Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Cotton picking music

Here's an interesting site: It contains transcripts and videos from a TV show Eugene Istomin did a few years back. Of interest to readers of Sequenza21 is a show where he interviewed six composers: Milton Babbitt, Richard Danielpour, Lowell Liebermann, George Perle, Ned Rorem, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Sorry Kyle, no Downtowners (an unpardonable oversight to me as well). In fact, the show opens with an assertion from Istomin that American music has its roots in Europe. Ned Rorem responds:

There's always been three kinds of music: the aristocratic music, music of the church, and music of the people. The music of the people was usually working-class music, with a regular beat, to keep them picking cotton; and that, of course, has become the music of our time, for better or for worse.

Other gems:

Liebermann's first composition teacher, Ruth Schonthal (a Hindemith pupil):

"You vill only have two uses for your music: to have pieces for yourself to play, and to seduce women." So that was her way of summing up the profession to me as a 13-year-old.

Rorem's interesting response to the question of the six greatest pieces of the 20th century (never mind that he names seven):

My list is significant for what it omits, I'm sure you'll be appalled. But it's simply the works that have had most impression, that have bowled me over the most. They're the Sacre du Printemps, Pelleas, Satie's Socrates, L'Enfant et les sortileges, Peter Grimes, Rosenkavalier, and the Copland Fantasy.

Eugene Istomin repeats a Gary Graffman anecdote:

Stravinsky once commented on Gary Graffman's programming his Serenade in A along with the Rachmaninoff Etudes-Tableaux in E-flat minor: "Oy, what a neighborhood for me to be in."

George Perle, discussing why the public is so ignorant of contemporary classical music:

When I was young, there were a lot of world-renowned composers around, and we heard their music. And then they began to die off, one by one, and nobody replaced them. And they're all gone now. I think the last one died maybe with Benjamin Britten, I don't know. But when I was a youngster, there was Ravel, he was still alive. Sibelius was still alive. Richard Strauss was still alive. Even Schoenberg was alive till 1951.

And they died, and I began to notice it: Where is somebody to take their place? And there isn't anybody. Now, that may be all right. There may be a new, we may not be dealing with masterworks in the future as we have in the past. Maybe we don't need masterworks.

Babbitt on being perceived by the European high modernists as an old fart (back when I studied with Ferneyhough in the 80's, he criticized Babbitt as well):

I hate to say this, I'm sorry, but there are European composers who regard all of us as very obsolescent. They have a new modernism, which they reward and which they perform. All you have to do to find out who they are is just notice the way they're regarded, the way they're rewarded. I know these people only because they get so much publicity, so much money. I get so much propaganda in the mail about them, I even know a couple of them personally. And the Lachenmann, for example. Do you have any idea of how many recordings of Lachenmann, how much money he makes, and how he regards all of us as being as least two centuries behind the times? It was a question of whether there is an avant garde, and these people regard themselves as the avant garde and we are the derriere.

posted by Christian Hertzog 5/18/2006