Composer / Author  George  Heussenstamm
 
A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

, as the New York groups are often called, they have always kept to a very different kind of sound.  Recordings of their music are often presented with several of their members, and it was fairly easy for me to elicit contact information for others from each of them. 

By setting up my programming to celebrate round-birthdays, I was relieved of the task of deciding whom to place where in the available time-slots.  This gimmick was completely color-blind and gender-blind.  When you had that special birthday you got a program.  Simple as that.  With that in mind, I often worked far enough ahead to anticipate upcoming events, and I contacted Heussenstamm just prior to his 65th birthday to arrange an interview. 

He was interested in my questions, and responded with the knowledge that a lifetime of involvement with many aspects of the process could provide.

Here is that conversation from the end of April of 1991 . . . . . . . . .


Bruce Duffie:    You’ve got several recordings out which makes for a nice representation of your output.

George Heussenstamm:    I’m pleased, but I wish there were more recent works.  Largo is a fairly recent work and is certainly a departure from a good deal of the style of other pieces, although I love them.  I don’t think I’d be running that way, though, as I move ahead here in my old age.  [Both laugh]

BD:    Is your music always moving ahead?

GH:    I think so.  I have seen my own music evolving.  At first, and like so many others, I was writing rather naïvely strict twelve-tone pieces.  At the time I figured this was what was happening, and I was turned on in that direction.  At the same time, I’ve always felt, even within this strict twelve-tone thing, there should be some kind of verticality to hear in the music, some kind of controlled sounds, and I think that’s happening more and more.  Although in recent pieces I still have a rule lying around, but if I’m going to use it, I’ll use it in the most-free possible way, without any sense dedication to sticking to the dictates of row treatment.  As Aaron Copland once said, you can get some interesting chords out of a row, and that he found that fun.  But more and more I’m exploring my own territory, which I find extremely difficult.

BD:    Let’s talk a little bit about the earlier works first.  You don’t feel that you made a mistake by using the twelve-tone system, do you?

GH:    No, I think it had to happen.  I don’t think I could have done anything differently at the time.  So it’s okay, but I don’t really gravitate much to strict twelve-tone music anymore at all, even the early ones, and even the establishes pieces.  I’m not that excited to listen to Schoenberg’s Third and Fourth Quartet, for instance, anymore.  I really don’t get that much satisfaction out of it.  

BD:    But you don’t object to the public getting a lot of satisfaction out of those pieces, or your own older pieces?

GH:    No, not at all.   Whatever anyone likes is great, and that’s just fine.  I am just relating to my own inner feelings and persuasions.

BD:    When you were working with the twelve-tone row, did that not relate to your inner feelings and persuasions?

GH:    It sort of did at the time, I think.   There was nothing else happening as far as desire goes.  But behind it, all still was unsettled.  I have a tremendous love of traditional music and tonality, and I teach it and I love all the great works, and that will never leave.  But that has to exert some kind of influence on what you’re going to be saying.  But at the time it seemed to be that I was comfortable.  I was comfortable doing it, even knowing it was still a very limited segment of musical public that moves in that direction in terms of going to hear music.  It’s still that way.

BD:    Is there any way to take the twelve-tone music and get it accepted by a larger segment of the population?

GH:    Well, Berg did a pretty good job, didn’t he?  He was a great model, and I don’t want to particularly follow that very same pattern, but that was probably the best path I can think of.  Berg never lost the sense of sonorities.  Several chords pop up in his music all the time, even though they happen to be growing out of twelve-tone procedures.  He would build triads into the rows.  What makes it so difficult is you want sonority, but not necessarily a blatant triad.  I don’t necessarily feel that’s the way to go.  So many composers are going back to earlier styles now, and to blatant tonality.  That’s fine, but I don’t think that’s where I want to go.

BD:    You mentioned that you’re always going forward.  Do you know always where forward is?

GH:    No, no.  It’s just moving from one piece to the next where there seems to be a continuity for looking back.  Even looking back, when I look at what I’ve done more recently I find roots of that in early pieces that I wasn’t really all that conscious were there.  Certain sonorities, certain sensitivity to sonority was there, and I’m more conscious of that now than I was at the time.  I’m more conscious of what I feel as the value of those sonorities than I had.  It’s just a matter of the amount of degree that my feeling and sense of enjoyment and interest in music is so much related to what you hear vertically; the chords and even the sense of chord progressions.  Something is happening vertically without the necessary link to what’s been done before.  That’s where in a way you have to find your own way somehow.  I can’t describe it any better.  There are no hard and fast guidelines for that.

BD:    What do you mean

48.  I had some physical problems, health problems, so I dropped out.  I really didn’t know what I wanted.  Years later, in 1960, I came back to Leonard Stein to study privately for  a year or so.  I did want study counterpoint with him then, oddly enough.  He asked me what had happened to me because he said I was ready for composition those many years ago.  I told him that I didn’t know it at that time.  But he missed me, and I was a very good student.  Anyhow, after I got married in 1957, I had a talk with my wife, and told her that I ought to be a composer!  She said I should go for it, and this was a miracle.  It was wonderful.  She’s been nothing but supportive all the way, and of course it meant a lot of sacrifice as I needed the time.  I continued working for this newspaper, and I knew what I wanted.  So I pushed my need by being mainly self-taught.  I took a few random courses at the LA City College, which is now Cal State.  I took a course in orchestration and another one in counterpoint, and one in contemporary techniques... just those three courses.  I got a little out of that, but by the time I took that counterpoint course I knew more than the teacher!  I was just motivated to teach myself, so with lots of books and records and scores I just went ahead.  All that I know about contemporary music is really self-taught, and most of what I know about traditional music is self-taught.  Eventually I started to write pieces, and slowly built up a reputation.  Among my colleagues I became accepted as one of them, and although I wasn’t teaching (I was still working for this paper), I was getting a reputation as a composer.  The time came when I got this job as manager of this chamber music association strictly on the basis of my reputation as a composer.

BD:    I would have thought they would have wanted more of an administrator.

GH:    Well, they just felt I could do it, and I didn’t know a thing about it, so I just plunged in and learned how to do it, and I did.  After thirteen years I had enough of it, and I did need some money but I was really busy for a while.  I was trying to compose, I was managing this association (which was a part-time job), and I started to teach.  I told my buddies in teaching that if they had any units around to let me know.  I needed some income, and I could teach whatever they want me to teach.  I felt perfectly confident I could teach any of these courses.  Someone at California State called me and asked if I could teach orchestration and counterpoint.  I said sure I could.  This was in January of 1976, and it was as if I’d been teaching all my life.  I just stepped in and I’ve been doing it ever since.  I have no degree of any kind.  I’m totally un-degreed!  I never went through the academic rounds for my music education, or any other kind, for that matter.

BD:    Once you were teaching, did you get enough time to compose?

GH:    I did, yes.  I taught part-time.  My wife and I have been very smart and we’ve been very frugal.  We’ve saved our money and we’re doing fine, and I can afford to do it.  I don’t have to teach full-time, and I couldn’t if I wanted to anyway because without a degree it’s almost impossible to get a full-time job.  But they seem to want me regularly part-time.  I do about six units a semester, and that’s fine.  I love it!  So I do have time.

BD:    It sounds like you’ve been having fun with it!

GH:    I have.  I place a great deal on the importance of teaching and relating to my students.  I really do like it; it means a lot to me.  I taught a course in music notation and score preparation down at Dominguez Hills a number of times, and from my experiences there I found out what little students know about music notation.  I never taught it.  No one teaches them in schools and that’s one of the great defects of the music curriculum.  So I decided to put together a book, and it is now book published by W.W. Norton called the Norton Manual of Music Notation.  It’s been out since March 1987.  I was very proud of it, and it’s doing well.  I’m getting the royalties on that, and the royalties are going up.

BD:    Good, that means more and more courses are using that as their text.

GH:    They are, that’s what’s happening.  And it’s just a thrill to be affiliated with Norton.  It’s one of the books that is in their music series now, and I’ve just been informed that it is going onto another printing.  So I’ve been proofreading it for little errors here and there, which there are some!  They said it’ll be continuing.  Norton books just stay in print.  They continue in perpetuity, and I’m working on another book called The Handbook of Harmony.  That’s taken up so much time because I’ve been so interrupted this semester.  When I teach, I relate to the student mentality.  I try to meet them on their own level, and most of these books don’t.  They’re above the student’s head, particularly some of the students I come across.  They really aren’t that brilliant to absorb that material.

BD:    But you’re not writing down to them, are you?

GH:    Yes I am, in terms of language, but I’m not reducing the quality of the material one iota.  It’s all going to be there, but I’m trying to present it in a way that is ‘assimilatable’ without plowing through language and concepts that aren’t immediately perceivable.  What I teach the students is to understand right away what’s going on in a talking class, and I’m trying to convey that in my book.  I have an approach that’s direct, no nonsense, get to the material, and here’s what it is without confusing them.  So now the manual is that way too.  My notation book is as  clear as a bell!

BD:    Do you find from experience in the classroom that this system works?

GH:    Yes, you bet it works.  They learn more than in their other classes and they learn more than the books will tell them.  They understand it.  I’m very much motivated to make a contribution there in the harmony area, although it’s very competitive field.  I don’t care!  I’ll use it in my own textbook, but it’s a very challenging assignment.  It’s not easy.  You must always keep in line.  Think of yourself as a student reading this thing!  That’s the point, and it works.

BD:    Let us come back to your compositions and the idea of composing.  When you’re writing and getting it all on the piece on paper, do you expect the performances to be exactly what you have written, or do you leave a little bit of space for interpretation by the performers?

GH:    I certainly do, yes.  I don’t have these infinitely detailed instructions in my scores, so I’m much more traditionalist in that sense.  Certainly I like to see performances which present a different point of view by the players.  I’m willing to go along with some of their ideas if I happen to be present, or if I happen to hear a tape of something, I might feel that’s an interesting approach.  I definitely feel there need not be only one approach and only the one way.  No question about that!  I will say that nowadays most of what I do write is notated in traditional rhythms and pitches.  Many years ago I wrote a lot of graphically-notated music, where you really were looking for different results from performance to performance because they were going to select their own pitches and their own rhythms.  Not that it wasn’t fun and exciting, and certainly it left each performance as an intriguing mystery as to how it was going to turn out.  But I’m definitely not in that area anymore, although still, from time to time, there will be some aspects of choice going on, with aleatoric passages particularly for a percussion section.

BD:    Have you basically been pleased with the performances you’re heard?

GH:    Yes I have.  One of the things that has happened, I have had the benefit of some of the very best players in the country do my pieces.  I have written a lot of brass music.  For instance, I wrote five brass quintets, and the Annapolis Brass Quintet has recorded one of them.  My first brass quintet was commissioned by the New York Brass Quintet, and my third brass quintet was written for the American Brass Quintet.

BD:    These are good groups!

GH:    Yes they are!  The fourth was written for Annapolis and the fifth was premiered the Empire.  These are great players.  I’ve had a few student performances, sure, but mainly they’re written for the top professional level of playing.  That’s how I write.  I write for the best professional players, and if your students can do it, more power to them.  I definitely don’t write technically easy works.

BD:    If you receive a commission from a junior high school band, you would tailor it to that level?  [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, also see my interview with Douglas Allanbrook.]

GH:    I suppose I would because that’s an interesting challenge.  I’ve thought about doing that just on my own, a piece for, say, even a university orchestra on the caliber of Northridge, where I teach.  They are good, but it would be wonderful to be able to write a piece that is good, but strong and interesting.  My music is still not all that difficult technically.  Now that would be a challenge!

BD:    That way they wouldn’t have to be worried so much about the technical difficulties.  They could actually get into the musicality.

GH:    They could.  It would be wonderful to do that.  I’ve never decided to do that, but I’ve entertained the idea a lot, I must say.  Usually when I do sit down and write something, I do just what I want, and I have the high standards of performance in mind as I do it.  That’s how it turns out.  Fortunately, most of the things have been playable, but usually you need some really good players.   My band piece, for instance, I wrote that for the Coast Guard Band.  I knew they could do anything I wrote for them.  They were that good, and they did very well.  It was also performed by the California State Northridge Band, and they tackled it with some satisfaction.  It was a far cry from what the Coast Guard did, though.  In order to do that, I did modify a few passages they just couldn’t manage.  But still it was a satisfactory performance, and I got lots of fine comments about it.  Everyone loved it.  It came off fairly well.

BD:    Does that then motivate the Northridge Band to work harder and learn a little more, and become more technically proficient?

GH:    This happens.  They liked it and they definitely get turned on.  This is a worthwhile effort to make.  A similar thing happened recently where the band performed a percussion work, the Timpani Concerto of Bill Kraft, which I think won a prize at one of the Freedheim awards a couple of years ago.  It’s a tough piece and they did a really good job.  He’s a good friend and a wonderful guy.

BD:    He was born here in Chicago, as a matter of fact!

GH:    That’s right, he was!  He’s a really nice man.  I’ve known Bill many, many years, and I’ve got a tremendous respect for him and his music.  We’re really glad to have him.  I’m glad he’s on the west coast still.  He loves it here, I know.

BD:    Is there a ‘west coast sound’, or a ‘west coast school’?

GH:    So they say.  I don’t know what it means.  I don’t know what to say about that.  Maybe it’s not as nervous as New York music.  There’s a lot of very nervous-sounding music emanating out of New York City.

BD:    California is more laid back?

GH:    Yes.  [Both laugh]  We’re more comfortable with ourselves in the sense that we’re not worried about what colleagues are going to think, or what they expect you to do.  Maybe we’re more independent-minded.  Certainly I feel that way, but maybe everyone feels that way.

BD:    Maybe you’re just more successful at it?

GH:    Well, you just don’t know.   I don’t feel that we’re western music like Roy Harris’s wide-open Arizona spaces!  It’s certainly true that it doesn’t matter where you live, but it differentiates people in one part of the country from the other.  Part of that is you’re in touch with the culture, you’re in touch with what’s happening.  You hear music, you hear live concerts, and the LA area is wonderful for that.  So if you feel a need to keep abreast of what the heck is going on, and you need that kind of nurturing, we have it here in plenty.

BD:    Composers who are represented on Crystal Records and on Wim records tend to have a kind of sound that is definitely different from what you find at Columbia-Princeton.

GH:    Really, yes.  Do you know Robert Linn?  He’s recently retired and he’s done some nice things.  He’s a good man and we’re glad to have him.  He’s been Chairman of the composition department at USC for a long time, and has been busy writing good things.  Maybe you will want to do something with him.

BD:    He’s one I have not talked with.  I see on the back of one of your records he was born in 1925...

GH:    That’s right.  He’s already made it through 65!  He is a very sweet guy. 

BD:    Are you, at sixty-five, where you thought you would be years ago?

GH:    I don’t think I ever gave one thought where the heck I’d be.  I didn’t, and still don’t, have any set goals after what I wanted to be.  Maybe that was mistake.  Maybe that’s why I never got a degree.

BD:    Are you pleased with where you are now?

GH:    I’m comfortable with it; I’m happy with it.  In a way I’m in a pretty enviable position.  I enjoy my life very much, and I have a lot of time and freedom.  I am able to make my own choices in so many ways, and not too many people have that.  I feel very much in control of what I want to do, so I can do what I want.  In terms of cultural and aesthetic pursuits, it’s great.

BD:    You’re in control of your life.  Are you still in control of your music?

GH:    Yes.  I’m a little distant from it right now.  It’s going to take me a while to get back, but I have an inner confidence that, when I do, I’ll be able to accomplish what I want to do.  I have a strong feeling for what I want to do.  I’ve written almost a hundred pieces.  This string piece is Opus 90, and I have a number of non-opus pieces, so I look back with a kind of amazement at all these things I have.  I take a look  at each of them, one at a time, and realize that each took a long time, and that one took a long time!  [Laughs]  How I did all that I don’t know, because I got a late start.  My first published piece was 1964 when I was thirty-eight.

BD:    So in a little more than a quarter of a century you’ve accomplished a great deal!

GH:    Yes.  I made up for some lost time.  Occasionally I come across students who are in their early thirties, and they look discouraged.  They feel it’s late, and I try to give them some encouragement.  It’s never too late!  I know I’ll be getting back to it, and I’ll be doing something major dimensions.  It has to be big, so the thing’s been coming much more slowly, but so what?  It’s what I want to do in my twilight years.  I’ve no interest in doing chamber music anymore, not at all.

BD:    Not at all???

GH:    No, no, not at all.  I could easily write smaller works, but I don’t want to at all.  It doesn’t interest me.  I’ve had enough.  I’ve written an awful lot of that stuff, and it’s fine, but there’s the dimensional needs there in me, and I’ll just have to be fulfilled.  If I have to wait for it, well that’s fine.

  [Both laugh] 

BD:    But Mahler was right?

GH:    He was right, but why?  I feel good music should show good ideas which emanate from a real awareness of your materials, a real sense of what can be done with tone.  Good music means getting to know your materials.  You have to know it, work it out, know what the hell to do with it.  So you’ve got to study, you’ve got to take your courses, you’ve got to live with your ideas, you have to explore your materials and develop them.  There’s so much of that.  There’s awareness of what music can do, what you can do.  Otherwise it is insufficient, it’s incomplete.

BD:    Do you make sure that the music you write is complete?

GH:    In certain ways I’m very happy with it.  If anything, it’s totally complete.  You’ll always find this could be this or that, but I’ve done almost no revisions of works of mine; very, very little.  I’ve been pretty happy with it, and most of the time I am more pleased than I thought.  It’s true that you write a piece, and when you hear it, it usually sounds better than you thought it would.  That’s kind of built into it.  That’s a little bonus one gets.  It’s true of most composers.  If they write something they wonder if this is going to work out alright.  It usually does to their satisfaction, and often it sounds better than you might have thought.  I’ve had no real cause to look back and say it was a mistake and I should do this or this or that.  I’ve been pretty happy with my output in that sense.  Maybe I’m being non-critical!  [Laughs]  Maybe I should be more self-critical!

BD:    Is composing, fun?

GH:    It can be, but it’s a varying thing.  Everyone has moments, periods, maybe long ones where you really are trying to write and nothing much is happening, and you do get discouraged.  For many years I did discipline myself.  I’m a morning worker.  I have been, and I still am when I’m really going.  I used to get up at six in the morning and write for two or three hours.  Then I’d go to work for my Coleman job for the music association.  I’m fresher in the morning hours, and sometimes you’d have to establish a kind of discipline.  Maybe lock yourself in that room, and no matter what happens you’re going to stay there.  That can be pretty painful, but it seems to work if you stick it out.  Something starts happening, some idea, no matter how flimsy it may be, and you start working something out.  Then instead of having that blank paper in front of you, you’ve got something out there.  I’ve had a mode of compositional procedure that has worked for me.  It’s a little unusual perhaps, but before I write a single note I do other kinds of preparation.  Usually it is a matter of letting words describe what I want to do, a verbal description of an overall concept of what I have in mind.  That will be further into a description of how the piece will break down into different sections, and I’ll work out an instrumentational distribution.  I’ve been much inspired and motivated to get going on a piece once I have worked out how I want my instruments to be grouped, and maybe have a plan for a whole piece where I will know the instrumentational combinations from section to section.  I get turned on by thinking about the instruments in their various groupings.  Look at the ensembles for brass quintet!  This was inspired, and many other pieces were worked out by thinking of how to group those five instruments in different duos, trios, and quartet combinations.  I worked out the whole sequence of all the sections in that piece according to various groupings.  Every possible duo was explored, every possible trio was explored ...

BD:    ...and it’s a slightly unorthodox quintet in that it has two trombones rather than trombone and tuba.

GH:    Well, brass quintets are divided into those two types.  There are a fair number of brass quintets with bass trombone.  The American Brass Quintet is traditionally that, but certainly the majority of them are tuba.  Then occasionally you’ll find that the bass trombone can also play tuba, so they can share all the literature.  There are a lot of brass quintets written where that low part is written to be playable either on bass trombone or tuba.  That’s not true of my pieces.  My brass quintets are very idiomatic for either bass trombone or tuba.  They’re not interchangeable, which, in a way, is unfortunate because it’s limiting.  I have no special preference for one or the other.  I love the one with the tuba, but I also like the crispness and directness and strength that you get with the bass trombone.

BD:    You also have written a tuba quartet!  [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my Interviews with Gunther Schuller, and Vincent Perschetti.]

GH:    I’ve got three tuba quartets!  One of them has enjoyed more performances than the others, as a matter of fact.  Tubafour, Opus 30, has been performed a lot and was recorded.  That was my first quartet.  I entered that into a composition contest, and it was a prize winner in 1969 at the first international tuba ensemble composition contest at the University of Miami.  There was woman tuba player, Connie Weldon, whom I did not actually meet until years later.  She’s still around but she doesn’t teach there anymore.  I think she still has an advisory position, but she was a phenomenon.  [See box below.]  Everyone loved her, and she had tubas coming to study with her from all over the place.  She was instrumental in getting this composition for a tuba group started.  I decided to write a piece for it, and it was just full of graphic notation.  I was right in the middle of my graphic notation period.  I sent it down there, and lo and behold, they made a special award for that piece.  Of course, the name was catchy.  I loved the name.  Some years later [1978] they had the big tuba-euphonium symposium held at USC.  I was commissioned to write a piece for that occasion for euphonium and stereo tape.  At that occasion I finally met Connie, who brought along the contingent of her students from University of Miami.  She was still teaching at that time and we hugged each other and it was wonderful.  One of her students told me he had just ordered his license plates, and Tubafour was on them!  So eventually it got around to Toby Hanks of the New York Tuba Quartet, and formally tuba player with the New York Brass Quintet.  That’s how I first met him.  He and three other great players that New York Tuba Quartet recorded Tubafour, and I have heard other performances of it.  Actually, I think a better piece though is my Third Tuba Quartet, and that’s been done rather frequently.  It was most recently done last August in Sapporo, Japan, with James Self.  He’s one of the country’s great tuba players, and he conducted that performance and he’d done this piece a number of times.  It’s a better work than Tubafour.  I have a lot more respect for it.  Tubafour was fun, and I was intrigued with the graphic thing, but I wouldn’t write that way again.  I have some other thoughts on how I’d now write for tuba.

BD:    Maybe some other quartet will record it?

GH:    That would be wonderful if that could happen, but no more tuba quartets!

BD:    Three’s enough, eh?

GH:    Three’s certainly enough!  And five brass quintets should be enough, for sure.

BD:    I’m glad that you’re getting into big forms, and that a symphony is waiting in your mind.

GH:    Yes.  I really had to push it out of my mind for a long while.  I didn’t even like the sound of the symphony orchestra.  The instrumentation was not attractive to me.  What are all those violins doing there with a smattering of wind and a smattering of brass?  It seemed sort of funny, and the sound character was one that I didn’t want to fall out with.  So I just stayed away from it.  Maybe that was the rationalization, but I certainly don’t feel that way now.  The symphony orchestra has that kind of overall sound character. There it is!  It’s because of the instrumentation.

BD:    You just weren’t ready for it, that’s all, and now you are! 

GH:    But for the other big pieces, I wrote a prize winning work [Tournament (1970)] for four brass quintets and four percussionists.  That can make a lot of sound!  That was a prize winner at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where I first met the New York Brass Quintet.  They were the judges.  It was a cash award, which was a commission to write another piece for the following year’s competition, which would then be premièred.  So I chose to write another piece for four brass quintets [Labyrinth]. 

BD:    Are either of these works antiphonal?

GH:    Yes, indeed.  These are definitely surrounding the audience at the corners of the hall.  I’ve written seven of these quadrophonically-conceived pieces.  I was very excited in 1971 when quadrophonic tape first started making its appearance as a possible thing in the home.  I was very thrilled with this development, thinking that composers can get out there and write works for that medium, have them recorded and have them played in the home, so that you can hear a composition created for quadraphonic sound.  It died because there was nothing interesting that you could hear.  Are you going to record Beethoven’s Fifth in quadraphonic sound?  What good is that?  Real hall acoustics is all they were talking about, and there was nothing interesting in that.  But my enthusiasm took a long time to wane.  Not too long ago I wrote yet one more quodraphonically conceived piece.

BD:    Henry Brant (1913-2008) would be the one to benefit from that the most, with all of his spatial music.

GH:    That’s right.  I know he thought the same way as I did.  I have two works for large ensembles, both of them scored for four saxophone quartets and four percussionists.  They’ve both have been formed a lot.  I’ve conducted many performances of these, and they’re something else.  They’re something to behold.  They are big experiences, as are those two brass works that I mentioned.  I also have a work for four clarinet trios.

© 1991 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded on the telephone on April 29, 1991.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB later that year, and again in 1996.  This transcription was made in 2015, 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.

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.