My grandmother was a pianist in theaters for early movies. And she was deaf since the age of 17. I remember her sitting at the piano and merrily tinkering away; she said she could feel the vibrations. I must have been four. Whenever I had a chance I would go to the piano and just mash around with the keys, pretending to play like her. But when I was in first grade in public school in New York City, they paraded a few instruments on stage in assembly, and we could choose which ones to take lessons on. I chose the violin, and played in school orchestras.
Later, I began playing blues and bluegrass with friends. My brother taught me some basic guitar chords. Since the mandolin is tuned like a violin, it was easy to add that on. I picked up Pete Seeger’s book, How to Play the 5-String Banjo, never dreaming that one day I would be playing folk festivals onstage with Pete.
In college I came to appreciate the viola, loving the inner voices. I studied with Jacob Glick, a real master, and the viola became my primary instrument. Some familiarity with piano has unlocked the accordion for me, and through the accordion, the concertina. I think, to be a true instrumentalist, it’s best to choose one instrument and stick to it, but as a composer, I have found it deliciously rewarding to keep an open mind instrumentally, and see how the instruments connect one to another.
Your new album, Restless Nation, is entirely instrumental concert music written by you. You’ve spent a good deal of your career writing music for theater, dance and film. What are the challenges – and the rewards – of writing music that is intended to stand on its own?
Yes, I do love to create music for theater and dance, but there’s something liberating about entering the world of instrumental music, letting go of words and theatrical concepts to communicate only in the language of music. If you’ve ever been in an Irish pub during a traditional seisún, then you know what it means to let the instrument take over, and give the fingers free reign. The challenge of creating “absolute” music is that you bring yourself face to face with the blank manuscript; there is no roadmap in poem, story, or lyric. And so, you begin to ask the really fruitful musical questions: what am I exploring in purely musical terms? Is there a DNA to this piece I’m composing, to this series of movements, and to my own signature style?
There are things I find myself much freer to explore in non-theatrical music. In “Restless Nation,” this has to do with rhythmic intensity in asymmetrical meters. In “Azazme Songs,” it concerns the microtonality of the Arab Maqam system, and also how to take the simple Bedouin tunes and make them meaningful in a longer context. The orchestral piece, “Letter from Woody,” is particularly interesting in this context, since it alludes to some of the iconic American balladeer Woody Guthrie’s songs. Again, my affinity for asymmetrical meter removes these songs from their original, eight-bar settings. But in this case, a longer version of the piece exists (unrecorded) as a dramatic work for orchestra, actor/folksinger and dancer.
The compositions on Restless Nation include the Oud, a non-western instrument, and folk instruments including the Nyckelharpa, bringing sonorities and tunings that are not typically part of “traditional” classical music. How do you mesh these contrasting sounds together, without the music becoming a “melting pot” of styles?
This has been a key question for me for several years now. As both a folk musician and a composer of new music, my model has always been Béla Bartók, who collected and revered folk music and also created groundbreaking new music. The issue of retaining the integrity of the folk influences while creating something new that is infused with the energy of this music is fascinating.
While I don’t have a clear answer in words, I can say that this requires the work of going deep into the folk tradition, not just learning a little about it. So it’s a long process of exploration that continues in each new piece. Also, as a professor in the NYU Tisch Dance Department, I find this question increasingly of interest to students, who are more and more striving to bring their own cultural roots into their music and dance.
For four years, I directed an NYU research Working Group, Translucent Borders, which brought contemporary composers and choreographers to Cuba, Ghana and the Middle East (www.translucentborders.com). We found that the disparity between the group identity of traditional folk arts and the individual expression of the contemporary composer or choreographer affects everything from music and dance vocabulary to perceptions of time. “The Ghanaian drummer and dancer Sulley Imoro told me “In our music there is no beginning or ending,” and Adel Al-Walidi, an Azazme Bedouin near the Israeli border with Egypt shared a similar thought: “All these songs are connected, the song never stops.”
But in the world of new classical music, development and form dominate training and creative process. In America and Western Europe, the pioneering artistic trends through most of the twentieth century usually distanced themselves from ethnicity or ancestral tradition, viewed as antithetical to innovative work. As I mentioned, Bartók ingeniously brought these two seemingly opposing viewpoints to resolution, making this question the crux of his work, and I take him to be an illuminating model. He believed that one should become so imbued with the folk influence that it pervades the new music and becomes the composer’s “mother tongue.”
With the rising consciousness of cultural identity and global equanimity, it’s time that composers, without neglecting the remarkable innovations of modernism and abstraction, learn to speak in their mother-tongue. I feel this is a life-long pursuit, and this album, with new compositions based on several folk traditions I’ve been learning over the years, is, for me, a big step in that direction.
In the liner notes, you mention that Azazme Songs were inspired by a trip across the desert with a Bedouin family and the oud player Yair Dalal. How did you get invited to travel with this group? Can you share a highlight or anecdote or two from this journey that was expressed in the music?
Yair Dalal is one of the great Israeli leaders in music. As an Iraqi Jew, he has also been at the forefront of Israeli/Arab musical dialogue. I’ve always admired his music, and I interviewed him as part of my Translucent Borders project, which looked at the role of music and dance at borders. After the interview, he invited me on this journey.
The trek was the dream-child of Yair and his Bedouin friend, Adel al-Walidi. Yair told me they had the idea of making a hike to “fill the desert with music.” Our group was made up of musicians drawn from Israel, many of them long-time students of Yair’s, and the local Bedouin community. I joined the journey from Ezuz, at the Israeli-Egyptian border, to Mitzpeh Ramon, Israel’s Grand Canyon, across the Aravah Valley of the Negev Desert.
We were about fifteen people and several sherpa camels. The desert is a marvelous place to let go of everything—there’s no cell service, just open space; you’re nowhere and yet you’re in the center.
Musically, our evenings were unforgettable. I’ll paint the scene: Tea and coffee are brewing; people are cooking. Music begins, ouds and violins, made up of one short repeating phrase, lyrical and endearing. I hear something that sounds very much like an Appalachian lap dulcimer. It’s a strummed instrument called a sumsumia that looks like a small harp, played by a man named Anad. I lie down in the sand close to the fire. My horizontal pose induces a feeling of both release and connection. My eyes are filled with more stars than I ever imagined one could see, with an occasional spark from the fire entering my field of vision. And the music’s sweet phrase turns over and over, the melodic equivalent of patience, of understanding, of companionship.
Over the next few days this music becomes a colored thread that weaves everything together. I try to learn what it is that makes this music so compelling to me, beginning with the sense of time. The sumsumia lays down an underpinning of constant eighth-note chords. Around the fire, people sing, often in even half-notes, a simple melody. I learn that this kind of Bedouin tune is called a Hjennie, a song of the camel drivers. The easy tempo of the singing is like someone walking, while the instrumental accompaniment is fast and patterned, as if carrying the singing. I can imagine camel drivers making up these tunes, singing them over and over on their desert crossings, for comfort. It brings to mind the American nature writer Edward Abby describing how he would sometimes make a small “comfort” fire in the desert.
The concept of maqam is more fluid than that of the scale. It’s not limited to the equal-tempered tones of Western music that developed to serve a keyboard-centered musical culture. Rather, the maqam tradition reflects the prevalence of the human voice, flutes, and bowed or unfretted string instruments such as the ouds played here. The maqam is a pan-Arab cultural phenomenon, found throughout the Mideastern nations and in many other places across the globe. The concept is historically resonant in this spot we were hiking, a point of nexus between the Persian musical culture to the east (and further, the ragas of India), and the African cultures to the west.
It may seem strange that I used the Appalachian dulcimer in Azazme Songs, bringing together these two far-flung instruments, oud and dulcimer. But the sound is very much like the sumsumia, and gives the piece its rhythmic flavor. Also, the clapping in the piece is reminiscent of the dance the Bedouins did around the fire, linking elbows and clapping their hands on each downbeat.
Similarly, you mentioned that Restless Nation was inspired by a yearlong journey with your young family. Can you share a highlight or anecdote or two from this journey that you express in the music?
We picked up a pop-up camper on Ebay and began going across the country through the state and national parks, homeschooling along the way. At one point we found a campsite with a laundry cabin, and I remember one night spreading my score sheets across the washer and drier and working through the early morning while my family slept in the camper.
There are some specific associations in the piece; The first movement, “My Eyes Were Hungry,” is titled by my son. When we hiked into the Grand Canyon, he said, “Papa, my eyes were hungry…and I didn’t know it.” The second movement is very much a reflection on the Smoky Mountains, beginning and ending with the late-evening rhythms of crickets and katydids. And the slow fifth movement, “Of Rocks and Rivers,” brings to mind our time hiking in the Big Bend National Park, on the Rio Grande in Texas.
I tried to bring some of the sense of awe to this music that one feels only after spending a long time in nature, whether wading through shimmering river canyons or coming upon an expansive view from a cliff. The final movement, “Finding Our Way Home,” takes all that restless energy we felt on the open road and directs it toward the road home, like when horses head back to the barn. It uses a scordatura tuning in the first violin, where the E string is tuned down to a C#, in the style of the old-time Southern fiddlers.
