Colin Holter interviews Jeremy Wagner.

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On music and society:

Even with my son, when it’s bedtime and I play him the guitar and make him sing along, it’s the best thing in the world—I hear his voice and we’re doing something together. And nobody’s hearing it but us, but that’s why music is so important and so powerful. We don’t sit around fires anymore. We don’t sit around talking to each other—we rarely even sit around and listen to music anymore. I hate the iPod; I hate the idea that music is such a personal thing that you can just stick some earplugs in your ears and have an experience with music. Music is a social phenomenon, and it’s about sharing with each other a certain oral tradition, ultimately. Even when music is written down, having it memorized and performed—there’s a power in that, a communication between two or more people, and having that dynamic is getting rarer in the world, but it’s something I value most highly.

On radio:

I was raised in Kansas, my grandparents were all farmers, my parents moved away from the farm to Hutchinson where I was born which is kind of an industrial town. Their farms are out in western Kansas, where even today there are hardly any radio stations. It’s a place really cut off from the rest of the world; you search the radio dial and there’s literally nothing on sometimes except for Rush Limbaugh. Being out there in the evenings after all the work is done, there were radios—you hear about Buddy Holly in the ’50s staying up nights, trying to get a radio station, going out on a hill. For people of my generation I don’t think that’s a common experience, but at night you’d be lucky to get a station from Wichita or college radio from Lawrence.

On performing:

I’d been in jazz band, I’d been a classically trained saxophonist, but what does a classically trained saxophonist do? I suppose you could go on and study classical saxophone and then at the end of your doctoral degree be in a really bad position—there are two jobs in the United States, and all these saxophones. I knew that I didn’t have what it takes. I get bored practicing, that’s the problem: It takes a certain kind of mentality, a kind of Zen ability to space out and really focus, and I found when I was practicing I kept thinking of other things, and that became a problem.

On reunion shows:

We play in this a bar in Wichita; its walls are the color of nicotine. It’s been so smoked-in that the walls turned brown. I came in one day and it smelled like fresh paint, and they said yeah, we painted—but it looks exactly the same! They’d taken part of the wall that was stained, taken it to Home Depot, and gotten paint the color of nicotine to repaint the walls.

On Dyspnoea:

I set out to write a piece that wasn’t too easy. When you have a performer like Irvine Arditti, I thought, this guy can do anything, and if he can do anything, there’s no reason to go easy on him. So I conceived of the piece as an inner dialogue among nine different separate compositions, each with its own trajectory, and the performer is shifting between them. Each piece has to have its own identity and be immediately recognizable; it’s meant to be a montage of compositions. Eight of them are mine, and one of them is by Bach. A guy who happened in on the concert said it was like a music teacher trying to teach someone Bach and also trying to escape.