Gil Rose: So much of your music is “aware” of so many other musics. Would you give a perspective of where you see yourself in the scheme of American music, or just music in general—in the historical timeline of compositional trades, styles, schools, agendas? If you had to write your own Wikipedia entry, who would you say Steve Stucky is? Steven Stucky: The shortest answer would be “I don’t know,” but it’s complicated trying to think of oneself from the outside. I’ve thought about this question a lot because of the necessity of talking in the composing business. What you say about yourself becomes a much bigger part of your persona than it ever was, at least for most kinds of composers. And because I have one foot, or up to one knee in academia (where what we do is talk, essentially, about what we do), you become a sort of self-musicologist if you’re not careful, with a combination of self-awareness and maybe self-consciousness. Your question is on point because I’ve thought almost my whole life about myself in relation to my heroes. I won’t say too much about my heroes. But of the two poles—anxiety of influence and ritual ancestral slaughter, or ancestor worship—I’m the sort of composer who has these sorts of gods and who acknowledges them somehow every day in my work and in my love affair with the history of music. Some of the pieces have overt historicism, as you know. But I think that always, I’m aware of what I’m doing as a kind of footnote to what thousands of others—to what my colleagues have done. I’m not so interested in inventing the wheel; I’m interested in painting it in beautiful shades, or somehow improving it slightly. I find it interesting that your interest in other music is very catholic, in the sense that you seem to be looking for inspiration and problem-solving and gesture externally. What about on a micro level? If we break down into your harmonic writing, any axes to grind on those fronts? Well, my principal axe to grind on harmony is that I’m for it, which is not as simple a statement as it sounds. Because, growing up when we grew up, it wasn’t a thing you could be for. There wasn’t a good way to think about harmony for part of the 20th century, for most composers, and I think I worked out only gradually my thinking about how this might tie to the traditions I loved most. In fact, I can now see, after so many years and with some help from others, that not only did I never give up the idea of harmony as a kind of governing force in almost all my music, but that the kinds of harmonies [I’ve employed] are related to specific traditions in music history, and especially to the tradition that you might say embraces Debussy and Bartok and Lutoslawski, and eventually Berio—this sort of chromatic harmony that has not been liberated
expanding horizons new frontiers in music
One on One with Steven Stucky
On June 26, 2008, under PMP’s auspices, Steven Stucky was joined by renowned conductor Gil Rose for a conversation about his music and career.
Steven Stucky portraits by Hoebermann Studio Photography
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Steven Stucky (b. 1949) is widely recognized as one of the leading American composers of his generation. His music is acclaimed for its formal clarity and imaginative use of color—as well as for its ability to communicate powerfully with a broad concert-going public without sacrificing complexity, artistic integrity, or technical finesse. In 2005 Mr. Stucky won the Pulitzer Prize for his Second Concerto for Orchestra, which The New York Times described as an “electrifying display of orchestral fireworks.” In addition to composing, Mr. Stucky is active as a conductor, writer, lecturer, and teacher. Music Director of Opera Boston and winner of Columbia University’s prestigious Ditson Award, Gil Rose is also the founder of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), a chamber orchestra dedicated exclusively to performing and recording music of the 20th and 21st centuries.
“The goal of art is to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, and that’s all I’m after, actually, and everything else is ways to make it happen.”
from some kind of ideal of euphony, of beauty. I’m not one of those people who want to ignore big chunks of 20th-century music or repertoire. I probably learned less from Schoenberg than from Debussy. I would not give up early Ligeti. I would not give up Elliott Carter for anything. And I encourage my students, many of whom live in this ahistorical now, in which a whole chunk of our heritage is just missing from their consciousness and I think it’s a terrible shame. I try to rectify that whenever I can. However, I do think that the emancipation of dissonance didn’t work, or didn’t work very well, because giving up the contrast between consonance and dissonance, however one makes that work—those are very general terms—was just giving up too good a tool, and most of us have gotten it back in some way. What about your relationship to early music? I know a lot of composers of your generation at this time have leaped back, stopping at Debussy and then taking a big jump to Josquin and from Josquin to Byrd. How did that happen for you, and do you remember when it happened? It happened in sophomore counterpoint class, I think. Well, it probably happened in high school choir, where you run into this music. But, one of the positive influences of academic life is that I get to teach counterpoint often, and it turns out to be really something quite important in my way of working, which I might not have had had I not been forced into this academic situation. I’m actually mainly influenced by the late 16th century, not so much Josquin and certainly not Machaut, but essentially the age of Palestrina, which is also the age of Byrd. What about how that primarily contrapuntal writing manifests itself in your orchestral writing? Do you find that that way of thinking contrapuntally—in longer lines and less obvious to the listener—is at the root of your music’s construction? Maybe not the root of the construction, but it’s a fundamental way of making the surface. Very often my music has quite dense textures, but these textures are constructed in rather simple ways. You know, canonic and so on. In a way that’s very much like, say, the micro polyphony of Ligeti—in a different style, but the same principle. If you look at them side by side, you can see that we’re interested in the same thing. Audience member: Do you enjoy going back to the shorter forms, like Album Leaves, after working with the larger forms, trying to say so much in a small amount of time? That’s one reason for doing these things, and some of those short pieces are those that you just write for someone’s birthday, you fax or PDF them. But those short pieces—I really just gave myself one or two pages to try to do something PMP 51
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PMP RUN-OUTS!
Making Music: Frederic Rzewski Carnegie (Zankel) Hall
Elliott Carter’s What Next? Miller Theatre at Columbia University New York stage premiere of Carter’s only opera, conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky and directed by Christopher Alden Amanda Squitieri, soprano Susan Narucki, soprano Katherine Rohrer, mezzo-soprano Matthew Garrett, tenor Morgan Smith, baritone Jonathan Makepeace, boy alto
Frederic Rzewski, Pianist Stephen Drury, Pianist Steve ben Israel, Narrator Opus 21 Ara Guzelimian, Series Moderator
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March
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Presented by Meet the Composer, New Music for Soloist Champions is the culmination of a year-long project in which eight soloists— all major figures in the new music world—collaborated with eight diverse contemporary composers to create a wide-ranging body of new solo works.
Featuring Frederic Rzewski’s Attica, Spots, War Songs, Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues (two-piano version), and the New York premiere of Natural Things (co-commissioned by The Carnegie Hall Corporation, the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and Opus 21)
May
New Music for Soloist Champions Symphony Space, Peter Sharp Theater
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Ever hungry for live music, PMP hosted four “run-out” trips to New York City to attend a variety of performances during the 2007–2008 season. Here is what they heard:
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that’s very immediate. This is one of the things about music that seemed so important to me, and it’s not so easy to do. That is, never to waste any time warming up during a piece, whether it’s a small piece or a big piece, but to start saying something right away rather than saying “um.” And in a small piece, you don’t have time to say “um.” You can only say one thing, and you have to have something worth saying. They’re very good for your technique, sort of liberating your imagination. Part of the liberation is, essentially that they don’t really have formal problems, so you can concentrate on other things. I do them sometimes as calisthenics or as gifts, or whatever. Audience member: If I understood you correctly, you said earlier that your approach has technical problem-solving as a means to an end of expression, and I think your music really demonstrates that. Well, thank you. The means to the end thing is a shortcut way of saying something that’s a little more complicated because there are cases in which I don’t understand the emotion that I’m going for in a piece until afterwards. It’s not that I say, “I have some emotional content and I need some tools in which to encode it.” Sometimes all I have are the tools and the intellectual thrust of making the piece work and then I don’t get to experience the feelings of the piece, really, until afterwards. This is rewarding when it works out—I suppose when it doesn’t, then it’s not. There are some emotional surprises for me. Not complete surprises, but you can’t get the whole picture… I imagine that if you’re making a film, that until you’re sitting in a theater with an audience, you can’t experience it the way that the audience does, even though you’ve seen it for a thousand hours in the editing room. It’s a little bit like that for me. The goal of art is to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, and that’s all I’m after, actually, and everything else is ways to make it happen. Audience member: What’s your approach to teaching composition? That’s a great mystery that in 30 years of teaching I haven’t completely solved. When I was studying composition, I had a tremendous amount of affection for, and even reverence for the people I studied with. But I’d be unable to tell you what I learned from them. And that’s not a condemnation of their teaching; it is a statement about the reality that you end up teaching yourself to compose with moral support from your senior colleagues. There’s not a whole lot of technical evidence that what we give to students turns them into composers. You can turn them into theorists or fugue writers, or something, but that’s not the same. I do try to be a good colleague to them, and I try to ask a lot of questions of composers that they have forgotten to ask of themselves in a particular situation—about what they’re doing in a piece, and why they’re doing it. So that if they can go home and keep asking themselves the same question, they are their best teachers, and that’s the sort of service that you can give them. But, I don’t have a system. I have
different approaches with different people because they all need different things or are able to accept different things. There are certain general areas of music which, if they’ve never thought about them, I will at least try to get them to think about. One of the ideas is making harmony work somehow—a composer who has just not had a chance to think about it, I will make him or her think about it. There are composers for whom harmony is not a subject—Lou Harrison, for example. Well, that’s a special case. Someone could have messed him up by making him think about harmony, but he was too strong of a personality to have fallen for that. If they have no way of thinking about form, then I try to find some way to make them think about form, which is, I hope, not a received method, but a way they can go about thinking about it for themselves. I don’t have a real system, though. There are teachers like that, who have systems, who have been successful, but I don’t have that. And no one used it on me; maybe that’s why I don’t have that. Audience member: What is your take on popular [idioms] that are kind of entering the composer’s technique? Is this a good direction that people are going into? GR: Why don’t I say something and then you can finish it off. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad direction. I think in the world of the Pandora’s Box that was opened and anything became possible, you don’t put anything back in that box. We’re never going to go back to a controlled modernist agenda. I think that that’s happened, and part of what’s happened is that those things have become eligible source material. And once they become source material, they will either be used to good effect, bad effect, with skill, without skill, with integrity, or without integrity. The elements themselves—the popular music element, or the rock element—they themselves are not good or bad for our using. And we might as well get comfortable with it, because it ain’t going back in the box. I agree with all that: materials are neither good nor bad; achievement is good or bad. A material is neutral. Secondly, the influence of popular music on so-called classical music is several centuries old. It’s not a very new subject. It seems like it now because everything is kind of more open than it was before, but there is a Neapolitan Tarantella in many a symphony and there are Croatian folk songs in a Haydn symphony, and so on. What’s great about the current situation is having dropped the barriers about what’s permissible material, what’s a means of expression, and so on, is inherently a positive thing. It makes possible results that we couldn’t have gotten before. What’s difficult about overtly popular references is that the real thing is so vibrant that there’s some steep competition when you do it over. So, not all of it succeeds, personally, but I’m completely in favor of the attempt.
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One on One with Steven Stucky
Pocket Concerto Project Miller Theatre at Columbia University Laura Elise Schwendinger, Chiaroscuro Azzurro (for violin and chamber orchestra) Ichizo Okashiro, The Starry Night (for piano and chamber orchestra) John Zorn, The Prophetic Mysteries of Angels, Witches, and Demons Performed by: Jennifer Koh, violin; Christopher Taylor, piano; Tara Helen O’Connor, flute; International Contemporary Ensemble (Jayce Ogren, conductor; Alex Lipowski, percussion; William Winant, percussion; Ikue Mori, electronics)
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