Needless to say, I followed through and made the phone call for the interview, and our conversation is contained on this page.

Much of what she told me in the letter was discussed during the call, but one further item of particular interest was left unsaid, and has been added at the appropriate place in the text below.

She mentions a few other composers, and those whose names are links refer to my interviews elsewhere on this website.  She also reminded me that she was, at that time, nearly 71 years old.

Here is what was said in 1987 . . . . . . .


Bruce Duffie:    You started out playing piano, then abandoned it, and then you came back to it.  What, specifically, kept you involved with music in between the times when you were studying it?

Juli Nunlist:    My mother’s family was very musical.  She and her brothers were both naturally gifted, and without having studied, played the piano very well.  Therefore we had a piano in our home which my mother played, and that was how I got started taking piano lessons.  I stopped because they made me be in a recital, but I didn’t stop playing around with it.  I played for many years off and on, mostly at my own things, messing about and composing songs and little piano pieces and so on.  Eventually, through meeting with Barbara Weisberger, and the fact that my daughter began to study ballet with her, I became interested in ballet and dance, and eventually ended up composing eight children’s ballets for the Wilkes Barre Ballet Theater, of which Barbara was the director.  A friend of our family saw the last one that I did, and suggested that I should study music, and that’s how that got started.

BD:    How are the pieces that you wrote before you began to study music formally different from the pieces that you are writing today?

JN:    Of course, in the beginning they were quite simple, although my husband’s step-mother was a musician.  She was a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory, and she heard me doodling at a little contrapuntal piece one day in their home.  She asked what it was and I told her it was a piece that I wrote, and she said, “You really should study music.”  This was before I was even married.  I wrote songs in German and English, not in French until later, but I wouldn’t change some of them now.  Some of them I would, of course, but for what they were I was pleased.  They were those of a one-handed pianist, in a way, because I wasn’t a very good pianist, and the right hand did a lot more than the left hand.  I had to learn a lot about that when I started studying music.  When I started studying the piano seriously, which was about a year and a half before I went to Manhattan School, David Jatovsky was my piano teacher.  He was a great musician and a great teacher, and I learned an immense amount from him.  Knowing that I mainly wanted to compose, he taught me not only how a piano should be played and how it should sound, but that it was in itself an orchestra.  That is, it had all the range of the orchestral instruments.  I was shown how to use that because I always composed at the piano, and he showed me how to use it not as a pianist, but as a person thinking in terms of chamber music, orchestration and things like that, and I’m very grateful to him for that.

BD:    He had the foresight to use what talent and abilities you had, rather than just forcing performance on you?

JN:    Yes.  Yes, indeed.  I was able to play much better than I thought I ever would at the time, but his main idea was to help me become a better composer through understanding what the piano had to offer.

BD:    So then you always had faith in your own ideas?

JN:    Yes, and I still do.  The music I write now is very different from the music you have on the record.  The first six of those songs were written in the year that I was being prepared by David and his son, Steven J, to go to Manhattan.  The seventh one was written after I’d been in school several years, and I wouldn’t change them.  I’m very fond of them still, but the music I write now has moved.  There are no keys anymore, but it’s not atonal.  Everything is in a tonal area, very melodic, really romantic, but it’s not at all like the music I wrote before I went to school.  It’s more complex.  It has much more dissonance in it, although it’s not far out at all.  It’s very conservative.

BD:    You don’t reject the idea of far out music, though?

JN:    Not at all.  I use it in teaching the choreographers and dancers, and dance teachers.  I’ve used all kinds of music

they all can understand creating art and take a part in it and be better people for it.   It’s a marvelous discipline.  I don’t know that I can say any more.

BD:    Let me pursue a different track of this same idea.  Where do you feel is the balance between the artistic achievement and the entertainment value, either in music or in any of the arts?

JN:    They both have their place, of course.  When you say entertainment, what do you mean?

BD:    Well, do you differentiate between art and entertainment?

JN:    Oh yes, I think so.  Maybe it’s a gray area.  I have Aaron Copland’s book, What to Listen for in Music.  I use that in teaching, and it’s the history of levels of musical consciousness.  First, the sensuous one where I tell my students, “You all do your homework or other chores to music you like.  It’s entertaining and you love it, but you don’t even hear it.  You’re doing your homework, but you’re in this bath of sound, and then suddenly you hear a piece that you love.  It’s your favorite, and you drop your homework and you listen.  You’re entertained.  Then when that piece stops and the rest goes on, you go back to your homework.”  The second level, as he says, is the level where you see the children playing, or the rainy day, or the funeral procession.  I’ve forgotten what he terms it, but then the last level is the musical level, and that’s the level where you move into art.  Everyone can be entertained at some time by listening to a piece he loves, but it’s not the same thing as deliberately composing it or listening to a Mozart symphony.  I’m not sure that there’s a line I can draw.  I am, if you wish to use the word, entertained when I listen to great music.  I don’t know whether it’s the use of the word that troubles me or not.  I am moved and uplifted, and if you wish, entertained.  I have a youngster now who wants to “learn to play the piano.”  I’m not a piano teacher.  She works for me a little and she wants me to show her how to play the piano.  She starts out with the theme song of The Pink Panther because her father likes it.  She brings me that music, which she has borrowed from a girlfriend, and I say, “Fine, we will start, and you will learn how to play the theme song to The Pink Panther.”  Through music that is entertaining to her I hope to draw her into music that will mean more to her.  One of the reasons I stopped taking lessons myself when I was seven or eight was that I was studying the recital pieces which were The March of the Dwarfs and The Norwegian Dance by Grieg.  They were very difficult pieces for a seven year old, and I don’t know how I played them.  They must have sounded terrible!  But the reason I stopped wasn’t only the recital; it was because I was in love with Vagabond King, which was just new when I was seven, and I wanted to learn to play some of the music from it.  But my teacher wouldn’t hear of it.  She was so rigid!  She said, “I won’t help you with any of that,” and I said, “Then I won’t work with you on any of the others.”  I think she made a mistake, but I’m not sorry she made it, because I think she was a very bad piano teacher!  [Both laugh]  But I don’t think it’s a good idea to look down on something that is entertaining.  I was in an Operetta Club in Montclair when I was in high school, and we did all the D’Oyly Carte operettas and we did Victor Herbert and Rudolph Friml and you name it.  I was happy as a clam and I loved doing it, and it brought me a lot closer to music.

BD:   

, or going up when the music goes up and down when the music goes down.  It’s knowing what’s there, that you may use any aspect of what the composer has done if you wish, that you may counter any one or more of those aspects, if you wish, or you may ignore them altogether.  But I don’t think you can do, in choreography, any of those things with as much artistic integrity and success if you don’t know what’s there to be used or countered or ignored.  When I say ignored, I mean using the music as a kind of scrim behind which to dance, or a backdrop before which to dance, or simply a sound environment within which to dance.

BD:    Do you feel that the music you use for the dance can also stand on its own without the additional movement of bodies on the stage?

JN:    Of course, it’s not my music they’re using.

BD:    I mean any music.

JN:    Oh, yes.  Oh yes, of course!  I love poetry, so I’ve written a great many poems as songs either for piano and voice or for chamber instruments and voice, or now this choral symphony or choral music.  I have always had the feeling when I’m studying a poem that what I’m doing is trying to pay a tribute to the poem, to give it another dimension, and it’s because I think the poem is so wonderful.  Perhaps that’s egotistic, but I feel as if I’m paying homage to the poem, and I do the best I can to express what the poet has expressed in my medium as best I can, and that’s what I want them to do as they honor the music with the dance.  They don’t just use it as a crutch or something to count to.  It’s an equal partner; it’s another leg.  It’s not just something that has a beat that they like or a tune that they like, and somebody would look nice in mauve dancing to it, or it would fit a story that they like.  They should treat the music with great respect.

BD:    Does it then become visual poetry?

JN:    Oh, I don’t think so.  There’s always this never-ending argument about the dancer is the dance, or shouldn’t the dance all be done without music and stand on its own, and so forth.  I have lots of reasons why choreographers use music, why dancers use music.  One day as I was leaving to go teach I asked my husband, “What’s another reason that people use music for dance?” and he said, “The box office would drop off if they didn’t.”  [Both laugh]  There are lots of very good reasons for using music, but I don’t like to think of them as using music.  I like to think of them as marrying their art to the art of music.  One of the things that I’ve been trying to do for twenty-six years is to get musicians to understand dancers, and dancers and choreographers to understand musicians.  A lot of musicians, at least in my experience, tend to look down at dancers, because dancers don’t count the way musicians count.  They don’t at all, and they shouldn’t.  They needn’t.  Their counting is different and it must be different, and it’s perfectly all right that they differ.  But the thing that I want them to do is understand how the musicians count so they can meet the musicians on their own ground.  They need to explain to the musicians, “I understand that this is an anacrusic beat, and you’re going to count it as 3-4-1, but I am going to count it as 1-2-3, and this is my reason.” They have a perfectly good reason for it, and I try to get this gap between musicians and dancers closed as best I can.

BD:    Are you succeeding?

JN:    Oh, heavens!  I’m only one person in a great big bucket!  [Laughs]  I don’t deal with the musicians, I’m dealing with the choreographers, so I have to work it from one side only.  If I could get a bunch of musicians together and show them what dancers mean by their count, that would be fine, but I’m only one person, and I have a lot of other things to do, and it’s the dancers I’m involved with.  So I try to get them to understand musical counts so that they can at least show the musicians they work with that they do.  Then they can also make a case for their own way of counting.  They do have a legitimate way of counting and it’s very strange, but it’s perfectly effective and usable.  It’s just I’d like them to understand musicians’ counts, and if I could get a whole bunch of musicians together, I’d like them to understand dancers’ counts, too.  If I ever get finished with the book that I’m supposed to be trying to write, then maybe some musicians would understand, because I have some marvelous pages of music on which dancers have scrawled their count in inch-high pencil marks, and it’s fascinating to see what they’ve done.

BD:    So it’s to take the scores that the musicians know, and then see how the dancers view them.

JN:    Yes.  For example, if you take something that’s very straightforward, four bars, eight bars, and it’s all in 4/4, 2/4, that’s just fine.  But when you get something like Copland’s Piano Sonata, the second movement changes meter darned near every measure and goes all over the place.  There’s no way in heaven that a choreographer can teach his dancers that count.  The dancers are up there on the stage and they don’t have anything to look at.  They don’t have any map, and there’s no way the piece can be counted in a straightforward enough way so that they can use the counts that Copland has put there, the beats, the meters.  They have to find their own way.  I had one young man last summer who was absolutely marvelous!  He found a way to count that with dancers’ count so that his dancers understood completely what was going on in the music.  They couldn’t under any circumstances have understood it if he had tried to count them as a musician would.  He scrawled all over the page these immense, “A one-y and a two-y and a three, four, five and a one-y and a two-y and a three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and a one-two-three.”  It was fantastic!  His dancers understood immediately and they heard it in the music.  What he was doing was listening to the motivic elements that Copland was using, and he was getting the kids to listen and hear the development of those motivic elements.

BD:    Is there any reason, then, to transfer this dance counting back to the musician to understand the music better?

JN:    Copland probably understood his music well enough.  I don’t think a musician could use a dancer’s counts, no, if that’s what you mean, but if they could be brought to understand if they could have seen and heard what I saw and heard last summer with Chris Fleming, who’s now in Bogota, Columbia, as director of some ballet company there.  They would then understand very clearly, I think because it only takes one really good example, and he certainly gave me one.

To read my Interview with Phyllis Curtin, click HERE. To read my Interview with Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, click HERE.

a lot of them would have to be transposed to get anybody, male or female human, to sing them.  But it’s always a joy to write for the human voice, and it depends on who sings it and how well they sing it, where the joy lies in hearing it.  It’s always wonderful to hear your music, but I agree with something Mr. Giannini said many years ago when we all trooped to Carnegie Hall to hear a first performance of one of his symphonies.  We rushed down from the balcony afterwards and met him coming up the aisle to tell him how wonderful it was.  He was beet red and he said, “Whenever I hear my music, half of me wants to sit there and listen, and think ‘Gosh, I wrote that,’ and the other half of me wants to be up on the stage beating the musicians into doing what I want, and the other half, the third half, wants to be a thousand miles away.”  And that’s how you feel if it isn’t done really well.  But I am grateful when it’s done at all because I’m not an operator and I don’t get a lot of it performed.  But when I hear it, I’m extremely happy to hear it, and I don’t really mind if they blow it a bit here and there, except on the two records that I never tell anybody about.

BD:    May I ask briefly about those so I will know why you dismiss them?

JN:    I’m not happy with them.  Mr. [Arthur] Loesser was marvelous to me, and at the rehearsal he not only played them beautifully, but he showed me where I’d written something wrong.  He said, “You don’t mean this?” and he played it the way it was notated.  Then he said, “You mean this, don’t you?” and played it slightly differently, and I said, “Oh, yes.”  So he said, “Then this is how you should notate it.”  So I learned, and I learn every time, and that’s without fail.  I’ve learned every time anybody’s played my music how I could notate it better, what’s wrong with the notation, and what would make it easier for the performer.  Anyway, he played them beautifully, and then the day that they were recorded by that company, he performed other music on the record, and he promised us he wouldn’t teach.  But he taught all day long.  The other two composers, whose music he played, were there in the recording studio, working with him, and I had to be in Jersey.  My mother had fallen and broken her hip.

BD:    Who were the other two composers?

JN:    Marcel Dick and Jane Corner Young.  They were there, and he played their music over and over again.  He was very tired, and he only went through mine once.  He apologized later, and said he wanted to do them again because he did them very badly.  He said that himself, and he wanted to record them again, but the Cleveland Composer’s Guild could not afford to do another recording of them.  So I don’t ever tell anybody about that disc.   On the other one they only did four of the six pieces, which was uncomfortable anyway.  I would have loved very much to have all six of the whole cycle done.  The tenor soloist was a shade flat, and then a perfectly dreadful thing happened at the end.  The sound was all right.  It was dry and clear and good, and the chorus was not bad, but this chap, who had promised not to do it, put this echo chamber sound on it and ruined it.  It’s dreadful!  I played it once many, many years ago and I’ve never played it since.  I can’t stand to!

BD:    Now you have this new recording out, and I assume you’re pleased with it?

JN:    Yes, I am.  It could be better, but it’s the best I’ve had, and I’m pleased with it.

BD:    Have you basically been pleased with the other performances you’ve had of you works?

JN:    In some sense, yes.  Sometimes they’ve been done with real TLC and I have been happy with them, but none of them has been perfect.  I don’t suppose anyone has a perfect performance, but none of them has been.  Even when there’s been a pretty good performance, I’ve never had a really good taping.  Something always seems to be slightly amiss, but I think that’s probably generally true of everyone, unless he or she has reached a place where truly professional performances with truly professional recordings are done.  I’m always happy to hear it, but I would like it to be even better, and more of it, but that’s human.

BD:    I want to ask you a question that you may not be able to answer.  Is it harder being a woman composer than being a man composer?

JN:    [Laughs]  It is impossible to say.  It’s probably a lot easier now for women, and growing easier all the time partly because of people like you and things like the American Women Composers.  Many more women seem to be writing music, or at least having a chance.  Maybe lots of women wrote it in earlier times and never had a chance for anyone to know it.  That’s quite possible, but probably more women are writing now and more women are being recognized as composers and having their works performed and published and recorded.  There’s a recording company that records a lot of women’s music.  I’ve forgotten the name of it at the moment, but I met the woman who started it at one of the conferences of American Women Composers.

BD:    That sounds like it would be Leonarda.

JN:    Yes, just as the Alice James Books in Cambridge publishes mostly women’s poetry.  Things are looking up for women in the arts and in composition especially.  In any event, I don’t know what it’s like to be a man composer.  [Both laugh]

BD:    Of course!  Perhaps an easier question would be is there a noticeable difference between music that has been written by a woman and music that has been written by a man?

JN:    Not to me.  There was a panel about that at an American Women Composers conference at Boston University a couple of years ago when I had a couple of my choral pieces sung.  It was a three or four-day conference, and there was a panel “Is there a difference, and can you tell the difference?” and nobody could make up anybody’s mind on that.  Some people thought there might be a difference, and some thought there might not be a difference, and some didn’t know whether they could tell and didn’t know that it made any difference.  I don’t know that I could tell.  If some of my music was played and you didn’t know I’d written it

BD:    I assume that you are pleased with all the strides that music has been making in the last many years?

JN:    Oh yes, indeed I am.  With all the experimenting and all the whatever’s going on, and the more that it’s played and the more that it’s listened to and the more that it’s published and the more that it’s recorded, the better I like it.  [Laughs]

BD:    Is there ever a time when we get too many composers writing, or too many recordings being made?

JN:    I don’t know.  It would be the sort of thing that Giannini meant when he said that the vast majority of things that will last will last, and the rest will be lost in the dust heap.  Of course you can always say that there are the wonderful ones that aren’t discovered.  Bach wouldn’t have been discovered if Mendelssohn hadn’t done it.

BD:    Are we throwing a joker into this now with the business of recordings where nothing is actually lost?  We no longer have to take a piece of music off the shelf and perform it.  You can put a platter onto a disc machine and hear the music even if you’re not a particularly good performer.

JN:    Yes you can, and that’s a wonderful thing.  I have all my stereo equipment and listen to great music, and I think that’s wonderful.  People who didn’t have that in other centuries lost a lot.  They had to go to live performances, and very often couldn’t.  But to be at a live performance is a very special thing.

BD:    That is still the best!

JN:    Still the best, yes, although I wouldn’t give up my records and tapes and everything else that I have because I live in the Boonies and it’s very hard to get even into Worcester in the winter.  So I forego a lot of live performances for that reason, and because of the weather and the ice and so on, but I have the music at home and I don’t think there can be too much of it.  Why would there be too much of it?  How could there be too much of it?

BD:    Well, at what point does the avalanche of material just become too much for people to explore in a lifetime?

JN:    Well, you could say that of the whole world.  I can’t explore it all.  I have to explore very little of the world, but I’ve explored what I could, and surely I will have missed out on some marvelous music that I’ve never heard of, but I can’t help that.  I’ll explore what I can, and the fact that there’s a whole lot out there that I’ll probably never hear doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be out there for somebody else to hear.  I’m limited in what I can buy, where I can go, what I can get to hear, but that doesn’t mean that a whole lot of other stuff shouldn’t be out there that somebody else can buy or get to hear.  It’s like saying can there be too much poetry.  There’s going to be good, bad and indifferent poetry.  There’s going to be great and excellent and good poetry.  There’s a poem by Robert Frost, called A Minor Bird, and why should his song be less important than, for example — and here I’m leaping around a bit

This CD (released in 1998) contains the 12 Bagatelles for Solo Flute by Nunlist. To read my Interview with John Cage, click HERE. To read my Interview with Vivian Fine, click HERE.

© 1987 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded on the telephone on August 28, 1987.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB in 1997.  This transcription was made in 2014, and posted on this website at that time.

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

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