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Chapter 6. "The Challenge of Finding Your Own Voice in Everything You Do" FJO: One thing that I find fascinating, getting back to the question of audiences, is that you wrote a musical piece for kids and I think this is something that more people should be doing. In the last few years, you've become a father yourself, and this piece, I think, predates that. . . JF: Yeah, Yeah. . . it did, it did. FJO: But, talk a little bit about what that experience was and what you feel, what you bring to that. . . JF: That was an incredible amount of fun. Again it was a challenge. . . it's actually one of the few things I've written lyrics for. I wrote the book, the lyrics, and the score for this children's theater piece called Stew!. It was a commission and educational residency from Meet the Composer and the National Orchestral Association for the Manhattan Wind Quintet. The quintet and I were in residence with a 5th grade class at a public school in Yonkers (P.S. 25) doing various educational activities that culminated in this piece. There's a challenge writing for a soloist, there's a challenge writing for characters, there's a challenge writing for kids, figuring out when the adults, the quintet and the teachers, have to carry things, and what roles the kids could have., Since the residency was so short, and I needed to wait to see the kids in action and find out what the teachers were willing to do before writing much of the piece, everything was telescoped and happened at the last minute. It was very much like those stories about an out of town tryout of a musical: the second act is written the night before opening. It was incredibly pressure-packed in that way. Next time it would be great to have a longer, more spread out residency, more time with the kids, and then a longer period to actually write the piece. FJO: Is the music simpler that the rest of your music? JF: Generally yes, it is, but there are moments for the quintet that are very "Elliott Carter," where there were detailed effects, independent parts at different speeds, or where I wrote models for them to kind of improvise on, things like that. There was also a big, simple song, which was a kind of pop, anthem-like thing that the kids sing. Of course I had to develop the song like theme and variations throughout Stew!. That's the classical guy in me coming out! So it was quite varied, sometimes it got to be a bit complex. But I was careful not to let it get too involved because of not just the young students, but the lack of time to prepare. It's a piece I wouldn't mind revising at some point. The premise of Stew! was that only by allowing different foods - representing the different cultures and peoples - to blend together can you make something really good: stew. It was great to have a professional ensemble performing it and working with kids. Educationally a lot of territory was covered with the piece and the residency: music, dance, theater, the nature of collaboration, food and nutrition, different cultures, and so on. I feel it's important to do projects like this, to be part of the community. I'm hearing that more composers are now writing works for students, for bands and choirs, etc.. That's good. I have a band piece, Incontrovertible Counterpoint, in the pipeline. All those years of high school band will finally pay off! FJO: That's great. . . JF: You do the best you can and find yourself, your own voice in every piece you do, that's part of the challenge, whether to do a musical or a rock song, and so on, it's finding the sensibility saying "this is me, those are my choices", "I like those, within the parameters". . . it's always interesting and challenging for me. FJO: One thing we didn't talk about yet is your new piece, Fallings. . . JF: The plot is interesting as it deals with issues of secrecy, deciding whether to be loyal to your friends or yourself, and how to put your life back together after traumatic events. It's very dark at moments, but it also finds the humor in trying to cope with everything. The main characters, all sung/acted by Susan Narucki - live or on tape, are people in music, which like in Showboat or Gypsy is always a fun situation. The members of Contrasts will do more than just play their instruments. They'll be onstage and will play minor roles, doing some speaking, singing, moving, etc. It's so great working with these people: Contrasts and Susan. Their enthusiasm and flexibility are infectious. There we go with that collaboration thing again! A couple of things have really struck me about working on Fallings. I obviously do a lot of different kind of things musically. I think it's sometimes hard for a person approaching my work to see exactly what it is I actually do because it doesn't fit neatly into a category, into an-"ism." Fallings is just like this. It's a hybrid. It isn't exactly opera or musical theater; it's neither strictly chamber music nor full-scale theater in its length or the forces used; it will use live performance and technology (pre-recorded sound, MIDI, etc.). Plus, I don't want to fall into the expectations game - theater people thinking one thing, the new music crowd another. So I'm calling it a "neutral" genre name: "chamber music theater." The genesis of the piece is a case of me not connecting the dots. It actually started with Evelyne Luest, the pianist with the Contrasts Quartet (formerly the Eberli Ensemble). Evelyne played in Extreme Measures, and her ensemble performed the third movement of Elastic Band. She liked my music, so it was natural for me to write a piece for her group. Out of practicality lately I've been writing a lot of chamber works. But, what I really have wanted to do was to write something orchestral or theatrical in nature. It had been a while since I had a beginning, middle, and end of a piece like that. So, I was sitting, talking to you, Frank, of all people, about a year and a half ago, saying "I have to write this chamber piece, and I don't know. . . we've talked about doing something with narration but I'm not sure exactly what to do. My instinct is telling me that I don't want to write another chamber piece." And you're the one who said "Oh, you do theater, you've worked with Susan Narucki, why don't you put them together and write a theater piece for Susan and the Contrasts Quartet?" And literally, the light bulb went off in my head. That put everything into gear and connected the dots. I give Evelyne a huge amount of credit for allowing this project to evolve into a theater piece. But, I am also finding that there are a lot of things that are near and dear, and important to me, that are coming together in this piece - along the lines of how you put things together in our conversation about the project. Obviously it's theater, I'm calling it a chamber music theater piece because of the language and form, and because it's scored for one solo singer, four acoustic instruments (Contrasts Quartet: clarinet, violin, cello, piano), and pre-recorded sound. The pre-recorded sound is going to rely very heavily on those five musicians, plus additional ones being recorded and then edited and manipulated. So it's not just sampled sounds, but whole passages recorded and altered so the live musicians will be playing stage with their doppelgangers coming out of the speakers, etc. I have this huge, endless palette - basically an orchestra. Not only can write for five trombones, even though there aren't any trombones in Contrasts, but the music can be realized whole using live players, from samples of trombones, MIDI, as well combinations of these. I can use all of this material in naturalistic ways or in very "un-tromboney" ways so that I can come up with a timbre or gesture and effect that is nothing like a trombone. But it's this palette that goes on forever, which has totally excited me, and somewhat frightened me. So, it's basically both a chamber piece and an orchestra piece. Of course, what's driving it is theater, words. So it's that too. One of the things that occurred to me is that in the past I would invariably get to a point in a piece where I wanted something, I wanted a gesture, a sound, and really couldn't get it, and I would always think, "Well, you just don't have the orchestral chops of a Jacob Druckman!" But in starting this piece, it occurred to me that the world that I hear is not strictly acoustic instruments. Light bulb! I grew up hearing recorded sound, and it's not just recorded sounds, but sounds that were designed to be recorded. In particular think of middle-period Beatles, which was so influential for me. Everything they did then was slow downed, filtered, put through Leslie speakers, played backwards. . . FJO: They stopped playing live. . . JF: Right. . . FJO: They became studio electronic composers. . . JF: Right, absolutely. . . FJO: For three years. JF: Yeah, and the wonderful textures/timbre that came out of that, plus, for example, what one can do with electric guitar, you can't do that with a solo acoustic clarinet. And so I'm now finding that how important those sounds are to me, and no wonder I was frustrated, I was kind of barking up the wrong tree, and now, yes, in Fallings I can realize the sounds I've been hearing, because I can either take the real clarinet and make it into something that it's not by manipulating it in my computer, or I can have any instrument that physically can't be on stage and have them on the pre-recorded part. I can have that huge, pounding percussion section which sounds like it's playing under water keep shifting from speaker to speaker as it slides down thirds of tones over a minute. I said, "my God, all that stuff I always wanted to do", and could not figure out how to do is all there. It really didn't occur to me that while I've been writing these traditional chamber pieces, which is something that I adore doing, that there's been a big component missing. It's exciting to think where this may lead in both Fallings and future pieces. FJO: That would actually make me come back to something you've said at the very beginning. . . I always find this very ironic, it is sort of very weird. At the beginning of our talk, you talked about wanting this collaborative process, writing for people rather than creating solo music on a synthesizer, and now you've come full circle, and have learned to work with people and create electronic music that involves the input of people, so collaboration is still going on, but it is a fixed form. JF: In some ways. The pre-recorded part may be fixed, we haven't totally decided on that yet. But don't forget it is still a piece derived from collaboration: with my librettist, with the live musicians (whether they are playing live or pre-recorded); with my audio engineer, and so on. I'm still not a hundred percent sure about is the final realization of the work. I think it's very possible that all of this stuff could be played/controlled through software on a laptop onstage triggered by the musicians, as opposed to coming from a fixed CD. The CD is in some ways easier, but it's also less musically interesting, more rigid. If the musicians trigger the pre-recorded sounds then it becomes more like traditional chamber music and that would be another level of collaboration. FJO: Now you're talking about theater, you're talking about mixed media components; how involved are you in the non-musical elements in this piece? JF: In this piece, very involved. I tend to want, or need, to be involved in any theatrical piece, to not just be a "hired hand" writing music. With Fallings I went to Seth and pitched a semi-formed idea to him. But, I think it also depends on both the piece and the collaboration, with whom I'm collaborating with, because it is a marriage relationship. You have to be comfortable, to be willing to give and take, and to be embarrassed, but not be made a fool of, and obviously I can do that with my brother. There are scenes that are very much instinctual for me. I'm not entirely sure of how the details work - that will be his job - but I know it's emotionally and dramatically right. I'm saying "Yeah, I want this". . . Recently we were talking about a possible funeral scene, my brother hasn't delved into yet, certainly hasn't written it, and yet I've been throwing things at him. I can see where it's going, what the characters are doing, even if I don't have all the details yet. Of course, all of this will probably change as we go forward. Again that's the collaboration, he may come back and say: "No, we really need to do this instead", or the scene might take a dramatically different turn and so we'll argue back and forth. FJO: So, this begs a final audience question again. . . How is an audience, for a piece that has other sensory input-visual input, theatrical narrative input, in additional to musical input, how is their perception of the musical content different in your estimation? Fallings is a music theater work, and in a lot of your pieces, there are these other components going on that are competing for sensory attention on the part of the audience. JF: For me, they should all be serving one purpose, they should be unified, and create a clear emotional, dramatic world. I try to always think of the theatrical and the dramatic elements. I don't like heaping effects on top of something. It's distracting clutter and doesn't usually help. It can be more about how clever I am than what is needed for the scene so, for me, that type of thing is not honest. Again, it's like the difference between being confused and confusing an audience. Are you lost or deliberately trying to make the audience feel they're lost? Very different things. But, going back to your point, think of what audience is listening to in a film score, they listen to 12-tone music, they listen to something that makes Ligeti seems like child's play. It doesn't seem to faze them. Some of it is clearly watching and not paying attention to the music, but, if there's a relation between the action and the music, a correlation, then it can fly with an audience. FJO: To bring it back to your example of a C minor going back to A major. . . it's great, but it gotta go. And, perhaps, to bring that thought to a ritornello one last time here, maybe what has to happen in a theater piece, in order for that C minor to A major modulation to stay, without getting cut, is that what's happening on stage also has to modulate from C minor to A major. What's happening with the visual and the narrative has to also be happening in the music and vice versa; one can't exist without the other. JF: Exactly, that might be another way of defining the difference between "dramatic" and "theatrical." This is what happens when something is text-driven, meaning that it's not just about the words, and it's certainly not just about pretty music for music's sake, but that the words are about specific dramatic situations, about characters. Fallings will not be musical theater, certainly not in the pop language or economic sense, but if Seth and I create characters that are real, that you care about, that you have a stake in, that's musical theater in the good sense. To me, everything is much more meaningful that way. It's creating those interesting, complex three-dimensional characters, having them in situations where their wants, their needs, and their desires are clear to the audience, that to me, is really interesting. I think Fallings is interesting in how it brings so many ideas in my work together, full circle. It will be a real watershed for me, a kind of summation or arrival piece. --Frank J. Oteri (click here for more info on FJO) Frank J. Oteri is a New York-based composer and the editor of NewMusicBox, the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award-winning Web magazine from the American Music Center (www.newmusicbox.org) Go back to Chaper 05> / Return to beginning> Back to top> ©2005 Joel Phillip Friedman