David Ward-Steinman Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Composer David Ward - Steinman

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

David Ward-Steinman (November 6, 1936 – April 14, 2015) was an American composer and professor. He was the author of Toward a Comparative Structural Theory of the Arts, and co-authored Comparative Anthology of Musical Forms.

Ward-Steinman studied at Florida State University and the University of Illinois, where he received the Kinley Memorial Fellowship for foreign study. After receiving his doctorate, he was a fellow at Princeton University from 1970. His teachers included John Boda, Burrill Phillips, Darius Milhaud (at Aspen, Colorado), Milton Babbitt (at Tanglewood) and Nadia Boulanger. He studied piano under Edward Kilenyi, and in 1995 attended a course at IRCAM. He was Composer-in-Residence and Professor of Music at San Diego State, becoming Distinguished Professor of Music Emeritus there, and he was also an adjunct Professor of Music at Indiana University.

From 1970 to 1972, Ward-Steinman was the Ford Foundation composer-in-residence for the Tampa Bay area of Florida and he spent 1989–90 in Australia under a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award, with residencies at the Victorian Centre for the Arts and La Trobe University in Melbourne.

Ward-Steinman received number of commissions, most notably from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

== Names which are links in this box and below refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website. BD

In April of 1987, David Ward-Steinman was in Chicago for a conference of the American Society of University Composers being held at Northwestern, and he graciously agreed to meet with me in my studio for a conversation. While having coffee together, his ideas flowed freely. We discussed many topics of mutual interest, and his knowledge and humor showed throughout.

Portions of the chat were aired at various times on both WNIB and WNUR, and now [at the end of 2024] I am pleased to present the entire interview.

Bruce Duffie:   You are both a composer and a teacher. How do you balance your life between those two activities?

David Ward-Steinman: I try to keep at least one day a week free during the school year for composing, and I keep the summers free unless I have a composer-in-residence appointment somewhere. But I normally don’t teach in the summer. Most of my composing gets done on the weekends, or whenever I can sneak it in or squeeze it in. It depends on what the teaching load is in a given semester.

BD:   Do you feel that you get enough time for composing by limiting it to one day a week, and weekends, and a little here and there?

DW-S: Oh, never! [Laughs] There is never enough time. Actually, I do more than just the one day a week. I will try to get in an hour or two on the other days, in the morning, or the evening, or at the end of the day. But I try to block one day out where my best energies go to the composing.

BD:   On the days when you are teaching, you give your best energies to the class?

DW-S: I have to, yes, but I will save some time. I can do orchestration, or copy work on those other days, but it depends on the schedule. I don’t have to wait for inspiration. I can compose whenever I’ve got a spare minute or five. There’s always something to do.

BD:   Do you always have something going on in your head?

DW-S: Yes, usually, and sometimes two or three pieces are underway at once.

BD:   Really??? How do you keep them straight?

DW-S: It’s very simple... I work on one until I get blocked and bogged down, and then I go to another one. Then when that happens again, I can go back to the first one. By that time the blockage has usually worked itself out, so it’s actually more efficient in the long run, to keep at least two pieces going at the same time.

BD:   Do you find that your creative energies are stimulated by what you see coming out of your students?

DW-S: Not so much. They’re stimulated more by the kinds of questions they ask, and the challenges they present to me. With most of my students, it’s a matter of basic craft and technique that they need to learn, and they’re generally not at the cutting edge, or avant-garde stylistically yet. So what I learn from them is a spontaneity in asking questions that otherwise might be naïve, and having to answer questions that I had taken for granted or not considered before. It forces me to rationalize what I’m doing, and what I think about certain other composers. But I don’t try to teach any style or system. I try to teach contextually from the standpoint of the potential that the students themselves seem to demonstrate. Whatever their music implies, I try to help them exhaust the potential inherent in the materials they working with, so that they can then make the best choices. I teach them that composing is a matter of choosing and editing, and they should generate a lot of material initially so that they have more choices to make. I’m fond of citing Brahms. If he had not consigned much of his work for his waste basket, the world would never have heard of him.

BD:   Do you do the same thing, generating a lot of material, and choosing from it?
dw-s

DW-S: Yes I do. I don’t necessarily begin a piece at the beginning and work straight through it all. Anytime I have a musical idea, I will jot it down or make descriptive notes, and I try to let the piece grow and find its own form in its own direction. I’m reminded of the French journalist who was very puzzled about the lack of logical consistency. He asked the famous director Jean-Luc Godard if he didn’t think a film should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the answer was, “Yes, but not necessarily in that order!”

BD: Are you ever surprised where your pieces take you?

DW-S: Sometimes yes, and I try to cultivate that aura of surprise. But it should be the kind of surprise that feels good, and that is convincing. Ultimately, I don’t want my music to be so predictable that anybody can anticipate everything, and then be bored by it. Nor do I want it to be so different and surprising that it is frustrating. I try to walk the line somewhere between, but what I’m seeking is a kind of controlled improvisation. I want the freshness and the spontaneity of improvisation, with the corrections of studio revisions that become possible.

* * * * *

BD:   For whom do you write?

DW-S: I write for myself and ‘the mythical other’, meaning it is for anyone who will understand and meet me half-way. But the first person I have to please is myself, and the actual composing is very rewarding, more so actually than the latter stages of performance, publication, and even recording. Those are nice, but the real thrill of discovery happens in the composing process itself. That’s when the conception is freshest, purest, and at its most unsullied. Everything from then on represents some sort of a compromise. [Both laugh] I don’t write antagonistically to an audience. I don’t mean to imply that I seek an audience consciously, because audiences are too fickle. There are too many different audiences and different kinds of music, and their background is so eclectic. I can flatter the audience by writing the best music I’m capable of, and I hope that the music will find an appropriate audience.

BD:   Does it always find that appropriate audience?

DW-S: Not always, no! [Laughs] Some of my music is more experimental, or at the cutting edge. Some of these pieces have their own specific time. For example, there are pieces that I would do at composers’ forums that I wouldn’t necessarily consider for a community concert audience. I often do multi-media concerts on college campuses. I’ve performed over fifty both here and abroad. They involve video tape, film, multiple slide projectors, prepared piano, improvisational ideas, and all sorts of things. The college audiences often are very receptive, but I try to program my concerts so at least somebody will get something out of a piece, or something on the program. One thing that I often put in concert programs is an improvisation on four, five, or six notes selected by the audience. I will ask them to vote for the note of their choice, one per cluster, and then make a piece out of it on the spot. This is technically very easy for me to do. It’s the easiest part of the program, and it’s always the part that gets the most positive audience response. It seems to be most impressive. I consider it little more than an old parlor trick, but I enjoy doing it!

BD:   It’s the only time that the audience can actually see the composer working, because while you’re sitting there playing, they can observe the wheels turning in your mind.

DW-S: Right!

BD:   But you say it’s little more than a parlor trick?

DW-S: [With a smile] Well, in a sense, but I’ve got it kind of routinized, although the notes that I’m given often throw me a curve. Sometimes I’ll get a whole-tone scale, which is very limiting, and then the improvisation comes up to be very French. Or sometimes I’ll get a pure tertian chord, and it’ll come out sounding very Copland-ish, or Americana style.

BD:   How many notes do you permit?

DW-S: Five is comfortable. I prefer five. More than that is too many to keep track of. I also play inside the piano. I’ll duly mark the dampers as I get the notes, and then pluck or play with mallets and brushes.

BD:   You’re really adding lots more colors to your palette!

DW-S: Oh, absolutely! In fact, my favorite medium is what I call the ‘fortified piano’. I use that term to distinguish it from the ‘prepared piano’ of John Cage, or the piano interior work of George Crumb. With what I call the ‘fortified piano’, I have three families of colors available. The first is the ordinary unprepared keyboard. Second is a group of notes that would be prepared, à la John Cage, by sticking various implements — nuts, bolts, wedges, and so forth — into the strings and between them. The third quality of sound comes from playing directly on the strings with fingers, finger nails, a variety of mallets, brushes, and so forth, and putting things on top of the strings like claves to make an instant harpsichord. Each piece is designed differently, with different preparations and so forth. I call the composite, the fortified piano, vitamin C. I refer to myself as the fortified pianist! [Both laugh]

BD:   Have you ever talked to piano builders, and if so, are they happy that all of this is going on inside their instruments?

DW-S: I’ve not talked to piano makers, but I have a Steinway grand at home that I try these things on, and I’m very careful about it, making sure that nothing would ever damage the instrument. I certainly wouldn’t want to do that. I always bring along a piano tuner’s kit to reassure anyone who is apprehensive backstage, but I’ve never needed it yet except to touch-up strings before I start playing.
dw-s

BD:   But you would have needed to do that anyway.

DW-S: Exactly! But as to the preparations, I am not going to damage the instrument. I’m very careful about the kinds of things that I use.

BD:   Are you your own piano technician for tuning and regulation?

DW-S: When I need to be, yes. There’s a very good book by Richard Bunger called The Well-Prepared Piano, which came out after I started doing this. It’s the most systematic survey I know of prepared piano literature. It has methods of preparing the piano that are safe, and those that might damage the instrument. When it came out, I was happy to see that all mine were among the safe category! I also liked Lou Harrison’s observation that any sound which does not harm the instrument is legitimate. Then, extending that perhaps even further, any sound is potentially musical, even in the context of how it is used and how it is placed.

BD:   Did you get involved in environmental compositions in the early 1970s?

DW-S: I made musique concrète pieces, and tape collages using natural sounds and permuted sounds. Sometimes I will still do that using classical techniques of early electronic music studio tape manipulation. I collect sounds. I also collect exotic non-western instruments, and when I find something which is particularly resonant — like wind chimes — I will add them to my collection. I have pieces in which I have eventually used all of these things. For example, the piece that we just finished recording last week, is a revival of the ballet that I wrote for the opening of the San Diego Theater in 1965. It was commissioned by the then San Diego Ballet Company — which is now extinct — and it was the only new piece commissioned from the opening of the theater. It’s called Western Orpheus, and it was a westernized version of the Orpheus legend [recording of the Concert Suite from the Ballet is shown at right]. It was scored for full orchestra with violin and piano solos, and it was originally performed by the San Diego Symphony Orchestra. I played the piano solos. It’s been revived by the successor to the San Diego Ballet Company called California Ballet Company. It has a wider venue and audience. They’re opening it next weekend for five performances in San Diego and then in Mexico. They subsided a professional recording with full orchestra, which is quite exciting to work with. As to some of the sound sources, one of the events in the ballet is when Apollo comes down from Olympus and presents Orpheus with supposedly the original lyre. In our version it’s a very stylized transmogrified kind of guitar, and with this magic guitar, Orpheus does battle against the forces of evil that have captured Eurydice. Every time he strums the guitar it acts like a pressure wave that sends the baddies cowering. So, I wanted a special kind of sound for this, and I use a combination of glissandos on a Chinese zheng (a zither), or an old turn-of-the-century ukelin (a folk instrument with dozens of strings in different courses). Then I am strumming on strings of the piano, sometimes with fingernails like a harp. So you get a conglomerate sound of randomly tuned instruments, which is very unlike anything you might expect from a standard guitar or lyre, or anything else. These are combined in various ways with the piano strings, and the harp. I’ve had that ukelin sitting around for probably ten years. My wife found it in a flea market somewhere, and picked it up. It was hanging on the wall, and when we got around to doing the recording, I decided that it was just the color I wanted to blend in with the Chinese zheng.

BD:   So, it wasn’t something that you just wanted to use, but it was the right sound?

DW-S: It was the right sound for that. I didn’t use it in the original ballet. I used just the Chinese zither and the piano strings.

BD:   Then this is a revision?

DW-S: Oh yes, a modest revision. There are also some other things that happened... I had to write some new music to extend the ballet, because they wanted some extra music for scene changes. I was able to do this in some of the sections, although it was rather interesting as a problem to go back to a style which was twenty-two years old and try to write music which would fit. One of the things in the ballet is a violin solo that personifies Apollo. Originally this was done by a solo violinist off stage, who was amplified with speakers. I wanted him physically separate from the orchestra. In this case, since we were doing the recording in a studio, we had to take advantage of modern electronic technology. So we recorded the solo violin in heavy reverb, and were able to position him so that the violin image moves around back and forth across the stage like a hovering spirit, whereas the orchestra is the Earth-bound component. The music is composed so that the violin is rather free and improvisatory, and the orchestra is very distant. So in this case, the orchestra symbolizes the spirit of Apollo, and the solo piano is the earth-bound Orpheus and Eurydice. One other aspect is that at one point in the ballet score, for the wedding celebration between Orpheus and Euridice I had imagined an improvised piano solo. I also have a jazz background, which is why I like to do improvisations. The rhythmic profile from jazz is a strong component in my concert music. At any rate, I had the notion that it might be interesting to have a joint improvisation between the leading dancers and the piano with me in the pit. I discussed it with the choreographer, and he was interested. He said, “Let’s try it and see what will happen.” I had the notion of a free-for-all, a cadenza with a lot of give and take that could go on indefinitely in the middle, just like a concerto soloist’s cadenza. The choreographer asked me for a sample improvisation that he could study, so I ripped off something on the piano, and he taped it, and started to work with it. A few weeks later I asked him how it was going to work out, and when we were going to start practicing it. By this time, the original choreographer had gotten cold feet and panicked. He said, “We want to use your solo exactly as it is. It’s perfect! We like it this way, and I’ve already set it,” at which point I had to borrow the tape from him and transcribe my own solo! I had to take it down in dictation so I could play it again, and I’ve been stuck with it ever since!

BD:   I hope it was something you were satisfied with. [Much laughter]

DW-S: I guess so! You’ll hear it right in the middle. It runs for about a minute, just a piano solo between orchestral accompanied sections.

* * * * *

BD: Are you a better performer because you’re also a composer?

DW-S: I think the two go hand-in-hand symbiotically. It works both ways. I think I am also a better composer because I have a facile keyboard technique. I was classically trained as a pianist.

BD:   That was the other side of my question, of course.

DW-S: Yes, it certainly helps. I’ve played other instruments too. I actually played bass for one season in the San Deigo Symphony Orchestra. I started out as a clarinetist and a saxophonist, but you can’t do everything. So now I concentrate on the piano. But you asked how composing affected performing. When I perform, I see things from a composer’s point of view, and I analyze whatever I’m playing for things that interest me as a composer, or that I think I would have been interested in. I don’t want to be pretentious about this, but when I’m playing I sometimes can bring a different perspective to a piece.

BD:   Do you do this when you are playing one of your own pieces?

DW-S: Yes, and other pieces too. I specialize in contemporary pieces. When I perform as a pianist, I do chamber works, but I’m not really interested in a solo career as a classical pianist. Life is too short.

BD:   Do you feel that you are part of a lineage of composers?

DW-S: I think so, even when I’m rebelling against the lineage consciously. The fact that I would try to rebel implies there is something to rebel against. Sometimes I accept it gracefully, and other times not so. Essentially our time is like no other in musical history. We’ve used up materials and styles at so rapid a rate that would have been unheard of in past ages. If you look back on the major style periods, such as the Renaissance and Baroque, we’re looking at a century-and-a-half segment of maybe 150 years. Then the styles telescope to about 75 years with the Classic and Romantic periods, with some overlap and sub-movements, and so forth. But when you get to the twentieth-century, the time is telescoping even more, to maybe a quarter of a century or less for Neo-Classicism. The 1960s, for example, was apparently the only decade for real exploration of indeterminacy and chance music. We even had a West Coast journal that specialized in this music. It was called Source: Music of the Avant-Garde [published from 1967-73 by teachers and students at the University of California, Davis], which was the West Coast counterpart to the East Coast Perspectives of New Music, which is a Columbia-Princeton academic journal [established in 1962 by Arthur Berger and Benjamin Boretz, and still going]. But it appears that the ’60s was the big decade for experimentation. Now some of the aspects of indeterminacy or open-form are being integrated much more subtly and more integrally into music. Minimalism has been on the scene for just a few years, and its roots can go back a decade or so to Terry Riley and others.

BD:   Are we coming to the end of Minimalism??? [Remember, this conversation was held in 1987!]

DW-S: It’s certainly evolving in various ways, and we really should just see it between two kinds of Minimalism. There’s the nominal form as manifested in the works of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley, and then there are true minimalists, the one-note composers like Lemont Young, Alvin Lucier, and Morton Feldman, who use just very isolated sounds. They have the sonic equivalent of the all-black painting, perhaps, or Tony Smith’s straightforward metal tube that he ordered from the foundry and had delivered to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He just phoned in the specifications! [Much laughter]

BD:   Then who gets the credit for that?

DW-S: I wonder! [More laughter] That’s also some of spin-off from John Cage’s activity to remove the composer as a controlling element from the composition. He wants to just let sounds happen. He sets up frameworks where they can happen, but he does not believe in controlling anything other than setting up the mechanism for letting things go.

BD:   How much control do you want to exercise over your music?

DW-S: I believe in controlling the macro form, the overall shape, the total limits, and the range of possibilities, but I like to leave some aspects of the micro form up to the performer. In a sense, this is a residue from the ’60s and indeterminacy. I never trusted my performers enough to give them complete control over the macro shape of a piece as, for example, Barney Childs does in some of his pieces. But I like the spontaneity and the freshness I can get by relinquishing some aspects of choice to them. I like to think that what I’m doing in many pieces is analogous to the structure of the Alexander Calder mobiles, which are free to move in certain dimensions that are limited by the engineering technique of the piece. In other words, Calder has control of the maximum range of possible movements, but he does not control the individual aspect which may vary with the air currents, people moving past, and so forth. That is open to change and to transformation, so in that sense the micro form, if you will, or the instantaneous form is unpredictable and variable, but the macro form, the total range of possibilities, is shaped by Calder, and is limited by the construction of each individual mobile. That is what I like to do in much of my music.

BD:   Are you pleased with the performances that you hear of your music?

DW-S: Usually I am, when I get good performers to play it. Often I am very fortunate in that respect now. In fact, I like to tailor-make pieces for specific performers whenever I’m commissioned to do so, or have the opportunity. But I try to structure my pieces so that if they follow my instructions when they do have choices, they cannot harm the piece. Indeed, they can bring qualities of freshness to it that will help keep it alive.

BD:   When you tailor works to certain performers, is this going to limit them, and keep them out of the range of other performers?

DW-S: It’s an interesting question. One of the first pieces I did for fortified piano in combination with another instrument was a piece for bassoon and fortified piano called Childs Play — Childs without an apostrophe because it was commissioned by Barney Childs as a kind of triple pun, not only on his name but on the fact that far from being child’s play, the piece is for virtuosos on both bassoon and piano. It was written back in the late 1960s, and there are multiphonics on the bassoon. [Score page and recording details are shown at the bottom of this webpage.] It was tailor-made for Les Weil, who was one for the first to develop fingerings for multiphonics. I got a catalogue of his sounds to work with, and there were things I wanted to do on the piano. I was surprised when one of my publishers decided to publish the piece a few years later, as I didn’t think he could possibly sell more than two or three copies. To my great surprise — and no doubt his! — the piece has sold several hundred copies. Perhaps purchasers have been somewhat misled by the title, but I’m told by bassoonists that it’s an underground challenge, and it crops up at the Double Reed Society conventions. I know of at least eight or nine different bassoonists who have played it. Heaven knows how many of those who have purchased copies have been able to play it, but it’s surprised me that it has a much wider currency than I originally anticipated for it. It’s nice to see it happen!
dw-s

BD: Have other people taken up things that you have written for other specific instances?

DW-S: Yes. I can’t think of any piece I’ve written for a single performer that has not been played by other performers or other groups.

* * * * *

BD:   Aside from the improvisatory, do performers ever find things in your music that you didn’t know where there?

DW-S: Sometimes they do, and sometimes analysts or theorists do. When I first studied with Milton Babbit at Tanglewood, I brought him a piano sonata that I had written years before. I had done the work with Darius Milhaud and with Nadia Boulanger, so this was my introductory piece to Babbit. I played the sonata for him, and when he started going through it, he picked up relationships and aspects of symmetry between different sections that I had not been consciously aware of. I certainly could not deny that they were there. They were part of the intuitive level of composing, which seemed to prove the axiom that anything once demonstrated can be heard, and that you don’t really need the artist’s permission to do an analysis. You don’t need to ask him if he had something specific in mind. Part of the fallacy in aesthetics is the counter to that, which is that everything you need to know about a piece should be implicit in the piece itself, and that you, the artist, shouldn’t have to rely on pleading with the composer if this is what he had in mind when he wrote it. So, to that extent, Babbit and others have found deep aspects of detail and structure in works of mine that I was not consciously aware of, but I cannot deny them since they were obviously there. With regards to performers, when I’m not around to coach them, or when pieces have been mailed to them, or I’ve gotten tapes back from them, I find they often come up with very different ideas as to tempo and phrasing, some of which affect my own view of the piece. I will sometimes like these versions better than what I intended originally, so I’ll incorporate those changes the next time I play it or conduct it. I like to keep an open mind as to the final form of a piece. I like to be pleasantly surprised. As long as the performers have adequate technique and musicianship for the occasion, I will be rather flexible, and allow them freedom of interpretation, phrasing, and whatever they think is right for them.

BD:   Do you ever go back and make major revisions to a piece? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interviews with Ned Rorem, Phyllis Curtin, Donald Gramm, and Samuel Baron.]

DW-S: On the whole, no because I’d rather apply what I’ve learned in the old piece to the next piece I do. I like to work very hard on a piece while it’s under construction, and when I can’t imagine it any better, or cannot find anything else to do with it, that’s when I consider it finished. [Pauses briefly to ponder] There’s one exception to this that your question brings to mind. When I was an undergraduate at Florida State University many years ago, I was a French minor and I took a course in French poetry. To get out of writing a term paper, I proposed to the instructor that I make a musical setting of some of the poems that we’d been studying. The instructor accepted, and I set two of the poems for soprano and piano. I got a friendly soprano from the music department to sing them, and that was my term paper. I thought I had just brought off a great scam, and immediately filed the works away and forgot about them. You know, they were never performed after that. I didn’t think all that much of them till a few years ago I got a query from an editor who was putting together an anthology of French songs, and wanted to know if I knew of any contemporary settings of French Renaissance poetry that he might include. I wracked my brain and my library, and I couldn’t think of anything or find anything. So, I sent him those old French songs I had written way back in my student days, and of course they sounded like it! [Laughs] I said that these were the only things I’d written, but they were early works. They’re no longer representative of my style. I offered to write some new ones if he couldn’t find anything else. Well, practically by return mail, I not only got an enthusiastic letter, but there was an engraved setting of the first song! He wanted them because he loved the songs. At that point I felt I’d better take another look at them! So, I went back over the songs with a fine-toothed comb, and I found that I couldn’t do much about the style. To change the style, or to update it would really have destroyed whatever there was in the songs. But what I could do was improve the counterpoint and the voicing. I could take out some of the obvious sequences and phrases. There are many things I could do with them in terms of style that would improve them, and if he wants the songs, maybe they’ll be of some use buried in this anthology. I wouldn’t want them published separately as representative of anything that I do or have done as a mature composer. But he thought there was a pedagogical use for them, so I did go back and revise them. I didn’t actually add or subtract any measures, but I rewrote what I had to in order make the voice part and the piano accompaniment more interesting. I did things with harmonics that I didn’t know how to do then, and I cut out some of the more obvious and egregious symmetries, and sequences, and repetitions, but kept it all within the framework of that particular style. When I finished the pieces, I thought they were relatively passable. They were much more of what I would have written back then if I’d had the technique to do it. So, in this case, I was using my technique or my craft in retroactive hindsight to try to salvage these pieces, which fortunately seemed to be of some use. But that’s the single exception in my catalogue. I don’t like to do that. If I’ve abandoned a piece, then I’ve abandoned it for reasons that I think it’s beyond salvage. So I had better be careful next time when I send old scores off! [Both laugh]

BD:   I trust you don’t want to disown any of your early works if they get performed.

DW-S: I already have! I’ve weeded out the works that I consider not original enough, or interesting enough to perform, or works that I want to keep very special. For example, the wedding music that I wrote for my wife and me. I believe that a composer should provide music for practical occasions in life, and that no self-respecting composer will want to get married to Wagner or Mendelssohn. So I wrote wedding music for a woodwind quintet, soprano, and organ, and that’s a piece I’ve not circulated or allowed to be published. There are some early works that were published as teaching pieces, and some piano works which are improvisations on children’s songs, folk tunes, and that sort of thing, that are in a very accessible style. But on the whole, I certainly stay with the works that have been published. They have their life now for whatever it’s going to be.

BD:   Does it surprise you when a piece will get performed, or if you find out later that it’s been performed?

DW-S: Sometimes it does. Occasionally I get reports of pieces coming back that I’ve forgotten about, or have been out a long time, and sometimes I’m asked to do them myself. When I was a student in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, in 1958 or 1959, I wrote a symphony, which was kind of my graduation piece with her. I went on to graduate school at the University of Illinois, and that symphony won two national prizes — a BMI prize, and the Bearns Prize from Columbia University. I thought my career is launched! So, I invested heavily in scores which I sent around to major orchestras. Those scores never came back. The piece got one performance, a premiere by the San Diego Symphony shortly after I had moved there to begin teaching. That was it for twenty-two years. Then last summer I was invited to be composer-in-residence at the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina, and they wanted to do some music of mine. It was really a major retrospective, and the director, Henry Janiec, was interested in programming something with the Festival Orchestra. So I sent him tapes and scores of all sorts of things — including the symphony — and lo and behold, he picked the symphony, and asked me to conduct it! It was rather interesting to hear it after all these years of languishing on the shelf. I was surprised at how well it worked, and how much fun it was to hear it again, and also to conduct it.

BD:   Are you the ideal interpreter of your works?

DW-S: No, because my technique is not always adequate to the pieces that I write. For example, the first piano sonata was written for a pianist who was a friend of mine, who’d asked for it, and who specialized in repeated notes. He used to do all the big bravura pieces that called for repeated notes, like the Liszt Mephisto Waltz, or the Ravel Alborada del gracioso. That was something I really never mastered, so I wrote the piece for him, and he played it, but then I was stuck with playing the piece, and I had to learn how to do this. [Laughs] I’ve never been able to do repeated notes as cleanly and accurately as I should for that piece. In terms of conducting, I will conduct to save time if I’m asked to do so, or if the conductor doesn’t have time to prepare it properly, or if he thinks I can save him time. But there are many conductors around who have really a far better disciplined technique than I have. I know what I want, and I think I know how to get it, and I try not to embarrass myself or the orchestra when I’m conducting, but I would be perfectly delighted to work with a sympathetic conductor who has much more technique than I do. I remember once in my career when I was ordered out of a rehearsal by the conductor! [This was Irwin Hoffman.] This man was the most arrogant and difficult to work with that I’ve ever encountered. He was stuck with a commission for a work that he had not commissioned, but was forced to play and conduct. I showed up for the first rehearsal. I’m used to collaborating with conductors, and being on hand to help out by checking for errors in the parts, and other things like that. The first time out, there are a lot of these things. Well, somebody in the orchestra directed a question to me about a note or something academic, and I answered the question from my chair. The conductor blew a fuse! He became apoplectic, and ordered me out of the rehearsal. He said that my job was finished, and the score was now his. I was welcome to come back for the performance. He managed the orchestra, and all questions in the future were to be addressed to him, and not to the composer!
dw-s

BD:   Seem like a waste of your time.

DW-S: Indeed, it was!

BD:   I hope that only happened once in a lifetime.

DW-S: Yes! [Much laughter] The irony of this was that this piece that was foisted upon the conductor got rave reviews from all the critics in the papers. It was a big success, both critically and popularly, with the result that he was maneuvered into the position where he had to ask for another piece, to make another commission! [More laughter] I met Hoffman in Florida when I was the Ford Foundation composer-in-residence, and he was conducting Florida Gulf Coast Symphony. It was the first piece that the sponsoring committee had asked me to write for the orchestra. At the same time, this was Hoffman’s last season here in Chicago after Reiner had died. He had taken over nominally, and was given less and less to do. He was being criticized in the local press for not doing modern music or new music. His programs were very conservative, and some of these rave reviews from Florida appeared after one of his concerts in Chicago. So, his hand was forced, and he ordered a commission for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and that piece was performed at the end of the 1972 season. It was called Arcturus, and was for synthesizer and orchestra. I performed live on the synthesizer, and was probably the first live synthesizer soloist with the Chicago Symphony! [Also on the concert were Tod und Verklärung of Richard Strauss, the Piano Concerto #3 of Ned Rorem played by Jerome Lowenthal, and the Symphony #8 of Dvořák.]

BD:   Did Hoffman conduct?

DW-S: Yes, he did, and he did a fine job. I must give him credit for that. We had made our peace! [Both laugh]

BD:   I’ve often wondered about that... Is it better to have people who are enthusiastic about contemporary music, or to make converts to contemporary music?

DW-S: If you make a convert, you’ve got somebody on your side for the future. It’s a painful process at the time, but if you can convert somebody to want to do contemporary music and be interested in it, you may create a whole new audience and a whole new possibility of repertory performances. That’s also more important in the long run, rather than preaching to the converted.

BD:   How much contemporary music should be done on each program in a season, and does that vary by group?

DW-S: I think every program should have a contemporary piece on it, unless it is a major work that takes a whole program, like the Bach St. Matthew Passion, or a Haydn oratorio. Otherwise, I think the only true balance is to include a contemporary piece on every program. I like very much the program that the Chicago Symphony just did this past weekend (conducted by Leonard Slatkin). They opened with Joan Tower’s new work, Silver Ladders. Then, the Samuel Barber Violin Concerto (played by Nadia Salerno-Sonnenberg), and the Prokofiev Seventh Symphony. This gave us three works from the twentieth century, the oldest of which [the Barber] was composed in 1939. There was no work that was older than about fifty years, and we had a real spectrum there. We had a neo-romantic work, a neo-classic work, and a contemporary work within this period of the last half-century. It was a wonderful variety. That’s my ideal kind of program. [The following week, Slatkin did symphonies of Haydn and Vaughan Williams, plus a work by Donald Erb.] I don’t believe in the all-new-music programs so much. Festivals of new music tend to speak only to the converted and to other composers. They are useful as kind of tradesmen’s conventions for finding out what the other folk are doing. You can learn as much from a bad piece as a good one. Of course, you could learn what not to do, but unless they are carefully chosen, I don’t know that these programs of all new music are very useful for building new audiences. What generally happens, as at the conference going on right now of the American Society of University Composers, is typical. The works that are chosen tend to represent the stylistic biases of the people on the committee — whatever it is — and you get a certain sameness of approach if you listen to concert after concert. For example, I’ve heard no minimalist works. I’ve heard no chance or indeterminate works. I’ve heard only one electronic piece. Most of the pieces have been of post-serial mainstream atonal. I’ve heard no neo-romantic. The works that have been performed so far this weekend have tended to be rather limited in stylistic spectrum. This often happens, and the only way to avoid it is to get judges from different parts of the country each time, so you have a truly eclectic mix.

BD:   [Trying to be optimistic] But if you go to the conference every year, you’ll immerse yourself in one style this year, and another style next year, and so forth.

DW-S: That’s right... if you have the stamina for that! These conferences are scattered around the country geographically, and they tend to alternate between East coast and West coast, or Mid-west. There was one in Canada before this. So, it tends to be self-correcting.

* * * * *

BD: Let me ask the easy question. Where’s music going today?
dw-s

DW-S: Who knows? [Both laugh] It’s off in many directions simultaneously. I don’t think we’ll ever have a unified international style again. The audience is too fractured. I spoke earlier of how quickly we’ve used up stylistic material and ideas. Part of that is a result of a communications explosion that Marshall McLuhan described so graphically many years ago. He talked about one world of communication through satellite television. We know instantly, or almost instantly, what’s happening in any part of the world. We have access to a vast library and repertory of music. Some years ago, André Malraux introduced the concept of the Museum Without Walls. It was in his book The Voices of Silence, and he was referring to the art book as an idealized collection of works scattered around for many museums which you can never visit or see simultaneously all at once. He spoke of works that he learned that way in a mental imaginary museum, the Museum Without Walls. The same thing has happened to music. We’re hearing so many different musics from all parts of the world that are influencing contemporary composers. This includes not only serious concert music, but works of more popular veins as well. The Beatles were influenced by Ravi Shankar in the 1960s. A couple of cuts from the Sergeant Pepper album used sitar and tabla. Other rock groups like County Joe and the Fish, or John McLaughlan’s Shakti used Indian and Eastern influences which were mixed with jazz, and so forth. Harry Partch and Lou Harrison take their aesthetic now entirely from non-western sources. Even within the so-called mainstream western music, we have neo-classic and neo-romantic branches. We also have post-Webernian serialism, which seems to be more abundant, or at least appears to have transformed itself in ways that are very different from the original Klangfarbenmelodie [Sound color melody]. Plus, there is the Webern plink-plank-plunk school! Then there is an electronic revolution underway with the new instruments, the digital synthesizers and new sound sources. I’ve written serious pieces for at least three different kinds of synthesizers, including the one I used back in 1972 for the piece for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It was then state-of-the-art, but now it’s just an old English machine, a Putney VCS3, which I still have in the studio. I don’t perform with it live anymore. A few years ago I wrote a Concerto for Multiple Keyboard, Percussion and Chamber Orchestra, commissioned from a group in Phoenix (recording shown at right]. One of the four keyboards was a synthesizer, a Rapid Five, and another keyboard was a toy piano, a wonderful one I found north of New Orleans a few summers ago. I had to talk them into selling it! It has a very rich gamelan-like sound, and encompasses three octaves. So I wrote a real part for that into this piece.

BD:   With all of this coming at us, to paraphrase a TV commercial, what’s an audience to do???

DW-S: Set their expectation dials back to zero! That’s a phrase of Barney Childs, and I’m delighted to acknowledge that. That’s a good way of putting it. Don’t come to a new piece with expectations of what it ought to be. Let it speak to you. A piece should imply its own standards. It should show what it is doing, and how it is to be judged. That premise and aesthetic can be traced to Philostratus in about the third century! You don’t know what you’re going to hear, but any sound is potentially musical, and the more you decide ahead of time what kind of piece you want to hear, the more limiting and limited you are going to be. So, I just say to try to meet the piece half-way! Give the composer a chance! Give the piece a chance! Something in any piece ought to communicate at first hearing. Something that would intrigue you to want to hear more of the piece, more of that composer, or hear the work again. A piece that fails to communicate anything at all the first time is not a good piece for you. Maybe that piece is a failure from that point of view, but then you have to consider where each listener is coming from. If I handed you a volume of poetry by Li-Po in Chinese, and you didn’t read Chinese, you would not be capable of judging the quality of the poetry. It would have to be first translated for you. Once you knew Chinese, or had a translation at hand, then you’d be able to approach the poetry with some objectivity, and some real sense of participation. The same is true with new music. You have to have some experience in different sounds and different sound producing media, so that the sounds themselves are not necessarily shocking. The question is not how new or fresh the sound is, but how well it is integrated into the piece, and how well does it contribute to what is going on. Apropos of that, I remember reading about a French Abbé during my student year in Paris many years ago, who was well known as a wine-taster. His tongue was famous throughout all France, and he used to appear on French radio and television shows, and blind quizzes. He would be given unknown vintages, and he could tell you absolutely everything about the wine, the vintage, the chateau, the growth, who trod the grapes, and so forth! The unasked question was how could this poor provincial cleric afford to develop this discriminating taste in wines. One day in an interview, someone actually asked him that question right up front, and the answer was very revealing. The Abbé said that a taste for great wines is formed not by drinking a lot of them but by drinking a lot of vin ordinaire [table wine]. Then when a great wine comes along, you appreciate it. That can be extrapolated analogously to contemporary music. The more experience you have in it, the more you’ve heard, the more reliable your taste will be. You’re always safe in saying you don’t like this piece. It does nothing for you. But to say that it is a bad piece, and especially to say it’s a bad piece because of such-and-such technique, or to complain that a piano is not meant to be treated this way and therefore that’s a bad piece, puts you on very shaky ground philosophically and aesthetically. You’re free to question the end results, but not necessarily the means.

BD:   Are you optimistic about the future of all music, or of all ‘musics’?

DW-S: Oh, very much so. It’s a tremendously exciting time to be alive precisely because we have so many options before us, and so many choices to make. It is no longer cut-and-dried, and I don’t think it ever will be again. The audience is highly fragmented, which may make it commercially risky, but that is not the artist’s primary concern, and it shouldn’t be. We have the availability of so many new materials, and so many new ways of making music. I’m only puzzled by people who say they don’t like new music. My question is what new music? Which new music? Whose new music? There is so much going on, and so many different styles to choose among, and so much that is truly fresh and interesting and exciting!

BD:   When you’re programming a piece of yours, would you rather it be on a program with Tower, Barber, and Prokofiev, or should it be with Haydn, Brahms, and Schumann?

DW-S: Either one! Just so that they program it! [Both laugh] The only thing that does not serve me ultimately in the long run is the program of all contemporary music.

BD:   So, you wouldn’t want it to be Harrison, Ward-Steinman, Cage, and Xenakis?

DW-S: That is not apt to attract a new audience. That will attract the converted, or the professionally interested. It’s fine to make points with your peers, and know what they’re doing, but that tends to be of more limited interest. We’re talking about orchestral programming, and I would prefer to see the kind of all twentieth century programs that the Chicago Symphony did this week as the norm, and have the older music be the exception. But I realize that is highly idealistic and unrealistic. In other ways, our age is also unlike any other age in its reverence for the past. Until the last century, the only music that was really played was contemporary music. Our interest in older music is healthy to a point, but not the point of morbidity. Far too many orchestras and groups are simply musical museums. However, to call them that is maybe to insult the better museums who will mount contemporary shows from time to time!
dw-s

BD:   They have to be living museums!

DW-S: Living museums, yes, ideally.

BD:   How do we get managements to be more adventurous?

DW-S: They are responsive to their constituencies. It has to do with building the audience, and having the audience respond to management. Write them letters. Let them know you would like to hear something new and fresh and challenging. Then, when you like a new piece that is done, let them know about it.

BD:   [Playing Devil’s advocate] But what about the people who come and say they want a guarantee before the music starts that they’re going to like it?

DW-S: Then I feel sorry for them. They’re in a box. They’re back in the womb. Life is closed to them.

BD:   It seems many people are scared about spending their money on something that they’re not sure of and they don’t know?.

DW-S: That might be an argument for the balanced — one contemporary piece, one Romantic work, and one Classic piece. I see no reason why there can’t be a least be a contemporary overture or short piece on every program. Then, of these people are that are timorous, the new piece can be done at the beginning, and they could come late if they must. Or, put it at the end so they can leave early if they’re so afraid that they’re going to be polluted or poisoned by the new work. People such as this are almost beyond reach, though I have found that if I can get them to a pre-concert lecture with a piano or tapes, so I can show them what’s going on and what to listen for, I’ve had a pretty good track record for converting groups like this. I used to do quite a bit of this, and I still do. I do pre-concert lectures, for example, for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra when it comes to San Diego. Also, I do them for the San Diego Support Group from time to time, and I always choose the programs which have contemporary music on them. I’m given my choice precisely for that reason. I used to do a lot of this when I was in Florida, on this Ford Foundation Grant. One of the reasons for the success of my piece that was done down there was the fact that I’d gone around to a lot of groups explaining what was happening, and making a case for new sounds and new sound sources. I was preparing them for it, so it wasn’t totally new and shocking to them.

BD:   So, you not only write the music, but you go out and sell it?

DW-S: I will whenever I am invited to do so, and whenever I have the opportunity, certainly! That’s very important!

* * * * *

BD:   Have you written any operas?

DW-S: Funny you should mention that! I have an opera, and it is the only unperformed work in my entire catalogue. This is a very sad story. It’s a setting of Robinson Jeffers’ poem Tamar. It was originally a commission from the San Diego Opera Company under Walter Herbert. It was supposed to be a bicentennial production, but I didn’t finish the opera in time for the bicentennial. I was off on this Ford Foundation Grant, and was doing other things, but I did finish before Walter Herbert died. His successor was Tito Capobianco, and I finally got an audition with him, with a view to ask the status of the opera. He had not looked at the score yet, so he asked me to play some of it for him, which I did. But it turned out that his sole interest was whether or not I could personally raise $100,000 towards the production, and I said I was not able to do that. He said it would cost that much in addition to produce it, and he said that he wasn’t bound by Walter Herbert’s commitment. There was no binding contract as such, so unless I could actually raise the money for it myself, there would be no possibility of production. Then I tried to test other waters, and I sent prospectuses around for major opera companies in this country. This included my background, and the synopsis, and I offered to send the score and audition tapes, or come and play it. I didn’t get a single response! I was an unknown composer, even though I’ve been recorded and published and have had major orchestral performances. I have not been able to even audition the work with opera companies, much less get a performance of it. It’s a full-length three-act multi-media work, and this was the centennial year for Robinson Jeffers. So that’s a very sore spot. It’s a slice out of my life, and I will never attempt something like that again without a binding contract or some kind of commitment. So I am very discouraged by the opera world and the opera situation.

BD:   [Being an armchair impresario] A few years from now it’ll get performed, and then you’ll be very happy.

DW-S: Posthumously perhaps! [Both laugh] My centennial may be celebrated with it!

BD:   You talk about being performed and recorded. Is it that important for a composer to be recorded?

DW-S: I don’t know. It helps to get performances, and it helps where BMI and ASCAP royalties are concerned. It depends upon who does the recording, what label it’s on, and what the group is. Some labels are known to be vanity press operations, and those you try to avoid. I’ve not had to subsidize any of my recordings yet, which is very nice. They’re good models of the piece, and if the composer is able to supervise the recording, and have adequate time to do it right, it becomes a kind of a reference for the performers who want to do the work. So to that extent, the recordings are important.

BD:   Are you pleased with the recordings that have been made of your works?

DW-S: So far, yes! I’ve been very fortunate in that respect.

BD:   [Noting his birth-date] You’ve just passed the big five-oh!

DW-S: Yes!

BD:   Has music changed the way you thought it would change, and is music going in any direction that you thought it would, and are there any major surprises?

DW-S: [Thinks a moment] I’m surprised and delighted at the interest in non-western musics, and the availability of those sounds, and the influence they’re having on other composers. Formerly, they were just one or two composers — Harry Partch and Lou Harrison, and maybe Alan Hovhaness — who are interested in other sounds, and exploring them with other instruments. Now it has become much more prevalent. I can also remember during the late 1950s and ’60s when everybody was writing in a post-Webernian serial manner. You’d go to new music concerts all up and down the East coast and the West coast, and you’d hear one Klangfarbenmelodie plink-plank-plunk piece after another. There was a time when that seemed to be The Way, The Truth, and The Light, and I’m rather delighted to see that that age has passed! I’m also surprised at the trend toward neo-romanticism. It was hailed in New York for a series of Philharmonic concerts that Jacob Druckman put together. People like Joseph Schwantner and Druckman himself are writing very interesting, colorful, and accessible music. I didn’t quite anticipate that happening, but it’s a healthy movement. I also think something will come out of minimalism... not the one-note sort, which really verges on conceptual art rather than minimal art. You’re almost at the point where you imagine the piece rather than execute it. Of the other group of proto-minimalists, I think Steve Reich’s music is the most interesting of that lot in terms of texture and rhythms. There’s a strong gamelan influence from Bali in the more recent works, which I find interesting. I still find that you have to listen to this music in a very different way. It is an ideal form of wallpaper in which the process and everything that happens is right up front. I have written a few pieces recently that represent my critique of this form of minimalism. What I accept is the simplification of materials, the use of ostinato or rhythmic patterns, but what I reject is the lack of modulation, of chord change, or the slow rate of events. When I found this kind of catalyst, it sent me off in a new direction recently toward greater simplification of materials, and a greater accessibility, but also without the sometimes mind-numbing monophony and literalist in much of this music. So, in that sense I’ve made my own spin-off from this, and my own critique of it, but it provided a springboard for me to do something else. I also think what’s happening in electronic music is still impossible to predict. None of the equipment has been around long enough to be standardized. The three pieces that I have written for different synthesizers — which were state-of-the-art at the time — have all been superseded by later equipment. This poses all kinds of problems. Dare one ever stop and say we’ve got a standard instrument now? I don’t know. That is going to guarantee a certain amount of change, especially the things that you can do with digital sampling computer synthesizers. So the future is wide open here, and not limited to the pop/rock crowd. They’re exploring a totally different vocabulary from the concert composer.
dw-s

BD: Should they ever meet?

DW-S: It’s inevitable, just as third-stream music in the late 1950s and ’60s was another more or less inevitable movement. The term was coined by Gunther Schuller to describe the fusion of jazz and concert music... classical music being the mainstream, jazz being the second stream, and the fusion of the two became the third stream. That movement got very bad press, primarily through the lack of enlightened criticism. The jazz critics didn’t know what to do with the new music vocabulary, so they panned it to be safe. The classical critics didn’t know what to do with the jazz improvisational elements, so they also panned to be safe! [Much laughter] So the term itself fell into disuse, but there is as lot of that kind of fusion going on in the underground since then without the benefit of the title. This boon was originally by the Modern Jazz Quartet, and the Orchestra USA. In fact, I was involved in that myself in a peripheral way back in the late 1950s in my graduate student days. The music publishing company that the Modern Jazz Quartet founded publishes some of my jazz works. They did a piece of mine that they commissioned for solo quartet and orchestra in Carnegie Hall in one of the Orchestra USA concerts. I was writing a full-blown concerto grosso, but in jazz style improvisation. That sort of thing will crop up from time to time with whatever contemporary form of jazz exists, and it’s already happening. Lalo Schifrin has written a jazz suite on the Mass texts that uses some chants, improvisational techniques, some very contemporary new music techniques, as well as improvising jazz over that. There will always be attempts at fusion, but I don’t think they will ever be successful to the point that fusion music will wipe out the various sources. The various components of fusion will go their own way, but where that way will lead I haven’t the foggiest! [Both laugh]

BD: What advice do you have for young composers coming along today?

DW-S: Listen, and keep your ears and eyes open. Don’t reject anything out of hand, and consider the ends rather than the means. Consider what ends may result from different means. In the final analysis, what matters is the art work, the final product, not necessarily how it is made, or who makes it, or what is used to make it. If the art work itself has a life and vitality, then that’s sufficient justification.

* * * * *

BD:   How do you like being back in Chicago?

DW-S: I like it very much in many ways. I did my graduate work (Master’s and Doctorate) at the University of Illinois down in Champaign-Urbana. So I lived there for three years, and I often commuted to Chicago at least once or twice a month for concerts, or jazz, or for different things. So it’s like old home base for me. It was fun to get back to Orchestra Hall and hear the Chicago Symphony again. I have very fond memories here.

BD:   Is it mostly like you remembered?

DW-S: Yes and no. Some things are different. There are new buildings since I was here last, and always new restaurants. The theater scene is totally different, but a lot of things have not changed, of course. The freeway system is still equally confusing and perplexing. It’s bizarre! It’s not as well marked as I’m used to in California, and since I rented a car this time, I was able to see some parts of Chicago and Evanston and other suburbs that I had not seen before. I like good old Lake Shore Drive. I’ve enjoyed the weekend very much.

BD:   What is next on the calendar for David Ward-Steinman?

DW-S: I’m doing some articles right now. I’ve been asked to do one on my music for Leonardo, the international journal of art, science and technology, and I’m doing a monograph for San Diego State University Press on analogues, and music, art, and literature. I teach a course which explores all this on a very basic level that does not depend upon subjective impression, and I’m finally going to do a paper on it. I was appointed University Research Lecturer for this academic year (1986-1987), and was freed from classes for the fall semester to work on this. In composing I did a piece called Elegy for Astronauts, for orchestra and chamber ensemble [recording is on the same CD as Western Orpheus shown above-right], and I’m going to do a piece for Bert Turetzky, the bassist, and his wife Nancy, the flutist, which they asked me for. Then probably another orchestral work so that I get the decks clear!

BD:   How do you decide which commissions you’ll accept and which commissions you’ll decline?

DW-S: It depends upon the instrumentation, the medium, and the conditions, and who’s doing it. It has to be something that sounds interesting to me. For example, I would not accept a commission for a concerto for accordion. It’s not that I don’t think anything good can be done with it, but I don’t understand the instrument well enough, nor do I like the sounds well enough to really want to work with it. I probably wouldn’t want to do a piece for recorder ensemble either. I also would not do a piece for a single instrument that was not capable of double stops or harmony, because my music depends too much on counterpoint, color, texture, and so forth. But these are my own biases and my own prejudices as to whether or not I’m receptive to an overture for a commission. Other than that, I’m generally pretty open, especially if they are professional performers, or if a major performance is going to come from it.

BD:   Thank you for being a composer.

DW-S: [Laughs] My pleasure indeed! Thank you for having me here. Your questions were very perceptive.

= = = = = = = = = = = =
----- ----- -----
= = = = = = = = = = = =

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on April 12, 1987. Portions were broadcast on WNIB later that year, and again in 1991 and 1996; and on WNUR in 2007, and 2014. 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.

* * * * *

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.