Microtonal Composer Ben
Johnston
A Conversation with Bruce Duffie
Ben Johnston was born in 1926 in
Macon, Georgia. He attended the College of William and Mary and
Cincinnati Conservatory, later studying with Harry Partch, Darius
Milhaud, and John Cage. Johnston taught composition and theory at the
University of Illinois from 1951 to 1983. Works include Quintet for
Groups, Sonnets of Desolation, Carmilla, Sonata for Microtonal Piano,
and Suite for Microtonal Piano, and ten string quartets to date. All
ten quartets will soon be released in a series of three recordings by
the Kepler Quartet (New World Recordings). Awards include a Guggenheim
Fellowship, a grant from the National Council on the Arts and the
Humanities, and two commissions from the Smithsonian Institute. In
2006, Johnston moved to Wisconsin in order to better care for his wife,
Betty Hall Johnston, who was seriously ill. Since her death in 2007, he
has continued to rehearse intensively with the Kepler Quartet. He is a
member of ASCAP and received the Deems Taylor Award in 2007. His
Quintet for Groups was awarded the SWR Orchestra prize at the 2008
Donaueschinger Musiktage.
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Much contemporary music is difficult for many listeners to get into,
and in the Classical Music field, this problem is accentuated
multi-fold. Being on the cutting edge or just making explorations
will leave most of the public out in the cold, at least until the new
ideas have been demonstrated and digested. Doing this in the
brief space of a single concert — or
even a series of concerts — cannot begin to illuminate the
wonders and glories of new ideas, if indeed there are any to be found!
Add to all of this the wrenching change in musical language that comes
with microtones, and you have got perhaps the thorniest and most
difficult arena into which one can venture. My guest, Ben
Johnston, has done just that, so if he is not as well-known as others,
he is certainly an outstanding proponent of his discoveries and
creations.
His catalogue includes string quartets and other chamber pieces, as
well as larger works and items for re-tuned piano.
We had spoken a few times on the telephone, and finally found a
convenient time and place to get together for an interview. He
was in Chicago to give the keynote address at a symposium, so we took
the opportunity to meet before everything got going.
Bruce Duffie:
Tell me about writing microtonal music. Why
aren’t you satisfied with twelve tones?
Ben Johnston:
[Laughs] Actually, that wasn’t why I
started doing it. When I first started composing, I spent about
ten years not doing that. I was writing music as everybody else
writes it, more or less. That was in the fifties. In 1949
and ‘50 I went out to California and worked for six months with Harry
Partch [photo at right].
It was going to be a whole year, but he got ill
and closed up his studio. So I went to Mills and studied with
Milhaud for
the balance of the year. Then I got a job at the University
of Illinois, and within a few years we brought Partch there and did
some of his large works. I was involved very
heavily in the business end of the
production of The Bewitched,
but not in subsequent productions. That was atypical of me, and
they were sponsored not by music but by theater, and later by the
student groups. He was around in this area, including
Chicago. He was living in Evanston for a while and did a film
with Madeline Tourtelot during the late fifties or early sixties, but
he went back to California where he stayed
the rest of his life. This was a fruitful period for him,
being in this part of the country. I don’t think he liked it
terribly well; he likes the west, but it was fascinating to have him
around.
So all during that period I was exposed to something. The
reason I went to study with him was because a musicologist told me
— after we
had a discussion about how music theory wasn’t based on acoustics, and
I was objecting that it ought to be and that it wasn’t — he
said, “I have a book you should
read,” and gave me Genesis of a Music.
So I read it,
and then I wrote to the publisher and they forwarded the letter
— which
they won’t always do, but it was a friend of his. So she
forwarded the letter to him and we corresponded for a while. I
realized rather quickly that I couldn’t get very far without really
being there and hearing what was going on; that if I tried to do it
myself, I would probably come to grief, and I think I would have.
It’s just too difficult and too expensive, and too a lot of
things. So I went out there, and that was the beginning of my
active interest in that kind of thing. But as I suggested, I had
become fascinated by the fact that music wasn’t in tune. I got
that
first by just hearing that it wasn’t on the piano.
BD: At that
point, were they were attempting
to be in tune?
BJ: Well, not
really. Temperament is what it
is; it’s a compromise. It’s a rather good compromise, but still,
if you listen closely, it’s just not. It
lacks something. I had heard choral singing — especially
madrigal-type choral singing and very good string quartet playing
— which is in tune, where people do take the trouble, and I
wanted
to know what the difference was. So I read up on it and I began
to be very dissatisfied with the way people were making
music. It was this question of being properly in
tune that got me into it, not the idea of a lot of notes, and
certainly not the idea of small intervals. When I began to
deal with Partch, he was using small intervals to represent the
inflections of speaking voice, the melodies of a spoken line.
BD: With the
rise and fall and everything?
BJ:
Everything was without any exaggeration, as it is when you set it to
recitative, or even to any kind of
traditional vocal setting. This naturalism interested me quite a
lot, not so
much because it was naturalistic, but because it was so precise.
And it did, indeed, sound the way he sounded when he spoke. He had put
his own vocal inflections into those melodies, and there they were
notated. This interested me quite a lot. I think that
probably my first fascination with microtones came about through that
particular application. I was not as interested in the
harmonies and the unusual scales that Partch was dealing with in a
purely musical sense. His approach to music was so alien to
me! I had a lot of respect for it, but it was really not
something that I would ever do.
BD: Did you
follow a whole new system of notation, or
did you use Partch’s notation?
BJ: I didn’t
use Partch’s notation because it is largely tablature. He tells
you what to do to
the instrument, not what’s going to sound. So if you don’t
know the instrument — which is almost impossible
since they’re privately
made and owned, and there’s only one of each — this
is just hopelessly
difficult to understand. So I thought, “No,
that is not a
solution.” I had to invent a notation, but
I didn’t do that
until well over ten years later. I started doing it after I had
established myself
well enough that people would take me seriously as a composer. At
first it was locally, at the University of Illinois, where
there were maybe three or four people — John
Garvey, who was at
that time the violist of the Whirlwind Quartet and the Director of the
Festival of Contemporary Arts; Claire Richards, who was a pianist;
and George Hunter, who was the leader of the Collegium Musicum. I
was fascinated by what George was doing because he was so careful
with the intonation. I was aware that what was happening was
exactly what I had been interested in, so there was sort of a
distant connection there. He was not at all interested in
applications I talked about making.
BD: Have you
got absolute pitch?
BJ: Yes, but
this doesn’t help. In fact, it
hinders. Absolute pitch is simply a very
good tonal memory, and if you are synched into it too well,
then you know where A is, and you’re impatient with any other A, which
in most music really not the case because, as you know, A moves.
BD: From
orchestra to orchestra it’ll
move.
BJ: Oh yeah,
and not only that, but within a piece. So it’s just not feasible
to do it
that way. I found
that I had absolute pitch in Partch’s system by the time I was through
working with him, so I could say, “That’s a 16/11 ratio.” I knew
that note, and what it did was to
focus me on a very, very careful cultivation of relative pitch. I
worked very hard during all that time with that sort of thing.
Then when I got into writing, my first idea was that I’d do it all
electronically, because Lejaren Hiller was just beginning to found the
University of Illinois Electronic Music Studio. There wasn’t one
anywhere in the United States then, not even Columbia-Princeton.
He started it down there. Columbia-Princeton got off
to a much bigger start than Hiller did because they had a lot of grant
money and he didn’t, but he actually did beat them to it. So I
thought that’s the way to do it.
BD: With
electronics, you had absolute control over everything?
BJ: Yeah, and
you don’t have to worry about training the players. I went to
Columbia-Princeton
the year before they opened. They let me do it because it was the
only year I had free, and it was a sabbatical year. I got a
Guggenheim Fellowship, and I found out within a week that I
couldn’t do what I wanted to do, because the instruments simply weren’t
subtle enough.
BD: You were
ahead of the technology then?
BJ:
Yeah. You need digital technology. I
could do it beautifully now on a computer.
BD: Would you
go back to it now?
BJ: Not
really, because I got so fascinated when I
was forced to do it. There are three possibilities.
You either build a whole set of new instruments, the way Partch did,
and
go that route. I knew what was involved in that and it terrified
me. I don’t have the right talents. So then I
thought about the electronic thing, and I discovered that technology
wasn’t equal to the task. The only thing left was to take
ordinary musicians and persuade them to do this, and somehow enable
them to do this. So I went that route. I got so fascinated
in
that problem that I never really wanted to go away from it. The
idea is finding people who understand what it is to play a
Mozart quartet and have it really sound in tune, and then extend
that. Extrapolate that and ask, “What is it to play
some much more complicated music really in tune? Exactly what
happens? Down to
fine points, what happens to the pitch?”
I began
analyzing things with that in mind. The first thing I did was to
re-tune a piano. I had an elaborately tuned piano with
eighty-one different notes on it — eighty-one different pitch
classes. There were only seven notes that had any
octave equivalent, and each of them had only one. So it was
really very hard to train my ear to
that.
BD: Did you
ever invite someone to sit down at this instrument and play some
Chopin?
BJ: Oh,
sure. That was a bad joke
from the beginning, but it was horrifying sounding to play
anything on it except just exactly what it was designed for. I
wrote the Microtonal Piano Sonata
for that during
that early period, and I wrote the Second
String Quartet.
BD: Is it
possible to play that microtonal sonata on
any other instrument than that specific one?
BJ: You can
take any
piano and re-tune it, but you can imagine how hard it is because
you don’t have any octaves. You’re tuning fifths and
thirds.
BD: You have
to tune every string, then, to a strobe?
BJ: That
would be one way. When the
recording was done in New York, they took very great pains and the
Scalatron people were involved. They had their tuner there and
they did it that way. But that was later. The piece was
written for Claire Richards, who was my piano
teacher. She was quite interested in what I was doing,
although she said she didn’t see why I did it. The idea of
writing a quartet came about because
I had written the First String
Quartet, which is a twelve-tone
piece. It was written for the Walden Quartet, Garvey being one of
the players. They played it in New York and the tape of it
was heard by the LaSalle Quartet. They liked it very much and
said they wanted to play it. I like their performance of
it better than the Walden. It was a very good
performance and they said, “We want you to write us a
piece.” After three years, the sonata was too oppressive to me
and I couldn’t get it done. So I stopped
and wrote the quartet in about a month. That Second String
Quartet was never played by them. They didn’t like
it. They
didn’t like what I was doing. They didn’t want to try to do
it.
They rejected the whole thing. Through
Salvatore Martirano, I was put in touch with the Composer’s
Quartet who did want to play it, and ultimately they are the ones who
recorded it. But that’s how this all got started.
BD: Are you
still working with
microtones?
BJ: Yes.
BD: Do you
think it’s still the way to go?
BJ: It’s the
way I want to go. I still
think that music sounds better when it’s played in tune.
BD: Your
tuning or
anyone else’s?
BJ: I’m really not
much interested for myself. I would never do what Easley
Blackwood has done. [See my Interview with Easley
Blackwood.] What
Easley does is to take all the different possibilities of temperament,
any number of notes up to fifty or even beyond. But he’s got some
pieces that
do explore the possibilities of all those different temperaments.
To me, they’re all out of tune. I’m not particularly enamored of
it, although
I can enjoy out-of-tune music. It’s like
anything else, like listening to the prepared piano, which is not a
normal piano. It’s different every time you do it because every
piano is different, and every screw is different, for heaven’s
sakes! Introducing indeterminacy like that doesn’t disturb
me, but I’m not interested in it intellectually, and I do feel that it
doesn’t have as much emotional power as really
in-tune music, because that’s what happens. When those vibrations
are exactly synched, the expressive potential of whatever it is you’ve
got in the music is heightened greatly, and that is very
interesting to me. I have gotten to where I count on that, and I
don’t like the idea of
writing other music. I have done other things, such as
when LaMaMa, E.T.C., the off-off Broadway Company — Ellen
Stewart’s group — wanted a piece. They
commissioned me, and I knew there was no point in writing a micro-tonal
or a re-tuned anything for them.
BD: Just very
conventional stuff?
BJ: Yeah, I
would have to. So that was a very
different thing, and I like the piece. It turned out well.
It’s recorded, and it’s called Carmilla.
BD: When you
write some music, what do you expect of the
audience that comes to hear either an old piece or a new piece?
BJ: I don’t
care whether they know that there’s
anything funny about the tuning, and often they don’t. Most
people listening to String Quartet #4,
which is the one the Kronos
Quartet played here recently, don’t know that there’s anything odd
about that piece. You would have to look at the score to see,
because it sounds in tune and that’s all there is to it. There’s
some blues inflections, and they’re not done by the seat of your pants,
so to speak; they’re notated. What I did was to figure out what
blues
artists were doing. It involves the seventh partial
relationships, which apparently were there all along in African folk
music. That’s probably where it came from, and got into
American blues that way. It’s a very characteristic
sound, so I used that and people are aware of that, but it’s not
any more so than half a dozen other composers you could name, including
Gershwin.
BD: Then are
you a creator or a
reflector?
BJ: I don’t
care. It doesn’t seem very important to me. Insofar as I
have used eclectic style
content, it’s been in order to prove how different each of those things
sounds when it’s treated this way — which is a
rather different
motivation from what one usually has. For example, during the
fifties, under the influence of Milhaud — who
was after all my teacher — I was writing
neoclassic music like a lot of people were, a
lot like Stravinsky in many cases. That music had a sort of
double intention. It was to reflect the past, and at
the same time, the present. Later I came back to some of those
intentions, especially in the Suite,
which is the piece they’re going
to play at ASUC [American Society of University Composers] this
year. That
is a piece which is deliberately very eclectic, and it’s very
neoclassic. The last movement is a sort of homage to
Milhaud. It’s very Milhaud, but with a difference
because this thing is tuned to the overtones between the 16th and the
32nd partial. So an octave is twelve of those partials, rather
than a
normal octave. It’s very strange if you play it, like if you
tried to play Bach on it or anything like that. On the other
hand, composing for it I can make it sound extremely normal, which
most of the piece does. Yet every now and then, something
very strange happens. I’ve got a blues movement in that, too,
because some of the relationships are available and also sound like
blues. This is a kind of scatter-shot way of getting at the whole
thing,
but to try to really center on what you asked me, I feel that what I’m
doing in one aspect is trying to prove the worth of a new
discovery. It’s not a new discovery, it’s really an
old discovery. It’s like saying people used to grow food
this way, and it’s better than the way we’ve been doing it.
People used to tune music this way, and it’s better. If you
build on that, you can get something which is very much more
contemporary-sounding than all the twelve-tone music you could ask
for. It’s much more dissonant than anything that any of these
hyper-dissonant composers ever wrote, if you want it to be.
BD: Are you
going for dissonance?
BJ:
Occasionally. The middle movement of the Suite is called Etude
and it sounds like Iannis Xenakis. [See my Interview wih Iannis
Xenakis.]
It’s
hyper-dissonant, but it is a twelve-tone piece,
which Xenakis is not. He doesn’t write twelve-tone. It
is certainly atonal. It’s an atonal treatment of those partials,
and it’s a lot more dissonant than an atonal treatment of the twelve
notes we usually use. As Partch said, “Not only
consonance, but also dissonance is heightened,” and people forget
that. So I can do very
dissonant stuff as I please.
BD: Coming
back to my question,
then, what do you expect of the audience?
BJ: I like
them to respond with a powerful, affective
reaction to what I’ve done. That isn’t asking something of
them, that’s asking something of me — that I
should produce that
reaction in the audience. I also want them to accept the music
readily, but the more they listen to it, I would want it to be more
interesting. A lot of effort goes into what has
traditionally been called the art that conceals art, the effort to make
it extremely complex but to sound extremely simple. String
Quartet #4 is a good example of that, but it’s actually an
extremely
complex piece. There is an analysis of it in Perspectives of
New Music that’ll curl your hair, but the piece is immediately
accessible. It sounds like Aaron Copland; you can
get to it instantly, and that combination pleases me. That
complexity underneath means the more you listen to
it, the more there is to find. It’s like the difference between
reading a murder mystery by no matter who, and reading Crime and
Punishment.
BD: Do you
always strive to write Crime and
Punishment?
BJ: Yeah, if
possible.
BD: Is there
any entertainment in your music at all?
BJ:
Yeah. Sure.
BD: Where is
the balance, then, between the artistic
creation and the entertaining creation?
BJ: I don’t
find that there’s any need to make that
distinction. For example, in writing Carmilla, which
is a rock opera — it isn’t really a rock opera, but it’s the nearest I
could get to one, not knowing anything at all about
rock music — but it is deliberately playing upon
people’s most
vulnerable musical taste. It ingratiates itself with you, and
it does this in order to get hold of your guts and squeeze and wrench
because it’s a very violent story about
vampires. It takes the idea very seriously, so that you begin
to get the feeling that this is really about some kind of sex
perversion, and it’s very unsettling. The whole point there is to
do what the
vampire does — to seduce, not rape. This
approach, without the
melodrama, which of course that is, is ingredient in just about
everything I do. The idea is to get to people, in order to say
something that I want to say, whatever that is. Sometimes
it’s totally nonverbal. I really couldn’t tell you what I said,
but I do know that I wanted to say it, and that it is
different from anything else I ever tried to say or, for that
matter, different than anybody else that I also look at musically.
*
* *
* *
BD: How has
what you’re trying to say
changed in the last ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years?
BJ: In about 1970 a
lot of things
happened. I had a very big health crisis, which I needn’t go into
in detail, but it was very frightening and it turned out well. I
didn’t suddenly discover that I was dying or
something like that, but it was as bad as that, and it really
frightened me. I really didn’t know for a year or for a
couple of years whether I would make it through or not. During
the time I was writing Carmilla,
which may be
one reason that’s such a bitter piece. That experience threw me
back on religion, which I had let drop,
and having re-discovered that, I found I was much happier. It
isn’t a matter of comfort, but a matter of responsibility. It’s
like having felt that I had been evading a kind of responsibility for a
long time, and that it was time I quit evading that. So
my whole style, everything I wanted to do, changed. I wanted to
stop writing music that was accessible only to other composers and
specialized concerts of “new music.” I wanted to write for more
people than that, and more ordinary people. I wanted to write
music my wife would like. I wanted to write music that people
that
I knew would never go to those new music concerts, would nevertheless
like. And yet, I wanted to interest the people that I had already
been trying to interest, who were going to those new music concerts,
and whose whole focus was around that sort of thing. So with that
double intention, it sent me into asking how I could make
the work so complicated that it will be interesting, and yet so simple
that it will be immediately accessible. I found I was trying
to write a very different kind of music. The Mass was one of the first pieces I
wrote in that
way, a little choral piece, which was a setting of a poem my daughter
wrote. What I was doing
was trying to write music that was instantly reachable, but which was
quite different from anything that people had ever heard,
but in a subtle way so that when they really began to get into it,
there was a difference between it and other things. They wouldn’t
necessarily understand this, but which is nevertheless very
perceptible, and it was the intonation that enabled me to do
that. In order to make sure that it would work, what I did
was to bring in the higher partials. I had been dealing up to
that point in what Partch called “five-limit,”
that is to say, no
prime numbers of overtones over the fifth partial, one-three-five,
which actually does refer to the triad, although
what we call the third is the fifth, and what we call the fifth is the
third, in terms of the partials. You can develop triads so that
you get eighty-one notes per octave. That eighty-one happens to
be what
I did on that piano, but fifty-three and sixty-five in the quartet, and
just any number of notes that you happen to want. You’re
still not using anything new harmonically; it’s
all based on the same intervals that everybody already knew. You
can see why I did that. To ask people to deal with
intervals that they don’t already know is much harder. If they’re
dealing with just simply pure versions
of the intervals that they are already very familiar with, the task is
easier. I thought that, but in fact it’s much harder because
people are
used to playing fast and loose with those intervals, and it’s very hard
to get them out of that habit. Whereas if they think they’ve got
to play something they know they never heard before, and yet it has to
sound in tune, they actually rise to the occasion a little
better. I was bringing in the seventh and eleventh partials — not
all at once, but bit by bit, bringing me up to the level of
complexity about where Harry Partch was.
BD: It sounds
like you’re taking all of
the performer-inspiration out of it, and making them rely exactly on
these precise intervals and precise notations.
BJ: Well yes,
but what happens is that I’ve got a very much closer approximation to
this ideal that you want
to always suggest to people. Then they can realize it how they
will, and it’s amazing how much more subtle that people can
be, and how they will get nuances. I would
particularly think that the two string quartets, #5 and #6, would interest you in that way,
because both of those
groups really get hold of those intonation problems and do
something with it. It goes way beyond what I knew it would
be! It isn’t different from what I knew it would be, it’s
just more so. It’s as if they got my vision, and being
players,
they were able to do more with it than I could! This is what you
always want.
BD: So then
despite this exactness of notation,
you’re expecting more out of the score each time it’s played?
BJ: Which
sounds just cruel, but in fact, it’s really very good. There’s
rather an interesting discussion of
Knocking Piece. Roger
Reynolds got interested in that piece, and
when he wrote his book Mind Models,
he discussed it briefly, and what he says it does is to push
thresholds. [See my Interview with Roger
Reynolds.] It pushes on thresholds of ability, and because it
does that, it stimulates a person to play right at the tip of his
ability, which of course is what any great performer always wants to
do. This almost guarantees that because you’re working so
hard to get those things right, and when you get them right, it feels
just
marvelous and there’s a kind of an exhilaration that happens!
George Hunter said that about the
un-notated, intonational problems of fourteenth and fifteenth century
music. When they rehearse Machaut or Dufay, they would sit and
listen to these things until they suddenly
found it just slipped into the right intonation, and then they would
just savor it. It’s just beautiful that way; the whole thing was
a kind of slightly ecstatic experience of getting
the whole thing to have that glow about it. That’s a very
romantic way of describing it, but it works. It
feels more like what the performer is actually experiencing to talk
about it that way. Hunter was the first person to point that out
to
me. It was, indeed, an emotional reaction that
you sort of knew. When I heard Indian performers play for the
first time live, it was in somebody’s home, so there was
a time to sit down and talk with them. I was asking about the
significance of the ragas and what they meant, and why they were played
at a certain time of day and what it meant. I also asked
why there were spring ragas and fall ragas,
and how that worked. They were explaining that Rasa, which
is their term for emotional content, was what the player
memorized, not the raga. He memorized the emotional content and
the raga was right when it expressed that precisely. It’s just
backwards from what we think
about. If we get it right, it will have the
right emotional content.
BD: You’re
saying put the emotion first?
BJ: Play
Beethoven right and it will move everybody. But they go the other
way around. If you
move everybody, then you must be playing it right. [Both
laugh] And that was, again, a lesson. It’s turned
my head around to think differently.
BD: Have you
basically been pleased with the
performances you’ve heard of your works?
BJ: What I’ve
done is gotten
into an area that frightens off people that aren’t good enough, so
I don’t very often have bad performances. I have no performance
or I have a good one. That’s one of the things that happens
when you notate everything this precisely, and it’s one of the
things that happens when you’re dealing with ear training. You’re
asking people to extend their ear training, and go on and
do things that they never thought they learned how to do. It’s
willy-nilly what I’ve had to
have, but yes, I think I’m very pleased. It took me
ten years to gain enough respect to be able to deal with those
performers that they would even look at my music! It might have
taken me longer than that, except for having certain people really push
what I did. I am better-known than I have any right to be,
considering how seldom my music is performed. I think that’s
because people remember
it. It’s different enough that it sticks in their minds.
I’m not sure that’s really what it is that makes
them remember it, but apparently they do. It’s interesting.
I have heard that said about Schoenberg, that his reputation
is out of all proportion to the number of times people have heard his
music. It’s true, but it’s that good! It
may be ever so forbidding, but it’s just very good, and when you get
into it, you have a kind of an experience that you don’t forget
readily. So consequently, without being performed very much, he
can remain one of the most important composers of our era. I
think he may never be performed very much because it’s
extremely hard to do it really well!
BD: Do you
think there will ever come a time when your
music will be easy?
BJ: I don’t
know. It’s getting easier; there’s
no question about that. I’ve had that experience that you hear
described so much, people telling Tchaikovsky that the Second Piano Concerto was
impossible, and that no one would ever be able to play it. [Both
laugh] Now everybody plays it. I mean,
literally everybody. It’s one of the things you have to play.
I’ve had that experience with Knocking
Piece. The people who
played it at first said, “We can’t play the whole piece. We’re
going to have to make a cut. We can’t stand it. The concentration
effort is too great and we just can’t.” So I said, “Well all
right, do what you can.” So they did what they could, but the
next time it was played, they played it all! It gets easier
and easier and easier, and now I hear theory classes learning bits of
it. You pose a problem, and if it’s a reasonable
problem and people solve it, then it gets into the pedagogy,
and it’s easy to communicate to other people how you do it. This
happens with the intonation. Even for
groups that have only heard one example of that kind of
thing, apparently most of them grasp it right away. I
have seldom ever had to go to a group and really work them hard to
begin with. What usually happens is that they take it and they
work on it for a long time, and then they bring me in and I tell them
what’s wrong. There usually isn’t a lot wrong. Certain
things do happen. For instance, there were going to be
three performances, not one, on this ASUC Series. I’m the
keynote speaker and they were going to do that as a gesture. But
two
of them fell through because there’s a lot of music being
played, and to undertake things that are that hard is very difficult to
do.
BD: As a
general rule, would you rather have your
piece played on an all-contemporary concert or would you rather have it
be in the middle of a mixed concert?
BJ: The
second; I would much rather. For one thing, I
think that generally all new-music concerts are terribly fatiguing to
the listener, and you fight that no matter what your piece
is and no matter where on the program your piece is. If it’s
first,
the audience isn’t warmed up; if it’s anywhere else, there is no
telling
what it came after. It’s just difficult for the audience, so that
no matter what the piece is like, it is in trouble to be in that kind
of setting. That’s one reason I wanted not out of those
concerts forever; I wanted at least to write music that wouldn’t be
thought of as only suitable in those concerts. That’s what’s
happened with the string quartets, and most of the
piano music. Virginia Gaburo, who plays both
of the big microtonal piano pieces — the Sonata and
the Suite — has
programmed them generally with quite different
music. She has to have an extra piano, one that’s tuned specially
for that, but she said that it certainly works much better
than to have it on a new-music program. On the record it’s with
Cage and Nancarrow, as
odd ways to use the piano. [See my Interview with John Cage,
and my Interview
with
Conlon Nancarrow.] That is what they focused on.
*
* *
* *
BD: In your
opinion, where is music going
today?
BJ: That’s very
hard to answer. I
certainly don’t think it’s going where people thought it was going
fifty years ago, but I’d like to think that what’s happening
is a humanizing of music, or re-humanizing of music. It got
terribly de-humanized in the face of the twentieth century, and I think
that the greater composers are exceptions. They’re not inhuman
like that, but if you start listening to all the rest of it, then you
see that an awful lot of it had its... I don’t know what happened
exactly,
but there’s something very strange about the emotional content, for one
thing. People seem to be primarily concerned either with
intellectual constructs, or with hyper-emotional states, like abnormal
or
insane states. All this stems from people like Berg
with the two operas which deal a lot with abnormal psychology, or
Schoenberg with the Pierrot Lunaire.
I’m sure it all
stems from that, but it also stems from the feeling of alienation,
and all those things that people talk about in contemporary psychology.
BD: Are we’re
getting away from this now?
BJ: I hope we
are. I think maybe we are. Maybe what is happening is that
the complexity of
contemporary life has knocked down to a kind of simple phase in terms
of how people begin to experience it. With computers and with
TV and a lot of the things that we take for granted as technological
main pillars of what we do nowadays, life actually gets
simpler on account of those things. On the one hand it is getting
more complicated, but it’s a lot easier to cope with it, and I think
that part of that has actually relaxed people somewhat. There’s a
movement that I sense to
rediscover the importance of the interior life as people traditionally
have described it. You see it a lot in people
who are overtly religious and give more attention to things like
meditation and
contemplation, and less attention to the more
external aspects. I think that this inwardness is helping
to correct a lot of the stresses in early twentieth
century music. It’s
been a violent period, Lord knows, and it reflects the external
world, I guess.
BD: Are you
then optimistic about the future of music?
BJ: I don’t
know whether to be or not. I feel
good about what I’ve been able to do, because I feel that if people go
in that direction at all, it will enable them to be complex in a way
that’s understandable. I know they need to be complex because
it’s clear. We’ve got a very complicated world that we live
in; you cannot be simple-minded about it and live. So we’re
stuck with the complexity,
but does it have to make us neurotic? Maybe not.
[Laughs] There’s a kind of analog between how to
deal with complex relationships sanely, and how to deal with complex
pitch relationships and still be in tune, so that it really does sound
complex and nobody would think it was Mozart again — not
that that would be bad, but anything again is not so
good. We are finding how to be as simple in our way as he was in
his way.
BD: You say “anything
again is not so good.”
Even going to another performance of the same work is not so good?
BJ: No,
another performance of the
same work is going to be new in some sense or it isn’t any good.
If it is just a carbon copy, then it will be dull, and I think that’s
what’s wrong with getting your favorite record out and playing it
again — which I don’t do anymore, or very
little. I found that I
wore out certain pieces so that I didn’t hear them anymore.
BD: You wore
them out in your ear?
BJ:
Yes. I heard them too much. I heard exactly the
same performance over and over again! A little groove is
worn in my ear, so that I know exactly what’s going to happen every
second, and it’s not good! Of course it’s a lot better if it’s a
superb performance to begin with, because that means that you have not
discovered everything in it on one or two listenings. Then it’ll
take you maybe fifteen or twenty listenings to get out of it what was
put
in to begin with. But that’s a great performance. Some of
them are, some of them aren’t, you know. [Both laugh]
BD: Are there
perhaps too many young composers coming along today?
BJ: There are
an awful lot, and I think
it’s like everything else — there’s just too much of everything.
One learns how to cope with that, and one of the ways is to turn it
off, which I think to everybody’s unhappiness is what has been done to
the majority of contemporary composers. People are just turning
them off almost before they had a chance to get started,
which is a damned shame because there are a lot of babies being thrown
out in that bathwater. But if you really are different in an
interesting way, then I think there’s a good chance people will notice
because there are too many people who aren’t, and the contrast is
fairly obvious after a while. The problem is
worse than it probably was once, but it’s the same, it’s not a
different kind of problem. I’m sure in the eighteenth
century in Europe, that to be a successful Kapellmeister was much more
likely than to be a Bach. There were a lot of those, and I
suppose too many, maybe.
*
* *
* *
BD: There is
a
work in your catalogue listed as being a chamber opera. Would you
tell me about it?
BJ: There are
two. There’s Carmilla,
which is the rock opera, and Gertrude,
a neo-classic
piece. Both of them were written with Wilford Leach. Leach
is the director of New York productions of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and of The Pirates of
Penzance, so he’s better known for
that. He’s a very interesting
playwright and I’ve known him since we were in college together.
He’s the one I always ask to work with if I can. He’s too
busy now, I guess, but the last thing we worked on was Carmilla,
and Gertrude was the thing
before that. Gertrude
is a
spoof, in a way. He did his thesis on Gertrude Stein, so in a way
it’s about Gertrude Stein, but it isn’t, exactly. It’s a
commentary on the legend of Gertrude
Stein and Isadora Duncan and Ernest Hemmingway and a lot of the
American ex-patriots. So it’s like a very ‘in’ joke, and the
whole thing is essentially funny. It takes just a few
players, but what’s hard about it is that the players, ideally, if
you wanted to do it absolutely well, should be mime dancers and able to
sing and act — all those things.
BD: That’s
asking an awful lot!
BJ: Yes, it
is. Consequently, the way we’ve
always done it is to have surrogate performers like Brecht. You
just sit them beside each other,
and when dance is called for, the dancer gets up and does it.
When singing is called for, the singer gets up and does it, and
when straight acting is called for, somebody else gets up and does it.
BD: All being
the same character?
BJ: Yeah,
which is okay. You can do
that by costuming them all the same way, and doing a few other things
like
that. It’s a detachment that’s required in order to get that
done, but with a kind of ironic text, it’s ideal.
BD: Are there
any other operas still in your mind?
BJ: No.
It’s so hard for people who
have to do a lot already — be on stage, memorize
the whole
role, act and all the rest — to worry about the
intonation as much as I
demand. So I haven’t tried to make that happen. The only
person I
know who has is Alois Hába in the opera, The Mother, where it is
quarter tones, eighth tones, sixth tones, etc. I’m not sure
what he used, but there are very elaborate tonal systems.
Apparently it was very successful, but I’ve never
seen it.
BD: When
you’re presented with a number of
commissions, how do you decide which ones you’ll accept and which ones
you’ll decline?
BJ: I don’t get
that many so I usually
accept them. Well, actually, I don’t. Sometimes
people ask me to write pieces and I
just can’t find that I know what to write for them, so I end up not
doing it; or I try and I don’t like it, so I never give it to
them. But other times, somebody asks me to do
something, and I do find the right thing to do. So I go ahead
and do it, and I didn’t even expect to write that piece. I hadn’t
been thinking about it or anything else, but for
some reason something worked. It’s very hard to explain exactly
why that happens. I’m writing a cello piece for Laurien
Laufman. I hadn’t planned
to write a cello piece and I didn’t particularly want to, but I got
an idea that suited and I liked the way she played. So I just
wrote this piece very quickly and it worked fine. The other
one that I can think of is a piece I did for Richard Rood, a violinist
in a string quartet for New Music of
America when it was in Chicago. They played one of my
quartets and he liked it, so he said, “I have a group that is a
trio with a clarinet. I’m the violinist and there’s a
cellist. We have a
pianist, but you probably would want to use the trio,
because we don’t want to re-tune the piano.” So I said, “All
right, I’ll write
you a piece.” I had wanted to write a piece involving a
woodwind with strings, and that suited me very well. It’s a very
light piece and not very long, but it’s pleasant. So there’s one
that I just did without knowing
that I wanted to do it. Ward Swingle commissioned a
piece for the Swingle Singers. I had done them one at his request
earlier and he didn’t like it. What I did in that case was to do
a big band jazz piece for them with microtones. They said the
microtones made it
so hard that they couldn’t put it on their pops concerts, but they
didn’t want to put it on another kind of concert because they didn’t
think it fit. So it fell between, and they never did it. It
was done later by Kenneth Gaburo and the New Music
Choral Ensemble, and it’s a nice piece. [See my Interview with Kenneth
Gaburo.] But anyway, I got to
thinking about the New Swingle Singers and he said, “I want you to
write the piece that you never wrote
for me.” So I did. I decided that it was going to be a
totally uncompromising statement of where I wanted to be technically,
so it’s ferociously hard.
BD: Too hard?
BJ: No, it
isn’t too hard, but it’s at
the limit for one-on-a-part vocal. It wasn’t that I wanted to
make it so hard,
but I wanted to utilize all the overtones up through the sixteenth
partial. The
others aren’t prime, so they result from combinations. It was a
very
complex harmonic and melodic palette to be using. Also, I always
wanted to deal with Gerard Manley Hopkins, and that’s what those
sonnets are. They’re very powerful, being about spiritual
crisis and death, and they’re absolutely without parallel in the
English language. I think they’re amazing poems, so I was
really asking a lot of myself, but that was something that I just knew
I wanted to do. I wasn’t sure I could do it, but I wanted very
much to.
BD: When
you’re writing a piece, how do
you know when it’s finished?
BJ: If you’re
setting a
poem, that isn’t so much of a problem because in a certain sense, one
whole aspect of the work is already complete. You only try to
make
your contribution to it as appropriate as you can, and then you know
when you’re finished. Very often I will make a very
elaborate intellectual plan for the piece, and I will then structure
the piece around that. I plan the climaxes. I plan
everything including all the psychological events to work within that
structure, so when I come to the end of the structure, that’s it.
So I’m not usually through-composing and working blind. I often
compose that way if I’m dealing with a text, because then I
have something that is already composed, and I am dealing with it.
BD: Do you
ever find that when
you’re writing a piece, it goes in a direction you didn’t plan?
BJ: Oh yeah,
sure, sometimes to the extent
that you have to start all over. It’s as if the piece had a will
of its own,
and you only discover that after a while, and then have to undo all
those things that you were trying to impose on it which it wouldn’t
accept. I think it’s because anything we actually compose and
anything you do creatively is coming out of a
deeper stratum of yourself. I’m not trying to talk depth
psychology, it’s just that it’s not the ordinary level that is
speaking. The level that is speaking is not susceptible to your
everyday will. You can’t just turn it on and off like a
faucet. It comes and goes pretty much of its own
accord. That’s where all these symbols that have been used for
centuries come from — like the muse — because
they better describe the experience than something else does.
You’re not really being dictated to, but at the same time, something is
happening which you do not have volitional control over to a complete
extent, by any means. You can only modify it. It’s as if
you have a nozzle, and you can make a fine spray or a
coarse spray, but you can’t really change what’s coming out. It’s
water and that’s what’s
available, and what comes out is often is very
disconcerting. I think that’s
what’s wrong with Marxist theory when it comes to art. The idea
there is that you express true things about human life in art,
and you know beforehand what truths are so you use art to put
them across to other people. Well, art just doesn’t work that
way. It’s going to go its own way, and you don’t know what you’re
saying until you’ve said it!
BD: So, it’s
a constant discovery?
BJ: Yeah, and
so I think that that’s just
wrong-headed. That does not describe the way how art works, and
that is why Russians and all other Marxist countries always have a
problem with the arts. It’s because the Marxist theory just
doesn’t work that way in art. If you really believe and live
according to those
things, it would come out in your art anyway, and you wouldn’t even
have to try to make it do that. So the idea that you try to make
it do that is
wrong to begin with. That’s just an illustration of
what I’m saying, but there are a lot of other things that are like
that. If you are going to tailor-make what you’re doing for,
let’s say, a particular TV audience or a
commercial purpose, you’re up against a similar
problem. If you’re really making art, you don’t
know what’s really going to come out. You have to have enough
rope to hang yourself — which you might do [both
laugh] — but enough to make something
work! If
you’re on too tight a leash, nothing happens. It really has to be
loose. You have
to have a lot of lead to go and do things. It’s a lot like
science. You can’t just dictate to science; it’s what they’re
going to discover.
BD: Do you
ever go back and revise your scores?
BJ:
Yeah. I don’t too often go back to old
pieces and re-do them, but I have done that.
BD: What do
you say to future generations when the
musicologists are digging around and declare, “Here is the
urtext, so let us do that.”
BJ: I hope
they’ll have the good sense that
I’ve heard people express in terms of Hindemith’s revision of one of
his song cycles, the Marienleben.
The earlier version is much
better than the later version. And I hope people will be
able to say in other
cases that the later version is better than the earlier version, if it
is.
BD: So you
will let posterity decide which is the better
version?
BJ: Yeah,
sure in that case. I can’t think of a good example of that,
but some of Rimsky-Korsakov’s pieces that he re-did are genuinely
improved.
BD: What
always comes to mind for me is
Bruckner, but that’s because he was being screamed at by so many
people.
BJ:
[Laughs] I think if you’re that good,
even if you listen to all those people and get messed up, you don’t get
completely messed up.
BD: Is
composing fun?
BJ: Yes, of
course it is. It’s like any
other kind of creative activity — there’s a lot
of pain
involved and there are unpleasant reactions. I
suppose a lot of it is like having to deal with human
relationships that you wish you didn’t have to deal with, like being a
parent. There are certain things you would just as soon
not have to do, but you do have to do them. In a way they’re
the most rewarding things, but there’s an element of dread, almost, in
getting into them. Doing really important things with
your children often has that feeling about it.
BD: Do you
regard your scores as other children?
BJ: No, not
really, but there’s enough of
a parallel that there can be at least a little bit of comparison
made. The point is not that they’re like people, but one’s
feeling about them is a little bit like a parent has about a child, I
suppose. You have to let them go at a point. After they
have been played and they have their
life, you sort of don’t mess into them too much.
BD: Is the
audience always right in its opinions?
BJ: No, of
course not. In fact, audiences have
been resoundingly wrong at times, given the later
history of a work and what they thought it was and whether they
liked it or not. There’s nothing foolproof. It’s just that
in the long
run music is a communication of a sort, so if it doesn’t connect
ever, there’s something drastically wrong. So eventually, the
audience is not so much right as necessary.
BD: Thank you
for being a composer. [Picks up the text of Johnston’s
lecture for the upcoming symposium]
BJ: Well,
it’s a pleasure to do it. [Pointing to the printed text] I
had quite a struggle
writing that address because to say what I want to
say in it demands that I deal with what I am doing and how I think
about
it, and it gets to be I, I, I. I wanted very much to avoid that
kind
of ‘and then I wrote’ ex cathedra
attitude. It was not easy to do. Not that I
tend to want to speak that way, but I do believe in what I’m
doing, and when I get to talking about it, I can get very passionate
sometimes. It can sound to people as though I’m saying, “Why
don’t you quit doing all those things you’re doing and do
this?” which is really not what I meant! On the other hand, I
think what I’m doing is important,
or I wouldn’t do it.
BD: But you
allow for all kinds of other creativity?
BJ: To be
done also, yeah. What I hope I’ve
done is to put that into context, but that’s what made it hard to
write. Also, I tend to want to write very terse, densely packed
stuff, and that’s what I’ve done. So it’s going to be hard to
read out loud.
BD: I’m glad
we finally got together.
BJ: Yeah, I
am, too.
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© 1987 Bruce Duffie
This interview was recorded in Chicago on April 7,
1987.
Portions (along with recordings)
were used on WNIB in 1991 and 1996, and on WNUR in 2006. This
transcription was
made and posted on this
website in 2012.
To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been
transcribed and posted on this website, click here. To
see the list of all of my guests and where their material has been
used, 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.