>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:03 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:22 >> Hi. Welcome to this evening's pre-concert talk. Before I introduce everybody, I'm going to say that there are two changes to the program, the pre-concert talk and to the concert. First of all, I know you were all expecting my colleague, David Plylar, to do this talk and he is actually pretty ill. I am recovering but he is not and so I offered yesterday, late last night, to take over for him so please forgive me for being perhaps a poor substitute or a lesser substitute. I will try my best. For the concert, in the program, it says that Rebecca Fischer is playing on Betts Stradivari which actually is in the case over there, but she is not, she is playing on the Ward Stradivari and that is from 1700. Its history is basically that a Greek person living in England had it and passed in on to someone named John Ward. So that's that story and I apologize for that. So, let's get started. Tonight's pre-concert talk. Why don't you just introduce yourselves and also the two members from the quartet here and they will leave in about 20 minutes to get ready for the concert. Jefferson? >> I'm Jefferson Friedman. I wrote the first piece on the program for these kinds over here. >> I'm Jonah Sirota. I'm the viola player in the Chiara String Quartet. >> I'm Rebecca Fischer. I play first violin in the Chiara Quartet. >> Thank you all for being here tonight. Jefferson, you are the recipient of a Verna and Irving Fine Fund Commission from the Library of Congress. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> This is thrilling and we're premiering it tonight. We have a world premiere here and this has been a very long, wonderful week of celebrating the Irving Fine Centennial. So my question is, with the commission, how did that come to you and how did the music come from that commission? >> I'm trying to remember who approached me for the commission in the first place. I've been trying to remember and I honestly can't remember, but-- >> You were so excited-- >> I mean it was actually quite a while ago, so I don't know, four or five years ago I got approached to write a piece for the Irving Fine Centennial Concert and I think, if I remember correctly, it was specifically for piano quintet and I've worked for the Chiara Quartet for many, many years and they've premiered all of my quartets and we have an incredible working and friend relationship with each other. So I recommended to the Library of Congress that they be the quartet involved and Simone Dinnerstein who's the pianist is a mutual friend of ours who I've always wanted to write a piece for and so I thought this was also a great opportunity to write a piece for her as well and then, I don't know, they gave me some money and see you in four years, do whatever you want, and then I finished this summer and gave it to them, and then they learned it and now they're going to play it. >> And actually, tell us a little bit about the piece. Each piece, each movement has a title in the piece and I want to understand how that worked. Each movement's title comprises a poem? >> Well, I wrote the piece and then one of my closest friends, Margaret Lemay, is an incredible poet. She lives in Iowa and went to the Iowa Writer's Workshop a long time ago and stayed in Iowa. And so when I finished the piece, I sent her a mockup of the piece and she listened to it and then wrote a poem based on what she heard in the piece. So the title of the piece is the title of the poem and then the poem has six lines and the piece has six movements, so when you see it in the program you'll be able to read it as a poem which describes the piece as a whole and then each line of the poem describes each of the movements in turn. So it's sort of like I commissioned her to do something that served a dual purpose of kind of overall describing the piece and then within each line describing each movement. >> Do you want to read the poem? I have it here. >> No, I don't. >> You don't. Okay. I'm just curious how it sounds that way. >> I honestly don't understand how to read poetry. It's really a special art. >> I know. >> I mean, it'd be like asking a poet to play a violin in front of people. It's not-- >> I wasn't sure how that worked and I've been curious about the words and how they sound and the sounds that are coming from the piece itself. It's just like a wonderful collaboration with musicians, a composer, and a poet, you know. And it's not like you wrote the piece after the poem. It's just a very wonderful collaboration. I congratulate you all on that. >> Well, I just surround myself with people who are really good at what they do which makes me look way better and I collaborate with people that I love and care about and are friends with and that's, I mean I think, how the best work gets done. >> Do you have any thoughts on the poem? [inaudible] >> Well, this is actually the first that I knew that the poem came after the piece because I thought you liked the poem and then wrote, so that's fascinating to me. The piece is, well, you'll hear it tonight. It's so beautiful. It's absolutely stunningly beautiful music. We've played now, how many of your pieces? >> Well, three quartets. >> Three quartets. >> And then this. >> This is the fourth work, right? >> It's the fourth piece. >> The first quartet is a piece that Jefferson won't let us play because he wrote it as a student and we played it at the Aspen Music Festival. Although, you being a student isn't the reason. I mean, he also wrote the second quarter for us when we were in graduate school together at Juilliard and that piece we play quite a bit and is a piece that you claim, right? >> Yeah, but as you know, as musicians, there's a huge difference between being an undergrad and being a grad student. >> Yes, there is. >> There is something that happens-- ^M00:06:54 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M00:06:56 >> But the reason that we don't play the first quartet is because you don't want us to, I mean you don't feel it's, in the sense that you don't feel [inaudible]. >> It's not good. >> Right. We liked it, but we were undergrads, too, so what do we know? But since then, that second quartet that we played quite a bit and recorded and we also recorded the third quartet. They go together on the album. The third quartet was a more recent commission. It's Brooklyn Friends of Chamber Music, right? >> Yep. >> 2004. >> 2004. Recent. [laughter] Yeah. So it's nice to finally get this done. >> They were out of graduate school, right? >> Right. Out of graduate school significantly. But what's great about this is that we've been playing with Simone such a long time, too. She's a wonderful pianist as I'm sure many of you are familiar. She's a very celebrated concert artist now. We all came up together through a program in Philadelphia called [inaudible] Services which was sort of a career development organization. They do wonderful work. And Becca and Simone had known each other for many years, since [inaudible]. >> Yes, almost 20 years. Yeah. >> Yeah. So we really jumped at the chance to do, of course, another piece of [inaudible] but to have it be a quintet with Simone, that seemed like a great thing. And what I think is interesting, to get back to this piece we're playing tonight, is that it certainly stems out of the language of Jefferson's music that we are familiar with but it's like it takes certain elements of it and completely magnifies them and other elements are not nearly as present. Both of the quartets have these moments of sort of vista-like, like time completely changes, completely almost stands still, and the time scale shifts dramatically and there are these moments of suspended motion it feels like. And I feel like this piece really expands that kind of idea in a really wonderful way. There's several movements that do that and it's been a real pleasure to kind of explore that edge of things. You know, I mean maybe you want to talk more about it, but it's really, really wonderful work. Stunningly beautiful. >> Do you want to talk about it a little? And you've had a long relationship with Jefferson and Simone and-- >> Well, Jefferson and I were just speaking outside. We were trying to figure out how long we have actually known each other and we met together as undergrads at Columbia University. And I played your Ovo [phonetic] Quartet, right? >> That's right. Also a bad piece. >> No, no. Not a bad piece actually. Very-- >> I was 19 years old, come on. >> Yeah, anyway. So we developed a friendship and so it's been 20 years and we're just so grateful for the kind of relationship we have with Jefferson. We, you know, as performers, I think maybe this isn't the case for everyone, I think it certainly is that I can speak for our quartet that, you know, the night of a premier is one of the most exciting things you can imagine. You know, to be part of the birth of new work and especially to develop kind of together as friends, as artists. It's been a really great experience in that relationship and so we were so excited to receive Jefferson's piece and kind of see where he's going right now and, you know, we've talked before, Jefferson and the Quartet, have talked before about how you've written for us as people, not just as a string quartet, an abstract instrumentation, but really for us as people and I think that is a very special kind of thing and something that we don't have with other composer friends. I think it's a really special relationship. We're very grateful for that. >> Just to followup on that. It fundamentally changes the writing process when you're writing, for example, this piano quintet and then instead of saying, okay violin one is going to do this and the viola is then going to do this and then the piano is going to do that to say that Becca's going to do this and Jonah's going to do that and Simone is going to do that, you know, it's like their personality affects what you write because you're then, it becomes like, it anthropomorphizes the music in some way, you know, and just becomes more intimate and special and alive, you know. >> Yeah, I was going to mention, we have a very special connection with Jefferson's third string quartet which he wrote for us and he wrote the last movement to, it sort of coincided with the birth of my daughter, my first daughter, and it was, I mean you should tell the story because [inaudible]-- >> You can tell the story. You tell the story better than I tell the story. >> Well, I don't know. But it was funny because my daughter was born and did I text you or I e-mailed you? I don't know if we were texting so much then? >> I think it was a text. Yeah. >> Yeah, I texted you and said, you know, my daughter's born. And he said, that's so amazing because I just realized that the last movement of the string quartet is going to be a lullaby. It's going to be an epilogue, a lullaby for your daughter. And so it was just a really wonderful sort of confluence of events and that's a very special movement. And-- >> And then, there's a portion in the second movement of that piece. Greg and Julie, the second violinist and the cellist are married and they were getting married at the time that I was writing this piece, and so I wrote them a love duet in the, you know, so that-- >> Which is very hard to play. >> And you're right and it's like it was designed so that they [laughter], it was designed so that only someone was getting married to someone else would be able to play because you have to be like so synced in with the other person-- >> Like a form of premarital counseling. >> Yeah, right. ^M00:12:47 [ Laughter ] ^M00:12:50 It's just. Are we taking questions from the audience [inaudible]? >> Sure. Let's do that since they have to leave soon. >> I just wondered when you compose something and you give it to the musicians, how much does it change afterward or is already like written and produced or? >> One of the most thrilling parts of being a classical composer is the division of labor, you know. So I write a piece and I hand it off to someone else and it's out of my hands and they bring it to life, you know, to be like a screenwriter and then seeing their play staged by actors who like bring just a completely different dimension to their words. So I think the analogy to a screenwriter is a perfect one, so they say all the words that I wrote, you know, there's no sort of improvisation as far as the words go, you know, but they bring it to life as an actor would. With that said, there are certain parts of my piece, particularly the part that I was just talking about with Greg and Julie where I give the performers a certain amount of leeway to give their own interpretation which is a trend started in the 20th century where you sort of have more kind of abstract notation and leave things up to the performer more and that's just a great part of the process for me and also I've been lucky enough to have greater interpreters of my music, you know, so I'm happy to leave interpretation up to them at times. >> I just want to add to that. So I was visiting Jefferson late this summer in LA and when I visited him he handed me the score in parts for the first time, which was very wonderful, you know, a big envelope to bring back. I was very excited about it. But one thing that I've always noticed about your music, I don't know if we've ever talked about, is how careful you are with the score, with the notation and with the visual look of it. And I don't think it's just, I mean I think you care about the aesthetics of it, you want it to look nice, but I think it's much more that you want it to be clear and precise and that's really wonderful because when, so if he's writing something that says for instance, well when you listen for the last movement of this piece tonight, you'll hear sounds that kind of come in and come out very gradually and they overlap in certain kinds of ways and it's a very slow-moving movement and there's no meter exactly, there's no kind of pulse going that we have to stick to. But rather there is relative entrances and exits and we have to be very accurate of that relative to one another and we have to hear a note change and respond to it. So the beauty, I think, of how carefully you line that up on the page, you know, it gives us quite a bit of freedom but it's also very clear that, you know, this event happens here and that's when this other event is triggered. And I really respect that because there's plenty of composers, you know there's wrong with it, but a lot of composers see the symbolism of the notation as enough and they're happy to have it, you know, they don't worry about whether it sort of looks the way it's going to sound. But you care very much about that and I appreciate that every much because when you leave us those kinds of freedoms, then we can actually kind of follow the path, if you know what I mean. >> But let me interrupt, they do have to leave soon, but following on that and Becca perhaps you want to speak to this, you are now known for memorization. >> Right. >> So speaking of this beautiful, careful score, will you try to do this, and perhaps the audience isn't aware of this, you will see this tonight and hear this tonight, but will you try this by memory? >> That's a very good question. Yeah, for the past few years, we've been taking it upon ourselves to go even more deeply into the score than we had previously and memorizing most of the works that we're performing. We're not playing the Fine Quartet by heart tonight but we will be-- >> Or the Friedman. >> Or the Friedman. But we will be playing the Mozart by heart which has really changed our whole working process and our whole experience of performing together on stage actually. But it's a very good question because usually when we have, since we've only been doing this for a few years, we've been taking a lot of works that we've known for a while and then sort of going a next step with them which is to memorize them, say the Death and the Maiden Quartet which we've played since we first started playing together, for example, you know, we've been playing that 14 years, 15 years and so that's a piece that takes it to the next level would be that I think your second quartet and maybe your third quartet would be a logical next step for those pieces. However, we have also, since we've memorized all the Bartok quartets and have been performing them without the score in front of us, some of those works were newer to us and we still took on that project. So I think, you know, it's a good question whether, especially for collaborations, if we're going to be asking our lovely esteemed friend, pianist, Simone to do that, but that might be a logical next step. >> I think, I mean it's certainly not for a premier because we really want to make sure first of all that we play the pieces as accurately as possible the first time and when we memorize we have to, almost exclusively, have to have had some performances under our belt with score. But it interesting with collaboration. Of course, Simone plays piano concerto all over the world with orchestras and she's plays from memory almost exclusively. But asking a chamber musician to memorize is very different and for us the process has become about, you know, the memorizing our own part happens fairly early on the process. It's really understanding everyone else's part and being able to keep that in your head. And so ask a collaborator to do that is to ask them to change a process. We love the process and it's become something that we're very fond of. We certainly don't try to impose it on others or assume that it's the right thing for others, but you know, perhaps someday we will [inaudible]. >> So then how do you go about picking you have Brahm's by heart? >> Right. >> Or all the Bartok, my goodness [inaudible]. >> Right. Well-- >> For those of you who don't know, it's totally insanes to play those Bartok quartets from memory. ^M00:19:23 [ Laughter ] ^M00:19:24 It's ridiculous. ^M00:19:25 [ Laughter ] ^M00:19:27 >> Yeah. And that won't be tonight. But perhaps another time. But it's very thrilling for us. Our quartet is made up of very strong, very analytical, minds. >> Type A is what you're telling us? >> Type A people and it's actually quite freeing for to feel like we've done all this incredibly intense work of internalizing the score. This goes to piano there, this goes to, you know, everything and just it's here and then to be able to release it, you know, and that's for us it's a very healthy and very exciting process. I'm not sure that it would be the same for everyone and actually some of the people we've talked to have been absolutely horrified by the idea and that's fine. But it seems to work for us. It's something that we've come to. >> And also for me, one of the things that drew me to their musicianship when we first met each other and I first saw them play 20 years ago was their interpersonal connection with each other when they play with each other and the visual connection that they have with each other on stage. It's like something I'd never seen before. They have such a, they just seem like so locked in with each other and when you watch them play the Mozart, you'll see, it's just they're like they're one brain together. It's an amazing thing to watch. >> I think visually it's amazing, too. I've really enjoyed watching you. I haven't seen this happen. I know the Kolisch Quartet did it ions ago, but visually, I like it without those stands there. I really do. >> It makes a big difference. I mean when you see a play, players aren't reading, again to go back to my analogy for play [inaudible], the players don't stand on stage with a score in their hands or with the script in their hands. I mean, it just fundamentally changes both the performer and the audience perspective, you know. And it's more than just like a gimmick or a tightrope act, you know, it doesn't have anything to do with that. It has to do with actually being able to communicate more internally and externally. >> Yeah. >> And now I kind of get why you say by heart. You pointed to your head and saying it's intellectual, it's not memorization. It's not. Maybe at first it was, but it comes out through here and I applaud you for that. That's wonderful. >> Thanks. >> Okay. Well, do you have to leave? I hope not. >> We probably should. We should probably start to get ready. I mean, unless you've got one more question. ^M00:21:49 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M00:21:50 I have one quick question I do have to throw in. The other piece tonight, the Irving Fine Quartet, is a commission also from the library, a [inaudible] commission from 1952. Is this a premiere for you? Have you played this before? >> It is our first time playing the piece. >> First period of time playing the piece. Yeah. >> I mean, yes, we've played it a couple of times in preparation. It's a wonderful piece. It's two movements, and you know, the other piece that we've played that reminds me of that two-movement form is the Berg Opus 3 Quartet. I would not be surprised if he was somehow influenced by that form because to me, you think of two movements, suddenly you're not, first of all it's definitely not a classical form, right? I mean a classical piece has three or four movements. So for him to do two movements, to me, sounds like something out of theater, you know, because it's two acts, it's got, you know, it really as a sense of an arc that kind of, I think, connects the piece from beginning to end through both movements and this piece does that quite beautifully. Within each movement, there's a little bit of contrast. The first one is basically fast with a slow m idle section and the second movement is basically slow with a more agitated middle section. But really the whole thing holds together as a single work of art. It's not four separate pieces strung together. And it's beautiful, you know? >> Yes. >> It's 12 tone in its way, I mean, he was using that technique but he was not strict about it so it's certainly not, he's totally happy to dwell on a tonality or obsess about a certain harmony or pitch. He's not upset about that. And I think he uses everything that he uses for the service of what he's trying to do. It's not, again, a gimmick of any kind. >> Right. >> Yeah. I mean I was just going to say, it's a really thrilling piece to play. I hope you feel that it will be to listen to as well. And I was really drawn initially to the slow movement because of these incredible colors that he creates both in the beginning of the movement with some of the soloistic voices and then also just this rich, kind of almost jazzy-like texture. The cello acts really as a base, sort of percussive, kind of goes throughout the second movement and it's a really, it's a stunning movement and it's incredible to play this in this beautiful hall, of course, and then with these instruments. We're fortunate to be able to work with them as well. So-- >> Well thank you for that and-- >> Thank you. >> And thank you for being here all week to have us hear them tonight. ^M00:24:41 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M00:24:43 >> Thanks. Well, we'll take our leave-- ^M00:24:44 [ Applause ] ^M00:24:56 [ Background Sounds ] ^M00:25:00 >> Okay. Well let's see what, I know, can we go back to student history? >> Sure. >> Okay. Can we go back to undergraduate? Graduate? Composers, how did you learn Corigliano? That whole, who influenced you? How did that work? >> Oh, that's a long time ago. >> It's not. You're so young. >> No, I'm not. I look young but I'm not young. Yeah, I went to Columbia and then I went to Juilliard and at Columbia I guess my main inspiration and mentor was David Rakowski who has a Fine connection because he teaches at Brandeis now and then when I went to Juilliard for grad school I studied with John Corigliano and they were both like huge influences on me as a composer, mentally and stylistically, let's say, or intern you know. And then, so then I graduated from Juilliard and was lucky enough to be able to write music for big orchestras and, you know, do all those things that you do in this world and then now I'm here. >> Well, actually now you're out west, LA? >> Yeah, I'm in LA now. >> I know a lot of American composers have made that trek and do film music and-- >> That's true. >> stuff like that, so- ^M00:26:20 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M00:26:23 >> Yeah. I don't know how to put this delicately, but there isn't really a whole lot of money in classical music and when you're pushing 40 you start to think about having a better quality of life and there aren't very many ways to commodify writing music in the 21st century and one of those is film and television and so I have connections out there. I decided to move out there two years ago. I was kind of, honestly, unhappy with my life in New York and the solitary existence of a classical composer and having to plumb the depths of my soul to say something to, unfortunately, a relatively small audience. And so moved out to LA two years ago and decided to kind of expand into film and television and just am finishing working on the score for this NBC show, so doing that now. >> Okay. >> And also doing this, so-- ^M00:27:20 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M00:27:21 >> Do you get four years for those commissions or is that-- ^M00:27:23 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M00:27:24 >> You get a week [laughter], so it's really, it's like a perfect balance for me now because, like I said, when you commissioned for a classical piece, they give you a pile of money and then they say bye, do whatever you want, and then when you finish it we'll give you the other half of the pile of money and that is something that most composers would probably covet, but it actually can be totally overwhelming and frightening in a sense sometimes, you know, and it's a lonely pursuit, you know, the image o0f the composer banging his head against the keyboard in the studio by himself is not actually far from the truth, at least in my case. And so film music is collaborative. There's a team of people involved in writing the music. There's not only the music team but also you interact with the production side of things, and you have to write music every week or else 3 million people aren't going to have something watch on Thursday night at 9:30, you know. So it's a great balance. I actually love the two things, having the two things together as one. >> You mean a deadline and [inaudible]? >> Yeah. And also it's not your soul on the line, right? So the show I worked on just got canceled and I'm very sad about it because the people that I worked with on the show were incredible people and really it was a really special, amazing experience to work with these creative, amazing people. But I was actually more sad for them losing their job than from me losing my job because I was just kind of a part of larger thing. Like my job was to make their vision better and to make their vision more clear, and I actually kind of fell in love with that, not having it be like all on my shoulders all the time. And you get instant feedback, right? So you write something for them and then they say, well no I don't like that so go back and do it over again and then you do it over again and it's usually better and they're usually right and you just have to get it out the door and it's just this mill that never stops turning. And so, I mean, this piece, like I said, I got commissioned four years ago for this piece and it's about 20 minutes long and obviously it wasn't the only thing that I did over the past four years, but I've written with my co-composer this fall, Blake, an hour and 45 minutes of music over the past two and a half months, you know, which is a ridiculous amount of music to write, but you just have to get it done and after a certain point, you can sort of re-use things and re-work things but upfront it's just kind of thrilling to write that much music, you know, write 15 minutes of music in a week, which is ridiculous but amazing and thrilling and great. >> Well, you had said earlier, with the Chiara that you or they felt you write for individuals and your connection that way, so when you're out in California and Hollywood, that's detached or that's separate or are you doing it electronically? I mean, is it a totally different experience moving? >> Everything's fake unfortunately because you just don't have time or budget to do it, you know. Like it would take a whole extra, I mean, I'm surprised we're talking so much about film music right now but it's cool, I'm happy to. You know, you have seven days to do a show and if you have live musicians, one of those days would be gone because you'd have to finish a day early and then give it to the musicians and they would have to record it and then you would have to edit what they recorded and then you'd have to mix it and whatever, so we use fake stuff because we get that extra day and it's sad because it would be so much better to use real people and I can't tell you how frustrating it has been for me over the past two years to spend a lot of time trying to make this fake stuff sound real. And, you know, I think it was like the first year I was in LA, I was commissioned by Town Hall in Seattle to write another quintet, a cello quintet. It was premiered in the beginning of the summer about a year ago, a year and a half ago or so, and I walked into Town Hall and the JACK Quartet and Josh Roman who had commissioned me, were just warming up and I walked in and it was like the most beautiful sound I had ever heard and I realized that like for the past nine months I hadn't actually heard any live string players playing string instruments in front of me. It was all just like in a computer in a box, and it was just like, like it just sounds so much better to have actual human beings playing instruments, you know. And it's come a long way. It's not like the synthesized sound. It's sampled sound so it's actually based on actual human beings who originally played them, but there's just no comparison. Obviously on larger budget movies where you have the luxury of more time and be able to hire real players, you can have that, but in television everything is so fast and the budgets aren't large enough so you have to make compromises. >> Well, I hope you can find balance with that with live musicians and instruments and tonight must be pretty thrilling. >> Oh yea. >> For the sound. >> Of course, yeah, it's amazing. Especially hearing the instruments that they're playing on as well and-- >> In the auditorium-- ^M00:33:05 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M00:33:06 >> And the space and then that they're amazing musicians and my friends. I mean, it's all great. Like, there's nothing to compare to live music. You know, once again-- >> Okay I got you to say what I wanted to hear. ^M00:33:16 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M00:33:20 >> Of course. I'll go back to, again I'm talking about the stage. You know, you see these huge actors who work in these big movies who spend their entire day like working on scenes over and over again in like a room with a camera with a green screen behind them or whatever and all of those people and they have the opportunity to go back to Broadway and perform live because that is like the real thing, you know, that's like actually what it means to be being an actor, to be performing live in front of an audience and communicating with that audience in real-time, you know. So you know, I would be surprised if there were very many actors worth anything who would say that they would rather do like, you know, a television scene 10,000 times over and over and over again, you know, versus actually communicating live with an audience on stage. So yeah, there's nothing like live music. It's obviously the best way to experience it. >> Great. Does anyone have any questions now? Yes? >> Would somebody please read the poem for us? ^M00:34:22 [ Laughter ] ^M00:34:23 >> I'm happy to read the poem, but I haven't practiced it. I've looked at it. I've tried to and actually I don't know if I should read it. >> I guess if anyone should read it, I guess it would be-- >> Yeah, yeah. >> I was hoping that Margaret would be able to come this week, but unfortunately she had to redo her bathroom so she couldn't afford to come. They found mold in her wall and it's a big thing, but anyway, she was going to come, she couldn't afford to. She's not here. It would've been great to have her read it right now, but I'll give it a shot. >> So if you can accept that, I think we'd all love to hear that at least. >> Sure. ^M00:35:00 [ Applause ] ^M00:35:04 The heart wakes into. The way in which touches the lights of others cut into the hills dawn alone being rent and want, the fold of bald wings is having had departed. >> Thank you. Does anyone else have a question? ^M00:35:23 [ Inaudible Comment ] Oh, okay. ^M00:35:25 [ Background Sounds ] ^M00:35:31 >> With all the creative people that are in Hollywood, do you ever get [inaudible] type inspiration that, you know, you're working on a TV show and you get an idea that finds its way into your serious music? >> It's actually been an incredible shift in the way I approach writing music now. Just generally, you know, it's all becoming this one big thing. I sort of thought, you know, actually my career has been one where I have separate things and then fuse them together, you know, or for whatever reason I want to keep them apart. So, you know, I grew up playing in punk rock bands but also went to the New England Conservatory to study classical piano and like those things were separate until I decided to put them together. And then when I moved out to LA, I was like well this isn't like that. These two things are like completely different from one another but then I realized that they just sort inevitably kind of sink into each other, you know, and obviously all of my experience as a classical composer is affecting the type of music that I write for television and film and vice versa, you know, so again it's kind of like inevitable that that's going to, I think it's just sort of inevitable that that happens. I think it's really difficult to compartmentalize like that as much as you want to, you know, I think it's actually, I've sort of proven time and time again for me at least, it's impossible to compartmentalize like that. >> Are you still a punk rock player? >> Well, yeah. I just played a show the other day for this comedy festival and we did some like punk-like stuff at times. Sure. >> Yes? >> Well, since you have multiple genres that you compose for, I have a question. I'm a long-time jazz fan and one of the most joyous things about a jazz performance is hearing the various musicians solo and, you know, they take themes and they play with them and the invert them and do all kinds of things. Have you ever considered that in classical music to give the musician solos? Especially the brilliant musicians you have? >> No. I'm too much of a control freak to be honest. But like I said before, I do give the composers a certain amount of freedom in certain sections but nothing like jazz. It's just fundamentally a totally different beast, you know, I mean I love jazz, it's just not the way in which I feel like I can express myself the best. Excuse me. And there are lots of classical composers that do that kind of stuff, you know. Sure. And you know, Don Zorn and that kind of New York school has done that for many years and sort of leaves a lot of discretion up to the performer, a lot of improvisation and stuff. What's interesting about that is like stuff from the avant-garde jazz scene from that area and stuff the avant-garde classical scene from that era are likely virtually indistinguishable from each other, you know, sort of like the same way of making music becomes like the end product ends up sounding the same somehow. But yeah, like I say, you know, these guys are type A, then I'm type A plus, you know. ^M00:39:03 [ Laughter ] ^M00:39:06 >> Any other questions? John? ^M00:39:08 [ Background Sounds ] ^M00:39:15 >> Since this is part of the Fine Centennial, do you perceive any relationship between your music and his? Can you compare and contrast? >> Well, I'm not sure I've ever been particularly striving to be avant-garde and I'm not sure that Fine was either. You know, I mean he's sort of pegged as a neoclassicist and I mean I guess that's the similarity that I see between me and him and sort of intent, you know, not necessarily musical language but just sort of our feeling about music in a way. >> In the back. ^M00:40:02 [ Background Sounds ] ^M00:40:10 >> This is more a comment than a question. I find it fascinating about your morphing between two worlds because it's almost a 21st century version of what Irving Fine and his colleagues really dealt with themselves, that Boston school included Leonard Bernstein who, as you know, in order to survive and also because of his own passions, crossed all sorts of genres as does Aaron Copland writing movie music. Irving Fine, my father, also towards the end of his career was working on, I think, what was it Joanna? She knows it. ^M00:40:46 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M00:40:50 And so I think it's just interesting that maybe we should all be more comfortable if we want music to survive because I also saw what you described as this lonely, banging the head against the key phenomenon as a young child. It's very, it's a hard life. And I think you should be congratulated for being able to really try to have it all and in that way allow music to survive. >> Well thanks. I think it's hard, things are getting better, but it's hard to realize that the second half of the 20th century was a real anomaly in the history of music where this was this divergence between classical music and popular music and again sort of compartmentalizing like one thing over and the other thing over there and Beethoven wrote incidental music for plays, right, which is the equivalent of writing a film score. Bach wrote cantatas which were like the movies of the church at the time, you know, and like Brahms wrote songs for cabaret effectively, you know, and also wrote classical stuff and yeah Bernstein, obviously West Side Story plus his mass and whatever and all that whole thing and then at a certain point there was sadly things went separate from each other and it took a long time to kind of heal from that process and thankfully, now it seems much, much better and people feel much more comfortable having a fuller musical life that kind of encompasses a lot of different things. And to be honest, part of it, like I said before, is out of sheer necessity, you know, like the recording industry doesn't exist anymore and we all have to figure out to pay our rent. So how are you going to do that? You have to do as many different musical things as you possibly can and the other thing is just that, you know, classical music has always been subsidized by someone, whether it was the church and then court and then there was a brief period in the 19th century where it was popular enough so that the [inaudible] actually supported it with ticket sales but then the 20th century academia supported it and now there isn't any support from academia anymore, so who is subsidizing classical music now? And I don't think we've actually figured that out yet so we're kind of all on our own trying to find our own way and figure how to make a life and make music at the same time, you know. >> There's one in the back. >> Okay. >> So the Japanese TV station that airs in D.C., I just saw a piece on VGO, the Video Game Orchestra, which I thought was fascinating. Can you say something about, sort of, obviously the extrapolation of film and theater to the video given that it's all-- >> Yeah, I would love to write music for video games. I love playing video games personally and also I like would love to write music for video games. One because that's where all the money is now [laughter]. I mean you'd get, you actually-- >> And the programs in school. >> You get budgets. I'm not saying that like I mean it is like the biggest industry now, bigger than film and television combined, like it makes tons and tons of money, but more importantly, I don't mean to say that in a greedy way. What I mean to actually say is that these projects are large enough so that you get a large enough budget so you can actually hire and orchestra and it's really the only way, the only genre now where you can hire a huge orchestra and have live musicians and multiple sessions and really get a good product out of live players. Plus the interactivity is really interesting and like sort of trying to figure out how to make music play with a game, like, so that you're playing the game and playing the music at the same time, or like the music is supporting the game play is a really interesting concept to me. And yeah, I mean, people go nuts for that stuff, the video game orchestras. They love it. Like the Final Fantasy Score and all that stuff is hugely popular. And there's actually a lot of good music being written for video games now, you know. It's a pretty interesting, creative world right now. It's like the Wild West. >> How does it intersect with, you know, some of the classical composer world? And who are the composers of this? What sort of intersection is there? >> There isn't a whole lot, but like I said it's getting better. But honestly right now, there isn't a huge intersection between, let's say video game composers and classical composers. And even like there's a differentiation between a video game composer and a film composer. It's really, really easy to get pigeonholed in Hollywood and it's simply because there's so much money at stake, right. So you do a score for a funny movie that was successful and then a movie that has like a 50 hundred million dollar budget, right? They're going to hire somebody who's already done a funny movie, so you're just going to write funny movies for the rest of your career, right? Even though maybe you want to write music for a serious movie. But there's just too much money at stake for anyone to take a chance on someone anymore, you know? I mean, you'd have to be like hugely successful to be able to kind of cross boundaries. So the video game composers are the same way. Like if you have a proven track record as a video-game composer, that's who's going to get those jobs, you know. And I guess it's no different than the classical world, you know, you're not going to commission a video game composer to write a piece for the Library of Congress. It's not going to happen, you know, because they haven't proven themselves as able to communicate that kind of like depth of musical, not, again I don't want to make a different, I don't want to make a value judgement between the kind of music that's written for video games and classical music because I think that's actually an unproductive conversation, but it's just a different way of expressing yourself and so yeah, no, I mean they commissioned me to write this piece because I had a track record in this kind of world and they wouldn't ask the guy who wrote the score for Mario Brothers to do it, you know. >> Anymore questions? >> You mentioned one of your teachers, John Corigliano, who although not to the extent you are but has had some Hollywood experience also, I'm just curious if he gave you any advice before you went out there? >> Not before I went out there, but he was an inspiration to me. It just took me a long time to come around to it, but he like, he was always someone not only, again he was actually a really great influence as far as like having a complete musical life, you know. Now, you know, for me. Because not only did he do like the Altered State Score and a few other scores but also he did the young people's concerts for [inaudible] and he produced all that stuff, you know, so he was like a radio producer, a classical composer, he did film music, he had his hand like in all sorts of different things. And that's just like the healthy way to be a musician, you know. I think that too often people think of the composer as like the delicate genus in the ivory tower who does the one thing, you know, who's like with the big hair and scribbling, you know, but-- ^M00:48:25 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:48:27 Oh yeah and where is he? >> Right there. >> Okay. Like that, you know. But not only is that totally again, an unproductive way to go about making music, but it's for the most part like a total myth, you know, and we should view ourselves as like any other musician, like a working musician versus like this delicate composer who's like special and different and set off from everything else, you know. >> One last question I think we have time for. Yes? >> I was wondering, it was mentioned that you had written some pieces for symphony orchestra and in that whole genre I wondered if you had, you know, whether those are largely pieces by academic composers or the different styles that are being written and anything else you might want to say? >> Oh for like what kind of orchestra music is being written now, is that the question? Well, orchestra is an interesting, I'm not sure if there's too much of a significant difference between the type of music that's written for orchestra now versus chamber music or solo music. I think the type of music that's written for orchestra is sort of fundamentally in the same language as chamber music for the most part. But for me, when I write orchestra music, it's a completely different kind of piece. Chamber music for me is so much more intimate than I'm allowed to say things that are much more personal like for example this piece that you're going to hear tonight is actually basically like a diary entry of what's happened to me over the past two years. You know, it's inspired by things from my life or experiences that I've had in my life versus the orchestra music that I've written which is much more like outward or there's a façade to it because it's just, I feel like it's difficult, at least for me, to say something intimate with so many people. The orchestra is like more of like an instrument. You know, it's like you take your focus back and you step away and there are no longer individual people and obviously you need individual people to play these things but as a composer you think of it more as like one big instrument as opposed to like four people. You know, you don't think of an orchestra as 100 individual people. It's a conductor that plays a big instrument that happens to be made out of human beings, you know. And there's a certain kind of disconnect, like a certain dehumanization as a composer for what the kind of music that you write for that would be. Like I can't be friends with everybody in the orchestra, you know, but these guys, like I went to their wedding, I see the birth of their kid, all of that stuff. You know, it's just like a much more intimate experience for me and so necessarily the music that I write for that would be more intimate. >> Great. I want to thank you and the Fine Fund for this event and I am going to look forward to seeing what you're doing next. >> Alright. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. ^M00:51:46 [ Applause ] ^M00:51:49 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.