Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

Transcription

Good evening and welcome. It's my great pleasure to be able to welcome Steve Reich to the GST and all of you really, it's a wonderful audience. It's already taken a long time for everyone to get here. So I'll really try to be as brief as possible. I'm sure we all want to hear and listen to Steve. So I'll be very brief. I also just want to say, before we get going that since I feel totally unprepared, I told Steve to be asking any questions about music, I have taken the liberty of inviting my friend, Hans Tutschku, who is the Professor of Music and Director of the Harvard University Studio for Electroacoustic Composition to join me also here on the stage to ask all the hard questions. So I'm very happy that he's here. I think everyone really knows Steve, you know his music, so you know that there's been many, many accolades. He's been called so many times our greatest living composer by many organizations. I think one of the things that is clearly important is really the history of his work and his range of experiences. Having studied philosophy to begin with, going to music, and then really both covering Western and non-Western traditions of music, which is obviously something which had such an important and deep impact on his work. The Guardian from London said once that there's just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history, and Steve Reich is one of them. When I talked to Steve about being here, like it would be completely normal thing, was asking, well, why like why in school of design? What's that got to do with music? And I feel that there are probably a lot of reasons. Of course, I'm very happy that there are a lot of musicians and composers here in the audience to help us with the event. But I can think at least of a couple of ways to answer that. One was really about the kind of the big picture, that obviously the work links to discussions of creativity. There's a sort of parallelism between the making of music and historically, the discussion of architecture, landscape, or the making of cities. And really, the people who work in this building, they are in the business of dealing with the works of imagination and I think understanding the parallels between that and that the work of Steve in composition is something that's very important for us. But I also think that there's a more specific maybe a more sort of precise thing, which is the way that he works often, the combination of voice and music, the relationship to ambient, sound is very much focused on questions of duration and time and temporality. And we are also in this business of how things live, how they come to live in time and I think is temporal dimension of music has a lot of connections with the way in which architects and landscape architects really think about the way in which a work is lived in a way, or the manner in which the concept of or the issues of the patterns of life, rhythms, repetitions, and acts of the building, have again, certain similarities or certain parallels with the way that is this concept of duration of temporality works. So at least those are a couple of examples. I'm sure there'll be others that you will want to discuss and raise, but without any further delay please welcome Steve Reich. [applause] Well, thank you all for coming. So what are we going to do this evening? We're going play-- I'm going to have played a piece of musical called WTC 911. It's performed by the Kronos Quartet, but it's not just one quartet, you'll actually be hearing three string quartets, which in performance, two of them are pre-recorded and one of them is live. It can also be performed with three string quartets and pre-recorded voices. So, who are the voices? Basically I'm going to be the living program notes, which you have in front of you. But such is life. My wife and I lived four blocks from ground zero for 25 years. On 9/11, my wife and I were in Vermont. We have a little house up there. And the phone rang about 8:30 in the morning. It was my son who was in our place in New York and with his daughter, our granddaughter, and his wife, our daughter-in-law. And he said, hey, I think, they've bombed the World Trade Center again. Because it had been done earlier. And they set a bomb in the basement only. And people, some people had died of smoke inhalation but it was nothing compared to what happened at 9/11. And we all jumped and turned the TV on, just in time to see the second plane hit. And it was clear at that point what was going on. So I told my son look, we had double windows, I said, make sure all the double windows are closed. There's some hardware store masks in the bathroom. Put them on the baby put them on yourself, on your wife. Don't go out and don't hang up. And thankfully, we had until 4:00 in the afternoon, we had a neighbor was very together and I knew that he'd have some way of getting them out of the city. And sure enough he showed up, and at 4:00, he took his family and my son and granddaughter and daughter-in-law, put them in his minivan, and drove up to Westchester. My brother drove in from Rockland, which was across the river, brought them out to his house, and then we drove down from Vermont, picked them up, went up to Vermont. And then because the US Army, said that we were below Chambers Street, which is the street that just sort of separates the bottom of the island off, it was no go zone. You're not going to go there. I don't care if you live there or not. So for 30 days, we had to say. We were all in Vermont. And then at the end of 30 days, we could return. Bottom line is, we got off easy. But I was very personally involved. OK, cut. I guess a couple of months later, someone was interviewing me and said, well, are you going to make a piece about this, because they knew that I'd done Different Trains. [inaudible] I use documentary material as part of a piece of music. I said, you know, frankly, I've been working on a piece called Three Tales which is a video opera, I'd done with Beryl Korot. And which will be at LA Phil in May and at Carnegie Hall next November. And it's all with samples. As a matter of fact, a lot the recordings were made-- Three Tales was about technology in the 20th century and the Three Tales were Hindenburg, early part of the century, Bikini, not the bathing suit, the atoll, where the hydrogen bomb was tested, and Dolly, the cloned sheep. And for Dolly, the interviews were done with Stephen Pinker and Rodney Brooks who was head of-- was at the time, the head of Robotics at MIT, a lot of the MIT people. And I was just up to here with samples and electronics and simulization programs and digital performer. And so when they said, are you going to do a piece on that, I said no. If I see one more sample, I'm going to get sick. And for seven years I wrote instrumental and vocal music, which is really what I had to do. In 2009, the phone rang. It was David Harrington from the Kronos Quartet. And he said, Steve, we want you to write a third piece for us. And we'd like you to use pre-recorded voices. And I said, David, for you anything. And I hung up the phone and I had no idea what I was going to do for him. And I walked around like that for a couple weeks. And suddenly a light bulb went on and I said, wait a minute. I have unfinished business. And then, hey, now I can do this. So the piece is in three movements. The first movement, you will hear the voices of the air traffic controllers, who were the first people to see that American Flight 11, which was going from Boston to LA was going south, and that's not how you get to LA from Boston. The second group of voices, which happened all on this very concentrated intense first movement are the voices of members of the New York City Fire Department, who, many of them whom, died on 9/11. And these are presumed, what you're hearing are the voices of people who survived, but I don't really know that. There's a silence at the end of this very intense, three-minute first movement. And then it switches to me going around my little digital recorder, recording friends and neighbors who lived in lower Manhattan like some of you may know David Lange, and you'll hear his voice saying, I was taking my kids to school. And the plane goes over his head and they duck. And the last movement is a little bit different. I didn't know this about Jewish law, but there's a law in Judaism that says when a person dies, you don't leave the body unattended. You don't leave the body alone until it's buried. I guess the history of that is probably in the Middle Ages, earlier, rodents and other animals would try to get to a body. But there's also a spiritual meaning to it, which is that we believe that the [? shema, ?] the soul is sort of hovering over the body waiting for the burial, at which point, the soul is free to go wherever souls go. And so, in this particular case in 9/11 as some of you may very well know, there weren't too many bodies. There were a lot of parts of bodies. And they were taken to the medical examiner's office on East 30th Street in Manhattan near NYU Hospital. And for a while, some people from Upper West Side orthodox synagogue were coming down and sitting and you read psalms, or you chant parts of the Bible next to the bodies. And you're supposed that 24-- around the clock. But on the Sabbath, you're not supposed to travel. You're not supposed to have any money in your pocket. You're not supposed to take the subway. So they said, it's a long walk from 90th Street to 30th Street and it's the other part of the city, it's crosstown. So they located a Stern College which is on 30th and Lexington, which is a part of Yeshiva University. And there were some young women there were approached about doing this. Can you make a lot cut there? Would you come in and do this? And they said, we would be honored. And this was in the New York Times and I read about it and I said, wow, that's beautiful. And I thought, well, I have to find some of these women to be in this piece. And I found two of them and one of them turned out to be the previous president of my music publisher Boosey & Hawkes, who had left the company to become a lay chaplain at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and when 9/11 happened she volunteered to sit and say psalms. It was all on shifts, going around the clock. And there's another girl who's presently in Seattle. You'll hear her voice. Anyway, that's basically what you're going to hear. Let's hear it. There are two things other things that you might want to know. The piece begins with a beep, beep, beep. It's-- how many of you here can even remember what a land line is? Ah, good, OK. Well, you will hear, those of you who had a landline know that if leave it off the hook, after a number of minutes, it gets really nasty loud beep, beep, beep. We had a land line and I was going to shower one morning and I heard this and I thought to myself, that's it. And that's how the piece begins. It turns out-- I don't have perfect pitch, but it turns out that beep, beep, beep is an F. So the piece begins with David Harrington doubling the telephone. And at John Sherba comes in with an E and at the end of the piece, this comes back. The other basic technique is that everybody, every speaking voice that you hear, at the end of what they say, their last vowel or consonant is prolonged and as a still stop action. You know like you see stop action in movies and the action just freezes. I always wanted to do the sync sound equivalent of that. But in the 1970s, you'd do Darth Vader. But now, thanks to software that comes out of the Ear Com, probably right here and many other places, even commercially available, you can literally stop a bit of a vowel or a bit of a consonant. They came from Bostonnnnnnnnn. And that's how the piece begins, one of the air traffic controllers. And this carries the end of the thought of one speaker into the next person and connects them harmonically in a way that I think, at least I hope, you'll find interesting. I'll play the piece. It's 15 minutes long. When it's over we'll be up and eventually the floor will be open, and we could talk about anything. Talk about the piece, talk about anything else that you've got on your mind. Hope you enjoy it. [applause] [audio playback] -They came from Boston. [inaudible] -Go ahead. -Boeing jet's crashing. Boeing jet's crashed into the World Trade. -Every available, every available airport. The plane was aiming-- the plane was aiming towards the building. -[inaudible] -Mayday. Mayday. [inaudible] [? -some tracks ?] in the rubble. -A second plane. A second plane. -Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. -[inaudible] -The second tower has just collapsed. -I was sitting in class, four blocks-- four blocks north of Ground Zero. -I was taking my kids to school. The first plane went straight-- went straight over our heads. Went straight over our heads into the building. -My eyes just kind of shot up. My eyes just kind of shot up. -Flights. Flights. One of the towers, one of the towers just in flames. -But we all thought-- but we all thought it was an accident. Accident. -I knew it wasn't an accident. I knew it wasn't an accident right away. Everyone was running-- running. Everyone was running and [inaudible]. -Then-- then the second plane hit. The second plane hit. -It was not an accident. It was not-- it was not an accident. -People-- people jumping from the building. Jumping from the building. People. -The first ambulance-- the first ambulance that got there-- -It was chaos chaos. It was chaos. -Nobody knew-- nobody nobody knew what to do. -The ground-- the ground started shaking. The ground started shaking. The ground started shaking. -You could feel it. The building came down. The building came down-- came down. -Run. Run. Run. Run for their lives. Run for their lives. Run. -Suddenly, suddenly it was black outside. Suddenly, it was black outside. -You could not see in front of you. You could not-- --engulfed everybody. --to breathe engulfed everybody who was there. -Everybody-- Everybody though we were dead. Everybody thought we were dead. -Totally silent. Silent. Just dust in the street. Just dust. -3,000 people-- 3,000 people were admitted. -What's going to happen now? What's going to happen next? -The bodies-- the bodies were moved to large tents, large tents on the east side of Manhattan. -I would sit there-- I would sit there and recite songs recite songs or I might -Simply sitting. Sitting. [singing] The world to come. I don't really know what that means. [singing in hebrew] -And there's the world-- and there's the world right here. [end playback] [applause] Thank you. You're welcome. As I said earlier, we really want this to be informal and we want to open this up as quickly as possible and have a conversation with all of you. I did want to take this opportunity just before we start to thank Shantell Blakely. I think she's done a wonderful job of really putting that document together that she distributed earlier. And I think now we all are somehow experts and I think legitimately qualified to ask questions, based on that document. So thanks, Shantell. I think you should be up here and asking questions. I think it's incredible how you started describing the motivation for the piece. In a way, it's a little bit like the assassination of President Kennedy, where everybody tries to remember what they were doing at that moment. And there's certain events in history that people never forget. And they always sort of also think about it in terms of their own relationship to that particular moment, whether they were close, like you were describing, but even when they've been far away, to really think what was I doing at that moment? And so I think it's very, very moving in that particular sense, but you describe the circumstances. But I think it would be great if you could describe more in a way the kind of the practicalities if you like, but at the same time the imaginative procedures, if I can put it like that, that leads to the making of a piece like this. By that I mean, there is the recording that you have, the conversations, the archival material, the telephone, the thing you were referring to before, saying, don't put the phone down and then the phone ringing. So there are all these reminders in a way. But then there's also the kind of relationship between the music and the recordings and the manner in which the recordings themselves become musical pieces. So how do you actually go about making this into interrelationship between the pieces to create the idea of the whole life, of the total ensemble. I listen to the speech melody. That's the key to the whole thing. When we speak, all of us, sometimes we almost sing, especially when we're very emotionally invested in something. Children, because their larynx isn't terribly developed, very often have extremely-- I was in London years ago. Somebody knew I was interested and they played me a recording, of a kid saying, (SINGING) Daddy, I want an ice cream. I mean it was just like that. Some of you may know an early taped piece of mine, It's Gonna Rain had come out That phrasing, come out, basically was da, dum, dam, dum, dam dum, come out to show them. I don't have every pitch, but it's just kind of a C minor. And I am not the first, by a long shot, to observe that. Two things come to mind. I did Different Trains. I was invited to talk to some students at Juilliard where I had been a student years ago. And there was an elderly European gentleman sitting in rear of the classroom. And he said to me, do you know the writings of Leos Janacek? And I said, no, I don't. He said, well, you should So I went to Amazon and I got the uncollected writings of Leos Janacek and Janacek used to walk around Prague with a music notebook, writing down not what people were singing, but they were saying and taking those speech melodies and putting them in his operas. He even has, in the book a transcription of a railroad conductor announcing a station, first in German, because everybody had to speak German in his lifetime. And then in Czech. And he said, uck, this German, [inaudible] disgusting. [inaudible] Because he was a Czech nationalist and he wanted to champion his own language. Stephen Sondheim, I recently had the pleasure to sort of speak with him at Lincoln Center recently when we-- and he said that what he found most interesting in what I was doing, was precisely this, that he feels that when he's writing a song, the model for the words is how they're said in the American English that he speaks. And that as long as you keep that going-- (SINGING) where you going? Barcelona. --then you probably will get the words and the music in the right place. So this is a very old phenomena. And I think that for me, the guide throughout the entire piece was, what was being said, a lot was said that I didn't use. You can imagine the enormous emotional range of reactions. And I had to wend my way through that. My music notebook is filled quotations, you know, crossing out. But the material that seemed to make sense, how they spoke, was more or less how I would use them. There are some changes I made, because as opposed to Different Trains where I really just exactly transcribe what people said, in this piece, there are slight adjustments of a semi-tone or even a little bit more because I want to be harmonically in a certain place. I wanted to begin in F minor because of the telephone and end in F minor because of the telephone. But the thrust of the piece, the life of the piece, is invested in the documentary material. But the connection, then once you decide to build on the rhythm-- No, it's the pitch as well as the rhythm. It's a melodic phrase. And but I'm sort of curious to see then is it that you build on that? And then that's really constructs, if you like, the continuity-- Yes. --of the piece. Because the piece becomes the basis for its own continuity, in some way? Well, I mean, obviously I am making aesthetic choices by what am I going to include next, which will be partly a verbal, OK, I want some continuity. Or this such a remarkable utterance that we have to use it. I have to use it. In this piece, as opposed to Different Trains-- Did I do it in Different Trains? In Different Trains, there's a lot, it's a longer piece. By the way, I mean this piece is 15 minutes long. And when I finished the first movement, which is very, very intense. And I was just completely wrapped up in it. And when I got all done with it, I said, it's three minutes long. Oh. Because, a big topic, 25 minutes. And I told-- David said to me, well, how long do you suppose it will be? You know, 20, 25 minutes. So I called him back after the first movement, I said, David, I've got some news for you. And he wisely said, you really believe in what you've got? I said, yes. He said, we want it. So I would say in this piece, more than any piece I ever did in my life, what I had in mind and where the piece told me, listen, bub, shut up, you're done. I have never been so dressed down or addressed by the piece telling me what I'm supposed to do. And the timing of it, which was totally at odds with what I had started out with as an expectation. And I think that for those of you who are composers here, that's something to consider. When you start a piece, you have certain preconceptions. And that's good to have them. And sometimes to peace goes, hah. Isn't it amazing, just the way you think of it. Sometimes you have to-- you find something's not working or you find that it's working fine, but it's not at all what you had in mind. And I think it's important to go with those things if they really grab you and you know, this is right. Because I did try to extend the first movement and every time I did it, it was like, padding it. Everything I put in was just a dilution of the emotional intensity. So it ended up being what it was. I don't remember the question any more, but does that answer it? That's good. That's always good. Let me see if Hans has something. I would like to ask you something about the comparison, probably, between Different Trains and this piece. Because they have a lot of commonalities and a lot of differences. So I think what you just described, that in Different Trains, you really just transcribed every pitch of the spoken documentaries. And you didn't change them. And that makes for a kind of very awkward harmonic transgressions throughout the piece. And tempo changes there are totally irrational. And in this piece, it feels more, you have kind of a master plan of your harmonic progression. And how you dealt then with these different voices, because some of them, they seem now to be kind of put together so that they fit your harmony. Exactly so. You're right. Next question. Let me just-- we're actually going to open it up right this minute. But I have one more. Yeah, yeah. But I just wanted to go back to the sort of the origins. I'll ask it here. to the origins of this relationship between the voice and the music. I'm assuming that sort of for you goes back to the '60s. Well, yeah, it goes all-- in 1965 I did It's Going To Rain. And that was really the piece you would say that's my opus one. That's the first piece that I really felt, this is a keeper. And there was recently a [? proms ?] in London where the program-- [? and the proms ?] is held in the Albert Hall, which is 5,000 seats, this huge cavern. And they start off playing It's Going To Rain with apparently blue light. I wasn't there. And then they did The Desert Music, which is a big orchestral choral piece. I thought, wow, that's some programming. And nobody walked out, apparently. Or with 5,000 people, who knows? So that piece, what was It's Going To Rain was taking this black, Pentecostal preacher, talking about the flood of Noah in the Bible in, I guess it was late 1964, two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And for those of you or most of you here who have a very vague idea, the Cuban Missile Crisis was basically Khrushchev saying, we are sending nuclear-tipped missiles on a boat to Cuba. John F. Kennedy saying, you do that we'll bring the hydrogen bomb to Moscow. Now that is a nervous-making situation. And I think I wasn't the only American to feel, we're going to be radioactive dust at any moment. And finally, Khrushchev backed down. And everybody just-- So to hear this guy talking about the end of the world, with the flood of Noah, triggers in the mind of anybody who was alive at that time, that, yeah, we came close to that. It wasn't a flood. And so part of why the piece has the edge it has is that the other part is that again, it's a phenomenal happenstance of reality. I recorded this black preacher and at the point where he said, it's going to rain, a pigeon takes off. The musician's union sent him there. And the pigeon goes, whap, whap, whap, whap, whap. So when you make a loop of it's going to rain, it's going to rain, you also get whap, whap, whap, whap, whap, whap. So the loop has a built-in pigeon drummer. Then you've got this low traffic. So garbage in, garbage out. You're wrong. If you're not from MIT, you know that. And if something really good in, the odds are you really have to really screw it up to ruin it. And I don't think I did. So again, it's like finding the right-- in early music, you say finding the right thematic material. If the thematic material is strong, the odds are the piece will work. And in a piece like that, that's the thematic material. And it is documentary. And it also is followed by Come Out, which was another speech oriented piece of a kid who was arrested for murder, part of the Harlem Six in 1964. The piece was made in 1966 as a pass-the-hat music for a retrial of these kids with lawyers of their own choosing, as opposed to the state-appointed attorneys. And I was there and it worked. They raised the money and the kids were retried and they were, except for one, who committed the murder, they were let go. All right, these pieces were recorded. They were the first pieces of mine that were recorded. Come Out was recorded by Columbia, which was then an American classical record company, in 1967. And got, to me, a surprising amount of attention. And in the interim years between that and 1988, when Different Trains happened, a lot of people were picking up on that. Laurie Anderson did those whoo, whoo, whoo. [inaudible] Superman. People were picking up on [? speech clips ?] and I was thinking to myself, all these people are getting something out of these tape pieces. What am I going to get out of these tape pieces? So after not having anything to do with tape from 1966, which was Come Out, until 1988, I thought, well, what if you actually-- instead of being, repeating speech that's just like music, what if it was really embedded in real instruments, really part of the music. And that really was the idea. I was also, at the time, being asked, would you write an opera? The Frankfurt Opera, the Netherlands Opera and I said, no, thank you very much. Because I don't believe in opera and I don't believe in acting singers. And then I'd hang up the phone and I'd be, what's wrong with me? Here's this incredible offer. But if you don't believe in something and you're going to put three or four years into it, and it's going to get a lot of publicity, you're committing suicide. So I didn't do that. So instead, I began thinking, well, wait a minute. I'm working in Different Trains with audiotape. So you don't see anything. What if I was working with a video artist and you saw people speaking and next to them were musicians playing their speech melody and elaborating it? There's my opera and that led to The Cave, which most of you haven't seen. And it isn't on DVD because it's five screens. But hopefully, at some point you will see it. And Three Tales, which is on a DVD and you can see it. And will be done in Carnegie in the next year and it's going to be done in LA in May. So basically, this kind of working branched out into theatrical work, which I never, ever would have otherwise done, again, tied to the documentary reality. And then there are other audio pieces that are tied. So this has been sort of one strain that started very early, was skipped over, and then picked up again the '80s, and then picked up again the '90s. And then picked up-- this was done 2010. So it's just like a thread in there. And then that way of working has, in a sense, very little to do with the way Drumming or Music for 18 Musicians or Double Sextet or any of the instrumental pieces or eventually, the vocal pieces had to do. We have a question there. I don't know where the mics are. Just behind you then we'll go talk. Sorry. Thank you for the piece, very interesting. But I had a question regarding what leads what? So what, wait, what, what-- What leads what? There is voice and there is music. And my first impression was that the voices were limited and were very important and that they had created the rest of the piece. But now you said that there are there was a lot of recorded material that you had to choose from. I'm losing a lot of what you say. [interposing voices] Why don't you stand up? Why don't you stand up, first thing? Take the mic a little bit away. A little bit away? Is that better? Yeah. Great. So you just said there were a lot recorded voices that you chose from. A lot of what kind of voices? Recorded voices that you chose from. It was not a limited number of recordings. So that makes me ask the question whether the music led the voice choosing, rather than the voices leading to composing the music and the way it was. So what came first, chicken or egg? Picking the voices came first, in all instances. And if there was an awkward modulation change of key or whatever. I took the liberty in this piece that I didn't take in Different Trains of changing it. I also slowed down almost everybody just a little bit, so unlike me, who talk too fast, you can understand them. So because the subject matter is not the Holocaust or a religious subject matter, where I felt like I didn't want to touch anything, here I felt, this is people I know and this is people who are-- I felt free to change the details. But in all cases, the question was, OK, who's the next speaker, what do they say? But I guess also, you make some use of the voices of repetition where you introduce a first idea and then with the reputation, you make actually the full statement. It's a little bit also combined with the musical cells you compose. So I don't think there is really a first and a second. They really kind of combine. No contact. No contact with the pilot. No contact with the pilot whatsoever. Yes, you're right. He asks great questions. We have another question. Could you just raise your hand if you plan to ask a question so at least I have a sense of where you are. Could I pick up on the question of repetition? When I saw the news right after the event, there was this kind of repetition of the plane going into building again and again and again and again, which was kind of astonishing in a way. And Freud makes this comment that one way to deal with trauma is to repeat things to overcome them. You kind of work through this. So I was just wondering whether at one level the use of repetition in this score, but also in the way that yourself personally, going through the whole experience again, becomes a way of dealing with it, of kind of like putting it behind you as from a personal point of view, of achieving closure, as it were, from the whole event. Well, let's see. Two things, two parts of your question. This piece, given what I've done over the years, has virtually no repetition. I mean there's very little that's-- there's no looping at all. As he pointed out, no contact, no contact with the pilot. That's not really repetition. That's just breaking up the first few notes is the theme-- so in that sense, it's definitely in my later pieces, which have less repetition in general. They have some, but less and this piece really is more-- and it's also because it's so concise. Again, because it wanted to be concise. It didn't want to have anything repeated. It, On a personal level, I don't think it brought me to peace with it at all. I think what it did do, was to have me get engaged with something that I had forgotten, but which in the interim period following, 9/11 was not an isolated incident and then it went away. I mean, hardly, it was the gateway-- I mean like bombing of London, the bombing in Madrid, I mean, on and on and on and on til today. The world premiere of this piece was held at Duke University Kronos, and for some reason or other, Japanese television NKH, NKR? NKH wanted to videotape it. And they came to rehearsal and then they went back to Japan. And when the actual time for the world premiere happened, in the interim period, the tsunami had happened in Japan. So we figured, well, you know, later for the NHK, they got their hands full. And these guys come with a huge amount of equipment. And I walked up to one and I said, how are you? How's your family? Are you OK? How come you even bothered to come? And he looked at me right in the eye and he said, 9/11 changed the world. So I think, to be engaged with something that I was personally involved with, but sort of shunted away. And then to deal with something that was obviously like an event which really just heralded many more events that were going to follow through, that we're very much involved with right now and for the foreseeable future, that's-- the most important thing for a composer when you're doing something is to really excited about what you're doing. When you're doing something that you'd rather hear than [? you and ?] Sebastian Bach, even though you're nowhere near as good as Sebastian Bach and neither am I, but you just love what you're doing so much that you want to hear it. And you want to hear it again and again and again. You want to put it in the car or you want to do an MP3, you want to get your juices going in any field I would imagine. And therefore keeping your metabolism going is really important. Like for instance, it was really important for me to say at the time, no I'm not going do a piece about 9/11, because I was up to there with that kind of working. And if I had done something then, it would have been onerous and-- but when the time came, nine years later, again, as a kind of surprise, perfect timing. We have quite a few hands on this side. Yes, please. I'll ask a non-WTC question. About 10 years ago, I heard a great performance Music For 18 Musicians, performed by students. And I heard something I hadn't heard before and didn't expect, and that was vibrato. Vibrato? Vibrato in the strings. So it was a very-- the audience loved the piece and I wondered if you could speak about that effect. I think you've talked about the connection to the European tradition with vibrato. Could you talk a little bit more about why you've kind of stayed away from that? Well, generally speaking, when I write for strings, including in this piece here, I say poco vibrato. Is that in the score? Yeah. And sometimes people, poco vibrato, meaning-- poco means little in Italian. And vibrato means a shaking out. I said-- and vibrato would be ahh-- I can't even do it. So that's why I shouldn't do it. The string players-- any string players here? Ah, they're all on this side. But if you tell a string player there's no vibrato, they all get a little sullen. I've got to nail that pitch. I can't-- so I don't want that. I don't want that horrible sort of like tenseness that happens when you tell people to play non-vibrato because you want people to, you know, get engaged. So [inaudible], look, you know and I know that you've got to move your hand a little bit to feel comfortable, so do that, but you're not playing Brahms. So don't play it that way. And everybody said, oh, yeah, OK, great. And that's basically the answer. If you saw people-- Kronos uses some vibrato. This piece hasn't got a lot of-- the long notes are very quiet. And they don't lend themselves to that. But in Triple Quartet, if you listen to that recording, there's really some very romantic stuff. And I just sit back and say, you know, great. If music doesn't allow interpretation, what's wrong? I mean, that's insane. Of course, if performances don't vary-- recordings don't vary, but performances and performances are the truth. If the piece doesn't work in the performance, it doesn't work and the recording is some kind of gimmick. You can bear that in mind too. Anyway. Who else was here? Can we get-- You're next. We'll come back here. So you speak of voice as song. A voice as song, if you can speak, you can sing. Speech melody. Yes. So my question is about space and whether in your experience in spaces, whether you can think of that as actually a space having a voice. In the way that a larynx is a space, and that is speaking, so from your experience moving through urban spaces, have you had an experience where you found architecture as having a certain voice or a resonant frequency? Well, I understand that it's the kind of question that would come up tonight. [laughing] I'm not completely stupid. He wasn't planted. That's what you say. there? Was a lot of attention given, notably by Stockhausen earlier in-- I guess 20, 30 years ago about moving the sounds in space, literally, having multiple loudspeakers, and not just stereo as we have here. And I felt, pooey. I mean, to put it in vernacular English. When I was a student way back in the '50s, I remember having recordings of Gabrielli, Italian composer, who wrote famously for St. Mark's Cathedral, where he had antiphonal brass choirs, very separated in space. [inaudible] OK. Beautiful stuff. And I had these records and I loved Gabrielli. They were monophonic recordings. You know what, sounded great. So I mean, yes, I would rather have you know, [inaudible] recordings rather than mono recordings of rather have better quality recordings. I don't know about five plus one. I don't have a system like that at home. I don't think, musically speaking for me, my attitude is Chuck Berry's attitude, any old way you use it. A piece has to be strong enough to survive adverse acoustics. It may suffer. A lot of pieces of mine played in a church would basically probably get turned into a-- you'd lose the detail, because the natural reverberation of the space would blur it. But hopefully enough so that it would work and other pieces could enhance. Like there's a piece called Proverb that works great in a church. Now again, I'm not saying that other people might feel it differently. I did do a piece called City Life. I don't know if you're familiar with that. I went around New York and I also use some pre-recorded material, but recording the Staten Island Ferry and door slams and the noises that I grew up with and grew to hate. And walked around with earplugs in my years for 30 years before we moved out of Manhattan. So, because I figure the best way to deal with them, car alarms, is to put them in a piece of music. But I don't think that that really be answer to what you have in mind about architecture actually somehow being a part of the sound. But it might be for other composers. I mean, there's a considerable interest in site-specific works, musical works that are site-specific. And they would have to take into account the acoustic nature of the space. And so I think I could tell you what I feel, but I know there are other people out there who would want to collaborate with you. So this is something that's certainly in the air now and probably will remain that way. Did we have a-- one here and then we're going to go on this side here in the front. I had a question back about WTC that you could also expand it to other things. When you said you selected from a lot of different samples, did you ever decide not to use one because it was too consonant and sounded unnatural? Didn't sound like speech, but more like music than speech? No. I mostly took things which were too politically inflammatory. Right. So or were too, I don't know, boring. No. I mean, I don't-- did you think that everything was-- I mean there is dissonance in the string-- No, I was just curious. No I don't remember that kind of situation. We have a question there. There's a contemporary popular artist named Kendrick Lamar who just released an album where he takes recordings of Tupac Shakur in an interview. And he actually speaks as if he's speaking to Tupac Shakur in real life and overlaid on it. He uses some strings. His is more brass but underneath is a very similar sort of rhythmic structure. And I was listening to the-- and he has street sounds as you do in other pieces. String or street? Street. And it occurred to me that the technology it's almost exactly the same, but also that the intentions somehow is the same. It's to put us in a place that is a place of the imagination, not an actual place. And it began to occur to me the way that so-called serious music and so-called popular music used to be in tension and learn from one another, and it occurred to me they've almost collapsed in technology and in some ways, intention. Very good, very good. I mean, absolutely. I don't know that particular, I mean I think Frank Zappa going all the way back to there used imitating speech. And I've seen that a lot of people have done stuff that I've seen on YouTube. You probably have seen it, that basically uses the same technique, taking some political speech usually, and either making fun of it or whatever by putting in musical very discreet, a very pronounced musical equivalent. OK. The relationship between notated in non-notated music, let's get away from pop and classical, goes back to the beginning of Western music. And this is one of my hobby horses. Excuse me if I go on at length. In the Renaissance, it was obligatory for any composer who was going to be taken seriously to write a missa L'homme arme, a mass using L'homme arme, which was a French folk song. And you've got everybody from Dufay through Palestrina, centuries of people, producing in some cases more than one mass, which was in that period of history, like writing a symphony. Basing that serious work on a folks source. (SINGING) bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. "104th Symphony," great Austrian drinking song. "Beethoven, 6th," everybody knows that. (SINGING) da, dum, da, dum, ba,da, da, dum, folk song. Bela Bartok, it's almost impossible to separate Bela Bartok from the folk sources. I don't mean the folk song settings. That was a very obvious, but I mean string quartets, abstract music. The use, his constant involvement in that folk music is so melded in with his own musical voice that you can't really separate them. Stravinsky lied like a trooper for political reasons, but "The Rite of Spring," "Petrushka," are filled with Russian sources. And Richard Taruskin, the greatest musicologist of our day, dissects exactly where they all come from. And much to Stravinsky's credit, I mean, important, he grew up there. And why shouldn't they be there? Charles Ives, in America, was an organist. And in most of his works you will hear hymn tunes that he played that were the popular tunes in that part of American history. George Gershwin, is he one of our greatest songwriters? Is he our greatest songwriter or is he one of our great composers? Well, he's both. And Aaron Copeland, I mean, admitted very, very into jazz influence. What is odd, is the period of time when I went to music school, from the early '50s up through the late '70s. And I would say that that was due to the influence of Arnold Schoenberg was a great composer. But who, for whatever reason, and we could speculate about them, really was writing very, very abstract music and didn't-- before Milton [? babb ?] because he said, I don't care if you listen. He formed a society for the private performance of his music. And that was very well advised. Now, I think Schoenberg's music is going to be played as long as there's musicians around to play. But it's always to be-- I think the metaphor that entire strain, which is then picked up by the Boulez and Stockhausen after the war is, in a sense, music for a dark corner. In other words, I mean, these people I mention are very serious musician. They are very accomplished musicians. They are great composers. But not everybody is going-- and being on the hit parade is not a mark of greatness. It's just, some music you can listen to any time, other kinds of music you really listen to less. And I think when I went to music school, basically there was one way to write music, which was no audible harmony, no audible melody, no tapping of the foot. And if you did anything like that, you were either laughed at to your face or behind your back. And if you think I'm exaggerating, think of the Titan of the Age, Igor Stravinsky, felt obliged after the death of Arnold Schoenberg, to get involved with anti [inaudible] and create several masterpieces. And he took great liberties with the technique, instead of having [? two albums, ?] he'd have an eight note row or something. "Agon," "Canticum Sacrum," "Requiem Canticles," great pieces, but again, I think he felt that he didn't want to be irrelevant. And the only way to be relevant was to write that way. Now if I go around today, and I go ask, raise your hand if you're a composer here. If you find this embarrassing, just say, you reserve the right, you take the Fifth Amendment and you don't answer. How would you describe what you're doing? You just say it loud enough and I'll repeat it. I know it's a ridiculous question. I apologize. But I mean, you're doing something that's romantic. You're doing something that's minimal. You're doing something that's whatever your models are. Can you say something that like that briefly? Just what you're involved with? Or different things you're involved with? You're not a composer. You're a string player. You're a composer. So ready and willing. Go. [inaudible] Hi. I don't know. I listen to everything, like what we were talking earlier, Bach and stuff like that all the way to Schoenberg to you and everyone from well minimalist, I know you don't like that term. But I people like to keep that term hush-hush. But like your work specifically also inspired me a lot, especially when I was in high school and things like that. Even to Kendrick Lamar over there, everything in any way. So I don't know. All is good. Who's up next? OK, right here. So I would say, for my compositions, it's write I more like the continuity of Bartok and-- Hertog? Bartok. It's a continuity of Bartok a little bit. Me too. I'm trying to go in some way to go back to the beginning of the 20th century, and to take from their where I can go from there. [inaudible] is doing that too. OK, can I have a third? Who will be the third? Come on. Don't all volunteer at once. I guess for me a lot of it starts with breaking down what I think maybe I'm assuming. So it's a lot of things that I think, simple things, even like notation or melody things I think a lot of hmm. I guess more specifically I think I maybe think in sound events. It kind of connects back to you were talking about, what we want to hear the most. And I think of it more in the texture and the sound moving over time. I guess, and how that balances. So I rest my case. What I'm saying is that all three of you, like you in particular were doing many different things. You were going back to the beginning of the century and could be fairly or unfairly sort of involved in, not near romanticism, but early, early 20th century, when the lines between modern music and Bartok. And Bartok was himself a kind of [inaudible] There's a large chunk of Liszt and then there's a large chunk of something that has nothing to do with that. And last person, it's hard to say, but diversity is obviously at work here. There's no one thing. When I went to school, there is one way. You're up against the wall. And how do you deal with it? Well, the way I deal with it, when I wrote a 12 tone piece, I never transposed a row. I never inverted a row. I never retrograded a row. I'd just repeat the row over and over again. And then showed it to Luciano Berio when I went out to study with him in 1961 or 1962. And he looked at and he said, if you want to write tonal music, why don't you write tonal music? I said, easy for you to say. And so, it just goes to show how you-- now, as to making a value judgment about this, and this is a general point, who's got it better? Somebody's who's up against the wall and there's just one way and either go with it or they fight it. Or you guys are in a sense, metaphorically out on the ice. You can just go where you like. You figure it out. I want to see if there are any people on the steps, who have-- We just need a mic in there. We have a question here but while I just want to make sure that you get the mic. So Ed here in the front is going to ask and then we'll go there. And then we'll come back. OK, but let's just go here first. Thank you. You said we can talk about anything, so I was-- If it doesn't work, I'll let you know. I was extremely taken by your description of the events of 9/11, your instructions to your son, whatever you don't put down the phone. And it puts me in mind of the apparatus of the telephone itself. I think of Alexander Graham Bell, whose son if I'm not mistaken was deaf. And Graham Bell used, or thought of the phone as way of communicating with the dead. So the apparatus of the telephone was already a special means of communication. But specifically, in this urgent condition, where a father speaking to his son and the continuity between father and son is sound, phonos, going through the ages. And I'm sorry this [? expands here, ?] I think of Abraham and Isaac, the ram's horn as the legacy of that fraught father-son relationship. It's so striking to me that a musician would say to his son, don't put down the phone. That's the connection to the son in this dire moment and I just wanted to comment on that. Well I mean, I appreciate the imagery that you've summoned up. But to be honest with you, I was just concerned that the phones, the connections were going dead by the bushel basket that morning. People losing-- the cellphone towers were down. I mean, I said don't hang up because if you do, I'm never going to talk to you again. And I wanted-- so that's was my only thought at the time. I mean, I wasn't about to take him to Mount Moriah or anything like that. Can we go there and we'll come back here please. Hi. Thank you for your piece. It was really great to hear. My question mainly has to do with your relationship with technology. I think of Come Out and It's Going To Rain, as the-- I mean, it's on tape, but it's about tape. And I feel like-- No. --for me at least, well in a sense that like the phase music seemed to be like-- I have to have this phrased well. Basically what it seemed that those early pieces were about machines not working right. And then, I remember reading an interview where you talked about a machine that you'd built in the '70s that would coordinate multiple phases upon levels of complexity you couldn't do necessarily as a composer perhaps. And you used it once, and then you put it on the shelf and never used it again and went back to performing, you know, just trusting the human body. And then I was very curious about how in this new piece, and especially in what you wrote, you say that the technology to do the stop action voice didn't exist in the '70s and you finally had an opportunity to use it. And so I was curious about this sort of interesting place where now you're like, seeking out technology to achieve things that you wanted to do, while previously your technology was something you either fought against or was somehow informing you in the way machines don't work right. Well, thank you for the question. It brings out some good stuff. But to be honest with you, really what's important to me, or what was important to me when I was doing It's Going to Rain and Come Out was what you hear. And the tape recorder simply was the means of making that happen. Paul I really didn't-- I mean, I knew a moderate amount about them, but they, in a sense, they're machines. They do what they do. And they made possible these taped pieces, which nowadays people, of course, can do by computer and so what? Because really what matters is source material and how it's handled and how it's paced. Does it go on for nine minutes or does it go on for seven minutes? That's really a big decision. And that's done with these pieces of equipment that we all happen to have. And they have been my guides throughout these pieces. You bring up another question that is, I think, really very interesting. And which is, in the '70s I wanted to do the stop action sound or slow motion sound. I even wrote kind of [inaudible] concept piece. And instead, that's all I could do because if you slowed down a tape, (LOW, GROWLY) rrr, you got that Darth Vader. So it wasn't possible. In the '80s, I went to Ear Con and they were getting into vocoders. And vocoders could do it, but it sounded terrible. It sounded like a telephone. And again, I didn't show up then and I guess it was 2001 or 2002, when I was working on Three Tales, Ben Rubin, who was a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, and who had been helped us with The Cave, said, there's some software that's going to do this for you. And it was written in max. and came out of Ear Con as well. And he just gave me a front end I could do it. So what I'm saying is that first, I had a musical idea. It would be interesting to hear what happens when you slow a voice down. One of things that happens is that every vowel is a glissando, but you don't hear that note because it goes too quickly. In slow motion, you see things. Slow motion is very, very interesting because you see things that you can't normally see, but which are real. They're really happening. That's one use of technology. You have an idea, you want to find a tool that will enable you to realize that idea. There's another kind of use of technology, which I personally am dubious about, which is here's this new piece of software, hardware. I'm going to go out and get it. I'm going to see what it can do and maybe something interesting will happen. Well maybe something interesting will happen, but my hunch is it won't. My hunch is that you know, you're just fooling around. And that's OK. That may lead to something else. There's no pathway through all of this. But for me personally, I think it's better to have a musical impulse driving the need for something technologically, rather than just simply saying, OK, this is here. How can I deal with it? But I mean other people may come up with something wonderful. We'll go here. And then maybe we'll have one or two. I know there are lots of hands. We haven't really had that many people from the steps. She's waiting patiently. I know. But there also a few people back there, so maybe we can get mics to them. Please go ahead. First thank you for being here today. Oh, thank you. I have two questions, which is a little bit greedy. The first one is who are your thought partners, your long term thought partners, like the people not necessarily just in music, but maybe collaborators or friends who you sort of gain intellectual or emotional insights from? And the second question is Mohsen did a really nice job of trying to thread for us why you were invited, but I'm curious, from your perspective, why you think you've come to a place in your career that you're at the school of design and speaking to us about music. But what's the connection for you? I don't know if that's a good question. [laughing] No, I'm just kidding. Since my memory is so perfect, ask me the first one again. First one was, who are some of your thoughts partners? Your thought partners, was that the phrase? That's a good phrase. When I was at Cornell, I was introduced to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. And I wrote my-- and I was talking to Shantell about that when we were in the cab coming back from the airport, because she did the same thing. And I have found-- I have a piece-- actually, he appears in a couple of pieces of mine. Proverb is a piece that I would recommend to all--I really, I don't think everything I write is so great. Proverb is really good piece. The whole text is from Ludwig Wittgenstein. I don't know the German, but the translation is, "how small a thought it takes to fill a whole life," which really is kind of good thing for me to [? sit. ?] He's also someone who learned a lot by looking at what we do every day. Instead of doing something, he would say, well, how do you teach a child the word mind? You teach in the same way you teach the word spoon? They're both nouns. And he said, philosophy is like letting the fly out of the bottle. You open up the top of the bottle, the fly is running around. He never looks up. Once he does, oh. Wittgenstein-- by the way, Wittgenstein's brother was Paul Wittgenstein, who was the pianist who lost his right arm in World War I, and for whom Maurice Ravel and others wrote the "Concerto for the Left Hand." Wittgenstein himself was noted, amongst his acolytes, for being able to whistle through entire concertos, pausing for significant moments. So the man was a genius, of a kind that I could relate to because he, I think, saw real, what I would say reality and wasn't seduced by his own genius and seduced by the pathways that others were taking at the time. Another one that I have not been as close to, but for a long time was the American poet, William Carlos Williams. I remember going into a bookstore when I was 16 in New York City on Sixth Avenue near Fifth. And I see this book on the side and it goes backwards and forwards the same way. So I picked it up and it was "Patterson," which is a very long poem about American history. And I really couldn't understand a lot of it. But I [inaudible] I'm just going to get through this, I'm going to go back to it. And while I was at Cornell in the '50s, Williams was invited up and read, after he had a stroke, he read this beautiful love poem, from "Asphodel," "That Greeny Flower" to his wife who was also rather elderly, a very moving experience. Williams was a doctor. He was a full time doctor in New Jersey. He went to school with Ezra Pound. Pound went off to Europe, started magazines, got involved with Mussolini, got himself in a lot of trouble being a fascist, but was a great, great, great intellectual and great, great poet. Williams stayed in New Jersey, delivering babies. This was the day of house-calls, mostly for Polish steelworkers. And there's some kind of a moral hero to this man who has to make these decisions. He's able to emigrate. But balances this tension between being-- I mean he wrote some of his-- I mean this probably the apocryphal. But it is probably true that he would write some of the poems on prescription pads. And so he is someone that I sort of thought was kind of a guidepost there. Now, the second question? Why are you her at the design center? [laughing] Because he asked me to come. That's really the truth. It's a gig, man. [laughing] It is Harvard. There have got to be some bright people here. right? The person who was moving their hand up? Did they get up a mic? In the fourth row. Thank you. I wanted to ask you more about the religious and political because impacts and messages that you want to send with your pieces, which I'm asking in particular with reference to the piece which we just heard, which has so many connections for me to actually Schoenberg and the survivor of Warsaw, and obviously a piece with very distinct religious and political messages. So I wanted to ask if you could comment how you saw that? Can you come closer and ask the question? So I wanted to ask you about the political messages and the religious messages that you want to send? Political messages and religious messages. Of what? Of the pieces that you write. And in particular, of the one that we just heard, which for me has a lot of connections to Schoenberg's survival of Warsaw in the way it deals with the musical material and ways it deals with the text, and this is obviously a piece that has a lot of political impact and wants to sent a clear message. So I want to ask you how you see yourself in that kind of tradition. Well, I hope you won't consider this a cop-out, but there is a famous phrase that if I want to send you a message, I'd use email. So I mean, I understand that anything to do with 9/11 has to have political overtones. It's impossible not to. But I think, I hope, I think I tried to walk a tightrope when doing it, between leaving a certain amount of ambiguity as to the situation. Although it's quite clear in some respects, 3,000 people were murdered. That's a pretty straightforward line. But I don't think-- instead of answering your question, I'll repeat a question that people have asked me. They say to me, do you think composers are obliged to write something has political content or relevance. And I always answer, absolutely no, absolutely not. Composers are obliged, really obliged, to write the best music they possibly can write. And that is their one and only obligation. Because in the long run, this piece you heard tonight, Survivor From Warsaw, Aida, which was written for the opening of the Suez Canal, the content doesn't mean anything. Imagine that. If you go to a performance of Wagner's opera, let's say "The Ring" is being given somewhere, and you've go-- at intermission, you go up to one of the-- excuse me, sir, what do you know about Nordic mythology? What do you know about Nordic mythology? Not much. Somebody will say, well, wasn't there a Thor and you have a hammer. So for Wagner, this was a burning, burning, burning concern. So what's-- because finally Wagner lives because the quality of the music. The subject matter was important to him and therefore he was invested with emotional energy to concentrate that musical genius that he had to do that. Now I think he was a proto-Nazi and I don't think there's any argument against it. But he's also a musical genius and you have to live with this. If you don't like this idea, I suggest another planet. So I don't know if that's an answer but at least you laughed. Steve, I think this is a good moment to stop. Thank you so very much for doing this. [applause]