This conversation featuring composer/performers Mike Duffy, Colin Holter, Josh Musikantow, Schuyler Tsuda, and Jeremy Wagner and conductor Bob Whalen illuminates the preparations the CMW has undertaken toward a performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s cosmic epic Ylem.
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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. >>>>
Colin Holter interviews Nick Zielinski.
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On being a composer/performer/improviser:
The playing informs the composing, which informs the improvising, which informs the playing, so it’s kind of a circular thing, and it’s all related. These days I spend maybe 25% of my time practicing technique things on the drums and equal parts composing and improvising after that. I’ll say 40% improvising and 35% composing. >>>>
Colin Holter interviews Brett Wartchow.
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On the New Music Scrapbook:
When I was a kid growing up in the resort, we went through some really tough economic times. My dad’s an economist, and probably one of the most creative-minded people I know. I can imagine him having the weight of the world on his shoulders and trying to raise a family with limited means, and he says, “Brett, if a job is not available for you, make one.” If you’re willing to work, there’s always going to be work available for you. I’ve thought about that, and it still befuddles me—is that even possible?—but from a very early age he’s always taught me to be proactive about whatever I’m doing. If things aren’t going the way you like, you do something different to change it so that it goes in the direction that you like. There’s so much back-room water-cooler talk about how things are going here—let’s just shut up and make music. Let’s create something we can all rally around and feel confident instead of victimized. >>>>
Colin Holter interviews Schuyler Tsuda.
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On building instruments:
I started taking art classes at some point. My first class was with Chris Larson, and it was a metal sculpture class. I’m not sure why I took it, to be honest, but I was interested in doing some kind of sound sculpture thing. When I first started, I was sort of a fish out of water because I’d never done anything like it before, but Chris Larson would say “just go ahead and do it.” The class was very heavy on conceptual feedback, which was great, because I got to the point where I wasn’t inhibited about working and learning from other people. That’s maybe the best way for me to work, to be able to experiment safely. The instrument I keep coming back to is the steel cello, which is based on Robert Rutman’s steel cello, which is just a huge steel plate suspended on a frame. I just do it on the floor or hand-held, it’s a smaller version, and I use steel rods on the surface with a spring reverb chamber I put together on top of it. Sonically it’s my favorite because I can do so much with it. But of course I think that it’s probably the least sound-sculpture-like; it’s more of just a DIY instrument. >>>>
Colin Holter interviews Josh Musikantow.
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On pitch and rhythm:
I didn’t actually know how to notate pitches until ninth grade, so I got a late start, but as a kid I was always trying to learn these crazy polyrhythms and odd meters. So when I started to learn about pitch, I immediately saw a discontinuity between the standard tuning system where you basically have twelve pitch classes versus rhythm, where you have infinite gradations of durations and proportions. I guess in high school I started teaching myself how to convert from ratios to cents and I got very interested in that. La Monte Young’s Well-Tuned Piano was a big piece for me in high school, so it was just sort of serendipity that I was exposed to that. Maybe it was the timing; maybe if I’d been exposed to something else at that impressionable age, I’d be doing something else. >>>>
Colin Holter interviews Michael Duffy.
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On expanding horizons:
A lot of it was through the jazz I’d been listening to since before high school, even. I mentioned Miles Davis. I had an uncle who was a jazz fan and liked old Blue Note stuff—the Italian side of my family from Philadelphia—organ jazz, Joey DeFrancesco. It’s a straight line, in a way, from Miles Davis to Stockhausen. It certainly wasn’t through classical music. I wasn’t playing Pictures at an Exhibition in high school. >>>>
Colin Holter interviews Zachary Crockett.
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On meaning:
I think the unique position of artists in human society is that we get to work more explicitly with meaning than anyone else does, so I feel like there’s a really deep moral imperative to pick the right meanings. Artists present something that they hope will shape the world, and it goes both ways—but in either case you can pick out those things that line up with your values and that you want to see more of in the world to present. Things that on the surface are really detestable and gross and horrifying and sick can actually teach us a great deal about ourselves, they can show ways in which we are vulnerable; our vulnerabilities are beautiful places. So there is a certain type of art that I think it’s important to create: It doesn’t have to be didactic, it doesn’t have to be pretty, but there has to be some very large, deep sense that I’m presenting something that’s important for people to see, to hear, to imagine, to react to. We make meaning, and the right thing to do is to choose meanings in accordance with your values. >>>>
Brett Wartchow interviews Colin Holter.
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On tasteless music:
There’s a little bit of a thrill about writing music that’s a little bit tasteless but that looks like contemporary music. One of the things that it’s taken me a while to do is write tasteless music. I’m really kind of invested in that now. If there’s one thing I would say for my music in the past three years, I would hope that I’m more willing to violate taboos now than I was before. I’m certainly more willing to be gaudy and tacky, as a composer, than I used to be, and in fact I think it’s really important for me to do that. Because, again, in order to identify these contradictions in culture you have to be willing to use the words. You have to be willing to cite the material that you’re identifying contradictions in, and that requires sometimes being tacky. >>>>
Colin Holter interviews Richard Yates.
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On getting started:
I started writing music when I started playing piano; I think that was the first time, and it must be because of my piano teacher. She must have said, “You can just write what comes to mind, too; you don’t necessarily have to sing what’s on the paper.” And in elementary choirs and things like that, we probably had improvisational kinds of exercises. I can’t remember a specific point where it was like, “Now I will write music;” I think it was always a part of the music-making that we were doing. I don’t know that that’s necessarily typical. I guess in high school, at some point, I started writing music for the choir, so I wrote a few pieces that were performed while I was a junior and senior in high school. I think I also started writing some instrumental music around that time too. I guess when I was little I would do a lot of improvising at the piano and singing and things, and driving my parents crazy. And my brother. >>>>
Colin Holter interviews James Holdman.
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On titles:
There are degrees of ambiguity and multiple meaning, if there’s any meaning at all. Part of the titling in strange ways is that I like the way that words sound juxtaposed, whether they have any meaning or not. Another aspect of these strange titles is that I’m interested in what kind of imagery they bring to the audience’s mind. You’re going to come up with your own idea about what it means—it’s not like “Prelude No. 3.” That in a way biases the audience, or confuses them, which is fine—because ultimately my music is not about anything at all. >>>>