Composer / Flutist  Janice  Misurell - Mitchell

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie




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Janice Misurell-Mitchell is a composer, flutist and vocal artist who lives and works in Chicago. She teaches about music and politics and contemporary music at the School of the Art Institute. In addition to her teaching she presents lecture-recitals and workshops related to her compositions, extended techniques for the flute, and the relation of text and music.

Misurell-Mitchell offers a unique vision of American contemporary music. Drawing on traditional Western European classical elements, she fashions pieces that reach into the rich sources of jazz, popular and ethnic music. “Her attempts at stretching music’s boundaries—by incorporating improvisation and performance art…have produced refreshing results.” [Ted Shen, Chicago Reader]

Misurell-Mitchell has been a featured composer and performer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the UNC Greensboro New Music Festival, Art Chicago, the International Alliance for Women in Music Congress in Beijing, the Voices of Dissent series at the Bowling Green College of Musical Arts, the Festival of Winds in Novara, Italy, and the Randspiele Festival in Berlin. Her honors include grants from Meet the Composer, the Illinois Arts Council, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Ragdale Foundation, and awards and commissions from the National Flute Association, the Youth Symphony of DuPage, the International Alliance for Women in Music, Northwestern University and numerous performers. She was chosen as a “Chicagoan of the Year” in classical music for 2002 by the Chicago Tribune. Her works are performed throughout the United States and Europe and have been played on the Public Broadcasting Network, at the National Flute Association Conventions, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Symphony Center in Chicago, and at Carnegie Hall. She is a member of the Six Degrees Composers, and was a member of CUBE Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, where she was Co-Artistic Director for twenty years.

A composer of challenging music for flute, she has received commissions and awards from the National Flute Association for several of her solo pieces, described by Nicole Riner in The Flutist Quarterly: “…she imagines new ways of involving the flute in performance. It is a very specific style but it is done incredibly well.” Uncommon Time and Sometimes the City is Silent, for solo flute, both commissioned for the NFA High School Soloist Competitions, have been praised by teachers and students alike for their musical and practical approach to extended techniques. Recent pieces that incorporate text within the flute writing, such as Blooz Man/Poet Woman, and Profaning the Sacred II, flute/voice, are virtuosic works that have excited a wide range of audiences; Profaning the Sacred II was the winner of the 2009 New Genre Prize from the International Alliance for Women in Music. Her most recent piece, The Art of Noise, for flute and percussion, draws on a text by early 20th century futurist, Luigi Russolo, and has been widely performed.

Since the 1990s Ms. Misurell-Mitchell has been developing music combined with speech, theatre and dance; she has produced videos of these works as well.  After the History, for voice/flute and percussion, presents views of war through a variety of musical perspectives. Scat/Rap Counterpoint, for voice and percussion, features nine different characters, played by the composer, who engage in rhyming dialogues on the state of the arts in the U.S.: “the evening’s showstopper,” writes the late Andrew Patner, music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times.  Give Me an A! for voice/flute and Are You Ready?  for solo voice, have transformed staid concert audiences into responsive jazz audiences. Her most recent work in this genre, Everything Changes, for flute/voice and percussion, received rave reviews from the audience at the international exhibition, ArtChicago.

She recently has expanded her area of vocal performance to works by other composers and writers: Berlin composer and pianist Stefan Litwin, Chicago composers Lawrence Axelrod and Patricia Morehead, and in presentations of poetry, both by contemporary poets and the Dadaists. She also has created music to be performed with readings by contemporary poets, such as Chicago’s Nina Corwin.

A composer of innovative works for larger ensembles as well, Misurell-Mitchell has created highly acclaimed pieces such as Luminaria, an orchestral work recorded by the Czech Radio Symphony, and Sermon of the Middle-Aged Revolutionary Spider, a musical monodrama for tenor, chamber ensemble and Gospel choir based on the poetry of Angela Jackson and written for the late world-renowned tenor William Brown.

In 2010 she released the CD, Uncommon Time, a collection of her music for voice, flute and percussion, on Southport Records: “Misurell-Mitchell…cuts loose with this sometimes arresting, often outrageous, always entertaining collection of avant-gardish pieces for voices, flute and percussion. Her fearless channeling of the great Cathy Berberian in “Are You Ready?” has to be heard to be disbelieved”, John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune. Her most recent CD, Vanishing Points, music for solo, duo, quartet was chosen by Peter Margasak of The Chicago Reader as one of the top five new music recordings in “Our Favorite Music of 2013”. A rave review by Frank J. Oteri is online at NewMusicBox. Her solo recordings are on the Southport Label; others include MMC Recordings, OPUS ONE Recordings, Capstone Records, Arizona University Recordings and meerenai.com; her videos After the History, Scat/Rap Counterpoint, Sermon of the Spider and others are available on Youtube. https://www.jmisurell-mitchell.com

Misurell-Mitchell received degrees from Northwestern University, the Peabody Conservatory and Goucher College. Her primary teachers in composition were William Karlins, Ben Johnston, Stefan Grové and Robert Hall Lewis, and Bonnie Lake and James Pappoutsakis in flute. Additional study has been with Joanie Pallatto, vocal improvisation; Barbara Ann Martin, classical voice; workshops with Jaap Blonk, Lynn Book and Theo Beckman in vocal performance and improvisation; Bunky Green, jazz improvisation; Harvey Sollberger, contemporary flute; Ralph Shapey, conducting. Before teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago she taught at DePaul University, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, Roosevelt University, the American Conservatory of Music and Chicago State University.


==  Text of the biography from the artist's website.  
==  Links in this box and below refer to my interveiews elsewhere on my website.  BD  



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Janice Misurell-Mitchell is another of the fine Chicago composers whose music stretches the imagination and enlightens the spirits of those who listen to both live performances and recordings.  It was my pleasure to sit down with her on the first day of May of 1995 for a conversation.  We did get into some forward-looking ideas, some of which have now (in 2022) become reality!

Portions were aired on WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago three weeks later, and again the following year.  Now, it pleases me to be able to present our entire chat . . . . .


Bruce Duffie:   You are both a teacher and a composer.  How do you divide your time between those two very taxing tasks?

Janice Misurell-Mitchell:   I have to divide my time in different ways depending on the time of year.  During the school year, I try to restrict the classwork preparation time to a certain number of days, and composition time to other days, and on the days that I don’t compose, I spend some time looking at what I’m doing.  Sometimes this is writing notes to myself, because I want to keep it as part of an ongoing process.  This even takes place when I go to concerts.  If I have something that’s in mind, I’m usually writing it down on the program.  Sometimes I take a little notebook with me, and when I listen to other people’s pieces, I’m also getting ideas, or it spurs me on to continue working with whatever I’m doing.

janicemm BD:   [With mock horror]  You mean you swipe ideas from other people???

JM-M:   Well...  [Both laugh]  Some.  I think we all do, but it happens in a different way.  I like to recommend to my students that when they go to a concert, sometimes hearing someone else’s work helps you solve problems, or helps you refine and define more of what you are doing in your own.  So it’s not even a matter of stealing or borrowing of any sort, but rather your mind is working in compositional channels, and sometimes those channels start working in a little more fluid way.

BD:   Do you also find some things that you would not do?

JM-M:   When hearing someone else’s work?  I don’t really think of it that way.  I don’t personalize it to that extent.  It’s more about thinking in terms of whether or not it fulfills what they’re trying to do.

BD:   It’s either positive or nothing?

JM-M:   Very rarely is it nothing.  You’re seeing that as positive.  That doesn’t mean that I’m being positive about a given work just on the basis of whether or not it’s succeeds in what it wants to do.  I may think that what it wants to do is something I would never do, and I don’t think it’s that good an idea.

BD:   Coming back to your own music, when you’re writing, is it what you want to do, or it is what the music wants to do?

JM-M:   It’s both.  That is a very good question, and I remember way back when I was just finding my way and developing my style, I heard Harvey Sollberger say to me, “You have this ideal of what you want the piece to be, and then there is the working out of that.  Those two are always  having a tug of war.”  At first I thought no, we always compose exactly what we want, but I was trying to be cantankerous at that point.  [Both laugh]  Now I realize that’s very true.  You have something in mind, an overall idea, but the working out is something that is often somewhat different.  You may have an overall shape or texture, or certain ideas in mind that are the things you do fulfill, but in the working out it inevitably changes.

BD:   Are there times then when the pencil is leading your hand across the page, and you have very little control?

JM-M:   I don’t write in that way.  I work through playing and singing things, and improvising, so it’s not exactly that the pencil would do that.  I would work things out either through playing or just singing something through, so it’s not a lack of control in that way at all.  If anything, it’s coming very much from me.

BD:   So you start it all in your brain, and then when it hits the page it’s already formed and polished?

JM-M:   Not polished, but since I’m doing it by either singing something through for a shape or a rhythm, or playing it through on the flute, or maybe trying it out at the piano, it’s not in a polished form.  That would be a basic idea, or maybe a basic series of pitches, or chords.  Then the way I start refining it is to start thinking in terms of the overall shape of the piece, and how it fits into the current idea and other things that I happen to be working with at the time.  Very often it would have to do with rhythm, or phrase lengths, or proportions of one phrase in relation to another, or texture ideas, or chordal ideas in some relation to another.  The raw material is what I get through on improvisation, and then I work things out in a very detailed way on paper.  So I can’t say that my hand starts running away, not in that sense.

BD:   But the music can start running away?

JM-M:   Yes.  I like to do improvisations and tape record them.  A lot of times I get basic ideas from that.  Within maybe ten or fifteen minutes of an improvisation I might find one or two things that I really want to use, and then that becomes the basic material, and I work it out.

BD:   But eventually it does hit the page in the form of little notes and squiggles?

JM-M:   Yes, right!

BD:   We’re moving now into the age of electronics where some people are actually composing into a machine, and it’ll come back at you either as sound, or as some kind of printed text.  But there’s no real working out with a pencil.

JM-M:   Right.

BD:   Is that a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing?

JM-M:   It’s a thing, and it depends how you use it.  I am very interested in going to that eventually, but not being primarily a keyboard person, I don’t have as great a need to do it.  When and if they ever develop something which is held transverse, like a flute, I will be extremely happy.  [Laughs]  Then you’ll hear a lot of new flute music, and we don’t need to work it out by copying.  That could be great.  It’s the same shift that people have to make from writing prose by hand to typing, or writing to a word processor.  You do make a shift, but in the beginning the hand feels very natural, so you say this is coming from me, and the typewriter is distant, or the keyboard is distant.  But once you start using the other medium, you start becoming more comfortable with it.  Now I really prefer to do all my prose and whatever I’m writing with word processing.  I used to believe extremely strongly in writing by hand.  I said, “That’s me, and this typed stuff never is!”  But that’s not true anymore, so I can see in the future I might be interested in going toward having a midi hookup, maybe within a year or two.

BD:   The word processor can correct spelling and grammar, and perhaps even sentence structure.  It might even be able to add ideas.  I wonder if the musical machine will wind up doing the same thing, and take control out of your hands, and have a life of its own.

JM-M:   [Laughs]  You could do that if you wanted to be very, very strict with yourself, and plug in a whole lot of parameters.  You could instruct it to have the piece include this or that.  People were doing that years and years ago with Fortran, because they were actually stipulating every milli-second.  So the piece was thought out ahead of time without actually being realized in real time.  That’s one way to work, but it’s an extreme form of this.  [When this interview was posted, JM-M said she was very pleased, and added this comment...  I had worked with Fortran briefly at Ohio State when Herbert Brün was a guest composer.  We had to create one minute of music using formulas that were basically like plusses and minuses.  It took a ton of time, but was a great exercise!  When I confronted Brün about whether or not he liked the result, he said, “If I don't, I put some lipstick on the piece.”  We argued a lot at first (I was only 23 years old) and then became great admirers.]

janicemm BD:   We have music, and we’re starting to get into virtual music.  At what time does it become non-music?

JM-M:   It’s all music in that it’s sound organized in time, but the question of how it’s organized may vary.

BD:   How do you decide which organizational process you’re going to use?

JM-M:   I have a lot of different ways of thinking about any piece I’m writing.  The sources usually are lots of different levels which I may talk about, and some of which I might not.  They may vary in that they could be inspired by another work, and that’s why I’ve decided to write it.  They may be inspired by something visual — paintings or landscapes or things like that — and that’s the case of a lot of things that I do, or they may be inspired by something a little bit more physical in the sense of dance or movement, which I’ve been interested in more and more lately.  So, it depends on the piece, and what it’s for.  How it works itself out is another part of the image.  Sometimes I may think a piece is about one thing, but in the course of working it out I discover it’s maybe more concretely about something else.  This is basically how I create.  I work through an idea of having an overall flow chart of how a piece is going to go, what the proportions are, what I might expect in terms of densities, rhythms, and, to some extent, the ideas of pitch.  But all that’s not part of the initial framework.  I do a lot of squiggles on graph paper, and then sometimes I refine it more by having the squiggles take certain shapes, which aren’t a language.

BD:   It doesn’t become Augenmusik, does it?

JM-M:   Ah, no, no, not like that!  [Both laugh]  Then, I start developing the basic material of the piece, which in my case frequently will be a tone-row that can be anywhere between twelve to fifteen notes.  Sometimes it’s two rows, or something a little bit more like a ‘traditional’ twelve-tone row, and then a second row.  Sometimes I’ll have something that seems to be twelve-tone, and then something which is much more blues-based, or more chromatic.  That’s how I think.  Sometimes I want to have more than just one particular melodic/harmonic idea, so I’d have that basic material.  Then, with just about every page of music I have a page that’s the working out sheet.  I have folders that have sheets called ‘With Page One’, and ‘With Page Two’, etc.  There the pencil flows very freely, because that’s where I try out a lot of things.  That way I can work out the basic material, and make all the mistakes, so when I’m really putting the piece together, I can have it more the way it ultimately is going to sound.

BD:   Should the audience that comes to hear a piece of your music be aware of these working-out pages, or should they just be aware of the sound and sight of the performance?

JM-M:   If they listen really carefully, they may know that there’s technical working-out.  When hearing what I’m writing, a lot of things reflect on each other.  So, that means my process of composition has not been from page one to page two, but rather with an awareness of things going back and forth.  That means there’s been some construction that’s been taking place independently of the piece.

BD:   Does anything wind up on the page just because it sounds cute?

JM-M:   [With a slight sneer and a bit of surprise]  Cute???

BD:   Or sounds pretty, sounds good, sounds nice, sounds lovely?

JM-M:   No, I don’t like pretty!  [She laughs]  I don’t work out pretty, or nice, or lovely.

BD:   [Searching for the right adjective]  Sounds great?

JM-M:   [Not angry, but being helpful]  That’s not a good word either.  It’s the sound I want, which sounds appropriate for the piece, and reinforces the identity of the piece.  They fit into the whole.  For example, when I look at the rows that I’ve written, there are some pieces I can consider very blue in the way they feel.  The rows have blue notes in them that were deliberately put in there.  Then there’s something I wrote in the past couple of years that I was thinking of as having a very bright sound.  When I look at that, the pitches and intervals in that row would give you more of a sense of whole tones, like major thirds.  So it has a brighter sound, a brighter overall effect.  If I’m writing harmonically for one piece versus the other, I’m going to be happy with the sound that compliments the overall sense of the piece.  It’s more a sense of what’s right or appropriate, not great, or wonderful, or beautiful, or any of those things.
*     *     *     *     *

BD:   When you’re writing a piece, are you conscious at all of the audience that’s going to be listening to it?
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JM-M:   Sometimes I am, in that I often write for performers, for particular people.  So, in that sense it’s not the audience that’s seated, but it’s rather the players, and I might be interested in trying to get at some aspect of their performance through the piece.  As far as the audience, or the people on the other side of the music stands, it vacillates.  It goes between me being there — and you’re your own worst critic, as you know — versus maybe family members from time to time.  It depends on the piece.  Sometimes it’s fellow composer friends, but I can’t say that I just write for myself, because I write in a more general way.  I think of how it’s going to sound.  I think of myself as a general listener, and I imagine the sounds coming from the stage to some distant space, somewhat abstractly, and I try to evaluate what I’m doing in those terms.  In a sense, it’s your head expanded!  [Both laugh]

BD:   When you give the piece to the performers, do you expect a bit of interpretation on their part?

JM-M:   Yes I do, but not in the sense of stretching things, or making things according to their taste.  I’m usually fairly explicit on the page about what I want, so they don’t think of me as a composer who is expecting a great deal of liberty to be taken.  I’m not expecting that on the part of the performers, but I will expect that their personalities as performers will come out in an individual performance.  It’s not so much in terms of a linear motion of left to right, or rubato, or anything like that, but rather expression.  In one person’s hands a piece can feel subtle and delicate, and someone else might pick out more forceful aspects.  So in that sense, there’s interpretation going on, definitely.  But in terms of how fast it’s taken, or how long the pauses become, those things are a little more regulated.

BD:   Is there any such thing as a perfect performance of your piece?  [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at right, see my interviews with John Eaton, and Steve Reich.]

JM-M:   I don’t think so, no.

BD:   But everyone should strive for it?

JM-M:   I don’t know.... if there isn’t, then how can they strive for it?

BD:   Then what should they strive for?

JM-M:   The first thing would be accuracy.  That’s the basic level.  You have to have the accuracy, and then getting the feeling of the piece in a way that they can do it best.  I see that as something which is different from person to person, especially with my being a flutist.  I have flutist friends who play pieces of mine, and they might say they want to do it the way I do it, and I say, “No, don’t!”  There are lots of ways you can do it better than I do it.  So, I don’t want them to feel that my individual stamp is on it so strong that they have to sound like me, and not have any ability to play with it.  We’re talking more about the sense the phrasing, the type of tone, the idea of what is delicate or what is strong, what is forceful, what is swinging.  These are things that may vary from player to player, and I expect that to happen.

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

JM-M:   Yes.  I work a lot with people who play my music.

BD:   Can that be intimidating for the performer — to have the composer actually there, and helping out?

JM-M:   Yes, it can be, but I try not to be.  That’s the one advantage of being a composer-performer, because I’m pretty careful about trying to respect what they’ve done.  I’ve been through things where the composer comes down hard on the performers, and then everybody feels depressed.  I try very hard never to do that, and I hope I haven’t, but I really work at taking it from a point of view of respecting the person’s work, because, after all, they’ve chosen to do this, and they’re doing me a favor in a sense.

BD:   You’re grateful to the performers?

JM-M:   Oh, yes!

BD:   I was going to ask if you are a better composer because you are a performer, and you have answered that.  Are you then a better performer of other people’s music because you are a sympathetic composer?

JM-M:   Yes, but you tend not to evaluate other people’s work in the same way you might when you’re listening as a composer.  When you’re a performer, you try to put across what you think the composer is wanting in the piece.  You don’t say that a section is too long, or the piece is really confused, but rather you try to figure out how you can present it in a way that it is most coherent, and to make it so this long section doesn’t feel tedious.  You evaluate, and you try to put them in the best light you can.  That may sound like a compositional evaluation, but when I’m in the process of learning someone else’s music, and when I perform it, I generally can’t tell you what I think of it because I’m not looking at it that way.  I’m really looking at what I can do to make this sound good.

BD:   Does that also help you when you’re playing Mozart, or Beethoven, or any of the other major composers?

JM-M:   Yes, I think so.  But I don’t think of major composers any more in that same extent, because that’s something I’m involved with.  This goes back to your very first question about teaching.  I’m teaching the Women In Music course, and there are a lot of very fine women composers that we learn about, and yet we don’t know if those, especially from the past, can be seen in the status of the ‘major composers’.

BD:   Maybe substitute Germaine Tailleferre and Clara Schumann for the two that I mentioned?

JM-M:   Right, but I don’t think about ‘major’ in the same way any more.  That’s a bad word.

BD:   Should we say ‘well-known’?

JM-M:   Yes, okay.  It’s more important, especially for composers these days, to be thinking about how people fit into their times, how we fit into our times, and how we reflect our times.  I really don’t agree with the idea of the composer being isolated from their surroundings.  More and more, a lot of examinations of the composers of the past turns out the same kind of thinking — that they didn’t write in a vacuum, and the idea about fate knocking at the door, and Beethoven’s got a theme for his symphony!  [Both laugh]  A lot of that has happened much more through the process of thinking, and hearing things, and playing around with it, and a lot of hard work.

BD:   A thousand years from now, could we really extrapolate our times by listening to the music that was written now?

JM-M:   If we looked at a wide variety of it, yes, but that would not be only looking at classical music.  They would be having to look at popular music, and certainly at jazz, and blues, and all the crossover-types that are happening these days, because there are so many influences going in both directions.

BD:   Let me ask the big question, then.  What is the purpose of music?

JM-M:   [Thinks a moment]  It’s expression in sound of a whole host of internal and external states.

BD:   Does it keep going over time?

JM-M:   Yes, it’s prolonged so it goes on over time.  So, if you take a definition like that, then you can look at it in terms of how it may reflect a certain social or historical time.
*     *     *     *     *
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BD:   You were mentioning that you also do some painting.  Why do you center on music rather than painting?

JM-M:   I don’t paint.

BD:   Oh, I’m sorry.  I thought you said you did.

JM-M:   No, I said I draw things.  When I’m working on a score, I make squiggles and things like that.  I have painted, but it’s not anything that I do on a regular basis at all.

BD:   [With a slight bit of disappointment]  Oh... I was just hoping that you would do your own Pictures at Your Exhibition!  [Both laugh]

JM-M:   That would be interesting.  No, I have a couple here and there, and they’re very expressionist, but they were done a while ago, not recently.

BD:   [Coming back to the topic]  We were talking about why you do music.

JM-M:   Music is the medium I feel comfortable with, though I’m certainly very interested in visual things.  I’m very interested in movement, and dance, and things like that, but I feel as if I’m probably better at hearing things and making mental connections with things that I hear as opposed to things that I might read.

BD:   Is the music that you write, for everyone?

JM-M:   Probably not!  [Laughs]  Though I have found there are certain pieces I have written that go very well in general concerts, and it’s no problem at all.  I’m not concerned about it not being for everyone.  But on the other hand, my music — and a lot of music of other people of this time — has not been given a fair chance.  Even though I’m very active with new music groups, we all hope that some day we won’t be necessary, and everything we do would be mainstream.  You’d have concerts covering a lot of different of periods of music.  One of the surprising things I found happening a few years ago at Orchestra Hall on the Ballroom Series, was that my piece Alone Together for bass clarinet and double bass was put on a program with Bach and Schubert.

BD:   [Quietly applauding]  Great!

JM-M:   Yes, and I thought, “This audience is coming to hear the two players, and then they’re going to get Alone Together!  We’ll see how well it goes.”  John Bruce Yeh, and Joe Guastafeste [Assistant Principal Clarinet, and Principal Bass of the Chicago Symphony], along with a few others gave a uniform sound from piece to piece.  There was The Shepherd on the Rock [for soprano, clarinet, and piano], and strings in the Bach.  Then, hearing Alone Together, even though it had jazz, and was very definitely a new-music-type piece with a tone row, it did not seem to be out of the context.  It worked very nicely, and I got an extremely warm reception.  I was surprised because I was a bit nervous about it.  I realize there are lots of ways of programming new music — and my piece is not one of the easiest — but it can work well if the listeners’ ears are tuned to either the sound, or particular ideas, such as the theme of a concert.

BD:   When you got the idea for the piece, did you know immediately it was going to be for bass clarinet and double bass, or was it just going to be sounds, and eventually you’d assign its instruments?

JM-M:   I usually know pretty much what it’s for.  I think about that usually before I start.  That’s an inherent part of the piece because the personality of the piece is going to be determined in part by what kind of instruments are being played.  I couldn’t really get very far into thinking about any piece without knowing what it’s for.

BD:   Let me turn the question on its head.  While you’re working on a piece, what happens when you get an idea that would really work for trombone?

JM-M:   [Laughs]  I have folders of pieces for the future.  I have lots of different folders with ideas that I have forgotten about by now.  Sometimes I go back, and there’s something from 1987, that I know is a wonderful idea, and I can use it here.  That’s very important to do.  One should not feel that they have to put everything into the piece on which they’re working at the time, but think of a whole future set of pieces.  Another thing I find in poetry will be certain phrases or verbal ideas I’ll want to use in the future.  I’ve got a whole folder of poetry for projects.  It’s the same thing as having a compositional idea going in your head all the time, and if it’s not the one you’re working on, then it’s maybe something for the future.  So I write it down, and put it in that folder.

BD:   Is the poetry for ideas, or to be set as text to music?

JM-M:   The poetry, ninety percent of the time, would have to do with actual setting to music.  Most of it I don’t use, and don’t set.  I just look at it and get some ideas about what I might do.  It really has to speak to me before I use it because I don’t do traditional settings.  I don’t write songs, and I don’t write melodious settings.  I am not comfortable doing that.  I never wanted to do that.  Other people do it very well, and I’m much more interested in exploring it from a more experimental point of view.  I’m happy to hear what other people do, and I like it, but I don’t feel the need myself to ‘set poems’ in a song-type fashion.

BD:   Do you occasionally use voice?

JM-M:   I do use voice, yes.

BD:   As another instrument?

JM-M:   Sometimes!  There’s a piece from 1975 called Mad Song, based on a poem by William Blake.  It’s a short, three-stanza poem, and in that I have created something for a cappella chorus that is based on the poem, and uses most of the words in the poem, but it deals with the feeling of the poem from a sound point of view.  The poem is also called Mad Song.  The poetry is about a person who is going mad, and hears the wind swirling outside.  These external conditions also reflect this person’s internal condition, so I thought it would be very interesting to write a choral piece where it was as if there were voices in your head speaking to you and being very frightening.  There are certain phrases that pop out, but more often they’re just certain words, or parts of words.  Instead of saying ‘wind’ you’ll get ‘waw, waw, waw, waw, waw, wah!’ and ‘ind, dee, dee, dee, din, din, der, der, ind’.  I’ll break it up, and try to give a feeling of wind, but not have to sing ‘the wind’.

BD:   It is interesting to break up a single syllable word.

JM-M:   Yes, to get a feeling and sound from it that’s appropriate to the word itself.

BD:   The radio programmer in me thinks about combining this work with Eight Songs for a Mad King of Peter Maxwell Davies, and the Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor to make a show.

JM-M:   Yes, right.  [Much laughter]  That’s the idea about programming — that you can take a theme and jump centuries.

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

JM-M:   Yes, I probably am.  I mix a lot of different styles, genres, and ideas.  There are certainly other composers who’ve done this, and so I’m part of that.  I’m also part of a group of composers that works very abstractly. I have a style that is quite abstract.  I also have a more experimental style.  My flute music especially has more of that with extended techniques.  Then, since about 1991, I’ve been doing pieces that are more like Music Theater.  That’s another area.  I’ve tapped into what other composers are thinking, so in that sense you could say there are lots of different strands, and lots of lineages.
janicemm


BD:   What advice do you have for audiences that come to concerts — either of your music or of other new music?

JM-M:   They should always be open to sounds that seem somewhat unusual, or maybe disconcerting.  There will be events that follow one another in some way that is unfamiliar, and pieces develop in ways that maybe you can’t anticipate.  That’s one of the difficulties.  The difference between music that’s familiar and newer music is that people know they’re going to hear a theme over and over if they’re hearing a more traditional eighteenth or nineteenth century symphony.  There is some sense about the form, and about how it’s going to develop.  Those composers will play with expectations, and people will accept that, but there’s enough that they are familiar with in terms of their expectations.  That way it’s not too upsetting.  It’s something they can follow and they enjoy doing it.  They feel secure.  New music often makes people feel insecure.

BD:   Should you be advancing a political idea, or trying to make an environmental statement?

JM-M:   Yes, all those things are valid.  We’re connected to our world, and composers do that more or less explicitly.  Sometimes it’s not explicit, and a composer may feel that they’re keeping it to themselves.  They had a particular experience in nature, or something emotional, or they feel a certain way about a political happening, and that could be the source of the piece they write.  They may or may not want people to know.  That’s one way of being political.  There’s also the political idea in terms of formal things.  There are composers who feel they are dealing with a form that was done previously, and maybe they want to play with it, or reject, or break it up.  In some cases, with a very eclectic piece they want to have quotes from a lot of different composers, either to tie them together for the listening public and say these are all part of the piece, or maybe to say these are all classical pieces and they sound silly when I mix them together.  There are lots of different reasons for people working this way.  Some of the more explicitly political pieces are either talking about a political situation and trying to heighten the awareness of the audience, or pieces that are political in that they’re trying to take words of a political movement and build them into a piece, therefore bringing it into a classical world and making a classical audience more aware.  The People United Will Never Be Defeated by Frederic Rzewski is that kind of piece.  There are all different ways of delineating a political involvement, from very subtle and hardly there at all, to very explicit.

BD:   Are you optimistic about the future of the kind of music you write?

JM-M:   I’m somewhat optimistic, although there are real problems with the musical establishment, and the fact that there is really a very, very large percentage of music in concert today that is not from the past ten years.  That’s disturbing, but there are lots of ways of getting audiences to come to new music concerts.  This has been something I’ve worked on with Patricia Morehead and CUBE.  In our programming we are very interested in dealing with ideas that we think will be exciting for audiences.  Doing American Experimentalism allows us to educate audiences in a way that is also fun.  One of our best times was about two years ago was when we did John Cage’s 4’33” for both performers and audience.  We did it at Curtis Hall, on Michigan Avenue on a very rainy night.  It was hot, so we had the windows open, and we passed out scores to the audience so they understood that when they saw the word ‘tacit’ it was defined.  It means to be quiet, and they understood that.  During each movement they had to be quiet rather than talk, and they understood that this is a piece where we listen to the sounds.  It was wonderful.

BD:   Did it really get to them?

JM-M:   I think so.  We got street sounds, the sounds of rain, and then at about two minutes after nine we heard church bells!  It was just a wonderful example of listening to the sound-world.  Then, because everybody knew that this is a classic, at the end of the piece all the members of the ensemble faced the audience.  We stood up with our instruments, and we bowed, and they gave us tremendous applause, even though we hadn’t played a note.  It was wonderful.
Note that BD performed this work twice on WNIB, each time on April First.  Rather than just broadcasting pure silence, I left the microphone open, so that the radio audience could hear me as I walked around the studio.  I purposely made a few grunts and knocks, and loudly ripped the paper off the tele-type when gathering the news.  The audience could also hear my side of the conversation when I picked up the telephone.  I had brought a kitchen timer with me, and at the beginning of the performance I wound it, and set it so that the ticking was audible.  Finally, I sat back down in the squeaky chair, and when the timer went DING, I closed the microphone pot (in the same way I would close whatever pot the recorded music would be playing though the control board), and announced, “We have just heard a live performance of Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds by John Cage.”

Each time, the response was uniformly positive.


BD:   Is composing fun?

JM-M:   [Thinks a moment]  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  It’s a lot of work, and sometimes when realizing an idea that’s somewhat complex, is not fun.  It’s just something that you have to do, so I can’t say that it’s always fun.  What I can say is that it’s frequently invigorating and stimulating.  Then you could take it from the opposite point of view, and know that when you’re not doing it, you feel frustrated and unhappy.

BD:   It’s always worth it?

JM-M:   Yes, it is.

BD:   Good.  So far, you’ve got three recordings.  Are you pleased with them?

JM-M:   Yes, I am.  These are all performers that I’ve been familiar with and worked with, and pieces that I’ve been very close to.  I’m quite glad that these are the first three that are out.

BD:   There are more coming?

JM-M:   There will be.  There’s a chamber orchestra piece called Luminaria, which is going to be recorded by the Prague Radio Symphony in late September, and will be on Master Musicians Collective.  [This CD is shown below.]

BD:   Thank you for all of your music so far, and for speaking with me today.

JM-M:   You’re very welcome.
Janicemm





© 1995 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on May 1, 1995.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB three weeks later, and again in 1995.  This transcription was made in 2022, and posted on this website at that time.  My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

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

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

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