For his new work for the Grammy Award-winning Parker Quartet, Jeremy Gill drew inspiration from a book described as a “kaleidoscope of postmodern fairy tales.” Motherwhere is a concerto grosso for the Parkers and New York Classical Players, who perform the world premiere on April 1, 2022.
In our insider interview with Jeremy, we spoke about his love for reading, collaborating with the Parkers and NY Classical Players, and writing for string quartet and orchestra.
Tell us a little about Night School: A Reader for Grownups, the book which your composition Motherwhere is based on. How did you come across this fascinating collection of stories? What gripped or fascinated you about it?
My wife and I are both avid readers, and a couple of years ago we decided that we would try something new: we would each read an author we had never read before whose last name began with A, B, C, etc., through Z. We chose our books (mostly) from the shelves of the McNally Jackson on Prince Street, in Greenwich Village, one of our favorite local bookstores.
My “B” author was Zsófia Bán, and I loved her book from the very first reading, for so many reasons. Firstly, her language itself is wonderfully musical – its rhythms and cadences – despite the fact that I was reading her in translation! (This is a great credit to her translator, Jim Tucker, who managers to translate her Hungarian into a wonderfully idiosyncratic, though natural-sounding English.) Secondly, she manages to perfectly balance whimsy and wisdom, such that one’s never entirely sure if she’s being serious or having a laugh; in this way, she recalls Italo Calvino (one of my favorite writers). Thirdly, she often allows the reader to watch her think “on the page” – we get to follow her train of thought and thrill at her obviously quick wit and sharp, sharp mind (here she recalls Anne Carson to me, another favorite). Fourthly (I could go on and on), she manages somehow to create a unity of twenty-one distinct and seemingly unrelated tales.
There is a magical through-line that runs from the first tale (depicting the surprising disappearance of “Motherwhere” – a kind of Ur-mother – all the way to the last tale titled “The Miraculous Return of Laughter,” in which a (maybe) post-Soviet “thaw” is translated into the contagious spread of existential merriment. My subsequent readings revealed many more layers, and unearthed unexpected connections between tales, sometimes via seemingly insignificant details. This, like her language, is very musical – as when a melodic fragment turns up much later in a work, in an entirely different context…
You’ve said “I wanted to evoke, musically, the experience of reading [Night School]. What was your experience reading it, and how does that translate to your composition?
Ultimately, I felt most strongly that the book is somehow many wildly, beautifully varied expressions of a few simple themes or ideas. Absence is one theme – this is obviously Motherwhere’s “condition,” but most of the characters that appear in the book are profoundly alone, and many of them are acutely aware of being so. One of the funniest stories is “Mrs. Longfellow Burns,” a campy, mocking quasi-biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in which Mrs. Longfellow – who ends in ashes – is somehow the lonely heart of “his” story. Another theme is the feminine perspective, which for me as a male reader made each character freshly “Other”, and had me constantly reevaluating my assumptions about motivation and desire.
My work – a concerto for string quartet and string orchestra – takes the form of twenty-one bagatelles, with each bagatelle corresponding to one story (in the order in which they appear in the book). In order to translate her use of “themes” into musical ideas, I came up with some very basic musical conceits that run throughout all the bagatelles. These are purely musical (not correlated to her literary themes) – symmetry (primarily pitch-based, with the D above middle C acting as fulcrum), the open strings, and the exploration of like-interval sonorities (sections based mostly on seconds, thirds, fourths, etc.).
Having these abstract musical anchors allowed me then to “react,” compositionally, to each of her tales. Sometimes, I made a very detailed reflection of her story in the music. One example is “What Is This Thing Called the Exchange Reaction,” which depicts a love quadrangle told through the guise of a couples ping-pong match: my four quartet members each assume a specific character in the story, and musically play out their shifting relationships. It’s a literal transposition of the story into music. When the (spoiler alert!) two female characters wind up going off together, they transform into the “Two Fridas” of the ensuing story. Other times, my musical reflections are more circumspect: “How I Didn’t” gives six parodic accounts of how and when the author did not meet a literary personage she admires, but my music is entirely concerned with only the final non-meeting, which takes place at the edge of the North Sea (the sea as Ur-mother is another of her important themes). Most often, though, my musical reflections of Bán’s tales are more purely emotional – music is, literally, non-narrative, so the best way I could find to encapsulate the experience of reading her was to try to match up the emotional evocations of the music and the tale – what was the emotional residue left by the tale? This was probably my most typical approach to writing each bagatelle.
The work features the award-winning Parker Quartet, a group with whom you’ve collaborated numerous times. Tell about the collaborative process of writing music for them.
I love the Parker Quartet – I first wrote for them in 2006, when they were relatively newly minted. I had received a commission from Market Square Concerts (Harrisburg, PA) to compose a 25th anniversary piece and I had my pick of the artists appearing that season. I responded deeply to the Parker Quartet’s playing and I wrote them a letter, included some of my music, and told them that I wanted to write for them but ONLY if they wanted a piece from me. In their typical, thoughtful and thorough way, they took the requisite time to get to know my music. They responded well to it, and said they’d love a piece from me. We had a wonderful first collaboration.
Over the ensuing years I’ve gone to hear them whenever we’re in the same general area, and we’ve worked together on other projects – I produced their wonderful recording of Mendelssohn quartets, for example. The last piece I wrote for them was Capriccio, an hour-long quartet in 27 movements commissioned by Chamber Music America. Capriccio felt like the ultimate string quartet composition for me (in that piece, I wrote that I aimed “to encapsulate, technically, expressively, and texturally, all that is possible for the string quartet”), so a next work for them would have to be completely different. Enter Motherwhere, a concerto for string quartet with string orchestra…
Writing for the Parkers is every composer’s dream: I feel like they “get me” completely, and always find in my music exactly what I hoped they would find (and often pleasantly surprise me by amplifying things I only partially realized myself). They are technically perfect, but go so far beyond that in their understanding and sense of the music. They complement one another perfectly – I feel like they are THE string quartet of today, and I’m lucky to have worked with them so often and for so long.
Motherwhere is scored for string quartet and string orchestra. You don’t see that every day! Which compositions for this instrumentation inspired you? How does the quartet’s solo part stand apart from the string orchestra accompaniment?
There is one great work for string quartet and string orchestra that I know – Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro – but there are many wonderful works for string orchestra that make incidental use of a solo quartet: Bartók’s Divertimento, Stravinsky’s Concerto in D, Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Vaughan-Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. These are a few of the nearly two dozen works I repeatedly revisited while composing Motherwhere. My solo quartet stands apart from the ensemble in its musical function – it is the primary source of musical material, and usually carries the expressive weight of each bagatelle.
The last concerto I wrote before Motherwhere was Concerto d’avorio for four-hands piano and orchestra, and I learned in that piece that a chamber music “soloist” is quite different from a solitary soloist. Throughout, the chamber music soloist needs to function as a chamber group – not as a collection of independent soloists. This might seem obvious (or inconsequential), but this way of thinking about the soloists was crucial for me. It also makes rehearsing the piece a (hopefully) more pleasant task – the quartet will spend a lot of time learning the piece away from the orchestra, and that learning process would be dreadful if the four parts only made sense in the context of the orchestra – they need to have their own, chamber identity that feels compelling on its own.
What do you hope audiences get from hearing this music?
I want the audience to feel – in so far as this is possible – my love and admiration for Night School, Bán’s wonderfully fun, inventive, witty, touching, thrilling book. If I managed to capture half of her infectious spirit and can translate that to the audience, this will be a great success! I hope, too, that the audience senses some of the affection I have for the Parker Quartet: writing for them is such a joy, and I hope that joy is manifest in the notes I wrote for them.
This is my first time working with New York Classical Players; they are fantastic, and Dongmin Kim is a wonderful conductor and – from everything I’ve heard – an ideal collaborator. The string orchestra is one of the most mind-bogglingly varied and malleable ensembles, and my approach to writing for the string orchestra throughout is to let it sound well. This, again, may seem obvious, but the older I get, the more I find myself focusing on creating the ideal musical environment in which musicians can sound and play their best. Musicians play the music they love because it gives them great pleasure to do so, and my aim is to afford them the kind of pleasure that draws them back to the work for repeated doses. When that mutual affection comes off the stage and makes its way into the audience – that’s when everything is working as it should.
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