Part 2
Collaborations can take on many forms. What role do they play in your approach and what are your preferred ways of engaging with other creatives, including the artists performing your work?
I love for each project to have its own identity and process, so each collaboration with other artists is unique. If I have composed a work involving many chamber instruments, then usually I am looking for other performers to interpret the work. If there is a piano part, then I usually play it, and am involved in leading rehearsals. If I am not performing, then I prefer for the ensemble players to lead themselves and I give feedback. If I am working with a conductor, then I usually provide them with a recording if there is one, and a score and we meet ahead of rehearsal to go over ideas and interpretation. If it is a fully collaborative project, I love the dialogue, the creative back and forth, and hearing the new ideas from other colleagues. I learn so much about technique from the other performers, which is constantly helping to improve my knowledge.
How is writing the music and having it performed live connected? What do you achieve and draw from each experience personally? How do you see the relationship between improvisation and composition in this regard?
Rehearsing and performing a new work is essential to discovering whether the ideas work in the way that I have imagined. I can hear textures and colors in my head, but sometimes the attempt at getting them in front of others is an opaque process. I try to use as many indications and terms within the score to reduce confusion and help interpretation. Improvisation is essential to my compositional process, as it connects my emotional and intuitional terrain to the music I am making and writing. If I can’t play it fluidly or understand it clearly, then it is difficult to translate that idea to someone else.
Time is a variable only seldom discussed within the context of contemporary composition. Can you tell me a bit about your perspective on time in relation to a composition and what role it plays in your work?
I think of music as architecture of time and sound. We are most familiar with linear time, and so often that is how music is laid out on the page. I love to occasionally work with layered time, where parts of the ensemble are in one tempo or interpretive universe, and others are in another parallel realm, like a hovering delicate texture that, if isolated, could be its own piece. Shifts in tempo and texture can manipulate our perception of time flowing by, and I use this combo often.
How do you see the relationship between the 'sound' aspects of music and the 'composition' aspects? How do you work with sound and timbre to meet certain production ideas and in which way can certain sounds already take on compositional qualities?
Ultimately, the composition is the skeleton and instruction manual for the experience that I want the musicians and audience to have. But no matter how much information I put on the page, there is always room for interpretation and expression, which will lead to a unique musical experience with each performance. I try to use descriptive words in the score for specific expressions and timbres that I am looking for - like “Sassy and crisp” along with a tempo marking for a vocal ensemble. For each of my recordings, I am in the session with the performers, and then sitting next to the engineer during editing and mixing, so I can give feedback. It is in the production stage that there is a chance to work even more towards the sound quality that you want through use of effects and placement in the mix.
Our sense of hearing shares intriguing connections to other senses. From your experience, what are some of the most inspiring overlaps between different senses - and what do they tell us about the way our senses work? What happens to sound at its outermost borders?
Sound and music is physical vibration, so it inevitably affects us physically as well as emotionally. When audience and performers are in harmony with one another the music has even more impact, because there is group focus and energy flow. I have always had very strong connections between music and memories, and music and images in three dimensional spaces. There is usually some image or even image/story that I associate with particular pieces I have written, and when I return to them the image and memory also returns. Senses in tandem stimulates a deeper understanding and connection.
Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?
For me, life and art are inter-connected. The process of creating a new work is impacted by what is happening around me at that time, by my mood and well-being, and by my thoughts about issues and the world at large. That does not mean that those issues are actually contained within the work, but surely they have a subtle influence. For my own work, I feel that my ethical values influence the direction of the piece and the intention. I don’t have a rigid agenda for the listener necessarily, only for my own feeling about the piece when it is finished, listening back to it, and how I present it to the outside world. And if I am performing someone else’s work, I want to know the context of that work when it was created, to help me interpret the mood and style. More and more, I feel that a central part of being a composer is being an observer, and reflecting on what I see, hear and feel in a new form or composite.
It is remarkable, in a way, that we have arrived in the 21st century with the basic concept of music still intact. Do you have a vision of music, an idea of what music could be beyond its current form?
Music is elemental to every culture on earth, and has always been a part of our lives. There are SO many styles! Many cultures still experience music as a communal ritual with everyone participating, with dance as a physical expression of that music. Recorded music has been so commodified in the western culture, and threaded together with celebrity culture, that it has removed the participatory element for most people. I guess a lot of people sing in their cars, or in karaoke, but many people are irrationally scared of singing in a public group or playing an instrument just for fun or dancing - it has been scared out of them. Music can be a language of love and release that brings people together in a time of great urgency. If we could transform the noise and chaos into global harmony, we might reverse the damaging coarse of destruction that we are on as a species.
