DANIEL LENTZ

DANIEL LENTZ – FRIEND AND CONTEMPORARY OF HAROLD BUDD – IS ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT COMPOSERS OF ‘ART MUSIC’ LIVING AND WORKING IN AMERICA TODAY.
He was the first American to be awarded First Prize in the Stichting Gaudeamus International Composers Competition in Holland; the first-ever recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in electronic music; and the first Los Angeles-based classical composer to be signed to a major record label (Angel / EMI) since Stravinsky. However, as the New York writer John Schaefer commented: “His works look back to an earlier time when music was not so divided between serious and popular. This is music that will appeal to a broad range of listeners”.
POINT CONCEPTION, his wild nine piano tribute to the octave, has just been reissued on Cold Blue Records, and new album IN THE SEA OF IONIA is due in the spring of next year. Lentz spoke to The Mouth Magazine about his career and musical development since 1965.

LET’S BEGIN WITH 1965. SOME EARLY WORKS WRITTEN BETWEEN THEN AND 1969 SEEM TO HAVE MORE IN COMMON WITH THE CONCEPTUAL MUSIC MOVEMENT THAN YOUR LATER WORK. YOU WERE FUNCTIONING AS A COMPOSER WHILE WORKING WITHIN ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENTS; AT BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY, THEN LATER AS A COMPOSITION FELLOW AT TANGLEWOOD, AND EVENTUALLY LECTURING IN MUSIC AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. WHAT WERE THE INFLUENCES ON THOSE EARLY PIECES, AND HOW WERE THEY A REACTION TO THE ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENT?
In 1965 I made my first ‘live-electronic-theatre’ pieces, GOSPEL MEETING, A PIANO: PIECE and HI-YO PAINT. These colour scores were published in SOURCE: MUSIC OF THE AVANT-GARDE #3, in, I believe, 1968. I was a student at Brandeis where my primary influence was Alvin Lucier, and specifically his 1965 ‘brainwave’ piece MUSIC FOR SOLO PERFORMER. Alvin ran the electronic music studio at Brandeis, where I spent much of my time. Academia hadn’t yet become a source of rebellion for me. That would come a few years later when I began teaching at U.C. Santa Barbara (1968-70).
In November of my first year there the Chairman of the department asked me if I would be interested in a tenured position. Not knowing what tenure was at that time, I said sure. In early 1969 I gave my first concert performance at the University, when I performed my GOSPEL MEETING, Bob Ashley‘s WOLFMAN and Lucier’s MUSIC FOR SOLO PERFORMER. The word ‘tenure’ was never mentioned again. In fact, the Chairman walked out of the concert during the first piece. In the Fall of that year I was asked to have a work performed in the annual Faculty Composers Concert, when we premiered my LOVE AND CONCEPTION piece for solo piano and page turner. For this performance I was able to get three local radio stations involved — impossible to do these days…
The music that I made was the first movement of a three-movement sonata in a 19th century ‘romantic’ style, a la Schumann. I think I wanted to prove to myself that I could compose in that way. The male pianist wore a formal tuxedo and the lovely female page turner a long black dress. I had made the sounding board of the Steinway concert grand into a loudspeaker by building a device made of plywood with attached sound transducers, which didn’t affect the sound of the piano itself. I had ‘hot lines’ to the DJs at the radio stations. During the course of the twenty minute performance, and about a minute into the piano playing, I had station 1 broadcast an electronic tape piece I had made at Brandeis. This was heard from within the piano and, like everything else, in ‘real time’. A couple of minutes later the DJ at station 2 broadcast a review of the piece as it was being played, giving the exact date and time. This too was heard from within the piano. For station 3 I had made a recording of the pianist playing the piece at a rehearsal the day before the concert. With the hot line to the DJ, I was able to coordinate the tape to the pianist’s live playing.
During the final moments when he lifted his hands from the keyboard the music kept coming from the piano. This freed him to stand alongside the page turner. They began a slow dance to the music, gradually circling the piano, eventually coming to the front of it and its raised lid. Just as the music is coming to its final notes, he flicks a hook behind her neck and her dress falls to the floor leaving her naked. And as he discards his one piece tux in a similar manner, the two embrace and gently fall into the piano. As the lovemaking begins the stage curtain closes.
All that people ever talked about was this last activity. I don’t recall anybody ever mentioning the radio broadcasts and the ‘real time’ components. Nor what I thought was a pretty good simulation of 19th century piano music. I’d been hired for a two year appointment. But I was fired as soon as the two years came to a semestral close, entirely due to these two concerts… And a few that followed.

YOU’VE DESCRIBED SUBSEQUENT WORK WITH EXPERIMENTAL GROUP CALIFORNIA TIME MACHINE AS HAVING A CENTRAL FOCUS ON TIME RATHER THAN SOUND…
The California Time Machine was formed as soon as I got to Santa Barbara, 1968. The four member group was intact until 1971. Because I began performing more often with Harold Budd and Wolfgang Stoerchle (1943 – 1976), I suggested we name our group simply Budd, Lentz, & Stoerchle. We performed in the US, and in 1972 Wolf and I made a mini tour of England, mainly London and Liverpool. I went onto The Netherlands to do some concerts there.
With California Time Machine in 1969 – 1970, I made what I called ‘In Absentia’ performance pieces: the OKLAHOMA PACKAGE, the PARIS PACKAGE, the CALIFORNIA PACKAGE, etc. We’d book a concert in, say, Paris and I constructed a plexiglass box with several (five or six) smaller plastic boxes inside. Each box contained a piece, or a set of instructions to perform said piece (à la AUS DEN SIEBEN TAGEN of the same time, I now realise). Instead of showing up to perform we left the Package on the stage or gallery floor. There’s a fellow in the UK who has one of these. He contacted me to see if I wanted to buy it. I offered $500 and never heard from him again. I have none now.
Maybe the most interesting ‘time shift’ gig we ever did was a 1969 or 1970 piece titled AIR MEAL, SPATIAL DELIVERY. We were booked to perform at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, which was run by Frank Oppenheimer, brother of Robert Oppenheimer, ‘leader’ of the Manhattan Project… where quantum physics became more than just a theory…
As it turned out we’d also booked a concert in Vancouver the day after the San Fran. So, I had the idea of making a performance on the Canadian Airlines plane from San Francisco to Vancouver, where we sang songs and drank wine, etc… Hard to believe now, but the pilots agreed to ‘relay’ our activities by phone to a phone booth in San Francisco, where Mary Ashley then called a phone (amplified) in the Exploratorium. This was transmitted into the performance space which we’d set up in halves, with half the audience facing the other half, so they’d have something to see. We had four large ‘Voice of the Theater’ loudspeakers surrounding the audience. Everything worked, except Oppenheimer didn’t quite ‘get it’, and refused to pay us.

THERE WAS A SIGNIFICANT POLITICAL DIMENSION TO YOUR WORK WITH CALIFORNIA TIME MACHINE. WAS THAT A CONSCIOUS REJECTION OF SOUND, AND HOW MUCH DID IT PERMEATE THE UNDERPINNING AESTHETIC?
Political pieces were important only for a brief time. Having lived in Sweden I got a rather different ‘take’ on the Vietnam war, and before most of my countrymen. I made a solo bass piece called ANTIBASSMUSIC, or ABM, composed for the great bassist Bertram Turetsky. Besides bass it has a lot of machine gunfire and bombs going off in surround sound. I once performed it at a ‘Spring Sing’ when my daughter was in the first grade (in Montecito, California, where 99% of the republican residents are in the 1%). She survived and is leading a good and normal life!
Another piece was HYDRO-GENEVA, where hydrogen peroxide (3%) is put in the ears of the audience by performers wearing hard-hats with miners’ lights and carrying small tape recorders playing my voice explaining the tie between the melting wax in their ears with napalm. On stage a person reads a scroll of Americans killed in the Vietnam war, beginning with five guys I knew in high school and ending (hours later – after 50,000 names) with the names of Asian Americans. It was impossible to separate politics and my music in the late 60s and early 1970s. But I got over it.
At the beginning of 1971, I was unemployed. I’d turned down some university teaching offers on the other coast, and made my way back to California, paying my way by performing in some venues en route: Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, New Mexico are the ones I remember. But back in Santa Barbara I had to go on welfare. I went to a grocery store with the food stamps. Not a good experience. The next day I went to the Art Museum to see who was donating money to purchase interesting art. I also went to a place called the Institute for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Long story short, I found two benefactors and after a day or two ended up with a tax-free stipend from an individual at the Institute, and made an acquaintance of a person who actually supported 20th-century art in the city. My main patron (the Institute) was a wealthy gentleman of about 87 – 88 years of age. My first task was to make a piece using his favorite homily “do unto others”… How to make a piece that I wanted to do while somehow pleasing a man whose favourite music was by Stephen Foster ..?

TO WHAT DEGREE DID WORK WITH CALIFORNIA TIME MACHINE LEAD TO A DEVELOPING AWARENESS OF ‘PROCESS’, AS REFLECTED IN WORKS LIKE YOU CAN’T SEE THE FOREST… MUSIC (FOR THREE DRINKERS AND EIGHT ECHOES), AND KING SPEECH SONG (FOR SPEAKER / WINE DRINKER AND FOURTEEN ECHOES). ONE WRITER SAID THAT THESE WORKS ARE “IN A CONSTANT STATE OF BECOMING”… ADDITIONALLY, IN THESE WORKS SPOKEN WORD BECOMES A PRIMARY SOUND SOURCE. DID YOU SEE YOURSELF DECONSTRUCTING OR RECONSTRUCTING THE ELEMENTS OF LANGUAGE?
By this time I’d already given up/disregarded the music so favoured by academics, mistakenly named ‘modernism’. So it was a natural step (or jump) to compose a work that was ‘pretty’, but also incorporated my interest in keeping my music in that ‘state of becoming’. The result was a piece for three performers and a complex array of delays, allowing the three to become many; CANON & FUGLE. We previewed it at a mansion in Santa Barbara during Fall 1971. I remember the contingent from Cal Arts that came; Ingram Marshall, Lucky Mosco, Harold Budd and some others. Only Harold Budd liked what he heard. The ‘official’ premiere was in Utrecht in 1972.
Like YOU CAN’T SEE THE FOREST… MUSIC before it, CANON & FUGLE used tape delay set-ups. In FOREST… MUSIC I used six English language clichés, all something to do with the process I was using, deconstructing the clichés and restructuring them via an eight-part delay or echo system, each about a minute apart. Over time the individual phonemes (or word particles) coalesce and begin to form complete words, then the complete sentences of each cliché.
It was scored for three performers, each with a large goblet nearly filled to the rim with red wine. I should also add that with each word particle spoken, the performers strike the glasses. I built mallets made from champagne corks for the mallet heads. Over the course of the seven lines and echoes, these built up to the completed clichés with the glasses sounding a lot like a gamelan. The sound of struck or rubbed fine lead crystal wine goblets is lovely. Only drinking from the glass can change the pitch, always upward. This was a theatrical bonus! I wrote FOREST… MUSIC for three performers, or speaker-wine-drinkers; for the Budd, Lentz and Stoerchle group. Wolfgang Stoerchle was a visual artist; couldn’t play an instrument or sing or read music. But he could speak and he could play a wine glass. Thus that particular instrumentation. The music / score I taught him by rote, so he had it memorized, unlike Harold and me.
The performers of this piece in the past ten years use a MAX / MSP software patch that the American percussionist JB Smith created for the piece. He has performed the piece in China / Chinese and Italy / Italian and elsewhere. And recently in LA with myself as one of the performers. His patch worked beautifully.

BOTH AS A SOUND SOURCE AND AS A COMPOSITIONAL STIMULI, WINE SEEMS TO FIGURE IN YOUR WORK FROM THE EARLY 70s AND LATER. THERE’S THE DRINKING SONG (FERMENTATION NOTEBOOKS), WINE SPECIFICATIONS IN KING SPEECH SONG (CANON & FUGLE) AND THE USE OF VARIOUS TYPES OF WINE GLASS IN THE CHORAL PIECE MISSA UMBRARUM… WHAT GAVE RISE TO THIS?
I had wine for the first time in Stockholm in 1967. When I moved to California a year later I became a bit of an enthusiast. In my first year of teaching at the University I even talked the powers to be into allow me to include wine tasting as part of the graduate level class ’20th Century Techniques’.
I remember many of the wines we tasted but not the students, except for the three I recruited for the CTM; David Barton, Fred McFadden and Janet Scarberry (now Nura Stone). I became knowledgeable with Californian and French wines. The department gave me a generous budget to purchase the wines for this bi-weekly class.
It wasn’t until late in 1970 when Wolfgang Stoerchle became a part of the extended CTM family that I made my first piece using wine and wine glasses. Wolf, Harold and I formed the Budd, Lentz & Stoerchle group at this time; separate from the CTM. For the most part we each performed solo pieces. One I remember performing was just me singing and playing a Fender Rhodes with a color / black-and-white film I’d made projected above me. LOVE RISE was the title. Harold’s pieces were primarily for solo keyboard. Wolf did his solo ‘performance art’ works.

THIS BRINGS US TO 1973’s MISSA UMBRARUM. THE TITLE TRANSLATES AS “MASS OF SHADOWS”, AND THE PIECE SEEMS TO POSSESS AN UNDERPINNING AESTHETIC WITH SOUNDS RECOGNISABLY BEAUTIFUL IN A CONVENTIONAL SENSE – BUT THE HARMONIES THEMSELVES NOT CREATED ACCORDING TO TRADITIONAL FORMULAE. TO WHAT DEGREE DID THOSE ‘BEAUTIFUL HARMONIES’ ARISE OUT OF THE STRUCTURAL CYCLES OPERATING WITHIN THE PIECE?
The most complex of my 70s wine glass and voices works was certainly MISSA UMBRARUM. Other than the Kyrie, the parts of the Mass each employ the glasses differently. For example, in the Gloria the glasses are rubbed by the four males of the eight-voice choir, and around the rubbed pitches they sing medieval-like melisma. In the Sanctus the females whisper the word particles while striking their glasses; kind of a sexy Sanctus.
The only liturgical performance of the piece was in 1974 at a church in Amsterdam; very intense and very cool.
The harmonies were carefully assembled to work within the ‘shadow’ network of the echo ‘cycles’. For example, using the simplest of the Mass sections, the Kyrie, I wanted each of the cycles to have its own complete feel, but also to work with the previous and following cycles textually, rhythmically, and harmonically. In the first Kyrie cycle we hear the words “Ky-ri-e e-le-i-son” spread out over the thirty second span (that is used for all five sections). When all eight cycles have been performed we hear three sets of this same text, traditional in the Ordinary of the Mass. In the Embolium, or Interlude and the Postludium, there is no echo format; they are performed in a normal left to right manner. Harmonies were composed intuitively, chords that I thought sounded good / rich. Similar to my first attempt to make such music in CANON & FUGLE (or “law and order” in the Nixonian parlay of the time). Pretty sounds that were always in the ‘state of becoming’ you referred to earlier…

THE NEXT QUESTION IS SIMILAR TO ONE I POSED TO HAROLD BUDD IN AN EARLIER INTERVIEW (read here). YOU’VE FOLLOWED PARALLEL COMPOSITIONAL PATHS, DEVELOPING AN AESTHETIC UNDERPINNED BY THIS ‘NEO-IMPRESSIONISTIC’ NOTION OF BEAUTY COUPLED WITH A CLEAR TONAL FOCUS. WAS THIS A REACTION TO THE PREVAILING AVANT-GARDE OBSESSION WITH TECHNIQUE – ESPECIALLY THAT TYPE OF MUSIC CREATED BY COMPOSERS WORKING WITHIN AN ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENT?
Yes, this ‘neo-impressionistic’ aesthetic was a reaction to what was going on in the so-called avant-garde – and academic – musical world. Those composers supported by academia didn’t think they had an obligation to make music which people might want to listen to. It’s paradoxical that composers inside academia in America tended to make pieces for ‘normal’ ensembles (including orchestra) while those outside of academia created more unusual groups and combinations (eg. Harold Budd, Riley, Glass, Reich and myself). For the non-academics, the instrumentation became a more integral part of the work and its uniqueness. Outside of electronic keyboards and amplification, electronics were / was used sparingly.
As noted before I used electronics for the time element not the sound, and built around the ‘processes’ used to stretch time. Harold used the recording studio itself to enrich primarily acoustic sounds. There were no apologies in making ‘pretty’ music.

NORTH AMERICAN ECLIPSE (O-KE-WA), A PIECE FOR MULTIPLE VOICES, DRUM, BONE RASPS AND BELLS, IS BASED ON THE O-KE-WA, THE SENECA INDIAN DANCE FOR THE DEAD. RITUAL APPEARS TO BE IMPLICIT TO THIS 1974 PIECE IN TERMS OF STRUCTURE AND EXPLICIT IN TERMS OF PERFORMANCE. TO WHAT DEGREE DID IT REFLECT YOU STEPPING OUT OF A WESTERN MIND-SET TO CONNECT WITH THE INDIGENOUS CULTURE OF THE NATIVE AMERICAN?
There are two versions of O-KE-WA; the original for eight voices and the slightly later one for twelve. In both, each singer is a soloist having his / her own text and melody. The melodies become the harmonies via the singers extending the notes of each of their melodies.
It’s to be performed with the performers moving around the listeners, allowing individual lyrics and music to always be somewhere else when it sounds again. It is also how the original O-Ke-Wa dance was done in the Seneca Indian death ceremony – usually from dusk to dawn for them. The ritual element of this piece is very important to me, as it is for MISSA UMBRARUM. I am a small part Seneca, briefly a Catholic as well. The piece works best in a resonant environment. The San Andreas Fault, performed it (and MISSA UMBRARUM) in cathedrals in Europe on a 1974 tour. We also performed it in some museums (Oslo, Copenhagen) and in some art galleries (Stockholm, Paris, Aberdeen); spaces which also work pretty well. But nothing like a large cathedral.

YOU SEEMED TO CHANGE YOUR DIRECTION WITH ENSEMBLE THE SAN ANDREAS FAULT, PUTTING AN INCREASING FOCUS ON VOICES, KEYBOARDS AND REAL-TIME ELECTRONICS. HOW DID WORKING WITH A CLOSE-KNIT TEAM OF PERFORMERS INFLUENCE YOUR COMPOSITIONAL PRACTICE?
The San Andreas Fault went through several incarnations. From 1973 through 1976 it was an eight-member group plus me as conductor, and sometimes ninth performer. The first substantial tour outside the US was in 1974 when we toured Scandanavia (3), Scotland (1), The Netherlands (4), Belgium (2) and France (1). The performers were all singers (SATB), although they also became adept at playing wine glasses & whistling.
Beginning in 1976 the group was composed of six performers plus myself (in the role of sound engineer and, when needed, conductor). I added a harpist and a couple of keyboard players, although all six also sang rather well. We toured Western Europe in 1976 and 1977. By 1978 I’d got it down to just four singing keyboard players. We played the MetaMusik Festival, West Berlin, in 1978 and, while in Germany, did several radio performances and recordings.
I formed the group initially to perform KISSING SONG, a piece I made in 1972. This is scored for a mixed choir singing without words, and for the most part into one another’s mouths. Sometimes it is boy to girl, other times boy to boy or girl to girl. I was interested in the beat frequencies this produced, and especially on how the sound was altered when the voices sing while French kissing. In 1973 I was hired as a visiting professor at Antioch College in Ohio mainly so that I could teach their mixed choir how to perform the piece. After first rehearsal it became apparent that those students were not up to the task but I was able to stay for the remainder of the semester, teaching a course in I don’t know what.
With new ensemble The San Andreas Fault we had no such problems. But with only eight singers I couldn’t get that ‘mass of sound’ I wanted. And by then I’d completed my MISSA UMBRARUM so we concentrated on learning this piece and O-KE-WA for the premieres here in California and for the European tour in 1974.
Two other choirs were contracted and interested in performing the KISSING SONG – one in, I think, Amsterdam or Rotterdam for the 1973 Gaudeamus Festival, and the RIAS Choir in Berlin as part of the 1978 MetaMusik Festival. Unfortunately, neither conductor could convince the singers to do it. It remains unperformed. The jury of the International Composers Competition for this Festival did, however, award the unperformed piece the Second Prize anyway. I’d won First Prize the year before for CANON & FUGLE. I like The Netherlands.
Working with the same core of performers for about six years most definitely did influence the way I wrote music. I was able to ‘liberate’ myself from the constraints that normal ‘pre existing’ kinds of ensembles engender with their fixed instrumentations and, for many, their fixed attitudes.
I was able to make music for wine drinking singers, and music for multiple singers also playing electronic keyboards. In addition I was able to ‘train’ them on the techniques of singing with microphones, and how to listen to their ‘live’ selves and to the musical events that happened earlier in the piece, first via stage monitors, then with headphones. In those days it was not easy to find (multiple) singers who could also play involved piano / keyboard parts, often doing both simultaneously.

OUTSIDE THE SAN ANDREAS FAULT, YOU CREATED WORK FOR OTHER PERFORMERS, INCLUDING MUSIC IN PARALLEL AND CONTRARY MOTION (IN 1978) AND POINT CONCEPTION (IN 1979). I’M PARTICULARLY INTRIGUED BY THE TITLE OF THE FORMER… A REFERENCE, I SUSPECT, TO MUSIC IN PARALLEL MOTION BY PHILIP GLASS…
MUSIC IN PARALLEL AND CONTRARY MOTION is scored for sixteen singers also playing percussion; mbira thumb pianos primarily. There are no words, and the singers are used as melodic percussion instruments. In the ‘manner’ of sixteen Swingle Singers. It was commissioned by Kit Tremaine and was premiered in Santa Barbara for an event with Jane Fonda; it was a fundrasier for disadvantaged kids. America was between wars that year.
Yes, the title refers to Glass’s MUSIC IN A PARALLEL MOTION – a piece which I’d not yet heard at that time. Mine was not in any manner a ‘practical’ piece to have made. But somehow we got through fairly well, even with (in spite of) my conducting. There was a binaural recording of that performance. It is an excellent quality recording, especially of the audience’s rustlings and coughs…

YOU FOUNDED AND DIRECTED THE DANIEL LENTZ GROUP, IN 1982. WHAT BROUGHT ABOUT THIS NEW INITIATIVE?
The more removed I became from the various academic institutions in the area, the more difficult it became to find good performers and find any traction (not to mention a disintegrating marriage). So in 1982 I moved 90 miles south to Los Angeles. I rented a totally empty, large, loft-like space in the downtown warehouse district.
I put some ads in the local papers and musical union flyers. Luckily the first to respond was Jessica Lowe (aka Jessica Karraker) who had only recently moved to LA, was looking for interesting work or something other than singing in a rock band as she had previously been doing in Florida. She happily became responsible for helping to recruit a group I’d at first wanted to form. Within a month or so she and I had found the ‘best’ six female singers and eight keyboard players I needed to perform a piece I’d made while living in Berlin in 1979 – 80; WOLF IS DEAD… We performed that and a couple of other works I made specifically for the group (originally called Lentz) first in art galleries, small theatres and clubs in LA. And then in 1983 and 1984 in larger venues, including the New Music America Festival in – I believe – 1983, and the same Festival when it was in Los Angeles in 1985.
The Daniel Lentz Group gradually got smaller as time passed. But the original core – Jessica, Susan James (voice), Brad Ellis and David Kuehn (keyboards) – remained… usually accompanied by additional forces of voices, MIDI percussionists, and keyboarders.
I liked writing for voices because of my fondness for words and how I could ‘play’ with words, lyrics / texts. Looping them. Deconstructing and reconstructing. Extending them when they had ‘soft endings’, etc. And there is something about working with the primal – rather the original human instrument. Keyboards I liked for their versatility and because of their great variety of sounds; especially after MIDI and then ‘sampling’ had become available and affordable. I’d always preferred classically trained pianists for the keyboard parts, and singers with the clean “sound” of pop and/or jazz, and not the heavy vibrating and chesty sound of opera-like voices.

MANY OF YOUR PIECES FROM THE MID-80s – IN PARTICULAR ON THE LEOPARD ALTAR – SEEM TO MOVE IN THE DIRECTION OF A REINVENTED ROMANTICISM. THE GHOST OF DEBUSSY SEEMS TO HAUNT MANY OF THESE PIECES, COUPLED WITH REFERENCES TO SCHUBERT IN THE INTERACTION OF VOICE AND KEYBOARD. YOU’VE COMMENTED THAT “THERE IS BEAUTIFUL MUSIC AND THERE IS UGLY MUSIC. TO ME, MUSIC THAT IS IMPORTANT IS NOT PRETTY BUT BEAUTIFUL”. TO WHAT EXTENT DO THESE WORKS REPRESENT THE CREATIVE REALISATION OF A ‘BEAUTIFUL MUSIC ..?
If there is a direction towards a reinvented romanticism in my music of the mid 80s, it probably began with SONG(S) OF THE SIRENS about a decade earlier, and in the mid to late 1970s with my AFTER IMAGES EP, especially the 3 MADRIGALS on it.
I believe that music can be both pretty and beautiful: Ravel’s DAPHNE AND CHLOE, and Stravinsky’s SYMPHONY OF PSALMS for example. And nearly everything that Debussy composed. And in our own time I can think of a number of both pretty and beautiful works. Harold Budd’s BISMILLAHI ‘RRAHMAN RRAHIM (1978) is a great example. And there’s music I find beautiful that isn’t necessarily pretty in a conventional sense. Gorecki’s 3RD SYMPHONY and Reich’s MUSIC FOR 18 MUSICIANS spring to mind.
‘Beautiful’ means different things for different folks, obviously. Damien Hirst’s DIAMOND SKULL is beautiful to some, as a Thomas Kincaid painting is to others. But, for me, a ‘beautiful’ piece of music must not only sound ‘right / good / exciting etc’, it also needs conceptual and structural integrity, and a good degree of originality.
I think repetition is the glue that holds music together, and how a musician repeats him or herself is key. It is also the first thing I try to plan when I begin a new work. My early pieces using tape delays – and later digital delays and ‘live multi-track recording’ – have an emphasis on repetition forms. Contemporary canons, if you like (Reich’s phase musics and Glass’s looping processes are examples of ostinato and ’round’ forms). Sometimes I have even ‘tried’ to make music without repetition. NIGHT BREAKER and 51 NOCTURNES are examples. But I discovered that it is nearly impossible to not repeat oneself.

HAVING MOVED TO ARIZONA FROM CALIFORNIA, YOU SAID “I’M GETTING A DARKER, MORE ADULT, SOUND; IT’S DESERT MUSIC”. HOW IMPORTANT IS THE CONCEPT AND EXPERIENCE OF ‘PLACE’ IN YOUR WORK? I’M THINKING OF APOLOGETICA (1994 – 95), WHICH WAS CONCEIVED IN YOUR HOME AT THAT TIME, IN THE SONORAN DESERT, NORTH OF PHOENIX.
It was after I moved from serene Santa Barbara to Los Angeles in 1982 that I heard later a discernible difference in my music; from a mostly slow and flowing sound to the high(er) energy, almost freeway driven sound, one hears in IS IT LOVE, THE CRACK IN THE BELL and AN AMERICAN IN LA.
After moving from LA to the Sonoran Desert in 1991, my music did get darker, if not more ‘adult’. I believe TEMPLE OF LAMENT was one of the first of my ‘desert’ works. Then APOLOGETICA shortly after. I bought a fantastic house in the desert (the Platt House; Will Bruder was the architect), and lived there, mostly alone, and about twenty miles from anywhere. The last piece I remember composing there was a concert-length work called CAFÉ DESIRE, in 2000. I commuted between the desert and San Fran for a couple of years, then a year in Venice, CA.
Not enough time has passed yet to tell the differences in my work, especially since in 2004 I moved from Venice to New Mexico and made quite a few pieces yet to be performed and recorded. The only piece I composed in Venice was for a string orchestra of mostly ‘fiddlers’; CONTINENTAL DIVIDE (not yet performed or recorded). New Mexico was as forlorn and dark as the Sonoran. I returned to California in early 2008. Except for brief sojourns in Italy and the East Coast I’ve remained here.

LIKE YOUR FRIEND HAROLD BUDD, YOU DON’T POSSESS A PIANO. HOWEVER, SINCE 2000, YOU’VE COMPOSED SEVERAL PIECES FOR PIANO; DORCHESTER TROPES (in 2007) and 51 NOCTURNES (in 2011). WHAT BROUGHT ABOUT THIS SHIFT IN FOCUS FROM THE VOICE TO THE PIANO?
In, I believe, 2009, I was staying at a collector’s house in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Dr Richard Marcus, besides having a marvellous collection of contemporary art (including many of my Illuminated Manuscripts), also collects grand pianos, has nineteen or twenty. In one of the rooms were two beauties, a Steinway concert grand and a Mason and Hamlin concert grand (1930s, I believe).
Since I was alone there from sunrise to sunset, and had a run of the place and pianos, I became like the proverbial ‘kid in the candy shop’, finally settling in with the Mason & Hamlin (piano), and making the DORCHESTER TROPES. Back in California shortly after that I rented a piano and made 51 NOCTURNES in 2010. I find that I need a piano around to make piano music. And since the rental was returned soon after 51 NOCTURNES was completed, I haven’t made any more. The CD with those two pieces plus a multi-piano piece also made in Boston, IN THE SEAS OF IONIA will be out on Cold Blue Records in the future.
I usually compose at a keyboard, and I still have my Yamaha KX 88 MIDI controller which I bought in about 1985. The module I still use is a little Roland JV 1010, and the only bearable sound on it is a sustained ‘string-like’ one.

YOU ONCE STATED THAT WHAT YOU ENJOY IN TERMS OF THE COMPOSITIONAL PROCESS IS “THE INITIAL IMPACT OF AN IDEA THAT COMES INTO MY HEAD, AND THE ISOLATION OF WRITING FOR WEEKS OR MONTHS”. ARE YOU CURRENTLY IN CREATIVE ISOLATION?
When an idea comes out of almost nowhere it is a very good feeling. Then the work begins… I don’t think that good ideas can be learned.
I went to Bellagio, Italy, in 2012, to work on a piece loosely built around the notion of recent war crimes. I won’t mention names… My intent was to write a libretto / lyric using only the letters of the musical scale (eg. ‘a bead, a faded badge, gagged, a dead dad’, etc). The score would be a twelve-member jury (a mixed choir), three soloists (prosecuting attorney, defense attorney and judge), and a gallery made of 24-48 strings. But on a train from the southwest of France to Milano I realized that we were travelling through a terrain containing some very ancient caves, including Lascaux (along with Pech Merle, Niaux, Chauvet) which was the ‘inspiration’ of my piece of the same name. A thought jumped into my mind – or, rather, a question to myself: what in those caves have sound implications? It was then that I put away the plan to make the war crimes piece and instead try to create a ‘scenario’, or build a sound palette using what was or might have been in those caves.
By the time I arrived in Milano I had instrumentation: voices (SATB Choir), crystal formations (wine glass choir), string orchestra (gut), and various soloists, including several bone flutes. There are no words / lyrics. I nearly completed the concert-length work during my month in Bellagio. I finished it shortly after return home. Its working title is CATHEDRALS OF MYSTERIES. I’m now in the process of trying to get the (substantial amount of) money together to record it using top flight musicians – possibly Los Angeles studio players and singers. Obviously there is no such ensemble in existence; one of voices, strings, glasses and bone flutes.
I recently got a commission to make a piece for twelve mallet players, which is due this summer. I’ll begin work on that one soon. Creative isolation? I think those two words do quite often work well together – outside of collaborations, something I rarely indulge in anyway. I live in a city where 99% of the residents are in the 1%. So, yes, I am isolated in that way. I guess I’m the creative type… Lacking ideas has rarely been a problem. But if I do ever reach a lull, musically, I find an excuse to construct one of my Illuminated Manuscripts, which also helps fund my strictly compositional needs.