expanding horizons new frontiers in music
From top: Terry Riley, photo by C. Felver Martin Bresnick, photo by Marc Ostow Shulamit Ran, photo by Edward Chick
Immersed in the Music: A Composer Symposium with Terry Riley, Martin Bresnick & Shulamit Ran
“I like jazz a lot, I like Indian classical music, I like western classical music, I like contemporary music— all of those elements seem to mix together and come out.”
by Peter Burwasser
If there is a thread that connects the work of the three composers featured in the PMP Composer Symposium last March, it is a quality of meshing tradition with innovation—in each case, in such a way as to have survived the musical style wars of the previous generation. It was probably not, for any of them, a conscious aesthetic decision, but simply a fortuitous outcome of a natural path towards finding a personal expressive language. This seems even to be the case for Terry Riley, a path-breaking minimalist, who gleefully absorbed musical idioms from around the world as he smashed conventions along the way. Shulamit Ran, while never really rejecting atonality, found a way to make it uniquely communicative, and in doing so, became one of the finest composers of symphonic music of our time. Martin Bresnick moved beyond his early work with computer music after encountering the intoxicating imagination of his teacher, the great György Ligeti. His joyously inclusive music has inspired a group of his own students who now form a leading edge of the new music world, including Evan Ziporyn, David Lang, Michael Torke, Mark Mellits and Julia Wolfe. Moderator Steven Smith, a music journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, among other publications, added another layer to the discussion by exploring transformative times and places in the lives of his subjects. Riley, an American West Coast minimalist pioneer, ended up having a seminal influence on both the new music and rock scene of London in the 1960s. Israeli born and raised Ran is fiercely proud of her Middle Eastern roots, but has since become a fixture of the American symphonic music scene; one might even say one with an American Midwestern voice. And Bresnick, who grew up in a socialist commune in the Bronx and has never shed the vocal patterns that identify that origin, had established his career at Stanford, and is even regarded as a West Coast musician by many of the colleagues of his youth. Smith drew out of all three composers an intuitive sense for their art that they all trace back to childhood (and perhaps beyond), which includes a complete lack of interest in stylistic categorization. Ran (b. 1949) can recall having stories read to her by her mother, and making songs out of PMP 42
the words. When her mother asked her where the songs came from, she answered, “They are right there, on the page.” Shortly after, she composed her first music: songs set to Hebrew poetry. When they were performed and broadcast over the radio, she was still in summer camp, and sat around a big radio to listen to them with the other kids. Even as Ran made something of a sensation as a child prodigy, the issue of gender never really came up. “It was never very much in the forefront of my thinking. In Israel, it just wasn’t an issue. Being a girl, doing this, did not seem to particularly upset anybody. I grew up in a country with a woman Prime Minister, and women are in the army.” As an ironic side note, her mentor in Chicago, composer Ralph Shapey, once told her that his parents wanted him to do something more manly than composing. Influences such as the famously independent Shapey, not to mention that radical from another time, Beethoven, have left Ran with a great sense of possibility in her creative process and language. “We do what we want to do at certain points in our life. I was very interested in the emancipation of the dissonance, an important trend in the 2oth century. But the emancipation of the consonance is equally interesting to me.” This statement, made only somewhat in jest, was an appropriate lead in to a segment from her 1997 Soliloquy for piano trio, a work that adroitly and elegantly moves back and forth between harmonic languages. You might almost say that, like the composer, the music is bi-lingual. Ran’s experience as the composer in residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1990 to 1997, amidst the Daniel Barenboim era, was critically formative. “I was immersed in the music. I thought it was especially important to be with all these people who have to compose and all these people who have to perform. That for me is the guarantee that music will somehow continue. People need to do it.” That sentiment was fully on display in the excerpt heard from the urgently expressive second movement from her Violin
“I’m not worried that my music is trivial or banal. I know how complicated it is.”
“I always try in my writing to find, to seek, the soul of the instrument.”
Concerto. “I write for performers. I seek the soul of the instrument.” Terry Riley (b. 1935), who seems to travel through life with a perennial twinkle in his eye, may not set out to confound expectations and stereotypes, but it often happens nevertheless. He began his career as an academically trained adherent of the music of Stockhausen, but quickly became a lover of jazz, which he performed, before he entered the most celebrated part of his career, as a pioneer of minimalism. Such current luminaries as Steve Reich name Riley as the father of the trend (he has said that “everything began” with the landmark work In C). But Riley confers the title of originator to his jazz partner La Monte Young. Smith began his talk with Riley on the subject of In C. The original inspiration is a surprising one. “I had the good luck to meet Chet Baker in Paris at the time [in the early 1960s]. We asked him to join our group. It was working with him and looping [on tape] some of his trumpet solos, that I got an idea of some of these melodic little cycles.” Riley continued to pile up influences of jazz, and most notably, Indian music (“I fell in love with Indian classical music”). In London, his work with tape looping was picked up by John Cale and the Velvet Underground, Peter Townsend and the Who, and other pop notables. When Smith suggested that at this point in his life he had become a sort of rock star, he deadpanned, “A poor one. In the ’60s in London there was a connection between different musicians. It was like a small town.” A new work by Riley was auditioned, the last movement of Banana Umberto, written for the Paul Dresher Ensemble. Riley described it as a “kind of a piano concerto for electric/acoustic ensemble.” It is a sweet, jazzy piece with a Brazilian rhythmic lilt and enough quirky corners that it sounds as if it could be a sound track for a post-Fellini filmmaker. Banana Umberto is, like most of Riley’s current work, and unlike his early music, mainly notated. It almost makes him seem like an entirely different composer, since improvisation and performance flexibility were so central to his work from the 1960s. “Sometimes it’s fun to actually have something come out of your work that you didn’t expect. Sometimes I’ve built on that.” Yet Riley seems unperturbed by his evolution as an artist, and seems to accept it as a natural process. “Your life experience goes into your music. It’s sort of irrepressible.” Martin Bresnick (b. 1946) was raised in a musically aware family that did not have any concept of making music as a living. He can recall his parents being amazed at the rapt attention, even trance-like state he entered into as he listened to music. But growing up in a cooperative working class community in the Bronx, in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers housing projects, there was a practical decision as to whether to buy a musical instrument or a refrigerator. Fortunately, there was a supportive community in the city in those days. “In the public school system, if they found a kid who could play an instrument they tried to help you.” Bresnick went to California in the late 1960s to complete his graduate schoolwork. At Stanford, he reports, “John Chowning took me under his wing.” This is not a household name, but in fact Chowning’s work is critical in the evolution of late 20th-century music. He discovered the frequency modulation synthesis, the basis for commercial proliferation of computer music, via technology that Chowning licensed to Yamaha. “Computer music reconnected me with the thing that got me going with music in the first place, which was the sheer love of sound and how sounds exist in the world.” While still at Stanford, Bresnick had another revelation, perhaps the pivotal one of his musical life, when he encountered the music of Hungarian composer György Ligeti. It occurred as he looked at the score of the landmark work Atmosphères. “This guy [Ligeti] is doing something with the orchestra that we had been struggling to achieve on the computer with much less success.” Bresnick became instrumental in convincing Stanford to bring Ligeti onto the faculty. Ligeti immediately became a central figure in Bresnick’s life, and he said that he has still not gotten over the death of Ligeti two years ago. The depth of his affection for Ligeti was palpable and moving as he spoke. Most of all, Bresnick seemed still inspired by the breadth of Ligeti’s interests and imagination. “He had a positive view of American music. He admired Nancarrow, Partch, and Riley, and wanted to meet them.” A similar breadth of style has been noted in Bresnick’s own work, as demonstrated by several excerpts. Gates of Paradise is an unusual sort of multi-media piece that includes reproductions of William Blake drawings and requires the solo pianist to recite Blake poetry while playing. Everything Must Go—In Memorium, György Ligeti is a jaunty, affectionate homage for saxophone quartet, written for, and here played by PRISM. He is unfazed by the differences in his music, and may well speak for his fellow symposium participants when he declares, “I don’t want to be bound by predictive notions. I want to tell you what I see now.” PMP PMP43 43