Composer  Vaclav  Nelhybel
 
A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

Bruce Duffie:   What do you expect of the audience that comes to hear the music of Vaclav Nelhybel?

Vaclav Nelhybel:   Really, the bottom line is I don’t know.  What is audience?  Let’s put it this way – I don’t think of the audience while composing.

BD:   Then for whom do you write?

VN:   Those answers are all kind of big labels.  In my case, composing is the thing I like the most to do, and – I am not improvising this answer – to compose music is the best means to manifest my existence as human being.  I feel that is my function as a person, and if something excites me, it is much more complex.  I must talk in specifics.  For example, I am delivering today a commissioned work I started working on one and a half years ago, but I will be working now on something that will be performed in about two and a half years, a concerto for organ and orchestra.  I am in this kind of vacuum a little bit; ideas come in because I am not under pressure.  I do function as a composer and as a person; the person and the composer is somehow identical.  I never said it, I never thought it, but that’s how it is.  So, for whom am I composing?  Again, those words sound so big and so fantastic.  I am trying to share my experiences, etc.  Finally, that’s what it is!  If something excites me, I try to freeze it into paper, to have it there.

BD:   It’s interesting that you would say you’d “freeze it” onto paper, because then the sound isn’t frozen, it’s a living thing.

[Photo at left and the next where he is conducting show Nelhybel with the Fifth U.S. Army Band in the mid-1960s]

VN:   But I don’t think so.  We can say [sings a musical passage quickly]; do you know how long it takes to write [sings the same passage very slowly]?  This is something that floats very fast, and it’s funny that when you compose it, it’s in slow motion.  I have two pianos at home, but I never touch the instrument.  I compose in total silence; I don’t sing for myself.  Of course, when I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, the piano used to be my best friend, my best helper.  But then, having conducted for twenty five years in Europe, you build up the inner hearing.  You know the sounds and you can write them down.  With a piano, how can you compose a duo for two clarinets?  Or if you try to imagine composition styles, for an oboe, if you will play it on the piano it will sound like [bangs hand on the table].  You say, “No, I will change it to muted trumpet!”  You try it on the piano, and how does it sound?  [Again, bangs hand on the table]  I am virtually allergic, against playing the piano for composing.  I use the piano for proof-reading of scores; I am very good in B flat, E flat, C, mixture, etc.  We were trained in Europe in the use of the different clefs, different transpositions, etc.  The piano is the best and fastest ‘checking’ instrument.  I live as a composer.  I don’t teach at all!  It’s not  a matter of not being offered it – I have been offered it quite a few times in this country – but it is an awesome responsibility to tell the eighteen or seventeen year old boy, “This is good!”  He will say, “Nelhybel says that I am good!” and they will immediately think I will push them into fame or something.  So I don’t teach.  It’s totally egocentric, but it’s also not really egocentric.  It’s just... that’s it!

BD:   In composing, where is the balance between inspiration and technique?

VN:   Who knows?  Period.  There will be very few answers.  I may have some strong opinions, but then I will laugh because how does one get an idea?  What is inspiration?  Would you say the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a really inspired composition?  There was a manuscript sketchbook of Beethoven’s Fifth – about twelve or thirteen pages – and during the Second World War they put it underground.  I saw it!  There were pages of sketches until finally the theme was [sings the opening theme].  For pages he had written [sings different ideas similar to the familiar opening] until finally he had it with all the drama in it.  That’s inspiration.  How much sweat and blood there was, changing and correcting it.  I am saying Beethoven knew – because he was a great composer – that there was gold in this little theme, and he was working on it and working on it.  For years I wanted to save every little piece of paper I sketched on, and then show a commissioner my suitcase full of ideas and the enormous pile of sketches.  But there must be some definitive idea in a composer.  Beethoven worked until he got it – resting on the strong beat and entering on the weak beat; there’s so much drama in it!  To some degree, everybody probably has some sort of idea in them.  Young composers, when they grow older and then look back at the composition they composed a decade ago, will say, “How did I let this go? This composition is awful!”  That is because the youngsters were very anxious, very hurried, and had no time.

BD:   Now that you’re a mature composer, do you feel that works you wrote ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago are of lesser quality?

VN:   No.  I was very fortunate to have one man who had an enormous influence on me.  A choral man, he taught conducting technique – not conducting, but conducting technique.  He was probably the best choral conductor in Czechoslovakia, and he commissioned me to write something.  I wrote it and I was so excited!  When I lugged it in, he pointed at it and said, “Do you know that you just wasted one big branch of a beautiful tree?”   This I will never forget.  It was the excitement of writing for one of the biggest names and for the best male choir in Czechoslovakia.  It was a fantastic honor, and because I was about twenty-one years old, I became pessimistic:   I would say “uh-uh,” and when something went well I would say, “It cannot be true!”  I would act like the devil’s advocate.  My first published composition was my string quartet, and the second was my woodwind quintet.  That was about forty years ago, and I stand behind them one hundred percent.  How great I am, I don’t know.  How bad I am, I don’t know.  But I know one thing – I know my crafts; I am a craftsman.  I know whatever there is to learn in techniques like twelve-tone, how to make a symmetrical row, etc.  I am a craftsman and I do as well as I can.  Whatever it is I am doing, I take all the time I need because I function on my own metabolism, not the metabolism dictated by the fluctuation of day and night.  I do work during the night quite a bit.  For example, last year I skipped seventeen nights of sleep (not in a row).  My kids would poke fun, but why should I go to bed?  I will always work after the ten o’clock news, and then I won’t know if it’s twelve o’clock or six o’clock.  The next day, I don’t have to take the key and go open the shop or the business, or worry that the boss will look to see if I’m in the office, or worry that the dean will say, “Hey, the teacher didn’t come.”  So there is no reason not to do this when my metabolism functions fine.  I talked to my doctor about it and he said not to worry about it.  I lie down and sleep for maybe about three hours, and I feel as if I slept fifteen!  I am blessed with only needing five hours, six hours maximum, of sleep.  I have no responsibilities, only responsibilities to my family, so my big responsibility is to bring milk!

BD:   Do you not feel that you have a responsibility to the music?

VN:   I don’t feel it; it’s there!  It’s my life, and this is what I fill my life with!  So would I cheat on it?  Heck no!

BD:   You can work on a composition as long as you want, so how do you know when each one is finished?

VN:   Well, yes.

BD:   How do you decide which pieces you will do and which pieces you will not do?

VN:   The past one and a half years was my orchestral period.  I had one commission from Australia and another from the Second Youth Orchestra in Stanford.  Writing on a low level, technically-speaking, I love to do it.  It is fantastic because you still have ideas, but you cannot go into complex elaboration or a complex architecture of it.  Yet somehow the music has to be there, the organism has to be there, the form has to be there.  The musician who sits there goes through a certain drama; maybe it’s a junior high school kid.  I have a commission that will probably start in two and a half years, a concerto for organ and orchestra.  I have about four hundred folders; I am very organized.  If I have any ideas, structural or thematic, I put them on paper to some degree, and when I come back six months later I remember what they were.  Then somebody will come and say, “Nelhybel, I’d like to commission you because we are going to a convention.”  They are very specific, and my mind starts projecting whatever he says into my folders.  The process is so accidental.  Tomorrow I will deliver Music for Woodwind Quintet Solo and Large Symphony Orchestra to Miroslav Pansky in Green Bay.  I last saw him about twenty two years ago in New York.  He’s from Czechoslovakia, and the difference in our ages is about fifteen years.  He told me then, “One day, I will have a good symphony orchestra, and then I will commission you.”  I’m so curious to see him tomorrow!  It’s an awful thing to say, but I have the time; I have never been under pressure.  When I say “never”, I mean all the time that I’ve been in America, since ’57.  I have the time, because I don’t do anything else.

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

VN:   There’s no answer, basically.  You have the whole scale, from suicidal to elated.  I still have an opinion about it...  There are certain things that I expect to happen, of course.  The conductor has absorbed my composition and identified himself with it, even though his metabolism was different than mine.

BD:   Do you expect interpreters to work with your music?

VN:   Oh, I like it!  When they ask, “How should we do it?” I say, “I don’t know!”  I don’t like metronomic markings, because if you have sixteenth notes and you take it so fast that it is only mumbled, then of course you need to do it slower.

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

   [Photo at right taken during recording sessions with the Fifth U.S. Army Band]

VN:   I have two answers.  One answer is a personal one, and is quite often, yes.  If you ask why, I will say I like a particular recording because it has a touch of personality. If it sounds very “this is how Nelhybel would do it”, God forbid!  I am a different animal than you are!  If you are a squirrel, try to be the best squirrel there is, not an elephant, and vice-versa.  I do like it if somebody identified themselves with the piece and made it his own.  The important thing to me is that there is the life in it, there is drama in it.  My second answer is that today the very important criterion is sheer perfection.  If somebody cracks a wrong note, it should not be so important as long as the tension and the smoothness of the piece was there.

BD:   Do concerts work well on television?  Have you seen them, and do you think they’re a good thing?

VN:   To me, a live performance is a live performance, period.

*     *     *     *     *

BD:   Your compositions are in a very tonal idiom, which is very unusual today.

VN:   I would not call me tonal what-so-ever.  I am not a tonal composer ever, never have been.  When you say tonal, I think dominant, sub-dominant, etc.  God forbid!  I have a few favorite composers including Machaut, Monteverdi and Bach.  Monteverdi is one of my passionate loves and a passionate hate, because Monteverdi was the no-good guy who introduced tonic, sub-dominant.  The Germans jumped on that, and what is tonic remains forever.  But if you play a major triad or a minor triad, you can hear dissonance in it.  The subdominant means to relax.  Then comes the guy who says get up – the dominant – and go to the tonic.  My music I call panchromatic; I use all twelve notes.  For instance, in my Symphonic Requiem, in the first one and a half minutes all twelve notes are constantly hanging somewhere all over the range.  It ends in F, and even though all twelve notes are in it, you still know it’s in F.  You can have clusters and orchestrate it in such a way that you stop it, but when three people play a certain chord, you have the feeling, “Oh yes, this was it.”  What my music has is gravitational pull.  I participated once in something done by CBS or 20^th Century Fox or some group like that, on background music for films and such.  There were twenty people – truck drivers, lawyers, boxers, anybody – and we played Story of a Soldier.  It meant different things to different people.

BD:   Have you ever gotten involved in electronics?

VN:   No.

BD:   Why?

VN:   I have absolutely nothing against it.  I have no philosophies about orchestras dying out and what-not because when I came here, I was so fascinated with this country, I was on the moon in a totally different world.  Twice I was invited to participate in a synthesizer event where I’d be given one and my name would be placed on it.  I said no.

BD:   Where is music going today?

VN:   Who am I to know???  [Ponders a moment]  Well, yes, I do have an answer.  After the Second World War, Germany, Japan and Italy are the three countries where radicalism in music really exploded.  Not in America.  Yes Schoenberg lived here, but he was an old-timer.  The twelve-tone idea was not such a crazy thing anyways, once people began to push it into total serialism.  It also exploded in New York.  I was there for thirteen years, beginning in ’57, and I went to anything and everything.  I saw the explosion into total serialism.  It went so fast to total freedom, with pieces like Music for Five Players and One Conductor.  It was a forceful act of intellect, and I wanted to have nothing to do with it.

BD:   Is rock-and-roll music?

VN:   I don’t know; I don’t know what music is because it is used for so many things.  One time we were adding an addition onto our house, and we had the radio on for about eight hours a day.  Unbelievable what I heard!  I discovered one piece of rock-and-roll that had virtual elements of Monteverdi in it.  I know what rock and roll is because I have two kids, almost sixteen and eighteen years, [laughs] and their musical tastes are awful!  My daughter is a brilliant classical musician, but she’s two different people.  She’s very intense with the rock and roll, but also plays in an orchestra.

*     *     *     *     *

BD:   I understand you wrote an opera early in your career?

VN:   It was ballet with singers in it, and also dancers.  It’s called The Cock and the Hangman, and it’s based on Slavic folklore.  There are different types of characters – those who are human, those who are more than human, and those who are less than human.  Those who are human sing; those more than human and less than human dance.  It was done in the National Theater in Prague for about three years.  I do have one opera, Everyman.  It was done at the American Opera Association in Memphis, Tennessee as the opening.  It is with winds and organ, and is in my medieval style.

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

VN:   I don’t know; I don’t think so.  I am not a Czech composer – I am modal.  My tale is squeezed in the fourteenth century, or even earlier.  I am fascinated by the Middle Ages.  I am not a tonal composer like Smetana or Dvořák.  I was born about twenty five kilometers from Janáček, where people there talk funny, very shortly, have funny accents, and so and so.  My only closeness to any Czech composer would have to be Janáček, but not necessarily that my music sounds like his.  Janáček created his own modality and certain things.  I am a more Slavic composer, more of an Eastern composer, more of a Russian composer.  People ask if there is a composer who was my greatest influence, and I reply nobody, not one.  When I discovered music, I would discover one, then throw him away, then the next, and the next.  The Middle Ages is what really got to me; don’t ask why.  As I mentioned before, I love Machaut, Monteverdi, and Bach, then Stravinsky.  It is interesting – everything might have been different if there had not been the Second World War.  I had just come in contact with Stravinsky about two months before Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia.  To have one score of Stravinsky would have meant to go to prison.  They said he was Jewish, but he’s in America and he hated the Germans.  Of course he hated Richard Strauss like hell, and vice versa.  I had a few scores by Stravinsky, and he remained a fascination to me during those dark ages of the Thousand Years Reich.

BD:   Is music ever political?

VN:   How can it be?  You can use a whole scope of paint colors – is it evil or is it good?  No, though, that’s not a very good metaphor.  Two people can have very different reactions from a piece of music – one may have a belly ache, the other may say “I love you” for it.  You can put any three or five words for a title and it still doesn’t change anything, and after a year you will probably say, “No, I shouldn’t have used this title.”  It’s interesting you say “political.”  Yes, they can take a political slogan and add music to it, and then it takes on a new dimension.  It’s not political per-se, but it can be used for political purposes; it’s manipulated.

BD:   Do you expect your music to last?

VN:   [Surprised at the question]  How do I know?  I do not have any of this kind of suicidal or messianic thought.  I function, I am here.  No, how can I know?

BD:   Does it please you, though, to have a piece twenty, thirty, or forty years old still played?

VN:   [Sarcastically]  Oh heck no!  Why would you ask me such a silly question sir???  [Both laugh]  But, of course.

BD:   What’s the role of the critic?

VN:   I don’t know, I really don’t know.  I have had some marvelous experiences with critics and I’ve had some experiences that were not so good.  I cannot complain too much.  There have been some total misunderstandings, such as when somebody said “This is the Opus Finale of Nelhybel.”  The critic wrote that I didn’t show anything of my technical skills.  Well, this was a piece for junior high school.  When I write on the school level, I put myself into the strait-jacket and then dance.  If you go and run a mile (which I never did in my life), they say there comes a moment when your metabolism starts glowing, and it’s a fantastic feeling.  For those little kiddies, the music for them is glowing.

BD:   Is the act of composing fun?

VN:   No.  I heard somebody say, once, that it’s rather suicidal.  I wouldn’t say that.  If it were not fun, who would do it???

BD:   Is each one of your pieces then like an offspring?

VN:   Yes.  I made it somehow.  It’s a chunk of you, yes.  Is it fun?  What is fun?  To me, as a foreigner, the word fun implies, “Oh lets go and drink beer.”  To me the really beautiful thing is if it produces joy.  Though I have never taken drugs, I know that you can get high and it can be fun, but it’s not joyful.  After joy doesn’t come a complete collapse.  Is it fun to have kids?  No, it’s awful!  But it’s also the most wonderful thing there is.

BD:   Do performers ever find things in your music that you didn’t know were there?

VN:   Yes, absolutely.  I hope it is something that is a plus, not a minus, but what is more important is that he found, somehow, a different soul.  It was his soul, and it worked – my soul and his soul.  We are different souls, yet they could burn with the same flame somehow, metaphorically speaking.

BD:   Do you ever revise your scores?

VN:   I’ve done it many times.

BD:   Even after they’re published?

VN:   This is rather tricky – just try to do it and you will see what the publisher tells you.  In my case, it is really very much a definite form.  Somebody might say, “Nelhybel, I didn’t like this section here.”  He will say it’s not properly put together – like the thumbs are too big on a small hand – but I will say no, because I take enormous time.  One composition could take me two and a half years.

BD:   Do you work on just one thing at once, or do you have several things going at the same time?

VN:   I have different stages. During the creative stage, I come up with ideas and put them into my folder.  As I said, Beethoven knew [sings the first four notes of the Symphony No. 5] was brilliant.

BD:   Is that what makes music great, what is done with the small ideas?

VN:   I have virtually no answers – I don’t know.  If twenty people heard that, it would mean twenty different things.  Some would be very categorically against it, and some would say, “Oh yes!”

*     *     *     *     *

VN:   It all depends.  If you work with the university level, it’s quite close to the professional level.  I try to find what produces a certain something in a performance, to see if I can plan it or manipulate it.  In any rehearsal I try to show them what it means to have a total climax of dynamics.  Then when you hear them do it, it changes to a completely different sound.  I conducted the All City Houston Orchestra – a magnificent orchestra, one of the best youth orchestras ever – in a twenty minute piece of mine in Mexico City seven times. This was an experience.

BD:   When you set out to write a piece, do you know how long it’s going to be?

     [The photo at left was taken at the University of Scranton just a few days before the composer's death]

VN:   You know something.  Very often they will commission and say, “I want something that is fifteen minutes.”  Don’t ask me how you know.  I am not describing any kind of method – there is no such thing.

BD:   When arranging concerts of your music, is it better to have all contemporary music, or to put your piece among Beethoven, Haydn and Shostakovich?

VN:   I do whatever they want for whatever reasons they have, because everybody has their reasons.

BD:   Are you the ideal interpreter of your music?

VN:   Oh gosh, that’s a funny question.  First of all, I am not an interpreter.  I don’t know to what degree a conductor is an interpreter!

BD:   Do you ever make suggestions to conductors?

VN:   No.  I try not to, unless they do something very basically wrong, and it’s somebody where I can talk and say it to them.  Physically, I don’t go into situations where I would have to do it.  I never judge.

BD:   Do you ever judge competitions?

VN:   No.  I did once, and never again.

BD:   You find it impossible to look for greatness in music?

VN:   What is greatness, what is it?

BD:   Is it not something that you strive for?

VN:   Who doesn’t?  Without exception, we all do.  We are all so limited.  We see limits, but we all want to surround them and go around it.

BD:   You’re not looking for fame?

VN:   What is fame?

BD:   I suppose most people are thinking about notoriety.

VN:   I really don’t have the answer.

BD:   Thank you so much for speaking with me today.  I wish you luck with these upcoming concerts.

VN:   It was a pleasure.

This interview was recorded in suburban Chicago on October 25, 1986.  Portions (along with recordings) were used on WNIB 1989, 1994, and 1999.  This transcription was made and posted on this website in 2011.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

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