the thing on paper, and you will try to fulfill the needs of what the commissioners want and what they need. What is the purpose of this building? Is it going to be a cathedral or is it going to be a skyscraper? You’re beginning with the premise, and then you have to know how to make the measurements. You have to know what will balance. You will have to know what weight the walls will support. These are things you learn, and you learn the same things in music. You learn what resolves. You learn what weight can be borne by any particular chord progression, and the inspiration of whether it has a personal statement. Whether it’s sweeping and lyric, it’s exactly the same with an architect. When I.M. Pei is asked to build a building, it stands up, and the roof stays on, and it serves the purpose for which it was intended. But it also has an inspiration about it. Some composers do that, and some don’t.

BD:   Do you try to put that in your music?

Coe: I really do! I mean, I try! I wish somebody else thought that I did, and succeeded, but that’s what I really try to do.

BD:   [Being supportive] Obviously enough people think you’ve succeeded because they keep commissioning you.

Coe: Yes, that’s right, that’s true, but I’m in an odd position as a composer because I lead a reasonably reckless life. It’s one that I chose to do, and it’s one that I feel is what I’m suited to do. I’m fatalistic in believing that one does what one has to do in life.

BD:   You do some teaching on the side?

Coe: I do, and I enjoy it. I don’t teach on a permanent or regular basis. I do take some pupils who want to be coached. I feel that’s where I can really help them. I’m not any good at the fundamentals. [Laughs] I don’t have the patience to do it.

BD:   Then you make most of your living from the commissions?

Coe: Oh yes, I do, albeit a modest existence. But I consider myself very lucky. I know how difficult it is to do that, and I would never have been able to do that had I not had this experience of living in New York, and living in Paris, and falling into certain things. The piece I’ve just have finished and have mailed off to London was a commission as part of the Purcell Tercentenary. It’s a very weird thing because it came last fall through a contact that I made twenty-five years ago. I’ve never done anything like this before, but they asked me to do something for big orchestra on Purcell’s music. It’s one of the few times I’ve ever been somewhat reluctant, but the money was so interesting, and it was a challenge. It was also a very nice circumstance, and it’s London with all expenses taken care of. I love London. I just started trying to put together a little suite of Purcell’s music, and then I got bogged down working on the concept of the decoration of that music, which I had never really studied. I love Purcell. I have such a respect for this man. It’s absolutely a passion for Purcell’s music which I always had even as a child, but I never really performed it. I’m not a performer, but when I got into that, I started working with a harpsichordist friend of mine. She is a great expert in that field, and was really trying to help me understand how the performer did these turns, and how important a very simple-looking phrase is to the structure of the music. Then I began to read more about it, and I came across a wonderful Purcell quote. During a rehearsal, a friend of his said that the singer was not doing what he wrote as far as the decorations went. Purcell said, “Let him do it as he wants, because he’ll do it better than you or I can teach him.” [Both laugh] That’s very interesting, because it gives an approach to music. After working at it, it suddenly dawned on me that when using a big orchestra, you have to write out these decorations.

BD:   Is that still true, 300 hundred years later?

Coe: Yes, but what is the equivalent today? Isn’t it odd that 300 years later the concept that the performer was expected to add something to make the music work in performing it has, little by little faded out? My theory is it’s because the performer got further and further away from the composer, so the composer had to write out all these details. He had to take nothing for granted. He had to write it all out because he couldn’t be there to say exactly how to do it. Every time he performed, Rachmaninoff played each piece quite differently.

BD:   Is there any connection for someone like Joan La Barbara, who will create a piece bringing the performer and the composer together?

Coe: That’s an interesting idea, and that is the big field in contemporary music, even though one doesn’t often think about it if you’re talking about great symphony orchestras.

BD:   Would it be more common in jazz improvisation?

Coe: Exactly! So this idea struck me like an absolute lightning bolt. Isn’t it weird that the only area of music which is played and it is not acceptable in the snobbish circles, is the idea that the performer in that field is expected to add a decoration, or an element of personality? This would be just something to give a little bit of structure to it. So that’s what we are going to try to do. [Bruce laughs]

BD:   Good luck. I hope it comes off well.

Coe: [Laughs] I do too! I’m going on November 1st, and the concert is on the 23rd, so we have some time. When I got this idea, I called the harpsichordist, who is a great friend, and she said it was a fantastic idea. It really has great possibilities. One thing was that I didn’t want this to distort the music of Purcell. I really didn’t want to take it completely out of shape. I wanted to see if we could do a piece where you have this contrast of a symphony orchestra doing its decorations, and a jazz trio doing its decorations, to see if we could sort of make it work together, and that’s what we’re going to do. After talking to her, I got my nerve, because the people I had been dealing with in London were extremely old fashioned. I wrote to them and gave them all these academic reasons, and asked what they thought. The next morning I got a fax saying they loved my daft idea! [Laughs] They went for it, and they’ve been very enthusiastic. Everybody has been enthusiastic. I’m the only one who has cold-feet at this point, partly because the trio has asked me what I want! [Both laugh]

BD:   You’re worried because you don’t have control over it?

Coe: Exactly. I confess I really don’t, and it makes me very nervous to see what they will come up with. I’m very confident about the orchestra part because I’ve done a pretty steady job on that. I even had fun the other day. It was the first time I’d ever run a score off on a computer, and played it through a program which reproduces an orchestral sound. It reads the whole score. I couldn’t believe it.

BD:   Did it sound reasonable?

Coe: I was very pleased. It sounded very good. If the addition of the jazz trio will not distort that, it’s got great possibilities. It’ll be a bomb, or it’ll be a blast, one way or the other.

* * * * *

BD: Let’s talk a little bit about your operas. Tell me the joys and sorrows of writing for the human voice.

Coe: [A bit shocked] Oh, my word! You have to be totally nuts to write an opera these days. It’s such a huge undertaking, not just for the financial risks. You might as well write six symphonies and hope to get them performed, rather than try to get one opera staged. Just the cost of rehearsing it is so prohibitive. It puts a composer in a terrible position because people don’t want to risk trying new approaches to doing an opera. It’s obvious to me now that if you’re going to do an opera, you have to use a small orchestra. You’ll also have to incorporate electronic instruments. Nobody can afford to have a huge symphony orchestra accompaniment for an opera anymore. It’s just financially impossible. Nobody wants to take the risk to do it.
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BD:   You wouldn’t want to do it in a house that also presents works of Wagner or Richard Strauss with their huge orchestra?

Coe: It’s a whole different ball game. You can’t do it if the house is too big. That’s the dilemma you find yourself in. I wrote my first opera absolutely as a calculated thing. I had just left France, and was in New York. I’d taken a job as a record producer with EMI/Angel Records, and that’s what I had expected to do. My degree in college was in musicology, so I was preparing myself for this kind of a job.

BD:   So, you produced other people’s music?

Coe: I produced other people’s music, and wrote liner notes, and helped run recording sessions. I worked for EMI for a year, and then I worked for Vox in New York for about three years. I also produced an album for a crazy company in New Orleans that asked me to come in, and then I worked for MGM Records for about six months.

BD:   Are there some recordings of your music?

Coe: There’s nothing available right now on CD. There’s one old album of songs, and it’s still available on LP oddly enough. It’s a set called London Songs for mezzo soprano and piano. [This is shown at left. Note that the more recent CD at the top-right of this webpage has the same performers, but different songs.]

BD:   On what label?

Coe: It’s called Owl, from Denver. It features a very, very good singer named Sharon Mabry. She is from Tennessee.

BD:   It’s a record just of your songs?

Coe: No, there are also works by Thomas Pasatieri. and George Rochberg. They’re all wonderful songs, wonderful pieces. It’s an interesting combination. I also have a CD which is coming out this spring that was just recorded. It’s my Fantasy for Organ, which was recorded in New York by Stephen Hamilton, who’s an organist at Holy Trinity. It’s on a collection of historic New York organs. [This is shown above-right.] He commissioned this piece from me a long time ago, and he plays it quite a bit. It’s a showy fifteen-minute bombastic organ piece. I’m very pleased about that.

BD:   Coming back to opera, why should anybody write an opera today?

Coe: The only reason a young person should write one is because he hopes somebody will do it. He or she should have the capability of getting it done. There are universities and wonderful groups like that who are capable of doing operas, but the idea of trying to write an opera for the Metropolitan is just sad. I shouldn’t get off on that, but it’s bound for disaster musically-speaking, or aesthetically-speaking, because you’re writing for a huge space. You’re writing for a gigantic cavernous arena that may be very effective, and may have very beautiful things in it, but it’s aesthetically wrong.

BD:   [With a bit of trepidation] Are you optimistic about the future of operatic composition?

Coe: Oh, yes, because somebody will come along and change the whole face of it! It’s very important that one takes into consideration the practicalities of music. That’s the Hindemith influence coming out of me, but I think it’s true. One should think in terms of whether you’re losing money every time you perform. Even if it’s sold-out at $100 a seat, if you’re losing money in a production on that scale, somehow it’s eventually going to die out. People are going to run out of money eventually, so somebody’s going to have to come along and find the way. I’m an admirer of John Adams, even though I don’t care for what he’s done aesthetically. I think Nixon in China is entirely too long, but I like the idea of setting a contemporary subject. That does appeal to me, and I like the way he’s used a very modest orchestra with the synthesizers blending in. That makes a very good way to approach it.

BD:   Tennessee is called The Volunteer State. Have you ever thought of writing The Volunteers?

Coe: I have written a big opera about Rachel and Andrew Jackson. The opera is called Rachel. I wish somebody else would do it. They did in 1989, and that was a saga. It was a commission from the state, and took fifteen years and a lawsuit to get it done. The Knoxville Opera did it in Knoxville and Nashville, and they really did a wonderful job. It was essentially aimed to be a popular work. When it was done on a reasonably big scale, it got out of hand. The initial concept was that it was going to be a very tight little roadshow that would be put on the back of a truck. I loved that idea, and I’d still like to write something like that. But it did get blown out of the water because it got involved in the creation of the big Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville, which is a huge complex of three houses. The big opera house is called The Jackson Opera House, and they got involved. So our scale grew, and grew, and grew, and that’s what threw a great monkey wrench into the progress of the work. But it was eventually done, and it was extremely successful. It was sold out, and they made money on it actually!

BD:   [At this point we stopped briefly to take care of some technical details.] May I ask your birth date?

Coe: Yes, November 12, 1930. I’m going to be going on Medicare in a month. [Both laugh]

BD:   Are you pleased with where you are at the retirement age?

Coe: Sure, I’m now happy! Of course, the wonderful thing is who would retire? I don’t believe in retirement.

BD:   Composers never retire!

Coe: No, just like conductors! I’m almost ashamed that I am so contented with my life. It’s bad to be that contented. I like my little house and I love my work. I love working in my garden, and that appeals to me very much. I have a tendency to be rather smug in my little cocoon there, and that’s not good. I should be a little bit more stimulated. Maybe this Purcell piece is going to shock me out. I have a couple of big schemes that need finishing. They’re projects that I had started, and I’ve got to get back to them. They are big jobs that I kind of dread at this moment because it’s two more operas. It could be fun... One is The While Devil of John Webster. It an intriguing concept, and very difficult to end. I’ve written most of it, but I haven’t got the end of it yet. [Laughs] It’s so complex... I was actually going to do The Duchess of Malfi [also written by John Webster], and then I ran into Richard Rodney Bennett. This was years ago when I was in London for a year between Paris and New York. I’m a great admirer of Bennett for everything he does, and I met him through friends. I mentioned to him that I was going to something absolutely opposite of what I’d done with South, which was done at the Paris Opera, and wanted to do something really ancient like The Duchess of Malfi. Bennett said, “No! You can’t do The Duchess of Malfi because I’m going to do it! You can do The White Devil.” That scared me because he is and was more successful than I am, and I was not going to compete with him.

BD:   [Noting the time] Thank you for coming to Chicago. It’s been lots of fun chatting.

Coe: Thank you. Very happy to meet you!

In addition to the concert works, Coe wrote music for films and television.
The box below shows posters for his five movies, and two TV productions.
The movies date from 1968, 1970, 1984, 1987, and 1992.
The TV items are from 1998 (a series of three feature-length films),
and 2009 (a four-episode mini-series).

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on September 28, 1995. This transcription was made in 2024, and posted on this website at that time. My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here. To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago. You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.