Composing for the Bassoon: An Interview with John Steinmetz

(I first heard John Steinmetz, as both a bassoonist and composer, during the last Claremont Music Festival,  34 (!) years ago.   Nowadays, he's one of the most active classical musicians in greater LA and along the west coast, and his composing and performing has been extended to teaching and lecturing (If you don't know it already, I strongly recommend John's essay on Resuscitating Art Music which is one of the most sensible statements of its sort.)  This interview took place, via email, over the last week or so.  John's answers were usually so complete and well-articulated that my questions were mostly superfluous.)  

DJW: We take the bassoon's range for granted, as a good utility player with both a distinctive bass and altissimo and a central tenor range designed mainly to blend. For new music, can we extend the extremes and,  in the middle, how much pitch flexibility is there for microtones,  
bending, or even slides?

JS: The bassoon is a treasure-trove of weird and wonderful sounds. Whenever writing extended techniques, work with a player. My favorite  pieces using extended techniques were composed with players' help. Working with a player ensures that the effects are playable and that they sound  expressive and musical. The player's involvement also reassures other bassoonists that the effects are workable.

Low Notes

Wagner and Mahler sometimes wrote low A for the bassoon (there must have been bassoons with that note, but nobody makes them now). The Nielsen wind quintet ends with this note. Players insert a cardboard tube in the bell to change the lowest note from Bb to A. Paul Chihara uses this effect in his Branches. The tube disables low Bb and messes with intonation and resonance of other notes.

There are fingerings for "pedal notes"--really multiphonics with a strong low pitch. (For low A, finger low F and lift the left hand 3rd finger. Lip down and give it lots of air.) On some bassoons with some reeds, some players can play low A, low Ab, low G, and maybe lower. The pedal notes 
sound much clearer when reinforced by another instrument. Very few players are practiced at this.

High Notes

Notes higher than D (2nd line in treble clef)--the highest note in the Rite of Spring bassoon solo--are possible, and the repertoire includes Eb,  E (Ravel piano concerto, Harbison wind quintet, Daugherty Dead Elvis) and even F (Wozzeck, West Side Story Dances). (According to legend, Bernstein wrote the high F in West Side Story as a prank, to tweak his friend who  
would be playing the bassoon part. But his friend saw the note before the first rehearsal, practiced it, and played it to spite Bernstein. So this prank note stayed in the  score. Some players just leave it out, because it is doubled by other instruments.) Some bassoonists practice these very high notes and can play them reliably, but some players struggle with them. On some bassoons they require special reeds and bocals (the metal neck) that may limit the  
effectiveness of other notes. Notes above D are simply less trustworthy, they are difficult to play staccato, and they are much easier to play when slurred from a nearby lower note.

Some players have figured out ways to play even higher notes, and you might enjoy including these exotic sounds if you're writing for one of those players. I recommend not writing very- or super-high notes unless you know who's going to play the music.

Bends and slides

The bassoon has lots of flexibility for bends and slides, but each note is different in its capabilities. (The bassoon, as Lou Harrison once quipped, is the only woodwind not spoiled by the Industrial Revolution. It never got modernized or standardized or homogenized, and this the source of its character and the reason for its quirky acoustics and illogical fingerings.) Some notes can be bent with lip pressure, some bend up but not down, some vice versa. In general, higher notes are easier to bend than lower notes.

Finger glissandos are easy on open tone holes (holes that are not covered with a key); slowly sliding the finger off the tone hole produces a slide of a half or whole step. Covered holes may produce slides by opening/closing the key slowly. Some players are good at slides and bends;  
others find them intimidating. (I have been surprised that the relatively easy glissandos in my Sonata scare some very accomplished players.) Some players have worked out ways to play glissandos that cover a wider range; write these only for such players.

Here are some easy slides that work upward or downward: in the bass staff,  from A to B, from B to C, from C to D, from D to E, from E to F--and the same notes an octave higher (upper E to F is iffy). These glisses can be joined to produce a longer gliss that may or may not be perfectly smooth.

Low Bb to B-natural can make a slide up or down by moving the key slowly.  Same thing for low B-natural to C.

High note finger slides sound beautifully plaintive. It's easy to slide between high B and C and between high C# and D.

Bending pitch is more challenging at soft dynamics, when wind pressure can't be varied as much. (Players control pitch through a combination of wind pressure and lip pressure.) Players who use stiffer reeds will probably have more trouble varying pitch.

Bassoons are designed with "sweet spots" so that notes sit comfortably at a particular pitch level where maximum resonance occurs; bending notes forces them away from that comfort zone, where they may not resonate as much. Often a note gets softer as it bends away from its accustomed place; players have to compensate for this in order to maintain an even dynamic,  
and that compensation is unfamiliar to most bassoonists, although it's not too hard to learn for somebody interested.

Jazz bassoonists Paul Hansen and Michael Rabinowitz have worked out ways to bend and scoop notes appropriately for jazz styles. To do this, they have evolved flexible, responsive reeds and playing style.

Microtones

Microtones are easy on many pitches, using altered lip or wind pressure or using special fingerings. Changing a pitch microtonally may also change its timbre. Very few players practice playing consistent, repeatable microtones, but all experienced players are used to shading the pitch of a note to fit its context.

Timbre changes

The bassoon can vary the timbre of most notes by opening and/or closing keys farther down the bore. This has the effect of adding or removing harmonics. This doesn't work for notes below low D. Alternate fingerings, available for many notes, can also be used for timbral effects. The low Eb and Db keys, used for resonance in many fingerings, can be opened or closed to alter the timbre of many notes.

DJW: Am I right that if you want specific sounds — like multiphonics — which are highly sensitive to the combination of player and instrument, some caution is in order when using them in pieces which you expect will be played by players you can't work with personally? This  
suggests that composers might usefully think of the bassoon very differently in solo and ensemble, particularly orchestral, contexts.

JS: Yes, I think this is a useful approach, and it also makes sense because special effects in orchestral writing are usually part of a big  texture, and so may not require as much specificity as the more exposed sounds in chamber music or solo pieces.

But, as usual, it depends. For me the first question is something like "What's the expressive purpose?" That helps me to know why a sound matters, or what matters about it. And when I know that, I can more easily figure out how to handle the technicalities. For instance, sometimes the mood or color or energy of a piece requires a very particular multiphonic sound. In that case, the composer must work with the player to find out how to produce a sound that fits the context, and if the piece is intended to be played by various people, then it will be important to use a sound that is easy to reproduce.

In other cases it's possible to give partial information about a sound and let the player work out how to do it. You can ask for a multiphonic that includes a certain pitch, or that has a certain quality ("noisy" or "includes some low sounds" or "gurgling, unstable" or "like a blender").  You might even be able to say "any multiphonic" if that suits the expressive purpose.

There are some multiphonics that any player can get, such as low F plus the right thumb Bb key. Other multiphonics are fussy and take some practice. Still others work only on some bassoons. There are books and charts about this stuff, but composers have been misled; always have a  
player try these things. One starting place is an old article of mine called "A Few Easy Multiphonics for Bassoon"  (These multiphonics are not as universally easy as I once thought, but some of them do work for many players.

DJW: How about the contrabassoon? It's gotten some attention from composers lately as a solo, even concerto, instrument. Is this a specialist instrument or will every professional bassoonist have access to and be able to double on it? What is a robust, reliable range for the  
contra? I've had the impression, in comparison to the bassoon, that there seems to be a lot less standardization and even some substantial recent innovation. Are we going to be hearing more from the contra in the future than just an "octave lower, octave slower" bassoon?

JS: Many bassoonists play contra, but not all. Not every bassoonist has access to a contra, and even those who double vary greatly in their comfort with the instrument. You're right that the instruments themselves also vary wildly; some are hard to play, and others work really well. Some have keys that are missing on others, so some intervals and trills are more difficult on some instruments. On the other hand, we now have some really terrific contra players, many of them members of symphony orchestras, with beautifully maintained instruments, sometimes with customized improvements. These people play with gorgeous sound, beautiful intonation, and technical elan. They have already started influencing the future, by commissioning and premiering works that feature the contrabassoon.

The instrument is designed to supply contrabass notes, so in my opinion it sounds best from (written) low Bb up two octaves. Because the contra usually plays a supporting role, most bassoonists are not experienced with playing solos on it, or with playing high notes. Notes above the staff tend to sound stuffy and can be unstable, although there are players who sound beautiful up there. The solo in Ravel's Mother Goose goes up to written G above middle C, and ensemble music in Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony goes higher. Recent virtuoso solo pieces have the contrabassoon screaming and wailing all the way up to (sounding) middle C. Jon Deak calls for contrabassoon multiphonics in Hyde and Jeckyll, but as I recall he lets the player  
choose. (And it's hard to tell the difference between a contra multiphonic and its low notes!)

During the 20th Century, composers sought expressive intensity by using instruments' extreme registers and special effects, but remember that all instruments have a "normal" range in which they are the most expressively supple, and in which the fullest, most resonant sound is available. Using notes and effects outside the normal range can be striking and highly expressive (I use a lot of this stuff in my own music), but in my opinion the most promising expressive potential is found in the normal range. I think this is especially true of instruments like the contrabassoon that were built to serve a particular function. (I'm also thinking of all those high-register double bass solos that overlook the gorgeous and absolutely unique sound of the instrument's low notes.)

I've heard about a new instrument, the contraforte, that a few players are trying. Apparently it is louder and has a clearer sound. We might be hearing more of those in the future.

DJW: I've recently heard that some players have taken up doubling on the French bassoon, with its different bore and keywork, for French orchestral repertoire. Is the difference between the systems too subtle, or might composing especially for the French bassoon be of interest to composers?

JS: The French and German bassoons diverged more than 100 years ago, and have developed separately since then. Although they play an overlapping  repertoire, they sound quite different and have different strengths. It  looked for a while like the French bassoon might go extinct, and many of  us thought this tragic. That instrument has a compelling sound, a superior cantabile, and a fleet and fantastic high register. Fortunately the French bassoon still has its champions, and as you say some orchestra players are now doubling, playing the French instrument for French repertoire. It's a wonderful instrument and it might very well be of interest to some  
composers.

Here's the Jolivet bassoon concerto played on French bassoon and on German bassoon.

DJW: With many composers coming from the keyboard, or even computer samples, we don't always get articulations for wind instruments right.  Moreover, there's a raging discussion about under- or over-marking scores. Do you have any suggestions about markings we have to make or markings we ought to be cautious about?

JS: In general, notation should help performers understand and realize the music's expressive intent. A mark that clarifies intent is good. A mark that helps the player to clarify intent for listeners is good. If the intent is clear without extra marks, don't add them.

It's not so simple, though. The marks available are insufficient to communicate the subtleties of phrasing and articulation that are possible, so we composers need to notate our music in a way that helps the player make good guesses about how to help this particular music to sound its  
best. In my experience as a player, seeing the notation is sometimes not enough; I may have to play and hear the music before I know what it needs. To make matters worse, many marks have ambiguous meanings or multiple meanings, and the same marks mean different things to different instruments. Even in standard repertoire people don't agree about what certain notations mean. There's a lot of confusion built in.

Here's my over-simple answer about how many marks to use: use enough to help the performers know what the music needs, and don't use any more than necessary. Sometimes adding marks helps; sometimes adding marks creates trouble. This is an art, not a science, and musicians have different tastes about how much information they want to see, and what kind. When you get stuck or confused, ask yourself about your musical intent.

Perhaps (this is just a guess) some music reveals its needs and character relatively quickly and easily, often on first playing, but other music becomes expressively clear only after a great 
deal of practicing and careful decoding of intricate notations. Both kinds of music can sound spontaneous and beautiful, but the second kind relies on lots of marks and lots of practice to make its intentions clear. In any case, there's no one right way to solve the notation problem.

Have a player play what you have written to see if it means what you thought it meant.

In standard repertoire as well as in new music, players often play differently than the notation instructs, in order to better serve the musical intent. We will slur unslurred notes, tongue notes under slurs,  shorten or lengthen notes, and so on. This is usually good news, because  even if the composer makes a notation mistake, the player will still try to serve the music.

Slurs. I think composers are most often confused about slurs. On strings and keyboards, slurs convey information about phrasing, but on the bassoon and other wind instruments, slurs are primarily instructions for articulation. The first note of a slur begins with a consonant--the tongue creates a "ta" or "da" by touching the reed--and then the notes under the slur are connected without tonguing, like notes sung on one vowel. When a new slur starts, the player makes another consonant. So if you want notes smoothly connected, like a melisma on a single vowel, put them under a slur. It's okay to slur across two notes of the same pitch; the player will tongue gently to separate the notes but make them sound smooth. Check with a player to make sure your slurs are possible; some note combinations are difficult to slur.

Articulation. An unmarked note is started with the tongue. The player won't know how hard or gently to tongue it (what consonant to use, or how accented to make the attack) and so will probably use a middling articulation until figuring out what the context calls for. If you want a  
series of notes to be tongued very gently--almost slurred--use a slur with dots or dashes over the notes, or just put a dash over every note. Because these notations have multiple meanings, add words that say "very smooth" or something similar. (For string instruments, slurred staccato produces notes with space between. Wind players looking at that notation will be  
confused, because sometimes it means "play this as a string player would," but sometimes it means "very gentle articulation.")

Weight. Accents indicate heaviness of attack. This is done either with harder tonguing or extra wind, or both. A dash can mean "lean on this note," but sometimes it means "make the note long." It's okay to put an accent or dash under a slur; the player will connect smoothly but give
emphasis with the breath.

Length. The bassoon is capable of a great variety of lengths, from a super-short staccato to a very long, smooth articulation that is almost like a slur. In between are more possibilities than there are notations.  Use words to indicate the expressive character you want, and this will  
help the player to know how short to play the notes with dots, or how long to play the notes with dashes.

An unmarked note is usually held for its full value. If you want the note shorter, then either make that clear in the character of the music, or put a dot above the note, or notate a shorter value. A dash sometimes means to play a note full value. A dot and dash together mean "a little bit shorter."

Dynamics not only indicate loudness; they are also clues to expressive character.

DJW: Finally, is there any recent repertoire for bassoon, as soloist or as ensemble instrument, that stands out for you as examples of getting the bassoon right?

JS: This is a great question! There are many, many ways to get the bassoon right, since the instrument is versatile. Here are a few pieces I have  enjoyed playing or hearing. Maybe that means these are well written for the bassoon. These are just a few that come quickly to mind:

Mario Lavista, Responsorio for bassoon and two percussion. Recorded on "Bassoon Images from the Americas," Albany Records, TROY 608. Expressive writing that includes evocative multiphonics.

Donald Crockett, Extant for bassoon and chamber ensemble. Published by MMB music. Xtet plans to record this.

John Deak, The Bremen Town Musicians for wind quintet. Short audio excerpt available here.

Wind Quintets by John Harbison, Elliott Carter, and David Maslanka. Also Carter's woodwind quartet, Eight Etudes and a Fantasy.

There's a very pretty bassoon solo in the middle movement of John Adams' Naive and Sentimental Music.

Alex Shapiro, Deep for contrabassoon and electronics. On "Notes from the Kelp," Innova 683. Audio clip available here.

Alex Shapiro, Of Breath and Touch, for bassoon and piano. On "Beck and Call," Crystal 846. Audio clip here.

Bill Douglas, Partita for Bassoon and Piano, published by TrevCo.

Gernot Wolfgang has written several terrific bassoon pieces.

David Maslanka, Music for Dr. Who, for bassoon and piano. A short piece that takes the bassoon into some unusual expressive territory, with very expressive use of some extended techniques.

For good or ill, my ideas about the bassoon inform my compositions for the instrument. See the list here.

Also, to hear another set of possibilities, check out the jazz bassoon playing of Doug Hansen and Michael Rabinowitz.

Composing for the Trumpet: an Interview with Joe Drew

(Trumpeter and composer Joe Drew specializes in new music and, under the nom de blog, Jodru, is the most prolific contributor to the AnaBlog associated with the Analog Arts Ensemble.  Satie once claimed that "with six trumpets you can do anything".  The possibilities which Joe describes here suggest that with one trumpet you can do almost anything.  I predict that, after this interview, there will soon be a slew of pieces featuring extreme pedal tone half-valve glissandi with plunger mute. This interview, which took place via email, is the second in a series.)

DJW: A generation or so ago, if you wrote for trumpet, that meant a Bb instrument, maybe a C, and some players might have a cornet as well. Now, it is not unusual for players to be ready to play Bb, C, D trumpets, piccolo trumpet, with some players specializing in historical instruments (natural trumpets, the F trumpet of late romantic music, even keyed bugles) and to play flugelhorn as well as cornet. What is the basic set of equipment that an orchestral player will have? What about a new music specialist?

JD: Every orchestral player will have a Bb, C & piccolo trumpet (pitched in A & Bb). Most students own all three horns by the 2nd or 3rd year of their undergraduate studies. That trio of horns will be all most gigging trumpeters need. If you are seeing an American orchestra performing German music on rotary trumpets, those players most likely do not own those instruments. They're probably owned by the orchestra or a school where one of the trumpeters is on faculty. 

A very common misconception about the C trumpet is that it's favored by orchestral players because it is brighter than a Bb. It isn't. The transpositions are much easier on a C trumpet. The American orchestral sound is so bright that somehow that basic sound and the prevalence of the C trumpet got conflated into this myth.

The next horn that most people would buy is an Eb/D. The D trumpet is most commonly used on the 3rd part in Baroque pieces, and the Eb is what most people prefer to use on the Haydn or Hummel. Owning an Eb/D also gives you more transposition options in an orchestra.

It is not at all unusual for orchestral trumpeters to have a whole variety of horns for different pieces. Gerard Schwartz liked to play the Haydn on Bb. Some guys would never dream of touching the Brandenburg on a standard piccolo. I've been to auditions where people lugged along a G trumpet just to play certain excerpts. Most players stick to that basic trio, although there is no universal system.

For many professional trumpeters, if a piece required them to use a flugelhorn, they'd have to borrow it. Same with cornet. Neither instrument is used enough for trumpeters to feel that they have to own one. That being said, it is not uncommon for a trumpeter to own all 6.

Historical specialists tend to play both the natural trumpet and dabble in the cornetto, although the players who do both equally well are rare. Most tend to focus on one in particular. In an ideal world, every trumpeter would learn the natural trumpet, because it strengthens your fundamentals so thoroughly.

A new music specialist could play most of the received repertoire with that basic trio of horns. You have to get pretty deep into the specialty before you start to require things like quarter-tone valves and double bells, but increasingly, you are going to see more and more trumpeters with that gear. I'm currently setting aside shekels so that I can add a quarter-tone valve to my flugelhorn, for instance. I've put it off for too long!

For the record, I have seven horns, but instead of the Eb/D trumpet, I have an Eb with 4-valves and a regular D trumpet.

DJW: I'm a fan of the old virtuoso cornet literature. With the growing use of the flugelhorn, is the cornet still an option for composers?

JD: The cornet definitely is an option for composer, even though they can't expect every trumpeter to own one. Aside from those old virtuoso pieces, the most famous piece that requires a cornet is A Soldier's Tale, and most people play all of that repertoire on trumpet. Though the trumpet and cornet are identical notationally, the sound is quite different, and a trumpeter can't just pick up a cornet and automatically sound good on it. If someone is going to play A Soldier's Tale on cornet, they are going to spend quite a bit of time getting comfortable on the instrument. Notes just lay differently on a cornet, and in that piece especially, the minor differences between the trumpet and the cornet can really trip you up.

The flugelhorn is much easier to switch to from a trumpet, although the sound difference is enormous.

DJW: What is a secure standard range for professionals, and how secure are the possible extensions both down- and upwards? If in doubt about the range is it more diplomatic for the composer to write out ossias or to let the player decide what to do? What endurance issues are raised by using extreme registers?

JD: The secure standard range really is what you read in the textbooks: from the low F# below the staff to the high C above the staff. A composer can expect any professional trumpet player to have that range. On the high side, it's not asking too much to go another whole step higher to the D. The low side is a different story. Most trumpeters can comfortably play a half-step below the F#. There are two common orchestral excerpts (Carmen Prelude & Ein Heldenleben) which require a pedal F that most trumpeters play by kicking out their valve slides and using false fingerings.

The possible extensions are where writing for trumpet gets highly variable. Since we're talking about classical music, I'm going to stick to what classical trumpet players can do. A lead jazz trumpeter is capable of extreme high notes which are not possible for most classical players. When I was at Yale, the Philharmonia was doing a piece by Timothy Geller, and we were all dying, because he'd written these unplayable parts where the trumpets would scream on high F's and G's for long passages. He was surprised to learn it was unreasonable, because he'd written it with the input of a lead jazz trumpeter.

I've attached a chart which outlines what is reasonable for extremely proficient professional classical players. On the high side, the high F (F6) is not unreasonable to ask. The G above that is probably pushing it. This upper extension on the standard range is either going to be very secure for a player, or it's not. Chances are, if they can get those notes, they're secure up there.

The pedal side is where it gets interesting. The pedal range down to C3 is accessible enough that a composer can ask for any of those notes from a professional. This range takes preparation to play accurately, but it is very secure. Below that, and you'll draw a blank with most trumpeters. However, these notes are not hard to get, and any trumpeter at any skill level can learn to play them in about 5 minutes! From F#2 to E1, the lower lip actually has to be outside of the mouthpiece. Since this is not a standard practice, composers shouldn't expect any trumpeter to be able to do it, but it is a wonderful sound. It's worth working with a trumpeter to get it. And just in case anyone thinks this is some kind of kooky 'new music' extended technique, just listen to this recording from 1902.

DJW: That's fantastic — you really understand why Robert Erickson named his solo piece Kryl. If the composer is in doubt about the range, is it more diplomatic to write out ossias or to let the player decide what to do, switching instruments for example?

JD: Switching instruments will give you a different sound; so, a composer should decide what's most important in the piece. Classical players like me will often use the piccolo to cheat on lead parts. To us, it's a fairly accurate imitation of the nasal sound of a jazz lead player, but put it next to the real thing, and the difference is immediately recognizable.

An ossia is certainly one way to go. Trumpeters will already take things down an octave without being asked! Diplomacy shouldn't be a concern. As all composers know, if they ask for something abnormal, the musicians will think that they're 'an idiot'. That's just a fact of life. However, professional musicians are also grown ups, and they're used to working around abnormal demands in a score. The best thing to do is make your intentions as clear as possible on the written page and deal with a player's limitations in person.

DJW: Are there leaps between registers we can ask for with some confidence, or are there some that should be avoided at all costs?  

JD: Leaps from the register below middle C to above the staff are difficult to execute on sight. A little practice makes short work of them, though. The standard range of a trumpet is small enough that leaps aren't too big of a problem. As Patty said about the oboe, we're not a piano. The leap from low C to high C is executed by a dozen facial muscles that are constricted by a metal ring that's less than an inch wide. So, it's a much more physical leap on a trumpet than it is on a piano. A composer should simply bear that in mind, however. Just because it's harder for us doesn't mean it should be avoided.

DJW: What endurance issues are raised by using extreme registers?

JD: Fatigue on the trumpet is a result of the pressure from the mouthpiece on our lips. The metal restricts the flow of blood. Imagine doing a bicep curl with a metal band clamped around your bicep. It would be a lot harder, right? Well, that's what playing the trumpet is like. As we go higher, the opening in our lips (aperture) gets smaller. The longer you play, the more swollen & tired your lips get, just as your legs wear out during a race. After a while, they wear down to the point where it becomes impossible to maintain the small aperture you need for the high notes. To return to the weight lifting analogy, it's the same as how your arms get rubbery after a weight lifting session. After long periods of exertion, our lips get rubbery too, and it's just harder to exert the finite control over them that we need to in order to play the instrument. 

The endurance of players varies widely. It's difficult to give a standard guideline for a composer to avoid wearing out a player. The key thing is to give us time to recoup. Sometimes, just a half beat where we can take the horn off the lips a bit helps get the blood flowing back in, and we're good to go again. 

There is no endurance factor for the low register. The only thing to bear in mind is that if you ask a trumpeter to play in the low register for an extended period of time, he will kind of be stuck down there. When you play 2nd on an entire classical symphony, you've been in your low setting for so long, that it's not easy to play in the high register for a while.

DJW: Let's move on to mutes. Straight, Cup, Harmon, Bucket, Solotone, Practice, any of the above in Metal or Fibre, playing in the stand, or just using your hand: what is the basic spice rack that every player will have, so that, for example, an entire section will use the same mute?

JD: Straight, Cup, Harmon, Plunger, & Practice. Every trumpet player will have one of those, and if they don't, they'll be willing to buy one to play your piece, because they know they'll need it eventually. There are tons of different mutes, and one trap to avoid is writing off-brand. When a composer asks for a mute that's not being made anymore or is really hard to track down, it just reduces a player's incentive to perform the piece. You may love the sound of the obscure mute you've discovered, but bear in mind, that not everyone will be able to find it.

DJW: The standard notation for muting is a binary + and -, on and off. What's the best notation for transient muting (moving between open and closed) or muting with a specific rhythmic profile?

JD: There really isn't a standard notation. Every player will be familiar with 'con sordino' and 'senza sordino'. A composer is always best suited by settling on a notation that's clear. If someone is writing a lot of mute changes very quickly, which is a nice effect, the notation would need to be concise. A 'cs' or + work just fine. If someone is giving specific rhythms to the mute, just put it above the staff (see below).

DJW: Since each mute affects the spectrum in different ways, a muted trumpet is not automatically a _quieter_ trumpet (indeed some mutes are at their best when used with strongly changing dynamics). Relative to the open trumpet, what are the effective ranges of the mutes? Which mutes hide the player more in a mixed ensemble and which make the instrument more penetrent?

JD: You make an extremely important point: mutes do not make a trumpet softer. If a composer writes 'con sordino' without specifying a mute, most trumpeters will put in a straight mute (I prefer a cup mute). Neither the straight or the cup mute deadens the sound of a trumpet the way a mute on a violin does. It simply changes the color of the sound. A muted trumpet can still be deafening. A straight mute makes the trumpet so nasal that it actually cuts through the ensemble, much like an oboe. The cup mute mellows out the sound. It's definitely easier to blend with a cup mute than a straight mute.

Composers tend to think that a trumpet must be muted to blend in with softer instruments in a chamber ensemble. No, no, no, a thousand times, no! A trumpet is capable of playing extremely quiet dynamics akin to subtones on a clarinet. (If you'd like, I could record an example). When I'm working with composers, I often find that they only have a mute in because they want the trumpet to blend with other instruments at a quiet dynamic. They are always surprised to learn that the mute is not necessary for that! Moreover, the straight mute, in particular, changes the sound of the trumpet so drastically that it strikes me as almost insensitive to ask for it just to have less volume. A composer who writes 'con sordino' is really asking for a timbre change; so, they should give a little more thought to the marking than, "I want the trumpet quieter".

The Harmon mute will soften the sound significantly and the practice mute completely deadens it. So, those are mutes that genuinely quiet the instrument, but again, the timbre change with them is extreme. Composers who are writing for mutes should make sure they are getting the timbre they want. The player can adjust his volume on his own.

You can play any mute over the entire range of the instrument. Mutes like Harmons and practice mutes make the extreme registers too difficult to play extensively. Other than that, there's no real limitation for a muted trumpet, particularly with the standard straight or cup. And I hope when composers catch on to the magic of the extreme pedal register with a plunger mute, you'll see a lot more writing for it! The trumpet can sound like a didgeridoo or a herd of elephants down there. It's amazing.

DJW: Speaking of the didgeridoo, how about using the mouth cavity to reinforce particular overtones? Is this as effective with the trumpet as with the low brass? What is the best notation for this — vowels?

JD: We are dealing with much smaller spaces than the low brass; so, the differences tend to be subtler. However, the mouth cavity is an extremely efficient way to manipulate the sound of the trumpet. There is no standard notation for this, and a composer would need to work directly with a trumpeter to figure out the range of possibilities. The difference between an 'a' position and an 'e' position of the tongue yields a very minute change in timbre, but for some composers, the difference would be fraught with drama. Articulation differences are much more acute. Say "ta da ga ha ka tee dee kee ghee" and then imagine that on a trumpet. Berio's Sequenza is a great place to start discovering the difference.

DJW: One real advantage of trumpet players is that they usually have a hand free. What extra work can we give a trumpet player?

JD: Bear in mind that playing one handed is stressful. There are certain pieces where I play for a long time with just one hand holding the trumpet, and I need to do some serious stretching afterward.

Keeping with the phonetic theme, composers should look to Berio and Stockhausen for just how rich this tonal palette can be. With the right mute and hand position, the trumpet can produce almost any phonetic sound. Cootie Williams was brilliant at making the trumpet speak.

Samuel Adler's Canto has the trumpeter tap on the instrument with the fingernails. There are all sorts of things we can do with our left hands. On a lot of my concerts, my left hand is fiddling with knobs while I play. That's a whole other ball game, but signal processing is definitely something that could use some compositional guidance. It would be great to have composers thinking about the trumpet that way.

DJW: Joe, off the top of my head, I get: turn pages, mute, change mutes, make percussive sounds, adjust or remove the mouthpiece, adjust the tuning slides or spit valves, remove the slides...

JD: Yes to all of this. Removing the slides while you are playing is probably the only thing that wouldn't work too well, because they aren't that easy to remove. However, there are pieces where the valve slides are removed beforehand and the effect is wonderful.

DJW: What can a player do with a half-valve (the valve is pressed 1/2 way down so that the portion of extra pipe associate with the valve is open in parallel to the ordinary length of pipe)?

JD: Anything. Literally, anything. After the unawareness about the dynamic range, the most common thing that surprises me about composers is that they are unaware that the trumpet can gliss. You can gliss over the entire range of the instrument with a half-valve depressed.

The half-valve also creates all sorts of beautiful timbre changes. For instance the B on the 3rd line of the treble clef sounds like an old lady moaning when played with a half-valve. Like Cootie with his plunger, we can imitate almost any sound with our half-valves. Talking about all this makes me realize that trumpeters really should get all this written down for composers. It's unfortunate that you have to work so closely with the performers to learn what an instrument can do, but that's how advances are made.

Berio asks for a few things in the Sequenza which just didn't work well, and he didn't find that out until Thomas Stevens got his hands on the piece. The reason Stockhausen's music for the instrument is so well-written is because he was working, often in seclusion, with his son. Come to think of it, those pieces for Marcus do represent a sort of manual for trumpet technique that would serve most composers well.

DJW: What about articulations: how much notation do you like to see on a page? I think that many composers have a weakness, coming from the piano especially, when it comes to slurs and articulations on other instruments.

JD: I don't have a personal preference. I think all composers have had experience working with gigging musicians who really prefer to have all the information they need on the page. If you care about the articulation, write it in. Trumpeters aren't used to seeing detailed articulations anywhere outside of method books, and as professionals, we get really lazy about it. So, if you get hyper specific, expect some grousing behind your back, but there's no reason to avoid it. We can deal.

DJW: What's the current standard for vibrato in trumpet playing?

JD: There is none.

DJW: Can players reliably respond when a composer asks to turn vibrato on or off or specify the width and speed of the vibrato?

JD: Yes. Trumpet vibrato can be regulated with extreme precision, regardless of how it's produced. A specific request aside from something basic like 'molto vibrato' will probably be new for most trumpet players, but there isn't a professional trumpeter who couldn't produce a rhythmic vibrato. A flutter tongue is another story, though!

DJW: Aside from the Stockhausen — of which you're a great advocate — what are some other examples of state of the art composing for trumpet?

JD: I know, too much Stockhausen, right? The thing is that he didn't just write a lot of music for us. He created an entire operatic role for us, like Brünnhilde or Siegfried. In my experience, both trumpeters & composers learn so much about the instrument from the pieces he wrote. Spending even 5 minutes with a piece like Oberlippentanz expands their perspective enormously. So, Stockhausen is a great starting point for contemporary trumpet.

Peter Maxwell Davies continues to write wonderful, very difficult music for the instrument. Mark-Anthony Turnage gave us a lovely little piece. Although I don't find it very interesting musically, Olga Neuwirth wrote a nice concerto based on a solo piece which gives us quite a bit to do. These are all straightforward concert pieces, and thank God we are getting new repertoire in that arena, because let's face it, what we have is crap.

John Williams tried to write a new standard concerto for us in the 90's, to replace the Haydn, and it's warmed over Arutunian, which is abysmal to begin with. For a composer who's interested in writing a trumpet piece, if they check out our standard body of repertoire, they're going to hear a lot of garbage. It's no wonder that composers have a hard time getting inspired to write for us!

Some of the most exciting music now is written with the new sonic awareness of the instrument that composers like Stockhausen and Berio have given us. You see a lot of effect-driven pieces, which, for me, are not too successful musically, but they are much more enjoyable listening experiences than something like the Halsey Stevens sonata. Also, they are infinitely more fun to play. You are also seeing a lot of music written for hybrid instruments with quarter-tone valves and double bells.

These are all very exciting developments, but we're still waiting for some composers to come along and turn all this into great music, if you know what I mean. As with anything, a composer can get lost in all the possible effects of a trumpet and lose the thread of what they want to say with a piece. If you want to make a melodic statement, use our best models: 2nd movement of the Hummel, Enesco's Legende, and Scelsi's Four Pieces. If you want to make a sound sculpture, there's no better model than the Sequenza.

I also think one of the basic truths of contemporary brass music is that it all happened in jazz first. The basic model of composers co-opting things that they admire from jazz trumpeters has served us very well.

If we're going to close (pity because it's been a lovely conversation), I would just put out a basic plea to composers that the trumpet is vastly more expressive than you've been lead to believe, and clearly, we need better music!

And here's a brief list of pieces that have really done wonders for our repertoire:

Berio, Sequenza X (The piano is so often forgotten here. using the piano as a resonator is a wonderful device.)

Stockhausen, Michael's Journey Around the World (This is an encyclopedia of extended trumpet techniques.)

Scelsi, Four Pieces for Trumpet (A great marriage of effects and music, and a wonderful example of how melodic one note can be.)

And others worth checking out:

Rebecca Saunders, Blaauw
Peter Eötvös, Jet Stream
Toru Takemitsu, Paths
Robert Erickson, Kryl

Peter Maxwell Davies, Sonata for Trumpet in D

N.B. :  In the original version of this interview, the score by Timothy Geller was misidentified as a work by Martin Bresnick.  

Composing for the oboe: an interview with Patty Mitchell

Patty Mitchell,  oboist/English Hornist is well-known online as the author of the the blog oboeinsight, a lively diary of playing, teaching, the mysteries of reeds, and almost everything else that goes into a professional musician's life.  As a composer, I find it very useful to listen in when instrumentalists and vocalists shop talk about their instruments and music written for them, and Patty's blog has long been one of my favorite sources of high-level oboe intelligence.  (This interview, which took place by email over the past few days, is intended to be the first of a series of conversations with instrumentalists about writing for their instruments.) 

DJW: Let's talk about range. We all know to take caution about squawking low Bbs and love the high f in the Mozart quartet, but what are the secure ranges for amateurs and for professionals? Are there breaks between registers or particular note combinations that ought to be avoided? And what about leaping between registers — avoid it, ration it out, or no problem?

PM:Aw, range ... that's always an issue, isn't it? I LOVE a low B-flat. But if you want to guarantee it's appearance writing a pianissimo B-flat would be a very silly thing to do. We can't mute our oboes at that point. So I would never suggest a pianissimo B-flat unless you are having us move down to it and having it as a final note without an attack. In other words, slurring down to it (as long as it isn't from a B which can be problematic because we have to slide) isn't as big an issue. It's the attack of a note that makes it especially difficult. Mozart, in his Piano Concerto #21, has the 2nd oboe playing triplet low Cs at the end of the piece that are killer. With the older oboes that wasn't an issue. But now? We mute the darn thing! (I just stuff my cotton swab in the bell) Then it's not so bad. Dvorak wrote low notes and I despise him for it. We can mute all but the low B-flat and low B. Then no sound will come out. Some players remove their bells to play Dvorak and that seems to help them; it throws the balance/weight off for me, so I don't do that.

A "secure range" would be from low B-flat (while keeping in mind what I wrote above) to a high F. But we can play higher. I expect my students to play up to high F by the time they are in high school. The sooner they learn those notes, the easier they are. Asking us to play them pianissimo is, again, more than a little difficult ... but Ravel sure loved to do it! (Listen to the first entrance (?) in the second movement of his piano concert (in G). Killer hard, but SO lovely when it works!

Leaps can be problematic. If you want a donkey-like sound, though, we're your instrument! (Listen to Richard Strauss and the stuff he gave EH ... lots of donkey there!)

Bad fingering combos: yes, but it's tricky to explain. Low B-flat to E-flat ... can't do it quickly so don't ask us to, but we can do it ... we have to get a bit of "nose grease" (you'll see an oboe player quickly put his/her little finger up to the side of the nose and just get it a bit greasy ... really!) so we can slide. Sliding TO the low B-flat from the E-flat is easier than the opposite, but both can be done ... (Tchaikovsky makes the EH do that several times in The Nutcracker). The same occurs with low B-flat to low C. Low B-flat to low B (or vice versa) is really mean to do. (It's slightly easier to do low B-flat to low B, as we can put our finger on both keys and just pivot the finger to get off the low B-flat key, but it's still not nice ... and NEVER ask us to do that several times in a row!)

If you had a fingering chart you could see that our pinkies have a lot of keys ... that's when things can get tricky. But rarely have I found a composer gives me something absolutely impossible. (But yes, it happens.)

For amateur players, I'm going to guess anything below about a D and above the high D will be ... well ... perhaps less than pleasant sounding. Depends on the player! There are some extremely fine amateur oboists, so one can also keep that in mind!

Pitch and dynamic range are a big issues with some amateurs, ... I suggest you don't write unisons! It's just a bad idea. I LOVE unison oboe when it's in the mid-range, but you're really asking for it unless you have very good players.

I think the biggest thing to understand about oboe is the attack issue. My students are taught early on not to "note test" because we are ALL so tempted to do that. Once we get started we are just fine. It's the darn attack that scares us. After all, we are working with two skinny pieces of wood that we have to cajole into vibrating! (WHO thought of this crazy instrument?!)

DJW: When you write that, after the attack, "once we get started we are just fine," how long can an oboist really continue playing? Breathing and endurance for the oboe are completely different from the other winds: when they end a long passage, they're gasping for breath, but oboists often end by having to exhale a mouthful of air held under pressure. Historical examples don't help much on this topic: there is baroque music in which the oboe has to play continuously and more recent music in which the oboe is used more discretely. So, without resorting circular breathing a la Josef Marx, how long is too long?

PM:You're right. We don't run out of oxygen ... we run into carbon dioxide. It's a totally different problem than any other instrument. Of course how long we can keep going does depend upon the player, the reed, the oboe ... but take a deep breath and then blow it out between your teeth, hissing. How long can YOU go? That gives you some idea of how much air we can put through those darn reeds!

I can play very long phrases. Tchaik 4? I can do the solo in one breath if necessary, unless the tempo is far too slow.  (He can too.)  I've never run out of air when I've had solos, actually. Now if we have a lot of lengthy phrases eventually we start to get awfully tired because we not only are exhaling and inhaling when we play, but we occasionally need to relax our embouchure. So there's that as well.

But if you were ask for an exact time ... geesh, hard to say! I'll have to time myself. Mostly, I hate the tremendously long phrase not because of ME but because of my listeners. They get so distracted by our not breathing ... even going so far as to not breathe while they listen! In timing myself just now with a few long things ... 50 seconds works fine for me.

I would say "too long" is when it sounds like a gimmick, when some will resort to circular breathing (remember I can go longer than some), or when it makes everyone so distracted they forget to listen!

Clear as mud, eh?

DJW: Composers love to have oboist double English Horn, and sometimes switch between the two horns with some frequency. The reeds have got to be ready and the instruments don't like to be played completely cold inside, so what is a reasonable amount of time to leave for a switch during a piece?

PM: I've had to move from oboe to EH (or the other way 'round) so quickly I have to play while moving to the stand to pick up the next instrument (thank you Mr. Mahler). I like to have a few measures at least. If I have a huge EH solo I prefer not to have to start on it cold, after playing oboe (thank you Mr. Dvorak and Mr. Berlioz). Sometimes when the EH solos are so huge, I opt to have them hire a second oboist and just play the EH part. It depends on the work. (When we did Roman Carnival Overture and New World Symphony last year I did that.) So if you DO have a player switching, I say "Please think about us and let us play a few notes before a solo on the given instrument!" But of course so many past composers didn't care about that. Go figure.

DJW: In addition to the English Horn, there is an increasing interest among composers in the "other doubles": oboe d'amore, piccolo oboe, baritone oboe, heckelphone. Are these so rare that composers should save them for commissions from players who own the instruments and specialize in them, or are players in general taking a greater interest in them with instruments available for lease when needed, or should we forget about them because oboists or concert organizers will see the names of the instruments and immediately strike the piece from the program?

PM: Oboe/EH double is expected. With the others composers need to realize that some will have to rent the instrument. Most of us are happy to do so because of the extra $$. (Where I work the first double pays 25% more, the second and all following adds another 10%.) I've never even heard of a piccolo oboe being played. Can't imagine where one would get that! D'amore and baritone oboe are rentable around here. Heckelphone would probably require an owner, so then you run into trouble. At least here. Some orchestras look at things like this and nix 'em because of the extra cost (some orchestras would have to rent them for the player). It really depends on the group.

DJW: Although some instructions are now well established, like fluttertongue, and I can always look up possible trills in reference books, I'm a bit intimidated about writing "special effects" for an instrument which I don't play myself. When it comes to composing for the oboe, it's alternative fingerings, microtones, glissandi, and multiphonics which seem to vary wildly from instrument to instrument and player to player that seem most difficult. Some composers go ahead and specify fingering or playing modes in detail, others are more impressionistic in their instructions. What is a good — meaning robust — middle path for composers to use?

PM: I played Berio's Sequenza for oboe eons ago. At the time I owned a Loree. Many of the fingerings didn't work for me; they were based on Holliger's oboe, which wasn't a Loree (I can't remember if it was a Marigaux or a Rigotaut, but it was one of those two). So yes, so much varies from instrument to instrument. And reed to reed, as well. I had to find more flexible reeds than I was using at the time to get some sounds. I'm sure I was off on others.

This is a topic I'm not sure I'm capable of answering well; I seldom do these techniques.

I CAN tell you pitch bending is pretty much a breeze. Glissandi are not because, unlike clarinet, we don't have open hole keys any longer. Some can do it; I can't. I also can't fluttertongue, as much as I've tried (we actually don't flutter the tongue; we "gargle" instead), nor can I double tongue (sigh ... it's the reason I can't audition any longer for orchestras!).

I guess I mostly prefer to get a composer's opinion about what he/she wants and I try to satisfy it. Fingerings can be given as suggestions, but as you know they don't always work!

DJW: You mentioned muting before. Is this something composers should pay attention to, or is this something that should be reserved to players discretion, to help with balancing dynamics?

PM: I've never seen a composer request that we do that. I only do it to make it less stressful to play pianissimo low notes. But if a composer wanted something muted that would be fine with me. Of course muting higher notes doesn't really help, since our sound comes primarily through they first open keys. With higher notes the open keys are toward the top of the instrument, so our sound is coming out there.

DJW: What special attribute or feature does the oboe have that you would like to bring to the attention of composers? Is there something we overuse or underuse or, maybe, some trade secret we ought to know about to help make better music for oboe?

PM: Hmmm. I'm not sure about this one. It does seem like composers have us labeled as the "make 'em cry" instrument ... but I love to do that so it works for me!

I'll have to think on this one a bit. I'm usually fairly happy with what I get ... although some contemporary composers write either ridiculously impossible or ridiculously easy stuff. (Funny how that goes!)

I HATE HATE HATE the composer whose computer played the rhythmically impossible stuff perfectly and is baffled when we aren't like a computer. And I go crazy, too, when I can tell the composer plays piano and does stuff that is so easy on piano and hard on oboe. (Like having us do an large interval over and over very quickly. Sure, we can do that on piano ... but oboe is a bit trickier!)

DJW: Piano playing may often give a composer a false sense about articulations on other instruments. There are raging debates among composers about how much to notate and while I'm mostly on the under-notate side of the debate, I believe that there are some articulations, particularly slurs, that are often essential for players. From your experience, what markings do we omit or commit too often?

PM: If you want something articulated a certain way, it is essential that it's notated! I play exactly what a composer writes. I didn't even realize some would leave out articulations. It's not like strings where, with their bowings, articulations are then added. We see it, we play it. We don't see it, we don't. The only time that rule is broken is with pop music, since it's often notated oddly in any case.

DJW: Thank you! This should be a lot of help!

An Interview with Paul Epstein

The composer Paul A. Epstein was, as a student, near the center of the storm which I have here called the radical music. As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, he was a member of a composition seminar that included La Monte Young and Terry Riley, which was, in turn, part of a very lively scene in the San Francisco Bay Area. More information about Epstein and his elegant music is available at his website, here.

DJW: Could you briefly describe your musical background and orientation prior to your study at Berkeley? How would you have then described your own musical style and what repertoire attracted you the most?

PAE: I grew up in Boston. My mother taught piano and made a valiant attempt to teach me. After four years (I was eight) we agreed it was hopeless, and I switched to clarinet. My earliest memories include my mother practicing Chopin and Met opera broadcasts on Saturdays.

Boston was anything but a hotbed of new music in those days, but we had good classical radio, and the BSO occasionally did one of the safer 20th century works. The first modern composers that made strong impressions on me were Copland and Stravinsky. I can't remember hearing a piece of 12-tone music before college. I started to think about composing somewhere around my senior year in high school. If I had started then I probably would have wanted to sound like the Copland of the Clarinet Concerto or the Stravinsky of L'Histoire du Soldat. I actually started writing in college and found that I wasn't very good at imitating specific styles, so I pretty much had to find my own way. At some point I decided to try 12-tone, but with very little theoretical knowledge prior to Berkeley.

DJW: What drew you to study at Berkeley? Which composers on the faculty did you work with? Did you always see eye-to-eye with your teachers on musical matters? Were there other graduate students with whom you had useful exchanges?

PAE: I don’t remember specifically what drew me to Berkeley. The Bay Area looked like an attractive change of scene, and the department had a strong reputation, though in large part for its historians like Lowinski and Kerman. And it was a liberal arts program, which is what I was used to. In those days we liberal arts types looked with scorn at conservatory-style programs.

In the three years that I was at Berkeley the composition seminar was taught by William Denny, Joaquin Nin-Culmell, and Seymour Shifrin. I remember Bill Denny as an accomplished orchestrator, soft-spoken, with a gentle sense of humor. Neither he nor Nin-Culmell tried to steer us in any particular stylistic direction, which was just as well given the makeup of the class. I was most stimulated by what La Monte Young and Terry Riley were doing, which at various times involved extremely sparse, post-Webernian textures, improvisation, noise-based material sometimes verging on happenings, and La Monte’s conceptual pieces. Among the performances that La Monte organized was Cage’s Imaginary Landscapes No. 4 for 12 radios which I had the pleasure of participating in.

I wasn’t yet prepared to go in the direction of La Monte and Terry’s more radical work, but it left its mark and I think informed much of what I did during the 60s and early 70s.

Terry had a more immediate impact on my work. He introduced me to the poet and film-maker James Broughton, who generously allowed me to set three groups of his poems. The first became a piece for reader and instruments that the members of the composition seminar performed at the annual Student Composers Conference with La Monte as reader.

The laisser-faire approach of Denny and Nin-Culmell vanished abruptly when Seymour Shifrin took over the Seminar. Shifrin was a brilliant musician who insisted that we know where every note came from and was going. That worked well for some, less well for others. Typical of the kind of tensions that occasionally arose was the time we found out that Merce Cunningham’s company was to perform on campus and that Cage would be with him. When we suggested to Shifrin that we’d like to invite Cage to speak to the Seminar, he went ballistic. Cage was not a real composer, and there was no way he would be allowed into Shifrin’s classroom. On the other hand, Shifrin taught a seminar entirely devoted to Moses und Aron that was a highlight of my time at Berkeley. Seymour was an extraordinary man. As much as he questioned our ideas, and as fiercely as he defended his own, he always treated us as colleagues.

The most important class for me outside of composition was David Lewin’s Webern seminar. The analytical skills I picked up there carried over directly into my 12-tone writing but also influenced my minimalist work in subtle ways.

In my last year at Berkeley, I was able to audit Berio’s composition seminar at Mills College. I spent the following year studying with him in Milan.

DJW: Did you have contact with Robert Erickson or any of his students, or others who went on to found the San Francisco Tape Music Center?

PAE: I didn’t get into electronic music until I got to Tulane in 1963, so I really wasn’t involved with the Tape Music Center. I never met Erickson. I met Pauline Oliveros out there, but I didn’t get to know her until much later.

DJW: You made a distinction between your own twelve-tone and experimental works. For several composers, beginning probably with La Monte Young, features of a radical and minimal style, including very long tones, increased use of repetition, and isolation of groups of tones that suggested, if fragmentarily, tonality, emerged in the context of twelve-tone or free atonal scores. So it appear to have been more complicated than a simple opposition between twelve-tone and experimental music. How did this distinction play out in your own music?

PAE: A very interesting question. I’m afraid I can only address it in a rather convoluted way.

After spending a year in Milan, I wrote one instrumental piece - 12-tone and strongly influenced by Berio - after which I found that that approach no longer worked for me. For the next few years I did electronic music, first at the Tulane studio started by Otto Henry; for one summer at Alvin Lucier’s Brandeis studio; and later at Temple University, where I made several pieces for live performance on the Moog synthesizer. I would characterize this work as experimental in that it proceeded from the capabilities and limitations of the available equipment rather from a clearly envisioned objective.

While at Tulane, director Richard Schechner, painter/designer Franklin Adams, and I started The New Orleans Group to do collaborative work in intermedia. This work began with a large-scale Happening-like piece and culminated in an environmental staging of Ionesco’s Victims of Duty. Schechner moved to New York in 1968, where he started The Performance Group, and a year later I moved to Philadelphia. That summer I began working with The Performance Group on their environmental staging of Macbeth. With TPG, Schechner, following Jerzy Grotowski’s model, had put aside all extraneous media, including incidental music, to focus on the performer. My role was to develop musical material with the actors, most of whom had strong voices but limited musical training. While we were able to use some strictly notated material, much of the music involved improvisation. With the actors I developed a set of exercises, derived in part from the vocal work they were already doing, that served as a basis for much of this music. After working on several productions I developed a piece with five members of the group, Concert for TPG, that involved scored as well as semi-improvisational sections.

In the mid-70s I began to work with the Philadelphia-based dance group, Zero Moving, adapting much of the work I had done with actors. At the same time I found my way back into instrumental music, and here’s where we re-connect with Berkeley. I was working on a piece for voices with text fragments by Gertrude Stein. (It would eventually become a dance piece, Four Movements for Moving Voices Moving, with all the vocal work done by the dancers of Zero Moving.) Most of the piece was semi-improvisational, using the full speech-to-song spectrum. When I got to the final section, that all changed. The text, appropriately, had to do with repetition. I found myself writing a simple diatonic melody proceeding in repeating canonic fragments. The process was similar to that of In C, which I had heard for the first time, belatedly, shortly before. I had loved the piece but had no idea that it was anything I wanted to emulate. So the Stein piece was a kind of conversion experience, and it determined my musical progress from that point on. Since then my music has continued to involve an exploration of melodic pattern. In C was a major catalyst, and the work of another acquaintance from my Bay Area days, Steve Reich, was another crucial resource.

Although my break with dodecaphonic music was complete, I’ve come to understand that minimalism involves some of the same tools and mind-sets. In fact I would describe much of my music as diatonic serialism.

DJW: Could you describe the music you're working on now? What elements of continuity with your earlier interests are present? Are there any new directions that interest you in particular?

PAE: For the past few years I’ve been working with rhythmic cycles that are prime to one another as a way of greatly increasing the period of repetition. I’m trying to retain something of the rigor, system, and economy of means of early minimalism while reducing surface repetition. Most recently I did a piece for flute, bassoon and piano that used 12 cycles of 3 to 37 16th-notes (all the prime numbers plus 4.) Recently I was startled to realize that there was a direct connection to the Moog pieces I did around 1970, where I modulated a tone with several slow waves that were out of phase with one another. In both cases short repeating cycles combine to create an apparently non-repeating resultant melody.

My music remains largely, though not exclusively, diatonic. And most pieces now include changes, even frequent changes, in the pitch collection.

In two recent pieces I paid tribute to Terry Riley and Steve Reich, whose music continues to be a source of pleasure and inspiration. The second movement of my AlgoRhythms 2 is entitled “At C” and dedicated to Terry. And one of my set of piano pieces, Interleavings, is dedicated to Steve. Entitled “ParaPhase,” it alternates notes of the Piano Phase and Violin Phase patterns.

Finally, another continuity with my early work is an involvement with text. I’ve had a long-standing collaboration with the poet and novelist Toby Olson that has thus far produced two chamber operas and a half dozen sets of songs and chamber vocal pieces.

Interview with Douglas Leedy 1974

...composition is only a very small thing, taken as a part of music as a whole, and it really shouldn't be separated from music making in general.

This is an important document about a seriously overlooked composer, an interview with Douglas Leedy by Valerie Samson, 1974. From EAR (the original, west coast EAR, of course), vol.4 no. 4, April 1976. While the discussion is decidedly of its historical moment, it is astonishing how current the themes remain.

Leedy discusses a number of topics central to the west coast radical music: the turn to world musics, the re-examination of musical time that would be central to the music tradition later identified as minimal, the increasing focus on musical intonation, studying composition alongside La Monte Young and Terry Riley, the problems of musical training — both the advantages of voluntarily entering a master-student relationship and the "the problems of being up against people whose thinking had completely petrified" —, the real reason why one should not care about audiences, and more about the west coast musical environment.

Read the whole thing here.

Begin modestly and let things fall where they may: an interview with David Cope

(Photo: David Cope, trumpet, Steed Cowart, umbrella, and Daniel Wolf, kite, April in Santa Cruz Festival 1983).

Daniel Wolf: You are well-known for your surveys of what might be called the "landscape" of new music. In your books and teaching, your approach has been broad and descriptive rather than selective and critical. But I do know you as a composer with your own influences, with strong tastes and preferences, so let's be a little bit more selective and critical. How do you locate your own music in this landscape?

David Cope: I have spent a great deal of time attempting to *not* include my biases in my writings on new music. I am sure that to some degree I have failed; but not for lack of trying. I have missed some ideas, works, and composers that I should have covered and probably vice versa. My basic principle, however, has always been the same - to cover the material as objectively as I possibly could, leaving it to readers to make value judgements.

As you point out, however, I do have my own tastes and preferences that I exhibit whenever I choose a CD to play, a particular concert to attend, and so on. I also exhibit these tastes and preferences in my compositions. For example, I love the music of the Navajo Indians and I have included particular instances of this music in many of my works over the past forty years. I do this for a number of reasons: I grew up in the desert Southwest, I am part American Indian myself, I have spent some time on the Navajo Reservation, and so on. Several of my Navajo works are available on Smithsonian-Folkways recordings.

How these works (and my algorithmic and experimental works) fit into a current landscape I have no idea. I have spent most of my life on the outside looking in (or possibly on the outside looking out).

It seems to me that caring where one fits into a landscape quickly leads to one trying to fit into that same landscape. I don't want to compose for such a reason. I'd a lot rather compose to suit myself and let others determine, if they care to, where my music might be located with respect to others.

DW: Doesn't the association with the Southwest, beyond the physical landscape and connections to Native American culture and mythology, also have a connection to more recent cultural geography? By more recent cultural geography, I meant, in particular, the contrast that often features in your music between very static materials and dramatic ruptures in that stasis. That contrast is carried by a formal rhythm or pacing that I can only liken to travel along desert highways, like the old Route 66 stretching through the desert, punctured by the old filling stations with their mechanical pumps and coke bottle machines, and ending in the ruckus of Hollywood...

DC: I don't usually think of my music in these terms. However, I certainly admit to loving pitch fields (static pitches scattered widely in register and playing as if initiated by some unseen force - a la wind chimes, of which I own several hundred). I then choose certain pitches to, as you say, puncture" the otherwise quiet "terrain" with motives important to the work's structure. I love the geography in the triangle between Winslow, Window Rock, and Canyon de Chelly, a landscape that is at once serenely quiet and yet incredibly deceptive - a thunderstorm of dangerous proportions can interrupt almost without warning.

DW: But would it be wrong to make a connection to a few other composers -- Varese, Partch, Childs, to name three very different personalities -- for whom the desert has been significant?

DC: I have loved Varese's music since my early twenties, have conducted his Octandre several times, and have included analyses of his music in many of my books. I use Partch's music and photos of his instruments in my classes routinely and consider him one of the most underrated composers of the 20th-century. I fondly remember Barney coming to my home and telling me of his exploits at Deep Springs College where he often lay in bed shooting scorpions off the wall with an ammonia-filled squirt gun. An amazing character. I took great pleasure in publishing his tome on indeterminacy in an early issue of The Composer Magazine. So, I suppose there would be connections between me and those composers.

However, I don't dwell or often think of such things - too busy making music.

DW: In addition to your interests in the natural and information sciences, you have been a lifelong reader of science fiction. I remember well your excitement at going to Heinlein's house with Phillip Jose Farmer. My own interests in that direction have always been more towards what might be called "social science fiction", so I may be out of my depths here, but I have to wonder if the license that science fiction has with relationship to "real" science plays a role in your composing: a science fiction novel, in the end, doesn't have to meet any standard other than that of being a good novel, it's consistency has to be internal, not consistence with the world external to the novel. Is there any parallel to be heard in your music?

DC: Thanks for reminding me of these memories. It is true that Heinlein lived up the road a mile or two from me here in Santa Cruz before he died, and that Philip Jose Farmer and I spent many years trying to get funding (unsuccessfully) to do an opera together, and that I do enjoy reading science fiction. It is further true that I spend a lot of time with matters scientific in the mainstream sense of the word, loving mathematics and astronomy especially. I never really saw a contradiction between the two, more that one is an extension of the other. My wife says that I don't need to think out of the box, since I never had a box in the first place.

In response to your question, I can't imagine that these interests don't have an effect on my music, and I do very much try to instill in my works an internal logic, even though I know that this internal logic will not suffice as the sole process of composing. However, whether this is a result of my interest in "sci fi" and/or of "sci not fi" I have no idea. It is certainly not something I consciously attempt to infuse into my works. Even my algorithmic music is largely built on databases of other music rather than rules I've written and, therefore, interestingly seems less rather than more influenced by the sources you mention.

DW: Mary Jane (Cope)'s remark is spot on, and it also speaks to a certain wild streak in your work. I don't know of another composer, for example, who would literally set off fireworks in the theatre, as you did in the finale to your Vectors (in addition to the bagpipes, percussion, electronics, and the two marching bands). But in the absence of that box, what factors or constraints guide you in deciding that this material does or doesn't belong to a piece by David Cope, or that a piece goes one way and not another?

DC: The premiere of Vectors set for the Cabrillo Festival the previous year had been cancelled leading to the performance to which you refer. My wife was delighted to get the box of gunpowder out of storage in our garage. Aside from you in one of the marching bands, I remember my four small sons wearing baseball uniforms and marching up the aisles waving American flags while the explosions lit everything from overhead. The lyrics of Vectors are quotes from Charles Ives, one of my idols, and it was great fun bringing his words to life again.

I love people and other animals very much and so I try not to hurt them in any way. Apart from that, everything is possible it seems to me. My process of inclusion is very simple: I begin works modestly and let things fall where they may naturally as the work progresses. Vectors began as a simple set of songs for voice and piano with Ives texts and as I began to understand what those texts said and meant, things just kept raising their hands and saying "choose me, choose me." In the end, it seemed unavoidable not to do what I did with the piece. That performance was twenty-eight years ago, and I still have people come up to me and ask about it.

DW: One of the ideas I carried away from my undergraduate years -- which included study with you and Gordon Mumma -- was that a piece should have a certain amount of depth. Not complexity, necessarily, but depth, in concerns are something of an afterthought. How does a composition teacher help students balance this pressure with other aspects of a work? Might a liberal arts setting be helpful in this regard to a young composer?

DC: I like to say that a good piece of music is like the proverbial onion; peel back one layer only to find yet another layer, and so on. Certainly a liberal arts setting helps (both in school and in life) and I highly recommend it. I also think that this is where music theory can help composers the most.

By analyzing pieces for their allusions, timbral content, structure and form, and so on, and not just their pitches as is so often the case unfortunately, young composers can see the insides of example music and, hopefully, listen in like ways. And to me, listening intelligently is the best teacher of all.

DW: How does a teacher deal with what might be called the double bind of "model composition"? In model composition, you are asked to follow the "rules" of an observed style to, in effect, add a new piece to a known repertoire. A successful exercise does just that, but a successful composition, on the other hand, will inevitably have to do things that are inconsistent with those rules. Do you, as a teacher, make a distinction between an exercise and a composition?

DC: I do not make such a distinction. From the very first day of beginning composition I tell my students that they are composers and students, not student composers. Stravinsky writes: "Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit." (from Poetics of Music, p. 68) To me, *every* composition uses a model (or, more likely, models), whether it (they) be explicit or implicit, conscious or subconscious. However, inconsistencies should not only be allowed, but celebrated. Chopin's Nocturnes are fairly poor examples of modelled John Field Nocturnes. They are also extraordinary music where Field's music to me is not.

DW: Over the years, you have concentrated on a number of areas, doing research that has directly led to compositions, but always in projects with ramifications larger than those followed in a single piece of music. For example, at one point in time, the use of mixed- or multi-media was an interest, and then computer synthesis, then instrument building and tuning systems, and over the past 20 years or so, you have been engaged with questions that might be broadly described as concerning musical intelligence and style. While each of these areas is rich enough for a lifetime of creative work, is there another area beyond these that is emerging or may emerge for you as a central concern?

DC: I have never really consciously planned what has occurred musically in my life, Changes have come about more or less naturally as I work. Therefore, I don't view my life as a series of disparate styles, but rather as a continuous evolution. As a consequence, I have no idea what's down the road for me. What I am doing now is continuing to work with Emily Howell, my computational composer/partner, in developing (her) style and composing new works. Her first album will be available in about nine months. I am finishing a book called Computer Music Analysis. Other than these things, I continue building and using telescopes and developing non-violent board games.

This interview was done by email over the past week. David Cope's website is here.