Paul Snyder
David Maslanka was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1943. He attended Oberlin College Conservatory where he studied composition with Joseph Wood. He spent a year at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, and did graduate work in composition at Michigan State University with H. Owen Reed.
Maslanka's works for winds and percussion have become especially well-known. They include, among others: A Child's Garden of Dreams for Symphonic Wind Ensemble, Winds, the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Symphonies; Mass for soloists, chorus, boys chorus, wind orchestra and organ, and the two Wind Quintets. Percussion works include Variations on Lost Love and My Lady White for solo marimba, and three ensemble works: Arcadia II: Concerto for Marimba and Percussion Ensemble, Crown of Thorns, and Montana Music: Three Dances for Percussion. In addition he has written a wide variety of chamber, orchestra, and choral pieces.
David Maslanka has served on the faculties of the State University of New York at Geneseo, Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Kingsborough College of the City University of New York. He now lives in Missoula, Montana. This interview took placeon October 29, 1998.
Of course it is a pity that so much of all creative work is so closely related to the personality of the one who does it.
It is sad and embarrassing and unattractive that those emotions that stir him deeply enough to demand expression, and to charge their expression with some measure of light and power, are nearly all rooted, however changed in their surface, in the particular and sometimes peculiar concerns of the artist himself, that special world, the passions and images of it that each of us weaves about him from birth to death, a web of monstrous complexity, spun forth at a speed that is incalculable to a length beyond measure, from the spider mouth of his own singular perceptions.
It is a lonely idea, a lonely condition, so terrifying to think of that we usually don't. And so we talk to each other, write and wire each other, call each other short and long distance across land and sea, clasp hands with each other at meeting and at parting, fight each other and even destroy each other because of this always somewhat thwarted effort to break through walls to each other. As a character in a play once said, "We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins."
Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.
—Tennessee Williams
Paul Snyder: When you describe your music as being "very personal", what do you mean?
David Maslanka: "Personal" means that it moves me a lot. It can come out of flashbacks, particularly to childhood times and other remembered experiences. When I write a piece, I have to be moved by the music, and moved very, very strongly by it. It can be a passionate kind of moving like you get in the Sonata [for Alto Saxophone and Piano] but there's also the sense of elegance in music—a thing cleanly made or beautifully made whether it has a passionate heat to it or not is another thing which moves me. I've always found that if something moves me, then it can move someone else, either a performer or a listener.
PS: So you consider yourself to be the first audience for the piece.
DM: Absolutely. In fact, that's an interesting point because my composing always begins by imagining the performance space. As I am composing, I am invariably seeing the music in the performance space and judging it as an audience member. When something nice happens, I say, "Wow, that's a nice lick! That'll sound great!" I am very interested in the feel of the moment—and that has to do again with the issue of being personal—and the idea of playing with the sounds. We say we "play" music. We've lost something of the meaning of the word "play", which means to fool around and to do something which interests you because it's fun to do. The music is fun to do, and included in that word "fun", is playing with the full range of human expression. I check and confirm what is happening in the music by being the first and most critical audience member.
PS: How much of a role have psychology, religion, or mythology played in your compositional career? You mentioned going back to childhood, memories, feelings, etc.
DM: Well clearly, it's been a huge influence—each of those things. I've always had an interest in psychology—first off in my own work as a patient back when I was having some serious difficulties. That put me onto reading the works of Carl Jung. Jung's position in psychology is one of having rediscovered or brought into focus an understanding of the layers of what we call the unconscious mind. He explored and then finally formulated the ideas concerning what he called the "collective unconscious." The "collective unconscious" is that element of mind which is completely out of sight, but which is shared by every human being. Having caught on to those ideas, I began to realize that they were illustrating the way in which I actually did go about music-making, that is I opened the conscious mind and participated in something "deeper." There is the idea that music is thought up by the conscious mind. My understanding of it is that it is quite the other way around. Music arrives through the conscious mind. The conscious mind has its constructions, its education, its ways, its habits of thought. It also has in most people, at least in my estimation of it, neurotic twists of one kind or another. Some of these can be very serious. In fact, sometimes a neurotic twist in the mind can be of such seriousness that it simply warps the entire character. Everybody has their problems whether they be large or small, and these problems influence how you see things, how you do things, how you hear music, why you like certain kinds of music, and what you want to do in music.
Going back in my own experience, I remember this whole question of anger in music or in the arts and talking with a poet once, many years ago, for whom anger was the primary motivation for his work. He did not want to explore his anger or to look at it in any way because if he lost the anger, then he would lose the motivation for his work. Now that struck me then and still strikes me as being a stuck position—it's not a good place to stay or to be—but it does illustrate the point that a particular warp of character decides how you go about things. Exploring this in my own self, exploring my own particular construction of mind, I came to understand that the music was arriving in spite of that construction. Powerful musical statements would show up in spite of my bent of mind. On the other hand, something in my conscious mind would also allow music to come forward. I began to think of this as the parting of the conscious mind, that is the pushing through it to a space that was not conscious and in which musical ideas formed—in a sense, sidestepping or going through a lot of the problem areas and simply opening the mind to receive. To receive what? This is the big question about where music comes from anyway and where the force of things come from. I often refer to it as "the other side."
There's the conscious mind and then the unconscious, which really makes up the most of the mind. The depths of the unconscious are not known. Jung formulates all of this in his own researches and in his own writings. I have participated quite a lot in those writings and have studied them deeply. They have shaped how I think about the unconscious. It comes down to the fact that I have some learning in this area but it comes down to an understanding that music is a thing which wants to come into our space-time area. I don't know where this is coming from—there are all kinds of theories and religion will then begin to take hold and to tell you theories about where this comes from and ideas of God are brought forward and ideas of supreme intelligence and force in the universe and of orderliness in the universe that wants to be brought forward into our conscious sphere. I participate in some of those ideas in my own way although I don't have a formal religious background or current religious practice. I don't participate formally in any of those things, but they're very important to me as ways of conceiving how things work. The result is that music comes through me and my task is to be as open as possible to let that force become what it wants to become. That means that one piece will be quite different from another although over time there is a consistency. Again the idea of play comes into question here. It's a matter of being open to the moment, of letting speak what wants to be spoken at the moment and not getting in the way, which is an interesting idea. That also, as far as music performance goes, is the same idea. When you perform well, something in you has stepped out of the way and allowed the music to happen. I hope you have had that experience as a performer. Can you see in yourself something of that sort?
PS: Yes.
DM: You know that you've prepared, you've learned the music thoroughly, and then something else happens that simply takes you over in the moment and the thing goes bang.
PS: It's as if it's completely out of your hands…
DM: Except yours are the hands that are doing it.
PS: Right, right. It's in your whole being.
DM: Right. That's how the composing has to be. If it isn't that way, then the performance certainly can't be that way because there's nothing in the music. I just wanted to say that in those terms so that there's a sense of shared experience, and that they idea of play is understood. It means how do you open all of your presuppositions and your prejudices, your training, and everything—how do you open that to receive the power of the moment. You have to have all the training. Without it, nothing can happen. In the moment of transcendence, in the moment of stepping outside of time there at that moment of fine performance of music or of fine composing, you are simply open to the energy of that cosmic moment. It's terrific. There are times of great stress, of course. There are times that it doesn't work, times of frustration. The creative process both for composer and performer is an intense one with big ups and downs. Sometimes there are days when you can put your instrument together and you can't play a straight scale. And you can only say, "What's going on here? Oh my God, this is not happening!" The next day or the day after, suddenly things are focused and brilliant again. That's how it works for the composer as well. You asked about psychology and religion, and what else?
PS: Mythology.
DM: And mythology. The mythological elements come into play through this understanding of the unconscious. Jung's idea about the collective unconscious is that it is made up in large part of what he referred to as archetypes. These are essences that have no substance as such. They are focal points in the deep unconscious and manifest themselves in the conscious mind through concepts like "love" and "mother" and "father", "anger", "hate", "hunger", "God", "evil", "good" "death", "life"—these words have no immediate substance, but they are fundamental points of reference and every human being shares them. They are profound connections to things beyond our own personalities. In mythology, a lot of these things have come forward and gotten clothed in stories and in figures so that you have all of the Greek and the Roman gods and the hero figures and the archetypal stories of love and death. These are things that everyone shares and they come through me as a artist when I open my mind and receive. This opening of the conscious mind is not with a specific intent of illustrating love or illustrating hate or fear; it is opening the mind and receiving the power of the thing that wants to speak and letting it become what it wants to become. Participating fully in the power of the thing that wants to come forward, the conscious mind then is the thing which is prepared to receive and shape all this material and write it down. That is the way in which mythology participates here. I do not consciously set out to illustrate the great themes of mythology—that's not my point.
PS: Do you ever become overwhelmed with the emotional strain, the pulling between the two forces?
DM: There is, in my particular character, quite a lot of tension which surrounds the creative act. I find that when I finish a piece, I am exhausted and it takes time to recover. In the heat of making a piece, the sheer interest that it develops in me draws me along. I'm not aware that I'm doing something huge. I'm aware that I'm trying to shape the things that wants to come through me. It's not a matter of fear for me, I'm not thinking that I'm doing something unique, I'm just doing. Yes, I experience the power of what happens. I experience it very, very directly. It will push me around a lot. There will be times when I can't find what it is that wants to be said and I can feel really desperate. Even after all these years—I've been writing music for a very long time—after all these years, the process doesn't change.
When I'm starting a new piece, it feels like I don't know how to compose because I've never written this particular piece before. I don't know how to do it and I feel very stupid. But I've learned how the process works, and at the starting point I feel like a dope. I don't know how to do this. There's this huge pile of music that I've written and there's this blank page right in front of me. And I don't know what goes on this page. Yes, there is a lot of strain. It is in part the tension of not knowing and the tension of searching out something which has never happened before and which you don't know. On the other hand, there is that miracle which does happen each time I compose. Between the start and the finish of that session, something miraculous has happened—that thing which never existed before has come into place. Really fine things happen, really fine ideas, really nicely made music will happen, and I can only say, "Wow! That wasn't there before today!" And all of a sudden it is. These are the kinds of pleasures which are intensely attractive to me and keep me going.
PS: Regarding the communication between the composer and performer that you mentioned before, how do you go about transferring the music from the unconscious to the conscious? What kind of skills have you learned that enable you to produce precisely what has been transferred and conceived from out there to this world? What has given you that ability?
DM: Well, I have to say that it is a thorough training in the tradition language of music and in the traditional skills. There isn't any other way. I have the sense of dismay when young composers—I've had this happen a number of times—say, "I got my synthesizer, I got my computer, and now I can write music." Well, no. You have what my good friend here in Missoula refers to as an electronic pencil. The machines can't give you anything. They can only give you what you give them. By the same token, a piano is a machine and so is a saxophone and everything else. You have to put the things through it yourself.
To have the system prepared, the mental system prepared, has meant the whole thing of learning music from the beginning of life, and then perfecting a particular instrumental or vocal skill—being thorough about learning that skill. Then there is the formal training in music theory, at the center of which is the whole study of counterpoint. Counterpoint is one of the roots of Western musical language. Any composer who says it doesn't matter either will not amount to much or will eventually have to learn it or reinvent it. The basic issues never go away. The basic issues in music are how do you make a melody and, by extension, how does that melody produce a full musical form and how do melodies work together to produce vertical sonorities. How does that happen? These are the basic issues. They don't go away. We've tried to make them go away, but they don't go away. They keep coming back. To have available in the conscious mind a working knowledge of how this happens, how you do this, is what allows music to come through. To give a more down-to-earth explanation, for us to write words on paper with a pencil or pen, just consider the amount of technical information your brain has to have and the muscle information it has to have. Also it needs the knowledge of language, the knowledge of the forms of script. If you have all this information and training, you can have a thought and your hand can suddenly leap into action. A whole array of symbolic stuff appears on the page without your even thinking about it. The same with speech. If I were required to know the sentence structure—that is to consciously have to think my way through the technical end of grammar in order to speak to you—I wouldn't be able to talk. But we glide over the surface of grammar, which is an extremely complicated business, and we glide over the surface of symbolic sounds which we all agree have meaning. That is we share these meanings with each other, and I can speak to you. This act of speaking is extremely complicated, as is the act of writing down music.
My ability to write music has to be as fluent as my ability to speak or my ability to write words. Once that's there, then it goes on automatic. When a thought comes through, I'm not wrestling with how to write it down. It just happens. I know how to do that. The thoughts appear and instantly the shape, the intervallic shape, the rhythmic shape, all the expressive markings come along with and they get written down. What that allows then is a quality of conception, which at times can be just awfully slow, but at times can be speedy beyond your understanding. There are times, for instance, when I can go into a session of composing and have an entire landscape suddenly appear in the mind. You can see it all go click and you say, "Oh, that's how that is," and then the rest of it is finding out how to write the notes down.
PS: How much do you look back into music history when you are formulating ideas for a piece?
DM: You mean consciously try to emulate?
PS: Well, not so much emulate, but say you hear a melody in your head, do you say, "This melody would fit best in a chorale,"—in a specific form that has been used in the past. How do you create that?
DM: The answer first has to do with receiving something and receiving it without worrying about what it is or what it's supposed to be. I don't initially pre-conceive any form. I start by allowing sounds to come into my mind and to hear relationships and to be moved by the feelings that want to happen. At a certain point, some distance into that thought process, it becomes clear that certain kinds of formal things are happening, certain ways of doing phrases, certain ways of collecting phrases into larger sections begin to show up. At that point, my understanding of the traditional musical form may lead me to use one of the established shapes, say sonata form.
We can go through the Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano, for instance, and see its relationship to classical sonata form. At other times, the musical material is such that it doesn't have a musical name from traditional forms. In that case, I don't worry about that. I just write the music as it wants to happen. But I do know classical forms. I find that these ways of shaping things are still current. It's interesting to consider classical forms, for a minute, as to what they really are. Where did Mozart get sonata form? Where did it come from?" You can trace the antecedents of Classical sonata form to the small pieces of Scarlatti. Do you know anything about Scarlatti sonatas?
PS: Yes.
DM: They tend to be about two pages long with a strong cadence at the halfway point. Scarlatti's idea of a sonata form is a starting at a point, an excursion to someplace else, and a return to a starting point. You can summarize it like that. The Classical sonata form is an evolution of this idea. The exposition with its several themes is the starting point, the development is the excursion to someplace else, and the recapitulation is the return. The need to shape sound in this way is an archetypal thing that comes out of the deep unconscious. This way of shaping things, this idea of statement, contrast and return just doesn't go away. It's current. The problem continues to exist: How do you deal with a statement? What do you do next? What is contrast for you? What is evolution of material? To ask if I look back into music history and use historical forms, the answer is yes, but my composing has to do with the idea of form as a living process, and the fact that the sonata is still an evolving idea.
PS: Which composers, then, would you say played a major role in your development?
DM: Well, there's a bunch. I'll often cite the major ones I remember as a child: the music of Bach, which still operates in me a lot. The music of the Classical period has never moved me a lot. I find some of it interesting, but it's not my favorite music. In the 19th century—lots of composers. Early in my life, Chopin was a big influence. The piano composers: Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann. Symphonic things have been more powerful in me than the operatic things. My line of development tends to go through Brahms, for instance, and not so much through Wagner. In the 20th century, Schönberg, Stravinsky, Bartók. These are easy names to say. Every composer is influenced by these people. I had a great interest in the music of Elliot Carter in my student days in the 1960s and early 70s. It seems the word "minimalist" comes up a lot in descriptions of my work. I never did subscribe to that as a term to apply to my music. I think it's no longer a relevant term for anybody, as a matter of fact. The one thing that I did find most interesting in the music of Phillip Glass and John Adams and the people who did the original "minimalist" writing was that it allowed a breath of air into an otherwise intellectually overgrown compositional practice.
What I want to say most about influence is that yes, there are all of these influences that come through the great traditions of Western music, but there is also the fact of being born and raised in the United States. That means a very large dose of popular music. The music that I was aware of as a young boy was big band music from World War II and certain kinds of jazz—I'm partial to old jazz and certain kinds of modern jazz. I'm very partial to gospel music, especially the male vocal groups. I'm partial to blues and those things that have come out of the country traditions.
There is gospel music and its relationship to blues and to early jazz, and that relationship to other popular music. As a kid, I grew up with the beginnings of rock and roll. The very beginnings of it happened when I was a young teenager. I saw the first performance of Elvis Presley on national television, for instance. These things made big impressions. I listened to this music intently as a kid, until I got be about 20, I guess, and then I stopped listening to rock. It made a big impact. There is an American musical speech. It is not a single issue, but it is a way of thinking and feeling and using language which has come out of American grassroots. This is as important to my music-making as the major composers of the European tradition. I have absorbed the European tradition but I am an American person with an American speech.
PS: What would you say you have taken from those composers and performers? What do you feel you have in common with your influences?
DM: Let's see if I can make some specific references to things. I'm thinking first of Brahms and the fact that he remains central to my sense of good music. What I like most about him is his sense of craftsmanship, his ability to make a seamless whole. The music starts and moves consistently through its space. At the same time, for all its formal elegance, he has a power, a sense of passion and of emotional purpose in the music. I like that quality. I like the idea of writing pieces that are called "Sonata" or pieces that are called "Symphony". I'm very partial to things that don't have a title as such and which I refer to "plain brown wrapper" music—you don't know what you're going to get when you get into it. There is no explanation for it; it just is.
Other composers, things that have attracted me a lot, I'm thinking now of Stravinsky, Rite of Spring. I don't think any composer can escape that piece and its surprising qualities of instrumental usage. Along those lines, of course the music of Debussy and Ravel. Debussy in particular. His music has always been a matter of great interest to me. I think, for instance, Afternoon of the Faun, which is quite a brief piece—I think it's about 120 measures of music—I think is one of the great pieces. It told me more about making music than lots and lots of other music. What I found in Debussy was his ability to respond to the moments and to let the moment move him. He also had that power of making these momentary feelings into bigger shapes, which made coherent sense in and of themselves. But Debussy was not constricted by any allegiance to established form. He built things out of moments. His backdrop is Wagner and the use of the motif as an evolutionary thing. And yet he took it in quite a different way and made it his own personal statement. One nice story about Debussy, was that the premiere of Afternoon of the Faun received a poor review from one critic in a newspaper who complained that it didn't have any development. That was the key issue. It didn't do the German development thing. It became itself one moment at a time. Obviously for that critic this was a confounding idea. But I loved that aspect of it.
Further on in the 20th century music, I was very attracted to experimental kinds of things: music of Harry Parch, music of John Cage. These are two composers who don't share the same aesthetic space at all. The space they do share has to do with building their own way of thinking about the universe. I find Cage often to be very refreshing just as a different way of viewing the universe; Harry Parch in the same sense because he invented his own instruments and invented his own intonation systems. This quality of becoming oneself, which these people asserted, is a quality shared by every good artist.
PS: What would you say your influence has been in 20th century music?
DM: I'm not qualified to answer that question. I can poke at it but I think it's finally best left alone. I leave that for other people to assess. I have written a fair quantity of music, which has been played a lot, especially my wind band music and some of the chamber music. But I have no way finally of assessing its general influence. I have some feedback from people, but what it means to the whole question of music in this country, I can't begin to answer. Just let it lie there.
PS: Have you noticed a change in your music from your early years to more recent times? A change in viewpoint or maturity?
DM: Yes, I do. The early music has about it a starkness and an angularity and a predilection for sharply dissonant kinds of sonorities and surprising things. I've come to recognize it as an explosive kind of thing which had to work its way through my personality. There have been very distinct marking points along the way. This kind of explosive and angry music of the earlier years very abruptly changed. That was in 1976. That was a time of great personal turmoil. There was a period of about eighteen months in which I didn't write anything simply because I was going through too many problems. When I came out the other side of that and began to compose again, suddenly things were different. The music was of a different character. It had absorbed all of that angry stuff and turned into something which was more directly powerful. Tonality has always underlain everything I've written, but it became clearer and more obvious as it got past the 1976 area…a clearer, open, tonal melody began to appear in the music. That was at a time when the prevailing compositional practice was essentially 12-tone and serialism at least in New York City, where I was living. I seemed to be somewhat out of step with it, but my whole feeling was I needed to do what I needed to do, whatever it was, and I never followed anybody's particular prescription or school of writing. So I just went ahead and did what felt right to me. It resulted in a very large quantity of music that established my reputation particularly in wind writing.
This all came to another point of accumulation with the composition of the Mass, which was completed in 1995. The Mass was a cumulative project that brought everything into one place that I had been thinking for the previous twenty years. When I finished that, I didn't know really again who I was anymore and I had to start reinventing myself. What I've been doing for the last two or three years is trying to find a new path. The pieces that were premiered in November represent elements of that new path. You see in them what could be seen as a complete regression to absolutely tonal music and the traditional ways of going about things. I'm not trying to make a statement about how music should be written. Rather, I'm just following the internal needs which say, "I like this,"; it feels good to do this and make music this way. I've done a lot of study in the Bach chorales and I use them as kind of contemplation. They've told me a whole bunch about how to make music. They get drawn into the music and into the way I think about music-making. What has come out of the chorales has been a very clear way of making melodies and a very clear sensitivity to harmonic motion as it relates to melodies.
It's a very childlike thing which happens now. I'm attracted by bright colors. Red is beautiful. Shiny objects are beautiful. Things that a baby would be attracted to attract my attention. They come out in musical terms in what seem to be extremely simple textures at times yet those textures tend to conceal a whole lifetime of experience and of thought and feeling so that a whole note in a given texture is not just four beats of something, it's a whole world. So the music begins to look simpler on the page and yet it becomes more difficult to perform well.
PS: Do you feel that commissioners' expectations help or hinder developments that you would like to undertake?
DM: Well, the happy thing is that when people ask me to write a piece of music, they don't offer opinions as to what it ought to be. And that's good. The business of commissions is—and I love this—it means that there are people who really like the music and are interested in producing something new. I have arrived at a position where people trust that I will do something good. They are willing to say, "We'd like you to write a piece and you're free to do what you want." There are times when commissions are more restrictive. For instance, when I'm writing for younger players, I have to take into account technical restrictions, length restrictions, and so on. Once I understand the limits I can find my way to work. This balance point between commissioning and so called free composing has really been a wonderful thing for me—to have someone say these are the instruments I get to use, and here, in some terms, are the restrictions of a piece of a certain relative size, and depending on the players, the level of difficulty, and so on. That offers the stimulus but it in no way forces me to repeat something that I've done already. I don't try to make another one of something that people really liked. Sometimes composers get in trouble with that because they write a successful piece and then the next people say, "We want one just like that." Composers sometimes attempt to say, "Okay, I'll try to write one sort of like that again." That's where you get into trouble. For me, what comes out, comes out.
When Steve Jordheim and Dane Richeson asked me to write a new piece, I'm not sure what they were expecting. Steve's experience with my music was largely through the Sonata, and Dane's was through my very demanding solo works for marimba. Having played the "Sonata", I think Steve was prepared for anything. I could have written him something again which would be viciously difficult and of the immense strain that the Sonata requires. When I began to get into the piece, well, it didn't become that at all. It became itself. It was something very different than the Sonata. Altogether different than the Sonata.
PS: My honest first reaction, Mr. Jordheim gave me a copy of the score [of Song Book], was that of surprise. The familiar/family-based nature of a songbook caught me off guard.
(Laughter)
DM: The feel of the movements became in some ways whimsical and the look of the music—some of it looks bizarrely simple. But it's just the issue of simplicity which has started to intrigue me deeply. What is a sustained tone? What do you do with it? What does a performer do with it? How much direction does a performer need? What I'm asking for with this kind of music more and more is that a performer has to dream as intently as I dream and has to come with parallel sense in himself…and this is what a good performer does in any case. This is why Steve Jordheim plays the Sonata so well—he's a passionate dreamer and can find that in himself. He may not have it in words, he may not even know that he's doing it, but he does it and the music comes out that way. This music now requires that very intently. The performer must enter into the dream fully and become himself with the music. We'll see how it works. I'm hoping it works very well. Every time I write a piece I always have to say that, "I think it's going to work. I really hope it does." But it really has to prove itself out. I'm pretty confident that as I write stuff, that it's okay. I'm eager to hear how all this goes and to work with the performers now to shape it out properly. I'll see what they give me, as always is the case, and then we'll work on this whole idea of opening the imagination and opening the mind to receive what wants to happen in the space.
PS: You often feature the woodwinds, is there any reason why?
DM: Well, several. One is that I started as a clarinet player and came up through bands in the public schools and had some orchestral exposure as a high school student and some as a college student. But my primary performance vehicles were bands and wind ensembles and wind chamber music. This is the sound that came to mind. Also, as a college student, I got to play some of the very best of the older pieces, for instance the Stravinsky Symphonies of Wind Instruments, the Schönberg chamber symphonies, which are not strictly wind pieces but there are significant wind parts in them; and the wind sonatas of the major composers, the Brahms clarinet sonatas, for instance. This music was at my core. I've always loved the qualities of wind instruments and the way they work together. All musical sound is wonderful. String sound is wonderful and yet the way in which wind sound was used by the great composers of the early part of the century, particularly Stravinsky, and the way he created the distinct characters of each of these instruments was very appealing to me. Edgar Varese as well. We did music of his at Oberlin at that time. It just struck me powerfully the sharp-edged quality the wind instruments could produce.
When I first started thinking about writing large ensemble works, the very first thing that struck me would be to write for wind instruments rather than traditional orchestral forces. So I did that. When I got out on my own in my first teaching position and decided to write a piece, the first thing I wrote was a Concerto for piano and wind instruments. This had its genesis probably in the Stravinsky Concerto for Piano and Winds. That was the starting point. I had the good fortune with that piece of having it performed by the Eastman Wind Ensemble with Frederick Fennell conducting. He gave recommendations to people including John Paynter, who performed the piano concerto and then asked me to write what became A Child's Garden of Dreams. From there on, people began asking me to write for wind ensembles and bands, and I was just happy to have the attention. That became the career path, and I followed it along.
The two things that have moved my wind writing are: people wanting the music and my having a particular penchant for these qualities of wind and percussion instruments. I think it's particularly significant to have performers want the music. Music for wind ensembles has blossomed in the past thirty years, simply blossomed, so the ensemble is a serious musical element in the evolution of modern music. I remember Owen Reed, with whom I studied in graduate school, saying the typical thing: "As a serious composer, you're allowed to write one band piece. If you write two band pieces, then you are stigmatized as a band composer and nobody takes you seriously again ever." I certainly didn't follow that advice. Neither did Owen Reed, for that matter. The music he's known for is his wind music. So it turns out that I just went wholesale into the writing of wind music. At the same time, I had written a whole bunch of other stuff too. I had figured that my pieces for wind instruments, at least for wind bands, amount to about 1/3 of my output altogether. Things have continued and I find that certain wind voices are very attractive to me. The saxophone has grown in my imagination over the years and is a primary instrument in my thinking. I love the sounds that these instruments make. I have loved the opportunity to compose for them and so there is quite a bit of music now for the saxophones.
PS: Did you originally intend on composing for non-traditional, non-orchestral instruments?
DM: No, not necessarily. If things come up, if people ask me to do stuff…I've written, for instance, two marimba concertos. One of them is for marimba and percussion instruments. Well, it was a request from a marimba player that produced the first one and that just turned out to be itself. Then I was commissioned by the Air Force Band for the second piece—they wanted the piece to inaugurate their new five-octave marimba. I don't know. It seems to have come to me to write pieces for the "non-traditional" instruments. It's always interested me. The whole idea of composing interests me. When people ask for a specific instrument, I think, "Well, what does that sound like?" This enters into a very interesting area of thought as to how to write for instruments. I remember the very first marimba piece I wrote, the solo piece, it's called Variations on Lost Love. This was written in 1977 for Lee Howard Stevens. I had a commission from the New York State Music Educators to write a piece for him. I went to hear him in concert and was very impressed with what I heard. I went away and said, "Now what does it feel like to be a marimba?" I actually placed myself in the instrument, mentally, that is, in an imaginative way, and felt what it felt like to produce sound as a marimba. Then I just listened in my head to what was happening and started to compose. And out of that came a piece which marimba players love. I get performance notices of it from all over the world. The imaginative process is one of going into the instrument and saying, "What does it feel like to be that instrument? What does it say?" Then the instrument speaks. I'm able to do that. But I'm guessing that's the process for any composer.
PS: What kind of instrument or ensemble would you say best matches the voice you hear?
DM: That's a hard question. The answer is in part that I really do love instrumental sounds and musical sounds of all kinds. I think it's clear in my large ensemble music that the wind ensemble music has dominated, has been center stage. If someone comes and says, "Would you write an orchestral piece that included X number of instruments of this and this type," I would say yes and be thrilled to do that. The sound world that evolves has to do with the instruments that are needed to be used. I have evolved my own sense of what it is to write for wind instrument. The evolution that has taken place in my more recent writing has been toward less dense textures, and toward more open kinds of sounds. Things that allow individual colors to show themselves. Low wind colors are becoming very important to me these days. Winds with percussion of one kind or another. Use of piano and organ in ensembles.
PS: Do you feel that you had a liberating advantage by receiving non-traditional commissions?
DM: I don't know. The result has to be good music. Just the novelty of a different instrument doesn't make good music. Novelty for its own sake really, really doesn't do anything useful. I'd have to say that it's not necessarily an advantage. It certainly has resulted in music that the people who play these instruments use. I guess that's the right thing—that's an advantage. I didn't set out deliberately to do something unusual for the sake of being unusual. It's what came to me and what I had a penchant for.
PS: Thank you very much for your time and your wonderful writing for the saxophone. I hope you will continue to compose for all musicians, and I wish you the best in the future.
DM: Thank you. My best to you too.
