“I sort of made my name playing an alcoholic, broken down chanteuse. So it seemed inevitable that I would get an award for that someday.” That was the beginning of my conversation with Mx. Justin Vivian Bond when talking recently about Bond being named the first recipient of the Judy Icon Award at this year’s Night of A Thousand Judys at Joe’s Pub in New York on June 3rd.

This is the 12th year of the event that celebrates the legendary Garland while also raising money for the Ali Forney Center, an organization that provides housing and services to homeless LGBTQ+ in New York City.

Bond, who uses v as the preferred pronoun, is a transgender singer, actor, cabaret artist whose shows (including Rare Bird which premiered at Joe’s Pub in New York in early May and will be performed May 30th – June 1st at Feinsteins At the Nikko in San Francisco; Bond will debut Night Shade at Joe’s Pub June 20th – June 30th) range from the brilliant to the absurd in equal measure. V is also one half of Kiki & Herb with Kenny Mellman.

In 2021, Bond collaborated with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo on a show called Only an Octave Apart. The critically-acclaimed show was recorded and the album was released in January of 2022

Last week I spoke with Bond about Garland’s influence, whether having a legacy is important to v and the role of dreams in one’s life. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview with Bond, please go to our YouTube channel.

You are the first recipient of the Judy Icon Award at Night of a Thousand Judys. How did that feel when you found out?

I’m very honored. Justin Sayre is somebody who I’ve respected for a long time. The work that he has done in the queer community, his performances and what he has to say with his work has always been very important and inspiring. So, to be honored by him and the group of people that he works with on the show is very flattering, obviously. You know, to get a Judy award, that’s pretty fancy. 

I read an interview that Anthony Roth Costanzo gave to the New York Times in September 2021 when you were doing Only an Octave Apart. He talked about the process of working with you and said, “I’m always looking for structure. And Viv is always like, ‘Don’t box me in because it’s not going to be as good.'” That sounded like something Judy Garland would say. How much of an influence has Judy Garland been on you both as a as a professional and as a person? 

When I was a kid, as everybody who grew up the generation I did, every year The Wizard of Oz played on TV. And every year I was terrified by the flying monkeys and the Wicked Witch and I identified with Dorothy Gale. Growing up in a small town as a queer person, you know that somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly, why can’t I? That was the question I asked myself when I was very young.

Of course, when you’re young and you see these sort of tragic stories play out, they’re very dramatic. But now that I’m 61 and knowing that I’m a decade-and-a-half older than she was when she passed away, it gives you a different perspective. But she has given me, I don’t know, fodder and intellectual inspiration, I guess, for my entire life.

Has the role she’s played as an influence in your own life evolved as you’ve gotten older and as you’ve come to understand that she was much more than just the character of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz? 

Yes. There’s no way that I think you could really understand fully what she experienced if you haven’t been in show business. I also feel like being a minority in show business, a marginalized sort of person, what people try to get away with because they feel like you are more powerless than they are, can be galling. But fortunately I have somehow managed to avoid that for the most part. I do that not by being in the mainstream, but by basically forging my own path. So I think maybe I learned that from her as a cautionary tale, as well as just the brilliance of her talent and hard work. 

In a 1967 interview that Judy Garland gave Barbara Walters on the Today Show she said, “I’ve gotten to the age where I rebelled, and I’m going to hit and hit back.” With all the political rhetoric that we’re facing right now, from all walks of life, about trans, non-binary people, what’s the best way to to rebel against that vitriol that accompanies these comments and actually inspires even greater vitriol?

My strategy, for the most part, has always been to put my body where it needs to be; whether it be on the street, whether it be at a protest, whether it be at a meeting or whether it be on the stage or sometimes on the screen. I feel like the most powerful thing that I can do as a trans person is live as full and rich and joyful a life as I can possibly live, in spite of all of that. I take a lot of comfort in knowing that the people who are coming after us are invariably much less happy and much less comfortable with who they are than we are. 

There’s that old axiom that success is the best revenge. But I think happiness is the best revenge.

I agree completely, and happiness is a skill that you develop and also something that you can’t be all the time. So if you aren’t happy at certain moments, you have to address them. I have a therapist who said, “Well, you are depressed, but you have a good reason for being depressed.” So work on getting through that, addressing it and dealing with it, and then hopefully it will pass. Sometimes it takes the medication, sometimes it takes therapy and sometimes it just takes time.

Kenny Mellman last year compared your level of fandom to Garland’s. “It’s as if Viv were a Judy Garland, but alive.” Of course, that sounds like a variation of your Whitney Houston joke. Your fans will know what I’m talking about, but what parallels do you see between your fan base and the fan base that Judy Garland has? 

They have, what was the line? Judy said they have good taste. I love my fan base and I’m proud of having a very intelligent, witty, and loyal fan base. I try to keep myself as fresh and invigorated for them as possible. It makes it easy because they’re so receptive to what I do and they’re willing to go with me where ever I may take them.

This year is the 55th anniversary of Judy Garland’s death. If 50 or 55 years after you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil somebody wants to prepare a Night of a Thousand Vivs, what would you like it to be? 

I couldn’t care less when I’m dead. I really don’t care. I don’t care if anybody ever remembers me after I’m dead or not. I don’t care about that, honestly. I just want to enjoy my life. That’s up to other people, too. I don’t have that kind of ego where I feel like, oh, I want to live on forever. I really don’t. I think that’s part of why I don’t make so many records, because I don’t really care. I’m not there when people listen to them. So I don’t get any pleasure out of them. You don’t make any money. 

I like singing live, and I guess that would be something also that I have in common with Judy Garland, because her live performances are so much more legendary, and the recordings of her live performances, than her studio records. There’s that chemistry that happens, the empathy and the relationship that you develop with the live audience, that you can’t really create. I think that’s also why working on Only an Octave Apart with Anthony in the studio might have been more powerful than doing solo records in the studio, because we were there together. We were performing for each other, and that, I think, ups the ante.

Even though there’s just a few weeks difference between when you debuted Rare Bird at Joe’s Pub and will now be doing it in San Francisco, does your relationship with the material change? Do you alter the show?

The material will not be the same because when I did the show here in New York, I did it with my full band. I’m coming to San Francisco with David Sytkowski, my pianist. He’s been with me at Feinstein several times now, but the only reason I ever wish I was more famous or more successful is so I could tour with my band because it’s so expensive. It’s impossible. But that doesn’t make the show any less interesting. I spent an entire career and it was just Kenny Mellman and I – pianist and singer on stage. I don’t feel like the audience is losing out on anything. But because of that, I have to work a little harder and come up with a different set list that has a lot of the same material, but some of the things just sounded better because you had background vocalists or just little things that technically wouldn’t work as well.

You’re going to Joe’s Pub for nine performances in late June which will be a completely different show.

Yes, that show is called Night Shade. It’s about how queer people exist at night and songs about nighttime and songs that you would listen to at night. I haven’t completely narrowed down the setlist yet, but I’ve been having a lot of fun picking it out.

When you said Night Shade, I thought, oh, it could be just the crap, the shade, we throw at each other. 

It could just be what we do with eggplant emojis.

You appeared in Desert In, which is a video series that Ellen Reid and James Darrah and christopher oscar peña did. I love how unconventional that series was. What stood out to you most about being part of of that? How much do you think projects like that and Only an Octave Apart, are going to inspire people to explore other ways of presenting music that may not be conventional, or may not even be music that they’re used to listening to?

That was an amazing experience and I felt so lucky to be able to do that during the pandemic. And I have to say, Ellen James and Brad Vernatter who’s the [General] Director at Boston Lyric Opera, found a way to pivot and keep all of these artists engaged and working throughout that pandemic. It was so great because each scene was written by a different composer. It was a huge amount of people and it was so much fun. James is a terrific director. It was a wonderful way of working that I would encourage more people to try because it really appealed to a lot of people.

I think the same thing with Anthony and I. You know cabaret is not one of the top genres in popular entertainment. But I’ve always tried to stay relevant because I just tell the truth. And the only truth I can really tell is my own truth. So working with Anthony and somehow contextualizing all of this opera music that he sings, which is so beautiful…But, you know, I went to his show Orfeo ed Euridice [at the Metropolitan Opera], which premiered last week. I turned to my friend after the show and I said, “The only problem with these operas and they’re all very old – the music’s beautiful, but the characters are all idiots.” You can’t believe how stupid these characters are. So I really love contemporary opera because contemporary opera, a lot of it appeals to a much broader audience because it’s hard to sort of take these things seriously if you’re there for a story because the stories are kind of simple.

During the pandemic James created videos for Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra that took classical music off of the concert stage and put it into our day-to-day lives and I feel like Desert In is part of that as well. That’s the way people are going to get seduced by the art form.

It was an interesting story that was kind of provocative. It had queer tales, it had heterosexual [tales], it had diversity and the writing was fantastic. Yeah, that’s what we need.

In André Breton’s Manifestos of Surrealism he wrote, “I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence, and attaches so much more importance, to waking events than to those occurring in dreams.” You have spoken throughout your career about the role dreams play in your life and their significance. Is Breton right? How much does that perspective inspire you?

When I lived in San Francisco, I went to the Jung Institute and I did therapy there when I was in my 20s. When I moved to New York, I found an analyst who worked at the Jung Institute here. So dreams are very informative. Whether they’re waking dreams or just keys into what’s going on or your own anxieties, or how you relate to other people and how they appear when they’re in your dreams. So I think dreams are important. Also being in my 60s now and having had a lot of my dreams come true and finding out, you know, sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes it’s not as exciting as you thought it would be. I think it’s important to never stop coming up with new ones.

It’s always important to realize, even when you have reached your dreams, that there are still more dreams.

Yes, absolutely. Because then if there aren’t, what’s the reason to be alive? My mother passed away last year and I told her the last day of her life how I was so fortunate to have her as a role model because she did not stop growing as a person. Becoming more open to new things and learning things and changing until the very last day of her life. And I hope that I can be that way as well.

Could you have dreamed that you would have this career, that you would be at this place in your life? 

Oh, yeah. And now I have to come up with new dreams. When I was in high school, I used to love The Merv Griffin Show because he had amazing people that were in New York that I had never heard of before. One of them was Alberta Hunter. She was this jazz singer who was successful in the 20s and 30s and into the 40s. But at a certain point, she stepped away from show business and became a nurse and she lied about her age. So when she was 70 or 72, they thought she was 65 and they forced her to retire from nursing. Then she was rediscovered and she put out a few albums and she had a residency at this club here called The Cookery every Monday night for years. And I thought, that’s how I want to end up.

I want to be an old lady who has a residency and a cabaret in New York and I can go sing my songs every week and never stop working. And that’s what I’m planning on. But I want more things to happen between now and then.

UPDATE: This story previously stated the the Joe’s Pub shows were sold out. They are not. Cultural Attaché regrets that error. There was a a link built into that paragraph where you can click co to purchase tickets and get more information.

To see the full interview with Justin Vivian Bond, please go here.

Main Photo: Justin Vivian Bond (Photo by Ruben Afanador/Courtesy Justin Vivian Bond)

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One of the best things that Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra does is their Sound Investment program which provides a commission and a tryout period for composers to work on a new composition and for investors to watch the creative process. Previous participants have included Matthew Aucoin, Sarah Gibson, Shelley Washington, Juan Pablo Contreras and Marc Lowenstein. Let me introduce you to this year’s composer: Nina Shekhar.

Shekhar is a first-generation Indian-American composer. Her most performed work to date is Lumina. Her music has been performed by most of the major orchestras in this country including LACO.

For her Sound Investment composition she has written a piece entitled Glitter Monster. The world premiere will be Friday, May 24th at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa. There is a second concert on Saturday, May 25th at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. Both programs also include Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor and Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C Major.

Glitter Monster is a work she wrote without any real rules. She let her imagination roam freely. This was part of what I learned in a recent conversation with Shekhar. What follows are excerpts from my interview with her. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: Matthew Aucoin called the Sound Investment program “very Bernie Sanders” and that it seemed “deeply Los Angeles specific” and that “there are a lot of supporters, not all stereotypically super rich, who want to support music.” How does his perspective align or not, with your own experience?

I think that the Sound Investment program is a really unique opportunity. On the composer’s side we rarely get a chance to workshop a piece or try ideas out. Usually we write a piece for an orchestra and then the orchestra rehearses it, performs it, and it’s very quick and you kind of turn around.

But in this case, we actually get the opportunity to workshop things and we get to have some contact with the performers in advance. We get to try things in a chamber setting and then have a reading of our piece in advance and the donors get to be part of that experience. They also get to sit in on all of these rehearsals. They get to hear what the piece is about. They get to offer ideas. I think it’s a really fun communal experience for everybody.

With so many people offering opinions, how do you distill what are good ideas, what are bad ideas? How much do you want to just remain faithful to what your vision is for a given composition?

Much of what my practice is as an artist is about my own voice; my own experiences and channeling that. That’s part of the reason I became a composer in the first place. I think of music as almost like my diary. I can really share a lot of my experiences [and] get to really understand myself better in that process.

But at the same time, I think a lot of composers forget that music is a communal experience. It’s not just my identity that’s being reflected in a work. It’s also performer’s identity. Everybody in the orchestra is interpreting the work. Also really importantly, it’s the audience’s identity that they’re putting into hearing the work and receiving it. That’s really important to acknowledge.

So in creating this, getting to hear some sort of feedback from the donors and having them say how they received the work or how it made them feel, definitely gives me a sense of how others are going to receive the work. It’s helpful for me to know that when creating a piece.

How important is how an audience responds to it? I think of countless composers, if they relied on audience response, would be grossly disappointed. Take, for example, Philip Glass. People didn’t understand his music until much later. Is the audience that important when writing music?

This piece, Glitter Monster, I felt a freeness in writing this piece that I usually don’t feel. I really took a lot of risks. I really just wanted to write something fun. Partly for myself, partly for the orchestra. In that sense it didn’t really matter what anybody else thought. But on the other hand, I do think it is important, just as an artist, to understand the perspectives of others and understand how others are going to receive your work.

This piece really builds a really, expansive sound world that I think many people can find different things in different kinds of meaning in the sound world that I’ve created. I’m glad that sometimes an audience member might receive something differently than I do. Even if my piece isn’t necessarily about what somebody else thought it was, that’s okay. 

Was this particular work that became Glitter Monster something you had been thinking about in advance of this Sound Investment commission or did it did it come about specifically because of the commission? 

I started brainstorming the piece after I received the commission. I had known I was going to be a Sound Investment composer in advance for a little bit. I’d been thinking about it, but I think really this past fall is when I started brainstorming the piece. The themes in it are about reclaiming femininity, but also as something that could be powerful, or it could be scary, or it could be angry. You know, rather than thinking of feminism as this dainty thing. So the title Glitter Monster came out of that.

I was thinking about this idea of glitter, which is so stereotypically feminine, and thinking about how can I harness that into something that could be maybe scary or angry. And thinking about my own self as a woman who is conditioned to take up less space, to be submissive and realizing, wait a minute, I have my own feelings too. Sometimes I get angry too. That’s how the title came out and then eventually morphed into this really subversive, or surrealist, psychedelic kind of piece, that moved beyond that initial theme.

Coming at this from a male, non-composer point of view, I’m thinking of glitter as shiny and sparkly. But when you combine it with the word monster that could mean any number of things. Does it have more than one meeting to you as a title?

It morphed into being a creature that I’ve created. There’s parts of the piece that sound underwater, there’s parts of the piece that sound like in outer space. It’s like this really large creature that I’ve created that is moving through all these different spaces, and it feels very expansive.

In writing this piece, part of the fun I had was creating this really surreal creature that didn’t exist and creating something that is unexpected. I mean, nobody would think of a glitter monster. For that reason it can mean many different things. Even in the course of writing it, it moved from this one idea to something much larger.

Glitter Monster is going to have its world premiere on a program with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 and Schubert’s last symphony. Do you see a through line from your work through those other two works?

As a composer who’s pretty active in the orchestra world, I’ve been thinking about the pieces that I’ve been paired with. I grew up playing a lot of Bach on the piano. I was a flutist also. I grew up playing a lot of Beethoven. Growing up, I think I did have a love for classical music. I still do. That’s part of the reason I work in that space. And I think that all of those elements have still influenced my music.

I think that my music has a strong sense of counterpoint, which I think comes from that classical world. There’s a lot of rhythmic, intricate details. Some of that comes from that world. I think with Mozart, there’s a clarity in his music and I try to aim for that in my music. In that sense, there is a through line. Although I do think that this piece is pretty shocking compared to those other pieces. But I think that’s great.

Schubert is quoted as having said, “The greatest misfortune of the wise man and the greatest unhappiness of the fool are based upon convention.” Do you agree with him? What role, if any, does convention play in your life and work?

As an artist we often are trying to make something that is reflective of ourselves. In that sense we’re all unique and we do break convention in that way – by presenting a new point of view. At the same time, though, I think that we are part of a larger network of artists. We are part of this lineage. Even pop artists today have been influenced by artists that came hundreds of years ago.

My work is also influenced by Indian traditional music and Hindustani traditional music. That’s thousands of years old. And in that sense, I think that we are a part of convention, but at the same time we can break convention. I’m embracing convention, but I’m not totally following it. I am breaking it in some ways – in a way that feels right to me. There’s no rule that says you can’t do this. This tradition has evolved over time because of that.

If audiences are familiar with any one of your works, it’s probably Lumina, which is getting a lot of play. But you have other compositions that are not getting as much attention. How do you deal with that?

We often say getting the second performance of a piece is probably the hardest thing. There’s so much allure around a premiere. Everybody wants to be the first one to perform something, or the first one who commissioned something and give the premiere. But I think that part of the challenge, and why it’s difficult to get second performances of orchestra works in particular, is because of recordings. With Lumina I had a recording that is publicly available because the first orchestra that played it was a university orchestra. A lot of this has to do with players unions and things like that. 

I’ve been lucky as several of my other orchestral works have been performed more often recently because Lumina got my name out more and people were more interested in performing other works of mine. With chamber music, it’s kind of a different thing because recordings are more available. So it’s much easier for me to have chamber works performed frequently. But I think with orchestras, that’s probably the biggest challenge that composers face.

Homer wrote,”…like that star of the waning summer, who, beyond all stars, rises, bathed in the ocean stream, to glitter in brilliance.” What is the stream to glitter you would like to see in your professional life in the next ten years?

In writing Glitter Monster I’m really learning to trust myself in my work. We talked about the role of the audience and all of this. But I think ultimately, as artists, it’s really important that we have faith in ourselves and that we are willing to take risks and try new things. I think that’s something that I’m hoping I carry going forward. With this piece I kind of threw all caution to the wind and said I’m just going to write whatever I want. I wrote something that was very out of the norm. Kind of campy, kind of 80s, larger-than-life, psychedelic, very unusual. But at the same time, it felt like me.

I realize that now going forward I’m writing more works that mean something really important to me. I feel like I want to continue that going forward. So for me, the glitter that I’m hoping that will shine through my life is that I continue to be on a path and continue to just take risks and explore who I am as a person in my work and really be confident in myself.

To see the full interview with Nina Shekhar, please go here.

Main Photo: Composer Nina Shekhar (Photo by Shervin Lainez/Courtesy Nina Shekhar)

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It’s a busy time for composer/pianist Marc-André Hamelin. On February 2nd his album New Piano Works was released. It was Hamelin’s first recording of his own compositions since 2010’s Études. Hyperion Records, his label, was acquired and the floodgates of his dozens of releases on Hyperion were suddenly available for streaming. It is, as Hamelin says, a veritable “treasure trove of recordings.”

This weekend he joins the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for performances on March 2nd at The Wallis in Beverly Hills and a March 3rd performance at Zipper Hall at the Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles. Hamelin will be performing Nadia Boulanger’s Three Pieces for Cello and Piano and César Franck’s Piano Quintet in F Minor.

I last spoke with Hamelin in 2019. His new album (one of my selections for New In Music This Week: February 2nd) was part of our conversation as were his concerts. It also served as an opportunity to see how his point-of-view may, or may not, have changed in that time.

What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To watch the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: You’re going to be playing two pieces in these concerts with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. One of them is Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor. That’s a work you recorded in 2016. How much does the personality and the musicianship of any given other four musicians make a difference in the end result of this, or any other piece of music that you’re performing? 

It does. But the fun, I think, of getting with a new group that you haven’t played with before, is to just to discover each other’s musicianship and finding common ground. Also, suggesting differences and new ways of doing things that they might not have thought of. It’s an area that’s very, very rich in surprises and possibilities. That goes for any piece in the repertoire, really.

With all five musicians in a quintet, or four in a quartet, is there any place to hide? 

Maybe small ones. But especially with a work that’s so well known as the Franck Quintet. It’s really one of the big five along with the Brahms, Schumann, Dvorak and Shostakovich. We hear it so often that people know how it goes, or at least most of them do. So, in that sense, there is little room to hide and for mistakes. In a lesser known work, belonging to the byways of the repertoire, then maybe, since the piece is not heard very often, perhaps it’s more acceptable to be faulty. It will matter a lot less, I guess. Of course, we always strive for as much perfection as possible. Or at least, fidelity to the composer’s thought.

Apropos of that statement, do you feel like works are museum pieces and should be slave to what the composer’s thoughts were? Or is there room for this music to live and breathe and have its own life in 2024 versus the life it had when it was composed?

There’s several ways of thinking about this. On one hand, being a composer myself, I don’t pretend to have all the answers. Nobody does. But being a composer allows you to feel a little closer to the works you perform and especially how they were created. Sometimes you can see the process. I have a pretty good idea of how I want my pieces to go, but there is so much you can do in the way of notation to convey that. You have to leave something to the performer’s individual views or ways of understanding musical notation.

On the other hand, there are several different types of composers. There are composers who will allow great variations of interpretation. For example, I can think of Grieg, who once said to someone this is not really the way I saw it, but don’t change anything, I love individuality. There are other composers who are thankful for any performance, even though it may fall short of their expectations. There’s lots of nuances within the individual composer’s appreciations and that’s what makes the whole world richer.

When we spoke five years ago, you mentioned that you, “Have the luxury, at this point in my career, to be playing, without exception, pieces that I really love.” How do you think your perspective on what those pieces are has shifted since then?

It’s pretty much the same, actually. I keep introducing favorites. Sometimes I come back to old ones because it’s always very healthy and also very fascinating to revisit things that you haven’t played for quite a few years. It’s always really startling. I see sometimes how much they have changed without you doing a single thing. In the meantime, you have changed yourself. Therefore, your approach has changed. When I play these pieces for myself, after not having played them for many, many years, they will be completely different. That’s only because of my personal evolution and, hopefully, my increased understanding of what the composer wants.

Do you find that there are pieces that intimidate you? 

I’m a little less inclined – quite a bit less inclined – these days to play the big virtuosic things. I’m much more interested in meaningful communication at this point rather than showing myself off on stage. That, to me, is really not very satisfying. A recital is really a one-to-one act of communication. An offering, an act of sharing with the audience. I’m always thinking every single second of the audience, rather than myself. Because what else am I doing this for? I just really adore sharing discoveries and perhaps new ways of doing things that people already don’t. 

Is there something that you think is pivotal to communicate to an audience now that perhaps reflects either who you are as a person right now or the times that we’re living in?

I really concentrate on the music. Generally a concert really should be, in the best of times, abstracted from whatever else is happening in the world. However, I will say this though. Maybe two or three days after the 2016 election I was giving an all-Mozart concert at the 92nd Street Y in New York. So many people at the end told me, thank you. We needed that. And I won’t say any more.

New Piano Works is your first album of material you’ve composed to be released since Études in 2010. Why this work and why now?

It’s really more for practical reasons than anything. I’ve been very fortunate in having been published by Edition Peters who are one of the major publishers. They originally solicited me, and the first thing they published with it was this volume of 12 études which I recorded along the same time. Since then I published a number of piano pieces which hadn’t been recorded. So it’s basically a collection of almost everything that I’ve written for piano since then.

It’s sort of a dull reason, but, I’ve really come to realize very quickly that even if you publish a score and make the music available, the music is going to be a lot more appreciated and more pianists are going to go to it if they can hear it first. That’s why I recorded these things. 

The album opens with Variations on a Theme of Paganini, a piece most concertgoers or classical music fans have heard for years. How do you approach something that is as familiar as that for a transcription versus something that an audience may not know as well?

It was really a fun thing to do and I instinctively chose the theme simply because it’s one of those things which is easy to elaborate on. I mean, the structure is very simple. It’s very easy to remember and you can riff on it in just a gazillion different ways. A piece like that, for me, is an expression of freedom in a sense. I couldn’t resist having fun and quoting different composers. I’m sure you heard, variation seven I think it is, there’s a passage and one of the variations in the Beethoven Sonata, opus 109, it’s in E major. I transposed it to A minor and for 16 bars, it’s already a Paganini variation. I didn’t have to change anything. That was a lot of fun. When I came across this little bit I thought, I can’t not use this. This is too good. And it happens to be quite funny.

Do you, as a composer, have any conversations with you as a pianist in terms of what is truly possible to play versus what you want to express in the notes themselves?

At the beginning when I started to write, I just wrote whatever I wanted. Whatever I heard, without really too much concession to pianistic comfort. I was wondering why nobody was playing my things. Even I had trouble and I wrote them. So over the years, as I gained experience, I was able to make things sound the way I wanted without them being so difficult. But I’ll always carry that reputation of my things being almost unplayable. But I can assure you that there’s a lot that I wrote which is perfectly approachable. 

Are there other ways in which you feel you have evolved as a composer? 

I think that my harmonic system, such as it is, because I’ve never tried to explain it, really hasn’t changed that much. I think if anything has changed, I think I’ve gotten to think more about expressing pure music than thinking in pianistic terms. 

Your Hyperion Recordings now available for streaming. Do you feel this new way of distributing music, however challenging it might be economically for a performing artists like yourself, balances out with this newfound exposure that people can suddenly have to countless recordings of yours?

I think exposure is really the priority here. We should be thankful for that. A lot of people, over the last few years, have complained to me, we can’t find you on Spotify. We can find your early recordings on other labels. Hyperion resisted for the longest time and purely for financial reasons. But now that they’ve been bought by a large corporation, the justification is there. I think people are just so pleased as punch that Hyperion is finally being heard. The catalog is a golden treasure trove of discoveries and wonderful performances.

What do you think the role is of a transcription in allowing listeners new ways of hearing works that they’re familiar with, or new ways of hearing music that they’re not familiar with, for that matter?

In many cases, it’s about expanding the repertoire. A lot of solo instrumentalists are envious of something like the Franck Violin Sonata and they want to play it. So there are arrangements for cello, for flute and other solo instruments as well. I’ve always been fascinated by composer’s views of other composers; appreciations of other composers. I think really a transcription is just another way of expressing that. It’s paying tribute, let’s say. You think of what Busoni did with the Bach Chaconne from the D minor Partita. He really built a wonderful cathedral of sound. There are some people who don’t like the transcription, but I personally view it as a tremendous act of reverence for a composer.

Amongst my favorite transcriptions are Liszt’s transcriptions of Wagner. I think those are really interesting because we’re so used to his big, huge orchestral arrangements. To have it pared down to one instrument, I find it endlessly fascinating and a different way of hearing Wagner. 

The only ones that I’ve played are the Liebestod (from Tristan und Isolde) and also the Tannhauser Overture. But that particular one, I don’t like pianistically. It’s in E major and it feels, under the fingers, like completely the wrong key. 

It’s interesting you say that because I spent a little bit of time over the years with Stephen Sondheim. He and I were talking once about The Ballad of Sweeney Todd. He said it’s published in F minor, but it sounds so much better in F-sharp minor. I went to my piano at home and played it. He was right. It’s shocking how even a half-step difference can have such profound effects on a piece of music.

Keys are a very important. They have personalities. They really do. Gerald Moore, the famous pianist, expresses that very, very eloquently. He guards against sometimes indulging transposition – a singer’s transposing. Because you can stray too far from the original mood of the song.

Liszt is quoted as having said, “My piano is to me what a ship is to the sailor. It is the intimate, personal depository of everything that’s stirred wildly in my brain during the most impassioned days of my youth. It was there that all my wishes, all my dreams, all my joys and all my sorrows lay.” What is your piano to you?

An extension of my thought. An instrument of communication and sharing and joy.

To watch the full interview with Marc-André Hamelin, please go here.

All photos of Marc-André Hamelin (Photo by Sim Cannety Clarke/Courtesy Colbert Artists Management)

The post Marc-André Hamelin: A Franck Conversation About His Music appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Which explains Lauritzen’s participation in this Sunday’s Music Box 2023 which is presented by Chamber Music LA at Zipper Hall at The Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles. The concert will showcase four different chamber music ensembles (Jacaranda Music, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Colburn School’s Chamber Ensemble-In-Residence Quartet Integra and Salastina) performing string quartets written by Felix Mendelssohn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schubert and a composer yet to be identified.

That last composer whose identity is being kept under wraps is where Lauritzen comes in. He has selected a piece of music and removed all details leaving it up to the musicians (Salastina’s Meredith Crawford, Kevin Kumar, Yoshida Masada and Maia Jasper White) and the audience to try to figure out who the composer is. This part of the program is called Sounds Mysterious.

Earlier this week I spoke with Lauritzen about his puzzle, Music Box 2023 and the start of the arts, not just in Los Angeles, but around the world. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

What excites you most about Music Box 2023 and and how do you think that excitement will translate to audiences who will be there?

The thing that really excites me about this particular program is that it’s about the string quartet, which is to chamber music, what the symphony is to orchestral music. It’s the pinnacle of what chamber music is. Every composer who tried to write seriously for chamber music wrote a string quartet. Generally you find in their string quartets some of their most serious, thoughtful, probing, artistic music within that structure. So to explore different styles of the string quartet, I think, is the thing that I’m most looking forward to.

Let’s take the Mozart, which opens the program. If all of four ensembles that are playing play that same Mozart, would a casual listener be able to discern a difference between how each one of them played that piece of music?

I love this question because it speaks to an element of virtuosity that is, I think, not talked about all that often. So what is virtuosity? We think about virtuosity as someone gets up in front of an audience and does something on a violin or a cello or whatever that seems humanly impossible. That’s one element of virtuosity. Another element of virtuosity is an interpretive element. This would be a cool thing for chamber music to do sometime is everybody plays the same piece. Then you can find out. I think even the casual listener would notice a difference and it might be something that you see, even if maybe they couldn’t put words on it.

What’s the criteria you use in selecting that that mystery piece of music?

I’ve done a couple of different options in the past [with Salastina] where I’m interested in both an unknown piece of music by a famous composer and a really awesome piece by an unknown composer. Those are the two extremes of the spectrum. I’m looking for music that structurally hangs together. I’m looking for music that we can hear it and we can identify things about this music that might give us a clue to what it is. I’m not really super trying to trip people up. I’m not trying to find a piece that makes you think it’s by someone and then it’s actually something else. 

What do you feel the state of classical music is in Los Angeles right now?

I think it’s a vibrant scene. We’ve got our really wonderful large companies doing amazing things. And, of course, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is – just ask the New York Times – the most important orchestra in the United States. That’s not just because of Gustavo, although Gustavo is awesome. From the largest company in the city, all the way down to the smallest chamber music organization, we’ve got some of the best musicians on planet Earth here in Los Angeles.

We have to because of the dominant industry that runs this town – the film industry. The music that’s written for film and television demands greatness from the musicians and they deliver every single time. I’m in awe of the incredible artistry of the amazing musicians of this town. It comes down to the musicians. If the music making wasn’t great, then the organizations wouldn’t work out. 

But, you know organizations of all sizes, whether it’s in Los Angeles or across the country and across the world, are having a hard time getting audiences to come back. Even one of the one of the ensembles that’s playing as part of Music Box, Jacaranda Music, is not going to be in existence at the end of this upcoming season. The million dollar question is what will it take to get audiences back? What will it take for people to embrace the collective experience of hearing music together?

You’re right, it’s the million dollar question. It’s so sad. I’ve been a Jacaranda fan for as long as I’ve lived here in Los Angeles. I was just reading yesterday about the Philadelphia Orchestra musicians. They’ve authorized the strike for various reasons. Part of the reason that management has said we can’t raise your pay is that audience levels are at 64%. Before the pandemic they were at 75%. So something has to change to bring those audience levels back. You hit on a key component of it: community.

What did we miss the most when we were all at home isolating from one another? We missed that collective experience. The joy of getting in the same space together and experiencing music There’s great resources online and yes, we can watch anything that we want to watch and listen to anything that we want to listen to. But there’s that electric experience that you’re sharing this space with your friends and neighbors and people that you don’t know that you might get to know afterwards.

The other component for me is storytelling. Classical music is complicated. Classical music is complex. Classical music has a high entry point and I don’t believe that it should. Who I am in the world of classical music is someone who says you may think that it’s a difficult entry point, but here’s how it’s easy. Here’s how this thing that Beethoven did that we think is this grand and glorious thing – yes, it is this grand and glorious thing – but it also relates to what we experience everyday in our world. It’s a combination of reminding folks how incredibly joyful a concert experience is, and then, once they get there, giving them the context and relevance and the kind of emotional experience of what a classical music concert can be. 

Since Schoenberg’s music is the penultimate work on this program and the first work is Mozart, I found this quote from him particularly appropriate. He said, “The way in which I write for string quartet, none can deny that I have learned this directly from Mozart.” We have a through line in this concert that is going to confirm Schoenberg’s quote. Looking forward, what do you think the through line will be? Schoenberg died in 1951, so he’s been gone for quite a while. What do you think the through line as a sequel to this would be, 25, 50 years in the future if we continued forward? 

Classical music should always be looking forward. Classical music should always be creating something new while looking back to the past and not dishonoring the past. What do we love about the great composers in history? We love Beethoven because Beethoven changed everything. We love Mahler because Mahler said everyone’s done everything with symphonies except this thing. And then Mahler blew everything up and created symphonies that no one had created before. So classical music is at its best when it’s looking forward. When it’s looking to what hasn’t been done yet, while still recognizing that there is this rich tradition and history. That as a composer or a musician you’re part of this thing that’s bigger than yourself.

To watch the full interview with Brian Lauritzen, please go here.

Main Photo: Brian Lauritzen (Courtesy Brian Lauritzen)

The post Brian Lauritzen Makes Classical Music Easy appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

To be fair, it is a little limiting to refer to Marc Lowenstein as just as composer. He’s also a music director (with The Industry and others) and conductor. He’s a singer and also an educator. But since we’re staying in the present, today we’ll talk about his work as a composer and also the most recent one to be a part of LACO’s Sound Investment Commission.

On Saturday, May 20th at the Alex Theatre in Glendale and Sunday, May 21st at UCLA’s Royce Hall, LACO will present the world premiere of HaZ’man HaZeh. I’ll allow Lowenstein to share details about the piece in the following excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview please go to our YouTube channel.

LACO’s Sound Investment Commission works a little bit differently than if you had gotten a commission from another performing arts organization in that the people who who donate into this program get to have a number of meetings with you, progress reports, hearing bits and pieces of a work in progress. I assume that’s very different than with any other institution.

It is very different. Although having said that, in my work in The Industry, we did do something similar in that we do workshops and we have our donors come to the workshops and we have meet and greets with them. But that’s not formalized in the way the Sound Investment program is. And it’s really formalized in a good sense: first I met and talked about my initial ideas, then I met and I had a small group of musicians play some excerpts just to check them out and to see if I could coerce one of the violinists into singing, which is a whole other issue. But I’ll tell you about that later. Then there’s one more meeting with donors right after one of the dress rehearsals. So they get to see the evolution from idea to piece and to performance.

One of the benefits of this program is the creation of modern classical works. If we don’t have contemporary works, how many Beethoven cycles can someone sit through? 

Oh, my goodness, no. I’m slightly older, shall we say. So I don’t I don’t think people realize what a renaissance of modern orchestral music there is going on now today, and such a broad array of composers, different styles. 30 years ago you just couldn’t get your music performed by any orchestra. Their idea of modern music was one piece by an extremely famous person and that would anchor the season. Now it seems like almost every concert by every major orchestra has a really interesting piece. Even if it’s not successful, it’s fabulous to hear. 

So I think we’re really in a tremendous renaissance of hearing a broad array of new voices of all ages and backgrounds and all musical styles. I think that’s crucial.

Of course, if we’re talking 30 years ago by one famous composer, it was either Philip Glass or John Adams.

I remember talking to my peers. All of us essentially made our own groups and our own orchestras to play the works. But there was still a barrier. It wasn’t necessarily a lack of awareness. It was sort of a blinkered mindset on the boards of all those institutions. The boards have changed and they realize that there’s all this great music out there. There’s a lot of great young composers out there.

I’m thrilled because the Sound Investment program isn’t just for young composers. I’m not exactly a young composer. I joke I’m sort of a mid-career despite my age, because of all these three different aspects that I do all the time. So I haven’t written as much as many other composers my age. But at the same time it’s refreshing that Sound Investment will have very young and untried composers with tremendous amount of promise and then somewhat older, more experienced ones. Just whoever they find interesting. 

What can you tell me about HaZ’man HaZeh?

It’s about the battle, the internal struggle, between nostalgia and sort of overt futurism. So I try to reach that through a dialectic between song and dance, and then something that’s neither song nor dance.

What inspired the work and its title?

I’m not that religious, but when I am, I feel marginally drawn to the sort of the Jewish mysticism tradition and where it intersects with Buddhism. It’s not very original of me, but it’s just sort of where I sit.

My roots, in terms of what I heard as a young person, [were] romantic chamber music and classical orchestra. Then I moved into jazz. So the beginning is sort of Schumann meets Sibelius meets Charles Mingus and this sort of wild party. Then I realized that in writing all these nostalgic styles, in some ways nostalgia is a beautiful thing. In another way, nostalgia is the enemy because you can drown in nostalgia unless you make something new out of nostalgia. It can really hold you back. 

Also I think if you worry too much about the future, you’re also holding yourself back. You’re not living in the present in that sense. So it’s this weird search for honesty between nostalgia and this sort of attempt to be new. I wanted to have some title that would evoke the present time, that overused word mindfulness of the present.

Then I realized there is something in the Jewish liturgy. There’s a very common prayer every time you reach a milestone, whether it’s just a happy day, a holiday, there’s a blessing. You thank God for bringing you the moment of this moment. And in Hebrew, the words are HaZ’man HaZeh, which literally means this time or the present time.

Where does a singing violinist fit into this picture?

I think one way to really live in the present is to dance. In all my music there is this binary between song and dance, and they sort of fuse together. There’s actually a song I had been working on at the same time. I didn’t think it was part of this piece. I had been setting this meditation on one of the Dalai Lama’s sayings, which is “My religion is kindness.” I’m working on the song. Can I take this block and just move it right here? 

I called up the orchestra manager and I said, “Is there someone in the violin section who wouldn’t mind just getting up doing this intonation, reciting?” At our last donor salon, one of the violinists, Sarah Thornblade, stood up and she just sang. She’s breathtakingly beautiful.

How important is it for an audience to understand what a composer is trying to get across versus just listening and enjoying it?

At its best there’s no difference. I think a lot of composers would say the same thing. We hope that there’s explanation beneath it, but we certainly hope that explanation is not necessary. Having said that, a certain amount of linguistic fluency helps, or familiarity, let me put it that way. 

Just as composers can get lost in the many styles that are around today, audiences, for their own good, might want to become a little fluent in things that they like. Which is just to say, if you like something, listen to it and try to figure it out. You might not. The first listen might not be as rewarding as the fourth or the fifth. Or maybe it’s not linear or something like that.

How much does working within an organization like The Industry, which has presented operas in a train station (Invisible Cities), in cars moving throughout the city (Hopscotch) and other unique locations, make you feel that we are moving in a direction where traditional expectations of how art is to be presented or consumed and genres are becoming passé? 

I would rephrase it slightly with your permission. I think they’re being expanded beyond that which is passé. Let’s talk about opera, not just symphonic music for a second. I want to look at traditional opera as sort of like those Civil War reenactments. There’s a place for it and people like that. It’s a history and a culture and it’s a deep part of us. It might be a little passé, but it’s deeply important. There’s a real place for the Met and for LA Opera and Chicago Lyric and all those places. At the same time, we can’t live in the past.

Whatever the words: problematize, interrogate, question the relationship between the audience member and the work. It’s very set. If you think about going into an opera house, you know what your relationship to the work is.

Yuval Sharon, Founder and Co-Artistic Director of The Industry told me that “The inner life of the piece of music has to be made manifest on a stage.” He was talking about Invisible Cities. Does that same thought process become part of what you think about when you’re composing something for a concert hall?

I love site specific concert music that doesn’t have voices. So I think there’s always going to be a home for these really beautifully acoustically tuned halls that allow you to immerse yourself in either electronic, acoustic or some kind of sound world so that you can project yourself into the sound. I think that’s fundamentally different than what happens in opera, where it’s a story and you project yourself into the story, the narrative or the scenario. Even with music that’s programmatic, I just think it’s a fundamental difference. So when you try to problematize the symphony hall, it’s going to be different.

I think you can listen to an opera in a recording, and I think you only really get it if you’ve seen it on the stage. But that’s not true of orchestra music. You can listen to wonderful orchestra music in a recording and really get it. And really get it in a way that you just can’t get up.

Almost anyone who listens to opera, which is probably not a lot of people, have almost always seen the work before. Or have seen a video of it. It’s always marketed with visuals in a way to bring you into that story. This isn’t arguing for one form over the other. I just think we have to recognize the fundamental difference, which, of course, will have blurred lines in between it. But I think they are different. And it was very challenging to me. 

I found a quote by Ray Bradbury where he said, “No sound, once made, is ever truly lost. In electric clouds, all are safely trapped, and with a touch, if we find them, we can recapture those echoes of sad, forgotten wars, long summers and sweet autumns.” How would you like your music, and this work in particular, once safely trapped, to help listeners recapture their own memories and experiences? 

I read Ray Bradbury obsessively when I was 14, and he’s definitely steeped in that same sort of nostalgia that I talked about. I don’t know. I don’t know that the music has a message that it wants to give out. I hope it’s successful on its own terms. I would almost unask that question. You tell me.

I’m much more interested in how other people react to it. I know what the sounds are. I know how it sounds. I cannot predict whether it’s even partially universal in expressing what I’m trying to express or if other people get other things from it. That’s always the case.

There have been many pieces that people interpret as one thing and that the composer meant something else. So I have no good answer. I hope it’s successful. I hope people hear it. I hope it’s successful on its own terms if that means something. I’m still kind of discovering what those own terms are.

Is this work finished in your heart and in your mind? 

Yes. I’m very good at saying, “Okay, let’s do the next best thing after that.” That is living in the present. The message of this piece is, in fact, to let it go and to just to do the next thing and to find your next mantra and to live in the next moment. Because that’s literally all that there is. It’s only by letting go and having a tremendous amount of throughput, I think, that you can really find the meaning in the moments.

To see the full interview with Marc Lowenstein, please go here.

Photo: Marc Lowenstein (Courtesy Marc Lowenstein and LACO)

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Last month we posted the first of two interviews with composer/singer/songwriter Gabriel Kahane. That interview touched on the political side of his work. This weekend the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra is performing his piano concerto entitled Heirloom as part of two concerts. It was written for his father, pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane and it looks at three levels of inheritances within his family.

In our conversations about Heirloom, Kahane revealed what it’s like composing for his father, the family stories that find themselves in his piano concerto and about the “existential muck of being human.”

What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see our full interview with Gabriel Kahane, please go to our YouTube channel.

You wrote on your Tumblr account about your piano concerto, “I keep putting it off in large part because I’ve never felt comfortable with large scale instrumental composition.” Did writing Heirloom help you overcome that discomfort?

I still feel ike a bit of an imposter when I’m writing instrumental music. My friend Eric Jacobsen, founder and conductor of The Knights and [Music Director] of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra and the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, had been nagging me for years to write something for my dad. I had resisted and resisted. Fnally I said yes. We put together this consortium of six orchestras. Just when it was about time for me to start sketching the piece, I was in Chicago to do emergency shelter intake form there and my dad was playing the Gershwin Concerto.

There was a pre-concert talk and the the person conducting the pre-concert talk asked my dad, “What makes the Gershwin concerto so special?” And my dad said, “The miracle of the Gershwin concerto is that it sounds like Gershwin.” By which he meant as much as Gershwin was steeped in the music of his more formal contemporaries, and as much as he admired that music and felt himself to be an impostor and in the shadow of that music, he managed to write this concerto that we would all say sounds like Gershwin. It sounds like Gershwin the songwriter.

I realized in that moment that that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to write a piano concerto that sounded not like Andrew Norman or Tom Adés or Missy Mazzoli, but like me. And so the musical challenge was how to translate my language as a songwriter into a concert work without it sounding sort of retrograde or neo-classical.

I would say that it did help me to get over some of that feeling of imposter syndrome in as much as just treating melody as though it were a vocal line. When I’m writing vocal music I feel very comfortable. Writing for a symphony orchestra it’s in the absence of text that I become unmoored. I think that one of the things that helped me with writing Heirloom was to just think of those melodies as being vocal lines.

Then to sort of take these three inheritances: the musical inheritance from my parents to me, my father’s inheritance from his mother who fled Germany and then finally my older daughter’s inheritance. We don’t know what that’s going to be yet, except that she’s as stubborn as I am.

Did writing Heirloom change your relationship with these various inheritances that you’re exploring in the three movements?

That’s a great question. No. Not particularly. That’s in part because I think if composers are being honest, whenever we assign a program to abstract instrumental music, we’re always doing a little bit of myth-making. I think that in the case of this piece the sort of non-musical subject matter really is there. But it’s not like I was doing therapy as I’m sitting at the desk. Like now I understand my father.

I think that the slow movement, which is the movement for my grandmother, has kind of surfaced in a number of pieces: my first piece that I wrote for the LA Phil back in 2011 called Orinoco Sketches. Then in the penultimate song from Book of Travelers, which is called Port of Hamburg, in which I set some of her diary from the time that she was leaving Germany and coming to the United States.

I think that really sort of feels like the emotional center of the piece for me. I was very close to her. She was an extraordinary person who went through a lot to get where she was at the end of her life. I feel like it’s a nice musical testament to her life.

Writing for your father, this is not the first time you’ve done that. He commissioned Django: Tiny Variations on a Big Dog from you. You two also collaborated in 2013 on a “curated mixtape concert” as part of the Chamber Music Northwest’s Summer Festival. Now you’ve written this piano concerto, Heirloom. I have to think that creates a special relationship between you and your father that is probably unique among other composers. Where do you think this journey has taken the two of you?

Oddly because we share DNA, it’s always been the case whenever he and I work together – he’s also conducted a few pieces of mine –  there’s actually less conversation or interaction than there would be with someone who’s not a blood relative.

Among his gifts as a musician is the ability to elevate and transcend what’s on the page with anyone’s music. I’ve always felt this with him both as a pianist and as a conductor. He is a dream interpreter because his musicianship is just so kind of peerless. Whatever you wrote he is going to make it sound better than it was. 

On top of which, he and I are related. So he gets my music at a very, very deep core level. Because I am a part of him and he is part of me. So really the only conversations that we had were that there were a couple spots where he said, “You know, I feel like this is sort of pianistically underwritten. Can you thicken it up a little bit?” He also had some notes in the first draft about places where he thought that the orchestration is too fussy. And I was like, “No doubt it’s fine.” Then we got through the premiere and I was like, “Oh, he was right.” 

So did you make changes?

I did one revision between Kansas City and Oregon. And now in the last ten days of the year I’m planning one more revision so that hopefully L.A. audiences are getting what I hope will be the the final draft, although it could change. There are still a few more orchestras to do it. So we could say, once it happens, it could be the world premiere of the final version of it. 

Could be?

I am kind of a chronic tinkerer. This is a piece where the first movement is kind of a beast; it’s 15 minutes long. The second and third movements feel like they work pretty well. I’m just hoping to understand better what the journey of that first movement is. I don’t generally work in long form. I’m a songwriter. So 15 minutes feels a little bit like a run on sentence right now. I’m trying to clarify that.

You did an interview with the Portland Monthly when you became the creative chair of the Oregon Symphony. In it you talked about “the existential muck of being human.” How does your work allow you to be more in touch or more accepting of that existential muck?

I’m going to be honest. The thing that most puts me in touch now – in this moment – with the existential muck of being human, is that in 8 minutes I get to go be a dad to my two daughters who are four and one. Our younger daughter just turned one a few days ago. It’s just really humbling being a parent. People say that, but I think the reason that it feels so humbling is that you’re just trying to keep them alive and teach them to be kind. That never ceases to amaze me. I think also being a parent just puts a lot of things in context.

The Right to Be Forgotten [his folk opera in one act], which is a piece we didn’t really touch on, deals more deeply with the idea of professional jealousy and the relationship between the internet and professional jealousy than anything that I’ve done before. It’s something that I think most of us in the era of social media wrestle with because social media is nothing if not an invitation to feel dissatisfied with our accomplishments.

But I find that being with my daughters, as they’re discovering in their different phases of childhood how to be in the world and my one-year-old looking out the window and seeing snow for the first time, it just reminds me how overly self-serious one can be and how messed-up our priorities and sense of hierarchical construction in the world are. So certainly music, songwriting, composing, have helped me to make sense of the world.

But in this particular moment, the thing that most makes me make sense of the world is being a parent. To try to not mess it up too badly. That is the same thing every working parent has to deal with, whether they’re a secretary or a composer or a garbage collector. It’s just that struggle that everybody has.

This interview took place on December 12, 2022. To watch the full interview with Gabriel Kahane, please go here.

Main Photo: Gabriel Kahane (Photo by by Jason Quigley/Courtesy MKI Artists)

Correction: We previously quoted Gabriel Kahane as having said his father commented that the concerto was “genetically” underwritten. In discussions with Mr. Kahane he clarified he said “pianistically.” We apologize for the error.

The post Gabriel Kahane Gets Personal with “Heirloom” appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

We did. There was a lot to talk about. The San Francisco Symphony is giving the local premiere of his emergency shelter intake form on Thursday and Friday of this week. This 50-minute oratorio that addresses poverty and homelessness had its world premiere in May of 2018 with the Oregon Symphony (who were lead commissioners of the work.) For this week’s performances Alicia Hall Moran, who sang with Kahane and others when emergency shelter intake form was recorded live in front of an audience later that year, will return. As will the composer himself.

In March there will be the West Coast premiere of Heirloom by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Kahane wrote this piano concerto for his father, Jeffrey Kahane, who will be the soloist. He’s also been touring behind his 2022 album Magnificent Bird. If that isn’t enough, last November the world premiere of his “folk opera in one act,” The Right to Be Forgotten, took place with the Oregon Symphony and in January the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra performed it.

Before the holidays I spoke with Kahane about the many works of his being performed, how his perspective has changed after spending a year without utilizing social media and about the absence of nuanced thinking he sees in the world. There’s a lot to digest. What follows are excerpts that have been edited for length and clarity.

Something that you’ve posted about and you’ve mentioned in interviews is the lack of nuanced thinking in the world today. What role do you think music can play in adding nuance to our world?

There’s so many ways to answer that question. I think there are all kinds of ways that artists can can approach being of value in the world. But I think that at a time when we are rather polarized, I’m increasingly finding, as someone with a lot of political convictions, that trying to open people’s hearts feels more politically useful than trying to convince people of something. In part because many of us are sort of ideologically calcified and increasingly our ideological silos are smaller and smaller and smaller. And the extent to which we’re willing to acknowledge difference, even within our tribes, seems to be waning.

One of the ways that we can achieve nuance is through spending time with each other one on one, rather than trying to communicate to a lot of people at once. I think one of the things that I’ve thought about quite a lot in the aftermath of spending a year off-line is the difference between doing what we’re doing, which is using technology to communicate one person to one person, versus the sort of incentives built by algorithms and technology companies wherein we’re rewarded for kind of lowest common denominator speech that appeals to what they call activating emotions.

It’s a difficult question to answer. I suppose the most distilled response that I can offer is to say that I think activating empathy in ourselves makes us better equipped to deal with opinions and experiences that are different than our own. If we can do that, then we can create a space in which dialectical thinking can flourish. Because we’re not terrified that we’re going to have our heads lopped off for, say, acknowledging the veracity of some aspect of an opposing opinion. 

We also live in a world where it just gets easier to identify people or to attempt to identify people by one thing. I know that one of the things that you shudder against is when people try to classify the work that you do by a genre. You had tweeted “Please stop talking about genre.” You did an interview with Zoë Madonna for Van Magazine in 2016 and you said “The more interesting question to ask is: Does the embrace of hybrid music by these institutions have to do with the decline of the audience for concert music? Or is it an embrace that comes from thinking that hopefully this is where the deepest music is coming from?” Do you have an answer to your own question six years later?

The thing that I object to, which happens a lot is and not just with my own work, but trying to put things in containers at the expense of grappling with craft. As far as what institutions are embracing and why, I think we’re having a very different conversation now in a post-2020 landscape. There’s no one size fits all answer. I think every institution is different. 

Coming out on top in this moment are the ones that were sort of ahead of the curve in thinking about how to serve their communities and serve artists in a more diverse way. In the classical music world, where institutional racism and sexism have been pervasive for such a long time, I think there was a kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t [mentality]. Where your efforts are either going to seem ham-fisted and too-little-too-late or like not enough. The thing about hybridity also speaks to this sort of reassessment of how we think of or quantify greatness.

I’m a straight white guy and I was the beneficiary of institutions rethinking greatness – outside of the context of identity – just on a sort of purely esthetic basis. I think one of the most welcome things to come out of whatever we want to call the sort of post-2020 awakening in arts institutions is just realizing what a narrow conception of greatness a lot of institutions and individuals have had. I’m glad to see that there’s a kind of expansion of what we think greatness is and also whether greatness is even a useful term.

If we look at the first quarter of 2023 audiences are going to get exposed to a variety of things that you’ve done. What would you like them to understand about who you are as a composer and who you are as a person from these works which are all very different?

It’s an exciting moment for me to be able to sort of look at what I’ve been doing over the last couple of years. I think what all of these works have in common, maybe Heirloom being the outlier which is an intensely personal piece dealing with family history and my current family, they’re all unified by an inquiry into the relationship between the individual and society and the individual and another person and how we conceive of other. In both Magnificent Bird and in The Right to be Forgotten, the relationship between humans and technology.

Somewhere in that thread of looking at technology is also thinking about inequality and the extent to which big tech companies are able to scale up without a lot of brick and mortar investment. That kind of hyper-scalability is also something that contributes to inequality. Then going back to 2018, emergency shelter, on its surface, is a work about homelessness. But really it’s a piece about inequality and homelessness is just a symptom of inequality. When you have these tech billionaires with one hand donating $100 million to study homelessness and then on the other hand lobbying congress to keep their taxes low, it’s like that is sort of a net neutral proposition. 

I’m a big fan of emergency shelter intake form and the writing you did for Alicia Hall Moran. I think she’s immensely talented and would love to see her get more attention than she’s been getting at this point. Did you write this with her in mind or did she become the singer who could bring it to life for you?

I also adore Alicia and thank you. I actually wrote the piece for Measha Brueggergosman, the Canadian soprano. For various reasons Measha had to leave the project shortly after the premiere and Alicia stepped in on one month’s notice for the recording. I should also mention that the album was her first ever performance of the piece. It was kind of trial by fire.

Our first child had just been born and I was introduced to Alicia, or made aware of Alicia, by the also great soprano, Ariadne Greif. So Alicia trekked out to Brooklyn where we were still living at the time. My daughter was five or six weeks old. I basically taught her the piece sitting at the piano and [she has a] fierce sense of pitch, sense of rhythm, sense of drama.

I really loved getting to know her and also getting to know her husband, Jason, who is an extraordinary pianist and composer. She’s a real activist, but also the daughter of one of the first, as she tells it, super successful Black men on Wall Street. She grew up with all the trappings of wealth. And yet that has not prevented her from really digging into the structural inequities in our society; whether they have to do with economics or racism.

That inequality that you talk about is at the core of emergency shelter. In Los Angeles it’s gotten worse. The inequality is far more pronounced, whether it’s in people who are homeless, people who OD on fentanyl, and it seems like there’s a genuine lack of political willpower. Certainly the not in my backyard thinking that you wrote about so beautifully in emergency shelter as to the collision of excuses leaving us with no progress.

I found something that the artist Barbara Kruger said really interesting. She said, “To me, these are the good old days, not because they’re good, but because we are alive to experience and to change them.” What role do you see art in general, and perhaps your art specifically, in being able to change situations?

I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think it’s necessarily direct. I’m sad to say the Oregon Symphony commissioned emergency shelter back in 2016. I had a whole internal opera about whether or not to write the piece and whether I was the right person to do it. Ultimately I said yes in no small part because I admired their courage in wading into a subject that kind of put a target on their back. They are downtown in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall where there are tent communities up and down the block.

There were some very beautiful things that came out of the premiere. One woman wrote to me and said that she had never realized the extent to which the mortgage interest deduction is a handout to rich people. Mostly this is in the movement about section eight housing and the way that we think conceptually in different ways about section eight housing. Vouchers, for those who are not familiar, are for low income folks to get subsidized housing. Yet they’re only available to something like one-fifth of the people who apply for them. Whereas the mortgage interest deduction, if you own a home, you write it off. 

That’s about as direct an impact as I could have hoped for. On the other hand, homelessness in Portland is worse now than it was four years ago when I wrote the piece. I guess the way in which I think of artists making a difference in a tangible way really has to do, or at least for me has to do, with the level of coalition building and the love and compassion and empathy that is required.

I think one of the weaknesses of progressive politics right now is that we have forgotten that in the word coalition it should be understood that we do not agree about everything. That in order to build electoral coalitions that can change the social safety net, make it more robust, change the tax code, we’re going to have to get into bed with people who we don’t agree with about everything. We have to have a big enough tent to make that possible.

Part of the reason that we can’t seem to make any progress on the housing crises that are mushrooming around the country and in Europe as well, as European democracies, weaken their social safety nets you have to change to tax code. I am not an economist, but there was plenty of great writing about ways to solve inflation that do not involve making working people suffer, which is what’s happening right now. 

His passion for political conversations is only matched by his passion for personal stories. In early March we will publish the second part of our interview with Gabriel Kahane in which we discuss the influence his family has had on his creativity and how those influences found their way into “Heirloom.”

All photos: Gabriel Kahane (Photos by Jason Quigley/Courtesy MKI Artists)

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This is a story about contemporary classical music. This is also a story about Mexican wrestling. These two wildly different things come together in Lucha Libre! by composer Juan Pablo Contreras. The work has its covid-delayed world premiere on Sunday, December 11th by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

The concert celebrates, in part, the 200th Anniversary of diplomatic and cultural relations between the United States and its neighbor to the south. Contreras will be honored by the Mexican consulate for his binational artistic contributions. In October he was awarded the Vilcek Foundation Prize which is given to immigrant artists to support their continuing work.

Contreras has collaborated several times previously with LACO. Lucha Libre! is part of their Sound Investment program in which donors help commission a work and have a series of meetings with the composer to see their investment come to life.

Born in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1987, Contreras grew up with Luchadores (wrestlers) as his superheroes. When this opportunity with LACO came about it served as a perfect opportunity for him to combine two of his passions and, in the process, create a work that might bring new audiences to classical music.

In mid-November I spoke with Contreras. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full, thoroughly entertaining conversation, please go to our YouTube channel.

At what point in the Sound Investment process did you come up with the idea of composing a work that celebrated Lucha Libre? And why this subject?

Ten years ago I had an opera company approach me and ask me to write an opera. My first thought was Lucha Libre is a perfect depiction of what it’s like to go to an opera – something that’s kind of rehearsed and staged, but at the same time really can bring in fans to watch these performers because they’re doing impossible things on stage. After working with LACO on a couple of smaller commissions I was offered this amazing opportunity to be the Sound Investment composer. I knew I was going to get the opportunity to really share my creative process with people and bring them into what it’s like to be a composer. I thought Lucha Libre would be really great because I’ll have the time to really share it with people and get them to know what Lucha Libre is all about. 

We got really very excited about Lucha Libre. We ended up purchasing 50 masks that people are going to wear at the premiere. It became something bigger than the piece itself, which for a composer it’s really exciting because our profession tends to be very lonely.

Was Lucha Libre something that was important to you as a kid?

Yes, very important. These were our superheroes. You dreamed about going and watching El Santo or Blue Demon, but with the opportunity of eventually doing so in person. I even had little action figures that were Luchadores. It’s more than just the spectacle. They really reflect a lot of things also about Mexican culture which is something that interested me.

Bringing back this idea of superheroes, to me you go to a classical music concert to see something impossible happen on stage. There’s a group of musicians coming together, choreographing something that is very intricate, where everyone is playing at the top of their game and it’s exciting.

That’s the connection that I made with Lucha Libre. Everything is choreographed, everything is planned out. It’s an act that they put on for the people to enjoy. That was what inspired me to mirror that on the classical stage. 

With Batman we know that it’s Bruce Wayne. We know that it’s Clark Kent behind Superman. But Lucha Libre really relies on complete anonymity. In fact El Santo passed away a week after he, for the first time, revealed who he was. How much does the idea of keeping one’s identity a secret factor into the work that you wrote?

One thing that I built into the composition was I’m going to have, just as it happens in a local arena, two teams, three rudos, which are the villains and three técnicos, which are the good guys. I geographically chose the players to be soloists within the orchestra, but they would face each other. For example, the concertmaster and the principal cello; the piano and the trumpet and the flute and the timpani. So we would have three opposing three and three on each team and facing each other.

Part of what’s fun about listening to the piece is you’ll get introduced to each of these characters by listening to their theme. When you go to a Lucha Libre match they enter the arena one by one and you hear the music that is associated with the Luchador. I wrote six different themes for each fighter. The piece starts with us listening to the themes. Then you’re going to hear two themes fighting each other: one versus one, two versus two, and eventually three versus three, where all of the themes are kind of fighting on top of each other and there’s a winner.

If you lose you need to reveal your identity. That’s the gamble that some of the fights agree on. So that would be the connection that I make. If you listen to this piece you will be able to see or hear who are the winners. 

In most competitions there’s the team you root for and the team you root against. There’s the good guy. There’s the bad guy. We sometimes look at competition as an analogy for good and evil. Is there anything bigger that you want to say about the nature of good and evil vis-á-vis this composition?

The main question that I wanted people ask themselves is what is my personal identity? Who would I root for or what kind of mask would I put on more than thinking about good and evil. What kind of mask have I designed for myself? What are some of the things that I value most about my upbringing and my identity. That has been a thread that has been present in all of my music which tends to celebrate Mexican culture and Mexican roots. 

If we’re going to talk about masks and identity, how does this work allow us to unmask who you are, not just as a composer, but who you are as a human being?

I think I am someone who is really making a strong effort, but in a not in a forced way, but in a really enjoyable way, to make classical music more fun and more accessible for for everyone and especially the Latino communities. I really want to bring the people who I identify most with, which are Latinos and Mexicans, to have them feel excited about going to a classical music concert. A piece about Lucha Libre, I think, is the perfect way to introduce people to certain instruments as well. That I chose six different instruments within the orchestra and having them be almost like soloists in the piece also allows people to get to know these instruments in a more intimate level. Sometimes we have this expectation that classical music is something very serious – that you can’t really laugh about it or there is no joy in that. 

What it tells you about me is that I’m trying to really scream Mexico with my music and really bring it to the forefront with how I’m writing my music. At the same time just giving permission to the performers as well. I think the orchestra’s musicians really enjoy it when they can play something that is rhythmic, that is colorful. At the same time also for audience members to say this genre is very much alive and there’s music that is very exciting and relatable as well.

Three years ago you told Voyage LA that you’re “constantly competing with both composers who are dead as well as living composers.” You cited Mozart and Beethoven for obvious reasons. As someone from Mexico what influence does a composer like Silvestre Revueltas have on you? How deep is his legacy in your mind? 

Very, very deep and very present and kind of challenging as well. Because of the fact that I also, maybe in a new way, but I’m attempting to combine classical music with Mexican music, more popular or folk, whatever it is. I sometimes immediately get “Oh, so you’re like Revueltas or you’re like Carlos Chavez or you’re like [José Pablo] Moncayo.” They are my inspiration, but I’m trying to do something new. 

Thanks to their legacy I’m able to explore things in my music that are combining my roots with the classical medium. I remember almost exactly ten years ago I had my first big break, which was that I won the BMI/William Schuman Prize with an orchestral piece. So I was able to say here’s my validation that I can write orchestra music. Within a year I had ten performances of that piece in the States and Latin America.

A lot of people that are famous in Mexico as composers were telling me “No, you can’t be writing music that’s influenced by Mexico. That’s not the trend right now. You should be writing something that’s more European, new complexity, more notes.” And I was like, “But this is really what I want to say with my music. I don’t see why it should be prohibited.”

I’m lucky that I have stayed in my lane and get to explore ways to write music that is Mexican in nature. I think the dividends are that my music is frequently played and I’ve been really able to enjoy so many great performances. So yes, I’m part of a legacy, but I’m trying to plant a new flower in the garden now.

The Guardian in England wrote about El Santo in 2016. They said “El Santo was more than just a wrestler. He was a Mexican hero who not only elevated the reputation of Lucha Libre, but became immortalized as a Latin symbol of power and heroism.” How would you like to change the conversation about what contemporary classical music can be as both a Mexican and now an American citizen? What does success look like for you in your career to have elevated the reputation of classical music born out of Mexico?

15 years ago I moved to the US with the intention of eventually becoming a film composer because I thought that was the only way I could write for the orchestra. I met Daniel Catán, who was a fantastic Mexican opera composer. He was the first living composer that I met. I couldn’t believe you’re alive and you can write music for the concert stage and operas – new music. That changed everything to me. It put me in a path where a switch was turned on. Yes, you can be a composer. I think that kind of exposure and just showing, not only audiences, but also future generations of Mexican-American and Latino composers, there’s someone that has a similar upbringing to me that is actually a composer, that changes the ballgame completely.

If people can recognize and get used to the fact that composers exist they’re going to be more open to listen to more new music because it’s made by real people that [they’ve] had conversations with. As composers it is our job to be a little bit more social. Put ourselves out there and get to know the audience.

Sometimes classical music institutions have this idea that as long as our programing is great we’re going to fill the halls and there’s nothing else we need to do. I think that is not the way to go. I think you need to really think about the audience and bring them in and make them a part of the experience so that your organization can thrive. In bringing that audience, having them interact and get to know a composer – which is exactly what Sound Investment is about – that’s the way to change the culture. It’s like going to a temple where you have that opportunity to really interact with the music and see it come to life. 

To see the full interview with Juan Pablo Contreras, please go here.

Also on the LACO program on December 11th is Dvořák’s Violin Concerto performed by one of our favorites: Gil Shaham. The concert will be conducted by Jaime Martín.

Main photo: Juan Pablo Contreras (Photo courtesy the composer and LACO)

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“I think some commissioners and ensembles want to commission composers and shine a light on them, let them write the music they want to share. But honestly, I think so much of it comes down to funding grant writing. There’s only so much money that we’re able to raise. Classical music is a very small niche field and there are listeners. But sometimes I feel like we all have $20 that we’re just handing back and forth to each other.” Composer Shelley Washington, like so many other composers, has to do battle for the same small amount of funding to be found to commission new works.

As part of Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s Sound Investment program, Washington was able to get a commission to write Both, which is having its West Coast Premiere this weekend in a pair of performances by LACO.

“I recognize how lucky I am to have been able to keep working and studying and that people believe in me and still like me enough to commission me, which is nice,” she said last month during a Zoom conversation. “But it’s not easy out there. I know people want to commission composers, but I feel like the most prohibitive thing is funding and it’s hard to find that. But when it works, it works.”

Both, which explores multiple layers of duality inspired by her own life, marks a rare opportunity for Washington to write a longer work.

“I have so many ten or 15 minute pieces and this is an amazing opportunity for me to get to write something more substantial,” she says of the thirty-minute Both which was commissioned by LACO’s Sound Investment audience-supported commissioning initiative along with other partners through New Music USA’s Amplifying Voices program. “There’s always the hesitation of, well, our audiences don’t have the attention span, in parentheses, for contemporary music because they won’t like it and will stop coming, which is an unspoken thing. I’m like, you are discrediting your audience. You’re not giving them the opportunity to explore and I feel like it’s undermining them. I would be offended if a conductor got on stage and was like, Your tiny people brains are not capable of enjoying something new.”

In addition to working as a composer, Washington is an accomplished vocalist who also plays flute, piccolo and clarinet. In press materials for Both she is quoted as saying “This piece is meant to reflect the fact that you and I both are not either/or, and that so many things and people, even seemingly places, are not the binary they’ve been billed to us as, but a spectrum from point to point.”

Which sounds like a lot to get across in a 30-minute work, but Washington utilized little tricks that she hopes will allow listeners into the world she has created.

“There are lots of broad things and also small things that the listener, they might be more secretive,” she offered as she began insight into how she viewed Both. “If someone were to look at a score, they’d be like, Ah ha! It’s a fun little trick. There’s the old school mentality that if you’re writing cute tonal music, it’s not serious, it’s not as respectable as blah, blah, blah, other things. So the second movement I wrote intentionally to be the cutest thing I’ve ever written and there’s a rhythmic thread that that begins in that movement and that actually continues on in a totally different context later on.

“There aren’t rules necessarily but I guess you’re giving the composer the autonomy to go buck wild. That’s also not always an accepted thing, but in more seasoned contextualization of themes, it’s pretty present and it spreads between all four of them. So the culmination of all of that is in the fourth movement. There’s a really fun rhythmic puzzle of the two, I guess three against four against five. It’s all happening at the same time, which I think might be initially kind of uncomfortable to listen to because it’s hard to grasp about where the ground is. But then as you sit back into it, I hope for the audience is that they’re able to find their own footing within that and have the ability to listen to it in a bunch of different ways. Me giving them an opportunity to find themselves in is another kind of give and take of the either or aspect of it.”

It might surprise some to find that Washington has described one movement, 11:30 p.m. to 4:30 a.m., as the movement that “shreds metal.” Not a common description of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. But Washington disagrees.

“I’ve heard it done before and I am stoked to hear them do it again.” She continues to discuss a concert she and Derrick Skye curated for LACO where she brought in a close friend who had the orchestra doing some things you wouldn’t expect.

“I got to bring one of my very dear friends here, Aeryn Santillan, a composer who comes out of the DIY screamo scene. She is an incredible guitarist and the band that she’s in, Massa Nera, uses lots of yelling, very loud, lots of really intricate rhythmic stuff. So that seeps into her chamber music in so many wonderful ways, including vocals and vocalizing and singing. So the string quartets that they played, they were not just singing, but screaming and shouting lyrics, which is not something they get to do all the time.”

During the process of composing Both, Washington faced personal challenges that, though she didn’t specify them, clearly left a mark on her and challenged her getting this composition completed.

“In my process, historically, I do a lot of just thinking, which honestly sounds kind of lame, but I conceptualize. I gather musical intel and it sits on the mental back burner for months and months. And then at the very end when I should write this out, it’s this incredibly fast, intense blitz of just brain vomit onto page.

“So I had a very tough spring of last year from April, May, June. And so March is when I’m going to start actually putting down notes on the page. But then something very significant happened that was emotionally taxing and then something else, then something else, and then something else. I’m very proud of myself for working through all of this, but the Lord tested me in ways that I was sad about. So I ended up, and I’m certain that people are going to hate hearing this, but I wrote all of that music in about nine days of actually getting it down from brain to page. I now know that I am capable of anything on the planet, that there is nothing that I cannot do. But that really pushed the limits of what I thought I was capable of doing. I like this piece a lot. And it is not something that I was like, Oh, man, I’m going to write down some fluffy stuff to get through it. I really like it very much. So I’m not going to be writing a half hour piece in nine days ever again.”

The duality of Washington’s life obviously continues with work and life. So when I ask her about English writer Alan Watts who said, “Every explicit duality is an implicit unity,” Washington not only agrees, but reveals the challenges she’s faced in accepting herself.

“I feel like my life had a very stark divide from when I was not a composer, but loved music and was a very active participant. And when I became a composer and put the hat on, I told people I write music. I moved to New York and this life started. However, every other aspect of my life still comes into this role. We are the product of our past. We are the accumulation of everything we’ve said or done. Our brains and our subconscious holds on to a vast majority of these things, and while we don’t consciously think about them, they’re still present. Even if you think, ‘Oh man, I’ve really changed my life, I would never do that again,’ you can’t say that because we don’t always consciously make the choices. Our subconscious does so much behind our backs, but it’s a part of you.

“Good things that you like about yourself, the flaws that you think you might have; for me embracing all of these aspects of myself has been really healing, especially in the last like three or four years. I’ve been working with Shadow Working, which is like Carl Jung’s concept of your shadow self, which is really digging deep and accepting things that you don’t find about yourself or that other people – whatever labels they place upon you. No, no, you don’t get to make these decisions about life I do, but I also have to accept all of these aspects of myself. So I have befriended the past parts of my life. They are not bad and just working through all of that. So I hope this piece doesn’t give permission, but acceptance, to people. I hope that they can hear something or at least maybe read the program note and think, ‘Oh, it’s okay. I like myself.’ Hopefully see themselves and feel seen. That’s what I would like.”

Update: Just as we were about to post this interview, Long Beach Opera announced that they have named Shelley Washington their Composer-In-Residence. Congratulations!

To see our complete interview with Shelley Washington, please go here.

Main Photo: Composer Shelley Washington/Courtesy Shelley Washington

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All that success would certainly lead to multiple opportunities for both her existing works and for the commission of new works. But then COVID happened and works stayed on the shelf until performances resumed. As restrictions lifted the opportunity for world premieres came back, but Reid wanted to revisit those works to see what they have to say now as opposed to what they might have said had they been performed as previously scheduled.

Amongst those works is Floodplain which is being given its world premiere by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in three concerts beginning on May 12th. There was also TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY which had its world premiere in February with the Seattle Symphony.

A lot to discuss with Reid for sure. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

What impact did winning the Pulitzer Prize, which you have described as “positive trauma,” have on you and your work?

I think it’s hard to know because you don’t know what the other side looks like. But I do think that as someone who has ideas that are outside the box, it’s allowed for me to have them heard a little easier, which is all the difference in the world, really.

And I think the biggest challenge for any composer today once you get a commission is finding where performances two, three, four and five are going to be.

Totally. But also you make getting a commission sound really easy.

Based on the conversations that I’ve had with other composers, commissions are easier to get than additional performances.

It’s true. Also, I like collaborating. I like things that are often a little nontraditional. So being able to bring those things into the world, there’s just a little bit more space to dream.

Floodplain was scheduled to premiere two years ago. You’ve stated that the pandemic allowed you a chance to revisit the work before LA Chamber Orchestra performs the work. Can you describe the fundamental changes between what you had written and what is being performed?

I have a few different ways to explain it. So the way that I like to work is I like to work on something a lot and then kind of put it on a shelf and work on other things and then come back to it, look at it, work on it a lot, put on the shelf and then when the deadline comes, clear everything off. You know, chop it up, mix it up, make it come together again.

I was on the second time of working through the material when COVID hit. So it wasn’t like I’m done. Final note. I had a lot of themes, a lot of material. I knew how I wanted some of it to flow.

I just made the commitment during COVID after things kept getting postponed that at a point I wasn’t going to work on something until I knew it was going to happen – as much as one can ever know anything, which is never. I decided to not work on things that weren’t within view. And so this one stayed on the shelf for a long time. I sometimes think about – this is so dorky – but think about composing like baking. You know, where part of the process of certain breads is this proofing* process? And some of them need to proof and some of them that changes the texture of the bread. So this piece proofed for a very long time.

When I got it down off the shelf I was like, What? What is this? What are you and what does this want to be? How can this feel relevant now? The work maintains a lot of the melodic themes and some of the chordal gestures. There is the rhythmic section and some other things that weren’t in the original sketches that kind of emerged from the long proof process.

Do you think that those who want to can find insight into your experience or your perspective of the COVID era or the pandemic itself?

That’s a little strong, I think. How to answer the question? It’s less direct. You know, the thing I like about the word Floodplain is it implies sometimes things go sideways. Not every day. Sometimes it’s going to flood and then otherwise it’s really fertile. So I think this kind of unpredictability, this kind of unsettledness that I still feel. I’m learning to trust and make plans again. I think some of those things are certainly somewhere in the work, but it’s not very specific.

Did the pandemic allow you time for introspection and did that change the way you thought about your work and/or how you want to express yourself?

I didn’t sit down and say, here’s what I want, X, Y, Z. But I think that any time anyone goes through anything challenging you just get to know yourself better. And you get to learn what what matters and that changes. I had to sit with myself a lot. There wasn’t as many distractions and there was a lot of unknown. And sitting with the unknown brought up some new things I’m interested in and things that I’m not interested anymore in a very clear way that it might have just taken a lot more time to find had we not had that experience.

I want to talk to you about Lunar Composition Lab, which I think is such an incredible thing that you and Missy Mazzzoli are doing in supporting female, non-binary and gender nonconforming composers. You’re six years in at this point. What impact would you like Luna and its graduates and fellows to have on the future of contemporary music? 

Great question. And the answer is kind of a non-answer, which is I want something that we can’t even see. For these fellows and alums, the fact they have their community, they have role models, they have mentorship, they have doors opening for them. I want for them to go somewhere that Missy and I and you can’t even envision. That’s what I want.

I know you’ve talked about how every project starts with a blank page. In Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George the first words are “White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge, to bring order to the whole through design. Composition. Tension. Balance. Light and harmony.” Do you see your challenges as more similar or more different than as it is expressed in the opening moment of that musical? 

I’m exploring my relationship right now with the blank page. I don’t know if that’s really accurate because we live in this multitude of our own imagination, so that the blank page is never blank. So I’m exploring how to start each piece actually with something on the page. Whether it’s finding a fragment of something and saying this is where we’re starting or the last pitch of the piece I just wrote. How actually to avoid the blank page because one hand it will be blank and it won’t be blank no matter what you do.

*proofing: the final stage of allowing dough to rise before baking

Main photo: Ellen Reid (Photo by Erin Baiano/Courtesy Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra)

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