BD: Is this to say that they were all mucking in a morass, or is this to say that it elevates the Perkins up to the level of Boulez?
EB: Well, it doesn't necessarily elevate it, but shows it as a representative piece of the same idiom. Every note produces a maximum possible surprise. There are constant polyrhythms going on. A large part of the formal organization of the pieces has to do with the rhythmic modality, but the gestures, if you will, tend toward great similarity. Those pieces are all abstractions. When you get atonal pieces that are actually dramatic pieces, and this is true in many of the abstract pieces as well, then the level of expression, again, becomes very similar, and the pieces tend to depict the ravings of a madman, various types of degradation, mayhem, perversion. I'm talking about pieces like Lulu, Erwartung, Pierot Lunaire, the Schoenberg Five Orchestra Pieces.
BD: Now you are working on a score in whatever idiom you're working and you get back and you tinker with it a little bit. How do you know when to put the pencil down and say, "It's ready. It's done. It's finished."?
EB: Oh, I don't make extensive changes. For an orchestral piece, I write in a short score. I find that I can get everything on 3 staves – treble clef, alto clef, and bass clef – the thickest texture you want to hear from an orchestra you can get down that way. Now as soon as I have enough measures of the short score done, the next thing to do is get out the full score page and write the whole thing down. Then, except for very, very minor, slight changes in dynamics and so forth, that's the final version.
BD: So you essentially just write to right through.
EB: Yeah. Just write it right through.
BD: And it's done?
EB: And it's done. Now there's hardly much of a chance to experiment and revise an orchestral piece. With a solo guitar piece, you have to confer with the guitarist, especially if it's in a conventional idiom because you can facilitate the parts sometimes by just taking one note out of a chord and very, very little is lost as part of the sonority of texture is concerned.
BD: Because the note is probably doubled some place.
EB: The note may be doubled some place else, so it's useful, when you're writing a solo virtuoso piece, to be in contact with the player and be sure that you're not overestimating. But I very seldom go back and make inserts or make cuts. I try to get all of that right just as I'm going. I may go back the day after and make a little change. But I won't make changes weeks after.
BD: You mean after the performance?
EB: No. After writing the passage.
BD: Oh, I see. It just comes out full blown.
EB: It comes out full blown.
BD: Has it gestated in your mind for a long time?
EB: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The 5th Symphony, I knew for several years how the piece was going to begin and knew about 30 seconds in. After that, it's coming back to the composing table everyday and saying, "Good God! How do I go on from here? Will I be able to get an idea or won't I?"
BD: So it wasn't self-evident.
EB: Not self-evident. Then I left a substantial amount of time between the first movement and the second movement because I wanted to be sure that there was a stylistic difference between the two. I remember very well that I had absolutely no idea how I was going to start the second movement. The week went by and I had to start it on Monday. What am I going to do? Well, Sunday at dinner I was thinking about it. No beginning comes to mind. Well, here I am finally that Monday morning sitting ready to start. Well, what do we do? So there I am with the treble clef and the alto clef and the bass clef before me and there is the blank 3 staff short score. Well, what do I do? I said, okay. I'll start with a half diminished vii chord in first inversion in E flat minor and follow that by V.
BD: And it worked?
EB: That got it started.
BD: So you couldn't get an idea in the middle of the movement and work to the end and then see how it would've come to it.
EB: No. That one was just composed straight through. Now, the last movement, there was, again, an idea for that had been running around in my mind for years, and I knew the very ending of the whole piece. When I got about three fourths of the way through the movement, I got to the spot where I wasn't sure how to go on. I could see several possibilities, so rather than worry about which one, I decided to compose that part where I knew how it was going to go, and that's the very ending. I then started composing backwards in 8 or 12 bar fragments per day until I was just about lined up with the spot where I had stopped. Then the questions was how to connect the two. There's a trick for doing this. There are 3 chromatic modulating sequences that occur just at that point which will connect absolutely anything to anything. I remember speaking with James DePreist, who had known the piece well, having conducted it 4 or 5 times. I confided to him just what had been done in the last movement and said, "Now you know the piece pretty well. Can you find the joint? Can you spot the place that links what had been written up to with what had been written backwards.
BD: Was he able to find it?
EB: No, he couldn't find it.
BD: So obviously, then it worked within what was going on.
EB: I don't think anyone would be able to find it unless I pointed it out. At least it's not one of those cases where a friend says, "You chose every note so as to produce the next maximum possible surprise."
BD: (laughter) Now that you've revealed this, are people going to listen to the recording and try to figure it out?
EB: I doubt it.
BD: You wouldn't want them to do that...
EB: I wouldn't mind.
BD: Really?
EB: It's no secret. There was a spot in the last movement where I began to get the idea that I wanted to make some recalls in the first movement and I had to pause a long time about that and say to myself, "Do I really want to do this or am I, in fact, just running out of ideas." Now recalls in the earlier movements – there are many well known pieces in the repertoire that do this. In some cases, the movement is a variation of an earlier movement. In other cases, material is brought back. But when it's brought back, it's not simply quoted. It has to be transformed in some way as Cesar Franck does in the D Minor Symphony. That's a particularly good example.
BD: So it's a recall rather than a reproduction.
EB: That's right, but a recall in a different mood, and likely in a different tempo. The lovely English horn tune in the slow movement is recalled with blazing fanfare in the last movement. So it occurred to me that what I really want to do is not simply present it in a variation as you find, for example, in the Bartok quartets or piano concertos, but I want a transformation on it. Then after thinking that over really carefully, I said, "Yes, I really do intend to do this. It's not that I've suddenly run out of new ideas."
BD: You've done a lot of teaching over many years. What advice do you have for young composers coming along?
EB: Well, I hate to say this, but it's not a very much fun profession.
BD: Teaching?
EB: No. Teaching is something else.
BD: Oh - it's the composing that is not a fun profession.
EB: There you sit and think, "My God, how do I go on from here?" It really is an unsettling thing to have a piece half way done and you've got to go back to it tomorrow and you've got to go back to it the day after that. Are you going to be able to go on? There are days when ideas come much faster than others. There's no guarantee that you are going to find the idea that you need.
BD: So it's not that you have to go back to it day after day. You have to go back to it till it's done.
EB: You have to go back to it till it's done. And you may be on a schedule, too. There may be a performance down the line. You've got to have the parts done.
BD: So you have to go back to it till it's done and it better be done by the first rehearsal.
EB: That's right. And the parts had better be copied and proof read and reproduced and bound and whatever else. And then you find something else. No matter what idiom you write in, I think every composer - at least from 1800 on - finds that there is a hostile faction out there that really hate you. They hate your music. They want to make you stop. They want to demoralize you. They want to make you believe that you've lost it.
BD: Even if you're part of the intellectual musical mainstream?
EB: Yes. There are always other factions that don't like it. Brahms was vilified. Beethoven was vilified. And this goes on today. I find it works both ways. It always has. It doesn't make any difference what style I write in.
BD: So you really have to have a lot of tenacity just to keep going?
EB: You have to have a great deal of tenacity. And if you need encouragement, you're not going to get it.
BD: So you just keep plugging away.
EB: You just keep plugging away. And there has to be some kind of a dedication to it.
BD: So what's the reward?
EB: Well, the reward is that once in a while, you hear a piece really well played and the audience really likes it, and it does what it set out to do. It provided an array of intelligent cultured people with high class entertainment. It was well received by the orchestra, well received by the conductor - or whatever group of players - or you walk out on the stage and perform something yourself and you bring it off and you get a reaction from the audience both from your playing and from your composition. So there are good moments. But there bad moments too. There are moments where you hear something and you say, "My God. No. That's not what I meant. I don't like that."
BD: Have you basically been pleased with the recordings that have been issued of your music since they have a longer-lasting, more universal appeal than a performance which is gone?
EB: Yes. Generally so. I've been pretty fortunate that way. The majority of the recordings of my pieces that are in the catalog or have been in the catalog have been quite representative. Some more than others. But, by and large, there are no klunkers.
© 2004 Bruce Duffie
This interview was recorded in Chicago on June 30, 2004. Portions (along with recordings) were used on WNUR in 2005, and on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio in 2006 and 2007. This transcription was made and posted on the website in 2009.
Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.
Used by permission.
Listen to Easley Blackwood's String Quartet No. 1, Op. 4 here.