Transcript - S3 Ep2: Origin Story
Intro:
This is Mission: Commission [intro]
Melissa Smey:
This is Mission: Commission, a podcast where we demystify the process of how classical music gets made.
I’m your host, Melissa Smey. I’m the Artistic Director of Miller Theatre at Columbia University in New York City.
On this show, I commissioned three composers to write new works of classical music - and to do it in just 6 weeks.
And every week you’ll hear how that creative journey unfolds through my conversations with the composers, and their own audio diaries of the process.
This is week 2, and let’s start with Ann Cleare. Here’s an excerpt from her audio diary.
Ann Cleare:
Hi, everyone, Ann here. And I'm at my desk, looking over ideas that I've gathered for the piece over the last week or so. And I suppose one image that does come to mind a lot – with the piano, and I know this is probably unusual, but I often think of pianos as almost a bit like trees. Because I suppose in terms of the other instruments we see on stage, it's such a big instrument, and there's a kind of majesty around it as well, I feel. Yeah, I'm thinking somehow that this piece might be connected to trees. [laughs]
Melissa Smey:
Well, hello there. We’re in week 2. How has this week been for you?
Ann Cleare:
Yeah, I think in all, it's been a good week. I suppose the main headline is that I do feel like I’ve found a direction for the piece that is like right in terms of the proportion of what the piece can hold. And also, for me, it's an exciting direction. It's something I really want to get into. So that feels very promising. But I suppose the week in general was kind of mixed because it was, in a way, it was a bit slow. I was sitting at the desk a lot, kind of brainstorming, and I found I was kind of coming up with more and more ideas rather than less. And more questions as well about these ideas and like, “How am I going to solve that, and that, and that?”
I'm thinking about places and places around me that I can really engage with. Some maybe experimentation with sound and with some field recording or improvisation might help at this stage.
Yeah, I went out to a place that I felt would be a good direction for the piece, and that really helped me a lot.
Well, I live in the center of Ireland in a little town called Birr – B - I - R - R. There are some amazing trees here, especially in the castle. So there's a castle in the middle of the town.
I know it's very Irish to be like living near a castle, but it kind of is the reality of a lot of towns in Ireland. But I'm very lucky that the castle across the road is a functioning castle – it has like a Lord and a Lady.
I did, I guess, have in mind that it would be really nice to do something in the castle grounds, just because they're so close by and they're just so rich in natural life and phenomena as well. And I haven't really done anything there before either, but I have thought about it, and I really love the trees there. They're just, they're like characters in a play for me or something. They just have so much history.
Okay, so here I am in Birr Castle, and I'm looking at some trees, which I'm thinking about in terms of concepts for the piece. Yeah, these beautiful oak trees mainly in front of me at the moment. And thinking about, three things: the tree over the surface of the Earth: the tree growing into the earth; and then I'm also thinking about the surface as well. And maybe thinking about, I don't know, one piano as being the tree above the Earth, the other piano being the tree below the earth, and then the surface that I walk on, that I begin to see the tree on, might be some kind of meeting place for the two pianos.
Melissa Smey:
Can you tell us a bit about the recordings that you made once you were on the grounds of the castle and how that, how that came together?
Ann Cleare:
I made a first run at recording one tree in particular that I'm interested in, which is this oak tree that has just such a beautiful shape. I recorded the earth there around the tree, which was very active. The microphone I use is – it's very sensitive. So I think I got a reasonable recording of the Earth, which was exciting to just hear and to think about, I guess, the life of the tree in the earth that I can't see. And then I recorded the tree as well, so I put the microphone on the tree.
The microphone has a kind of suction cup that you can attach to the tree. I think when I go and record in these places, I'm always hoping you'll just attach the mic, and this tree or hill or rock or whatever I'm recording that it'll suddenly just speak to me. You know, it'll make this amazing sound. [laughs]
Melissa Smey:
Well, it's funny, so having heard a little bit of the recordings that you made – I wonder if it is speaking and it's just that we don't yet have the ability to process what it's saying to us.
Ann Cleare:
So true. Yeah. Absolutely.
So what I’m going to do now is record here. I’m going to record the earth. So I'm going to put a microphone into the soil, which is kind of soft here, that shouldn't be an issue. So I have a geophone that records the vibrations in the earth. It kind of transforms the vibrations into voltage, so we can hear the activity of the earth. And I'm also going to try and record the tree, and I'll share these recordings at home when I can play them on the computer on the speakers and talk to you about them.
I'm back in my home studio, and I am analyzing the field recording I took. It's a process really like a testing process, because there's certain sounds that are tones even, that kind of linger, but they're really hidden in the kind of fabric of I suppose the spectrum of the place. So I'm going to play a little bit. This is the first go, and I can already tell how I can go back and actually record the place in a different way that might be more productive. But anyway, I'm going to play… this is a tiny bit just to give you a sense of maybe the recording when it's unprocessed. So before I do any filtering to get to certain sounds and materials, it would sound something like this.
[SOUND]
So basically, that's me setting up the microphone, moving cables around. You can already hear the microphone kind of captures a tone that the general place has, or at least is kind of emanating. So this is the sound of the Earth around the trees, or the tree I was working with.
[SOUND]
Yeah, if I filter that and maybe try and isolate some of the different kind of textures that are happening in there, on first go, I get to something like this.
[SOUND]
And this is the sound I got from the tree.
[SOUND]
Yeah, so that’s it. As I said, it’s a bit of a learning process with every place you record. So I have a better sense now of how to record, and I’m going to go back to the same tree and try again and take a few different approaches, and see how that goes.
When I kind of go to a place like I did this week, it's more, I don't know — I move more into feeling the piece in a way, and that's a really important, I think, transition for me in the process of making is where you move away from so much, kind of, thinking and you just can kind of feel instead.
Melissa Smey:
OK, so I want to shift. A really, a big question to ask - and the idea of a sense of place, because it seems very evident that place is very important to you and your work and your process. So you know, you grew up and studied initially in Ireland, but you've spent time in the United States, and you've spent time in other places. And so I'm curious to start to unpack, what does place mean for you?
Ann Cleare:
I think it's always been important in my music because, for as long as I can remember, I've always imagined pieces as existing in some type of place or environment. It's not really a musical object. It's more like a musical object in a place that it's in a world, in a way – that it's not this kind of isolated object that lives in this kind of impossible place.
I kind of want the, the kind of gravity of the world around it in a way. And so that I think has really always been present when I've been composing. I think about four or five years ago in starting to go to specific places that actually have inspired pieces. I think that has really informed more of what place means for me. And I suppose really hearing these places as well, hearing the sound of the earth, the activity of the earth – that's been really kind of fascinating I think, for me, and has kind of expanded the sense of what place means in my work as well.
[theme music]
Melissa Smey:
Good. Well Ann, thank you.
Ann Cleare:
Thanks Melissa.
Our next composer is Wang Lu.
[AUDIO DIARY – AMBI TRAIN]
This week Lu traveled from her home in Rhode Island to New York City for a special event.
Melissa Smey:
Well, hello there, Lu. How are you?
Wang Lu:
I'm good, thank you so much. You know what, this has been really interesting. I pay so much more attention to how much I think about music every day. Because I'm reporting back. [laughs] And then I realized it, this mental space is very important to be preserved. And thank you for reminding me of that.
Melissa Smey:
Oh, well, you're so welcome. And you know, I have to thank you for joining us today because it's a very big day. You are going to have a premiere performed by the New York Philharmonic tonight.
Wang Lu:
That's very exciting. Thank you.
Melissa Smey:
So I would ask you with my like, podcast-host hat, how has this week been for you? And we'll, we'll get into how it's going on the piece that you're making, but what is the experience like having been in New York this week, preparing for the world premiere of a new piece by a major American orchestra?
Wang Lu:
You know, as a composer, when you work with an orchestra, it's not working with your friends. You have to sit there and know everything. Everything has to work. If you sit there, you're like, “Wow, hope nobody raised their hand and say, ‘what is that?’ You know, ‘I don't have that note.’” That didn't happen, I guess. Yeah. They played beautifully.
You know, well, also I was thinking the whole orchestra can sound really colossal. It’s like, [it] can sound huge. The idea of big sound for the piece came to my mind when I was working on that was two things. One is the war. The war is going on, you know, the Russian invading Ukraine. And in general, just the war is always going on. It just, whether we turn away from it or the news talks about it, right? I thought about the war, kind of like a snare drum and brass. And also, I thought about glaciers collapsing. So I thought about big chords, collapse and falls, so big chords. So not a melody, but maybe lines breaking to different parts of the orchestra. So those are the images and then drive forward and, in the end, hopefully a positive celebration.
Melissa Smey:
Yeah. It's exciting.
Wang Lu:
Yeah.
Melissa Smey:
And then while you were here, you had an opportunity to go also to a performance at Carnegie Hall. And I wonder if you want to talk a little bit about what that concert was like and what that experience was like.
Wang Lu:
Two nights ago, I went to Carnegie Hall to Cleveland Orchestra’s performance. Again, it's fascinating because the first half is interspersed the Schubert Unfinished Symphony and Berg Lyric Suite selections. I've never heard it being programmed that way. It's very convincing in the way – it's a conversation, right, a hundred years apart of Austrian Viennese music. And it's very lyrical. There's abstract music of sounds and almost feels like, you know, one movement feels like Berg – like a glass surface and tiny hairs. And then you have this very warm Schubert.
And the second half is Schubert Mass No. 6in E-flat major. I'm not familiar with the piece, but it's very moving. When you're up there, the sound actually rises. It’s beautiful.
[MUSIC – “MASS NO. 6 IN E-FLAT MAJOR, D.950, I. KYRIE” BY FRANZ SCHUBERT]
Feels like a humming quality, right. It feels like the cloud and aroma of the sound, other than, you know, here are the pitches. Just the quality of that is also like singing a lullaby.
[MUSIC CONT.]
I thought about my grandmother in China because I'm very close to her. And, she's gradually fading. She has Alzheimer's, she has days she doesn't really talk at all, and she has days she repeats the same thing. I thought about this kind of music. She's never heard it performed at such [a] high level [as] at Carnegie Hall, but when I look at her when she's so calm, or – I just connected that with the kind of sound.
So I feel like the opening of the mass feels like, not like an opening, you know – it's like a halfway through her life, at least, kind of thing. And I also thought about the kind of music she liked. She loved singing the Ancient Qin Opera from my hometown Xi'an in the Northwest region, which is the complete opposite of the sound of Schubert.
[MUSIC – “DAQIN ZHENGSHENG,” QIN OPERA]
It’s a lot of almost like a multiphonic throat noise. And they're famous to train younger female singers to sing even lower than a male bass voice. Growling noise – she loved that, she performed that, too. I mean, she's an amateur. So I thought about that, you know, the different ways of expressing this kind of passion.
And her way of losing, you know, losing all of that now. And I wish there was a way to, you know, connect. So, we're talking about walking. How she used to wait for me every morning to take me to the daycare. She’d wait for me outside our apartment building. She would hold a piece of chocolate, and I would go. We walk, so this walk and this whole ritual. So I was sitting there and I was thinking about all of that.
Melissa Smey:
Do you think that any of that might make it into the piece that you are writing now for us, for this podcast?
Wang Lu:
I do think so. As a composer, we live our life. So I get up, I get ready for my daughter, and then I think about what I cook for the meals everyday. And then I sit down, I write music, or teach. I cannot sit down, write music and completely erase my real life.
Melissa Smey:
Sure.
Wang Lu:
To reflect my mental place and emotional place into the musical writing is part of the job. But there's no intention to isolate that part. So it is going into the piece. As a composer, you go through training. We don't talk about emotion. I don't think they teach. This is not something you learn.
Melissa Smey:
Why is that? Why can't they do that? Right? It's so important.
Wang Lu:
Right. So it's talking about what's going in the score, what's going in the recording, what's going in the festival, how this sound is made, how this thing is being processed, how the form stands up or doesn't work. But I think, after learning all that, it's very important to think about the emotional purpose. So for a composer, I think about that. I think it’s to going make it into the piece.
Melissa Smey:
Just thinking about, you know, when you're talking about roots and memories of China, do you think that a listener can hear your roots in your work?
Wang Lu:
I think when I was a child, you know, very early on, I caught an expression about roots when I was a kid. It’s [in mandarin]. So it’s basically saying, “Frequent shifts make a tree dead, but would make a person prosperous.” I do think listeners can hear my roots because first of all, the strongest root is the early upbringing and culture. And in my case, it's from this very, very raw and direct kind of culture from northwest. The first impression of meeting people originally from there probably would not strike you as sensitive or elegant, but rather dramatic and direct. And also, like, I've left China for so many years, almost 18 years. I still get it. I have deep empathy and really love towards these people who are compared to me today are very different. But because I came from that culture, I understand.
I also think about roots as something you make as you move on. As you live in different places, you create new roots by learning how other people feel and how they communicate and to really understand. And then once you understand, you have new roots by, you know, having empathy. I think it's very important to have this empathy. And I think this, this empathy is probably, I hope people can hear from my music, you know. Not that it's from the ancient Chinese opera, it has to be loud and very soft, and it's out of tune and… No, it's the empathy towards things that might not fit into one culture or the other. But I deeply understand that as a human, you have to respect how they express themselves. Because I'm from this weird culture – you might think it's weird – but it was the capital of China for 13 dynasties. It used to be the mainstream culture. [laughs] So thinking about roots to me is it's this respect and the building, the new empathy. Yeah.
[theme music]
Melissa Smey:
I think this is a good place to pause this week. Thank you so much Lu.
Wang Lu:
Thank you
Melissa Smey:
Our next composer is Miguel Zenon. Let’s hear an excerpt from his audio diary
Miguel Zenón:
So I’ve been traveling a ton the last couple days and haven’t had a chance to really sit at the piano or work at the piece a bunch. But I have been thinking about this sort of melodic figure that’s going to float on top of those chords that I figured out, and those chords are eventually going to modulate to a different key to a different type of voicing with this melody. That’s sort of like a lyrical, semi-lyrical melody that’s meant to balance out some more of the crunchy or atonal things coming out of those chords. My plan is for that to arrive to this sort of arpeggio that’s going to come down and eventually settle into something that’s a little more specifically rhythmic. I still have to figure out what that is, but I think I have sort of a clear vision at least up to the point of what it’s going to be like. So that’s sort of the plan as of now.
Melissa Smey:
Well, so welcome back, Miguel.
Miguel Zenón:
Thank you.
Melissa Smey:
I confess I was looking at your schedule to see that you are in a different state every night, and I wanted to check, kind of knowing that, I wanted to ask you, what kind of a week has it been for you?
Miguel Zenón:
Um, it's been busy [laughs]. I mean, I feel like I'm reverting back to like pre-pandemic days, when like toured a different place every night. I mean, it's not like that, but I feel like it's been a busy week. I've been moving around a lot. So I was in Illinois last week doing a residence, then I went out to San Francisco to play a concert. Then I went home for a couple days, and now I'm in Iowa City, and now we do a different place every night.
Melissa Smey:
Yeah. Okay. Well, so now the big question. How is the piece coming along?
Miguel Zenón:
[laughs] The piece is coming along okay. But I've been thinking about it a lot and I've been scribbling a lot of things down in my notebook. I've definitely made progress in that sense. Like I'm seeing a little farther down the line than I did when we last spoke.
Melissa Smey:
So I'm curious, I have a couple of follow up questions for that then related to [it]. So thinking about form – and we talked about some of the different parameters of form last time – I'm curious to talk with you about instrumentation and both in the abstract but then in the very specific, right? Because you know Matt and Miles really well, so it's not that you're writing a piece for piano and guitar in the abstract. Of course, I mean, you are, but you're writing it also for very specific people that you know really well. And so, I wonder if you could talk a bit about instrumentation and how that factors into your thinking about the form, either in general or, you know, obviously also particularly for this piece.
Miguel Zenón:
Yeah, I mean, it definitely factors for a few reasons. You mentioned that I know them well, and we played a bunch together. But also something that I think a lot, and I was thinking a lot when I thought about Miles and Matt is, you know, I like to think about rhythm as something that has a kind of an identity. And a lot of times when I'm listening to music, I'm asking myself, what's the rhythm identity of this piece of music? Even if it's something that has a groove or has a meter or something that's, that doesn't necessarily feel connected to a grid or to a meter or to, you know, time signature.
When I listen to music and when I write, [it’s] the same, you know? It's like, I hate to feel that I'm bypassing the idea of rhythmic identity. It's one of the first things that I think about. When I’m thinking about Matt and Miles, something that I share with them is, I could describe it like an affinity for a rhythm. A lot of the things that have to do with rhythm, we hear them in the same way. We definitely connect. So when I'm writing a lot of this music, even though this is a piece for piano and guitar, like you mentioned, I'm thinking about it in many ways with sort of a rhythmic perspective and what can be done to create that effect that you would create with a drum or a percussion ensemble or something like that.
And also kind of going beyond that, thinking about them as instrumentalists, there's a lot of things that Miles, for example, likes to do and the way he plays the guitar, that's sort of very particular to him.
[MUSIC – “SKIPPY” BY THELONIOUS MONK, PERFORMED ON GUITAR BY MILES OKAZAKI]
He plays guitar in a very percussive way, kind of going back to that. He picks, he picks a lot of this notes individually.
[MUSIC CONT.]
As opposed to like a lot of modern guitarists, especially in the jazz world where a lot of the things are more slurred. So you play a – you hit a string, and then you kind of slur with your fingers. In his case, it's more like individual picking.
And then, the same way thinking about Matt. I guess the way I would describe it is like, when you think about rhythm and you think about rhythmic layers and the tension that's created when you put a layer against each other, you know? That's dealt in different ways by different people. For example, me, I like that tension to create a groove, you know? And for me to feel like it's still something that I can feel within those grids in tension. I feel like with Matt, it's a little different, you know? Of course, he likes to groove, but I feel like he likes those tensions to be agents of disruption. You know, it's almost like, those layers are going to unsettle the music.
[MUSIC – “THE AMUSED,” WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY MATT MITCHELL]
I feel like you could be here, but you could also be here. And it's not really clear.
[MUSIC CONT.]
I get this a lot when I hear his music and play his music. So you'll have this, you know, figure 15 or figure 13 kind of going together, and they're not really meant to sound together. It's almost like they're meant to constantly fight each other. So I've been thinking about that idea a lot. And I know that's something that he's comfortable with. And at some point, maybe getting to a point in the piece where that could happen too. You get this sort of like, mashup that's not really meant to be anywhere, almost like a… like a gluey type of rhythmic thing. I don’t know how else to…
Melissa Smey:
I mean, the nice part will be that, if it comes together, we'll be able to hear it right as the piece develops. We might have an opportunity to hear how that sounds. Well, something I wanted to come back to is to ask you a little bit more about, a sense of place, and we had talked about that a little bit last week. And the way that your work, that you yourself are rooted in a sense of place coming from Puerto Rico and your roots are there. And so, can you tell us about the ways in which your roots in Puerto Rico are or are not part of the works that you're composing? Is it that they, you know, sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not? Can you unpack that a bit for us?
Miguel Zenón:
So yeah, I mean, I spoke a little bit about, you know, writing from a source, and also this idea of what it means to me as a composer, musician, performer to be from a specific place and sort of what, you know, the influence that has on me as an artist. Even if I don't mean to do it, it's so – there's always something there that I feel sort of represents that side of things.
So there's two pieces in particular. This was for a project called “Yo Soy La Tradición” that I wrote for Spektral Quartet and myself – so string quartet and myself – a few years back, and we recorded eventually. And one of the things that I did was I went down to Puerto Rico and started interviewing musicians who only play traditional, this type of music, this traditional music. There's one musician that I really connected with, and I've known him for years, his name is Orlando Laureano. He's a cuatro player. Cuatro - Puerto Rican cuatro, which is his string instrument. He actually, he's the guy that teaches at the conservatory there. And this track in particular, Dios te salve María, he had played it for me a few years ago when we went on this trip together to Cuba. He was like, “Man, I want you to check this out.”
[MUSIC – “DIOS TE SALVE MARÍA” FROM ROSARIO CANTADO]
And I remember when I heard it, it was like, it blew my mind for many reasons. I mean, it sounds so raw, and it just sounds like, you know, some people in the neighborhood just kind of singing together, but it's so complex.
Like it's meter – moving and meter, and they're doing it together. It's like incredible. You know, I was like, man, what is this?
[MUSIC CONT.]
This Catholic tradition of the Holy Rosary, which in Puerto Rico is sung, and Rosario Cantado. This happens in a lot of places in Latin America, too. So it's musicalized, you know, and musicalized differently in different places. So this one from Barrio Maresúa, which is a small neighborhood in the west side of the country, was some field recording that someone made at someone's house, you know?
And it ended up on an album. And then that album, you know, that album, which is not printed anymore, he had it, of course, because he has everything. So he was playing it to me as different examples of Rosarios. So I was like, okay, this is… this is incredible. So my process was like, I sat down, I basically transcribed everything, the whole melody with all the different meters, the way I heard the meters, and where I heard the beat and the pulse and all that stuff. And then went through the process of like writing this piece sort of based on the idea of the Rosario, but also based obviously on this one Rosario in particular.
[MUSIC – “YO SOY LA TRADICIÓN, 1: ROSARIO,” BY MIGUEL ZENÓN]
And usually what that entails is I'll kind of have the original source transcribed with everything, and then I'll start writing, like, kind of going back to this idea of layers. I'll start writing variations on the theme.
[MUSIC CONT.]
So this piece, Rosario, was basically written that way. Starting with the original piece, and then sort of building variations and reorganizing, reorchestrating those variations. And of course, then organizing them for the ensemble itself.
[MUSIC CONT.]
And of course, most people won’t know what those quotes are. Like you’ll know because you heard both. And my friend Orlando Laureano, he will know because he knows the piece well. So it's like, “Oh, I love what you did there, and I love how you incorporated this and that.” But for me, it's like putting those quotes there. It's not so much as a thing so people go like, “I know what that is,” it's more like, for me, as a composer saying, “Okay, so this is where it's rooted, you know? And that's what the source is.” So in this case, that's how, that's kind of how it works.
[MUSIC CONT.]
Melissa Smey:
That’s it for this episode, thanks for listening.
Mission: Commission is a production of Miller Theatre at Columbia University.
Major support for Mission: Commission is provided by the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts. Support for Miller Theatre is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts and the Howard Gilman Foundation.
Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. Support for contemporary music at Miller Theatre is provided by the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and the Amphion Foundation.
This episode was produced by Golda Arthur and me, with Adrienne Stortz, Lauren Cognetti, and Taylor Riccio. Erick Gomez is our sound designer and engineer.
This episode featured audio excerpts of pieces written by Ann Cleare, Wang Lu, and Miguel Zenón.
Visit missioncommissionpodcast.com for a full listing of pieces, performers, and recordings included in this and every episode.
Thanks for listening.
