A Conversation with Viet Cuong, Benjamin Pouncey, cont.

Regarding some of your earlier pieces, you have mentioned that in some cases you wrote them beginning to end, and did not begin with a form in mind.3 Is that the case now or do you think differently about form when constructing a piece?

Viet Cuong: Yes and no, I think it still depends on the piece—but I do think about form more now than I did earlier in my career. There is almost this youthful indiscretion in Sound and Smoke where I was writing whatever I thought should happen next and wasn't considering form as much. But now I like to combine that with being more deliberate about the overall structure of a piece and to every so often take a step back and think about that structure. Over the past ten years, in terms of structure and form, I've learned how to make the most out of one musical idea. In Sound and Smoke there is an early indication of that in the second movement when a motive is developing but it's all over the place. Now I really try to squeeze as much as I can out of one idea and be really economical with it because I think it results in a piece that's really tight and focused. I think if you want to use a word to describe a big change over the last ten years it's focus. I think my music is much more focused now.

Do you think about thematic or motivic material early in the process? Or do you begin with a specific timbre first?

Viet Cuong: It's hard to say what truly comes first, melody or texture, because it's different for every piece. Usually I start with one of those two. I think for Vital Sines, the very first thing I wrote that ended up in the piece—actually there was a lot that I wrote that didn't end up in the piece because it was originally supposed to be premiered in December of 2020 at Midwest. If that had happened the piece would have been completely different than what it is now and I think it's much better now than what it would have been in 2020— however, the first thing I wrote that ended up in the piece was the opening measures. That “melody,” I guess you could call it, led me to orchestrate that in the winds. I knew right then what the texture would be. It was almost as if the texture and melody came together. I knew immediately that I wanted to make it sound really resonant and reverberant, and as if all these sounds are being echoed. It developed from this way of writing for piano that I had been working on in pieces such as America the Beautiful: “Echo Chamber,” which was a prototype for the technique, as well as another piece called Again and Again that I wrote for prepared piano around the same time.

Melody and texture are almost inseparable to me. When writing a melody, I immediately think, “how am I going to orchestrate it?” And when working within a texture, I think, “what melody am I going to use with it?” I don't ever write a piece as a piano short score and then decide when it's time to orchestrate it. It's totally inseparable to me. Some composers will write something that looks like a piano piece, or they'll use a couple of grand piano staves to write the piece and then orchestrate it. What I do is insert a couple of piano staves inside the band score and that's where the information is, because it can get really unwieldy if, for example, there is a whole band plus a sextet, (chuckles) so there are piano staves running throughout the piece. Those staves do not contain music that anyone is actually playing but they act as a short score within what is happening everywhere else.

Regarding the acoustic delay processing effects that you have uniquely incorporated in your music, how has that technique become a compositional throughline in your work and how has it developed?

Viet Cuong: If there is one thing I want to be my signature, I want it to be that. I have used this delayed sound world since 2011 when I wrote a saxophone solo titled

Naica. It's been over ten years and it has become an aspect of my orchestration that feels really personal to me. It has also been really fun to explore. In a piece like Sound and Smoke the delay is a quarter note, so the rhythmic offset of the delay effect, or echo, is equal to one beat. That is something I still do but I have played around with using delays that are different durations depending on what meter the music is in—which is something I first did in Re(new)al. What is interesting to me about this idea [delays of different durations depending on meter] is that a computer, such as a Max patch or a pedal, cannot do this—unless a really complicated Max patch is written that is probably going to have bugs or not work. Changing the duration and speed of delay note to note is something I've been more interested in recently. I incorporated this in Vital Sines too. In that piece, sometimes the delay is even set to the dotted sixteenth note in addition to being set to eighth notes at other times. The actual delay becomes a counterpoint to the music that is being processed. It’s been really fun to do that and I'm still exploring more ways to use these sounds—it is something that has been a throughline throughout a lot of my music. There was a time in graduate school that I was not using it as much. I used it in Sound and Smoke and in Moth, however,

I didn’t use it in Diamond Tide — there was a period when I wasn't really interested in it up until somewhat recently within the last couple years.

On another level, for me, this feeling of delay and echoing symbolizes, especially during COVID, all of us being alone and our thoughts bouncing around in our head. Our communities became these online echo chambers and it was almost the only way we interacted with people. There is also the idea of music notes being echoes of our influences and, as musicians, we are echoes of our mentors’ pedagogy. There are different ways to look at it, but I think thematically it is a tool and an intriguing sound.

Wow, I love that. Regarding the delay effects, when you are creating different sound pallets, are there certain timbres and instrument combinations that you are drawn to or do you try to create something new each time?

Viet Cuong: I really like the sound of using delay with percussive instruments, such as piano or marimba playing staccato notes, with woodwinds. With brass I have these tricks to make them playable because, for example, playing dotted eighth notes at a quick tempo creates this cross rhythm of four against three—what I oftentimes do is give the brass downbeats so that it is easier to play. Sometimes, however, that rhythm on brass instruments does not sound as effortless, but if I were to write repeated dotted eighths, it's more challenging to count.

I just finished a piece for band titled Deciduous, for the Florida Bandmasters Association and Florida All-State Symphonic Band. The entire work is delay effect and it’s mostly in the woodwinds, mallet percussion, and piano. I would say in terms of colors I'm drawn to, I really like woodwinds and percussion because those are instruments I play—brass is great too—but for the delay effect, woodwinds and percussion are the instruments I gravitate towards most because they're just more nimble.

When you are designing a piece, do you begin with orchestration, such as voicing the delay processing effect, or harmonic motion? Does one drive the other?

Viet Cuong: I would say purely that, for example the harmonic motion of a G minor chord, that is not connected to the effect. But to make the delay effect the most effective, the notes have to be a certain distance apart. Otherwise it just sounds like a scale. But if I voice a G minor chord with notes a sixth apart, it makes the delay