A Question

I am now towards the end of the second iteration of a book I am writing, a book that is part of an exchange with Wiff Rudd. Wiff has already written his book, called Side by Side, and it is a truly wonderful book. Side by Side is about teaching and the concept of creating a great culture in a university music studio. Wiff has done such a great job with the topic that I have decided to go in a different direction with my book.

When thinking of my life I realize that I’ve been lucky enough to experience many different sides of music, and so the book contains different chapters about each of the areas of music where I was a participant. I’ve free-lanced in Los Angeles, played in different orchestras, played both chamber music and solo music, and done a lot of teaching. These days I’m a composer who started a podcast and a also Substack page. So my thought and hope is that by talking about my experiences in these different areas I can show how classical music covers such a wide and beautiful range of expression, and what it is like to be in the middle of it all. During the course of the book I will use these different areas of music to cover topics that I think are interesting and hopefully informative (below, as an example, is an excerpt about interpretation).

So my question is this: I have no doubt forgotten to discuss a topic or two in this book. If any reader of this post is inclined, please feel free to send ideas about topics that are interesting to you or which could possibly be discussed. I can’t guarantee that I will include them in the book, but it will sure make me think about things. Many thanks for your any thoughts you might have……and here are my thoughts about interpretation that will be included in the book:

But this brings up the topic of interpretation, which I can talk about as both performer and composer. And I must say that the way I view things is not logical at all.

Perhaps because of my studies with Tom Stevens my tendency as a performer was to be quite literal in interpreting what a composer has written. And it still is when I am giving a master class. But as a composer I have had many different interpretations of pieces of mine, and they all seem fairly interesting, thus I am not nearly as literal. So here are a couple of stories about interpretation and how to approach interpretation, which combined actually might muddy up the waters a bit.

Years ago I taught for a few weeks in Rome at the Academia di Santa Cecilia. A student named Giovanni played a solo piece by Frank Campo called Times, a piece I had performed this piece many times and knew quite well. Giovanni was a terrific player, and played it in a fairly romantic manner, which I said I didn’t think it was the correct interpretation for the piece. But Giovanni liked his interpretation (and I like it when a performer will stand up for his/her beliefs) so I said, “Frank is a friend of mine, and he speaks Italian. So let’s call him later today and you can speak to him.” We did and Frank’s answer when Giovanni asked if he could give a romantic interpretation to Times was, “Of course you can; it just won’t be my music.”

I think that students have a huge advantage these days that very seldom is realized. And that is that with internet and websites they can contact a composer directly to ask about interpretation…..or anything else. The worst that can happen is no reply. A perfect example of this was when I was working with Eddie Ludema in Freiburg about Masks for Trumpet and Piano by Dana Wilson. Eddie had some questions (and thoughts) about the piece that I didn’t really feel qualified to answer. So I suggested that Eddie write to Mr. Wilson. And Eddie’s reply was, “no, I can’t do that.” “Why?” said I. “I just can’t” was the answer. It took some pushing on my part, but Eddie finally wrote to Dana Wilson and got a lovely and detailed reply in return. So if you are a student who is reading this, write to a composer if you have questions about a piece of their music!

As mentioned, when I think of interpretation from a performers point of view, I tend to be pretty rigid. But as a composer I tend to be pretty flexible regarding interpretation. I would think that most people would be just the opposite……rigid regarding their own music and flexible regarding other people’s music. But in my case I have heard so many interpretations of my music that were not at all the way I was thinking when I wrote the piece……yet they usually worked, and sometimes worked better than I had originally anticipated.

My own idea about interpreting a piece is to start big and then go small. By that I mean one should start by first thinking of the architecture of the piece, and once there is a stable idea of what is most important with a piece then a person can narrow things down to movements, then sections, and finally phrases. I remember years ago hearing a trumpet student play the Theo Charlier Etude #2, a very lyrical and expressive etude, one of the best written for trumpet. And this student was making a statement with every phrase, playing every phrase as beautifully as possible, and with rubato. Dave Krehbiel once used the term “pissing on every tree” to describe this sort of phrasing. The problem with this is that at the end of the piece, instead of hearing a piece you just hear a series of phrases.

So the challenge is to construct a piece of music rather than a series of phrases. There is a well known quote attributed to William Faulkner, which is, “you must kill all your darlings.” By this he meant that if he wrote a sentence that he thought was particularly good or beautiful but didn’t fit into the architecture of the paragraph or chapter, he could not include it, no matter how beautiful it might be. I think the same thing applies to music as well. As an example, the great Mahler conductors, or great Bach conductors, all deal with the same thing…..one great passage after another. Yet they must somehow make sense of the larger piece. A perfect example of this for me is the Mahler 6th Symphony…..it begins in A minor and ends in A minor, but within the 80 or so minutes of the piece there seems to be almost all of what a human can experience. So how does a conductor manage that? I have no idea, but the great ones have found a way, and I imagine that part of their way is to know what is truly the most important material and what is secondary material.

As an example of changing interpretations, when I first began to perform Hindemith’s Sonata for Trumpet and Piano I thought that the entire piece led up to the tragic chorale at the end, and (even though it was physically painful) I played the chorale at a slow tempo so that it could, in a way, be a focal point of the entire piece. But over time I began to feel that the chorale was more like a coda to what had already taken place, and thus played it at a slightly faster tempo. However, just recently, in an interview with Chris Gekker for my podcast, he spoke of Hindemith’s own view of the chorale, as told to a friend of Chris, and that was that the chorale should be played like a Lutheran chorale, meaning faster than the normal tempo it is played today. And so it is never too late to learn something new, although I wish I had heard this earlier when I was a player.