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Windblown ceremonies in search of Vocalissimus: an interview with Matt Barber on his composition To the roaring wind

Reference: Eeckhout Bart.- Windblow n ceremonies in search of Vocalissimus: an interview w ith Matt Barber on his composition To the roaring w ind The Wallace Stevens journal - ISSN 0148-7132 - Baltimore, Johns hopkins univ press, 43:2(2019), p. 152-167 Full text (Publisher's DOI): https://doi.org/10.1353/WSJ.2019.0019 To cite this reference: https://hdl.handle.net/10067/1642630151162165141

Institutional repository IRUA WSJ 43.2 Interview - 1

Windblown Ceremonies in Search of Vocalissimus: An Interview with Matt Barber on His

Composition To the Roaring Wind

BART EECKHOUT

MATT BARBER is a composer, performer, and teacher who studied at the Juilliard School in

New York and the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. He plays the bassoon and the recorder, is a conductor with a repertoire ranging from Bach to Xenakis, and has taught composition and computer music courses at various institutions. In 2011, Matt published a 22- minute song cycle for soprano and percussion ensemble entitled To the Roaring Wind. Curious to find out more, we decided to get in touch with him in the context of this special issue. He embraced our suggestion of an interview, which was conducted by e-mail in the spring of 2019.

To allow us to prepare for the conversation, Matt sent us the musical score as well as a weblink to a recording with scrolling score.1 For those readers who find score-gazing unhelpful or distracting, a stage recording of a 2011 performance, on the occasion of the work’s premiere, is also available online.2

Bart Eeckhout: Because the readers of this journal can’t be expected to be knowledgeable about contemporary composers, let’s start with a few questions about yourself. Your full name is

Matthew Barber, but much of the time you seem to go by Matt Barber, also as a composer. Is this WSJ 43.2 Interview - 2

to avoid confusion with the Canadian singer-songwriter Matthew Barber or has this never been an issue?

Matt Barber: Thank you for this opportunity to talk about my music. I waver on which version of my name to use professionally: I have preferred “Matt” since third grade or so, and nobody really calls me “Matthew” in conversation or correspondence. I did once get confused with the

Canadian musician you mentioned; I taught for two years at Colgate University, and the students there, eager to find out more about me, found the singer-songwriter instead and were very confused when I walked in. Aside from that, there is a young amateur songwriter Matt Barber

(from Iowa, I think) to whom friends occasionally compare me, and a conservative firebrand

Matt Barber whose name I regrettably hear in connection with rabid homophobia.

B.E.: You went to Juilliard as an undergraduate, where one of your teachers was Milton Babbitt.

Because Babbitt is such a towering figure in twentieth-century American music, can you tell us a few things about how you recall him and what impact he had on your formation as a composer?

And how is this reflected in the piece for violin, piano, and computer you wrote as an In

Memoriam for him in 2012?

M.B.: This would take up the entire interview were I to answer in full detail. I started study with

Milton at age seventeen, totally green and until then self-taught in the backwoods of Denver. (He had a joke about this: “You know the major problem with autodidacts, yes? They have such awful teachers!”) I was eager to learn anything and had an ear for twelve-tone music and other kinds of systematic music. What I remember most about him was his speech, which was so fluent WSJ 43.2 Interview - 3

and extemporaneous. You can get a feel for it by reading his writings: he spoke exactly the way he wrote, and when I read his writings I hear it in his voice. He called me “my dear boy,” and the year after John Elway retired, he joked that if I ever tired of composition I could go quarterback the Broncos. His guidance was intense, but not altogether methodical. He introduced me to a great deal of music I had been unaware of, and helped me learn how to think about it. The best advice I got from him was that whatever we call “form” in music is not some kind of vessel we pour content into, but both emerges from and controls content, and is content at various removes from the surface of the music.

All of this went into my composition Call It What You Will, my memorial piece for him.

It incorporates quotes of his music, of music I and many of his students studied with him, and music of mine I wrote with him. One movement is a take on his exhaustive knowledge of show tunes, which he would often play on the piano for friends at gatherings. This piece has had more performances than any other of my pieces, and I suspect it is because it really does reflect the very personal nature of a teacher-student relationship, and Babbitt and his music have such a reputation (undeserved in my opinion) for being utterly impersonal; my piece, and the many memorial pieces written for him, show his legacy in another light.

Incidentally, I’ve written about the Babbitt memorial piece at length, and the essay is scheduled to appear in an issue of Contemporary Music Review, which will be dedicated to

Babbitt and his world, with a special focus on its playfulness.

B.E.: The composition about which we’re eager to find out more here, To the Roaring Wind, dates from 2011, when you were in your early thirties. At that time, you had composed more than fifteen works, at a rate of a little more than one composition per year. I will be turning to these WSJ 43.2 Interview - 4

works’ remarkable diversity in instrumentation in a moment, but let’s begin with the impression I got that To the Roaring Wind was the first composition in which you set a canonical literary writer to music. This project started as a commission, right? So how did you wind up selecting poems by Wallace Stevens?

M.B.: Yes, this piece was a commission from the amazing soprano Jamie Jordan, along with

Robert McCormick, director of the McCormick Percussion Group and professor of percussion at the University of South Florida in Tampa. I had actually set text before in a piece called Severall

Figur’d Atomes, the title of which comes from a seventeenth-century poem by Margaret

Cavendish. In that piece, I set passages of poems--rather than whole poems--by Donne, Milton,

Stevens, and Cavendish. The Stevens passage is from “Sunday Morning,” the stanza that begins with “Jove in the clouds . . .” (CPP 54). Each poem in that piece has themes of either atomic theory or commingling of disparate elements (e.g., blood of two would-be lovers in Donne’s

“The Flea,” human blood with divine essence in Stevens, and so forth).

I bring this up here because setting Stevens in that piece spurred me to continue with his poetry in the song cycle for voice and percussion. One particular challenge any composer who would set Stevens’s poetry to music faces is that his verse is so musical. This may seem counterintuitive--shouldn’t musical poetry be easier to set to music? The reality is that a composer who takes up Stevens has to find a way to embody the music of the poetry without hiding it, all the while adding something that isn’t merely an add-on. There are also lots of ambiguities and layers of meaning where one could feel forced to choose one meaning to reveal or express in the music. The best way I have found to face these challenges is to take advantage of Stevens’s urgent pursuit of the abstract, the formal intricacy, the sometimes ascetic--all of WSJ 43.2 Interview - 5

which lends itself quite well to a musical formalism that comes naturally to me. It allows one to let the meaning of the poetry “sit atop” the music without the music interfering with the words or painting a specific interpretation of them. Having said that, I should add that interpretation is unavoidable in some sense, and with any text painting I tend to go with the most literal sense of the words I can find, so that if there is irony or hidden meaning it stays hidden. Sometimes revealing irony in the music is like starting a joke with the punchline--it’s much better to let the poetry do its thing than to use the music to nudge-nudge-wink-wink the listener.

Finally, I see a lot of my work as writing “music about music” in much the same way that

Stevens writes poetry about poetry--it’s making a statement about what a piece of art can be by arguing in the art form itself. And setting poetry to music can be a form of literary criticism and analysis. Setting Stevens’s poetry to music adds that many more orders of reference and aboutness: it’s music about music, music about poetry, music about music about poetry, music about poetry about poetry, . . .

B.E.: On your website, we can read that you have “avoided adopting a particular style of composition, and every new piece represents a different and original compositional interest.”

This is where the striking diversity in your oeuvre comes in. Before you started composing To the

Roaring Wind, you had written music for, among other things, orchestra; chamber orchestra; solo violin; solo piano; percussion quartet; wind quartet; saxophone quartet and electronics; handwhistle, homemade glass instruments, and electronics; electronic playback; two male vocalists, three recorders, lute, violin, viola, and cello; solo contrabass, obbligato contrabassoon, contrabass clarinet, three oboes, three clarinets, three celli, and electronics; metallophones and electronics; and recorders and ocarinas, again with electronics. Can you tell us something about WSJ 43.2 Interview - 6

your desire for different musical expressions and forms, particularly in relation to this unusual diversity of instruments? Were all or most of these works the result of commissions, and if so, what does that say about the pressure to be maximally flexible as a composer of art music today?

How are we to understand your combination of traditional instruments from the history of

Western art music with far less conventional types, such as handwhistles, homemade glass instruments, and ocarinas? And how do you tend to balance such instruments against the electronic tools you explore?

M.B.: Again, I could spend the entire interview on these questions. The first is quite apposite, and in some ways amounts to: “How do you conceive of writing for instruments?” There’s a kind of tradition in classical music to separate “the music itself” from its realization in some instrumental form. For instance, it’s quite possible to analyze a symphony by referring only to its pitches and rhythms (“the music itself”), while implicitly imagining its orchestration as a separate activity-- something like adding color to pictures in a coloring book. Moreover, this isn’t exactly belied by some composers’ aesthetic practice: Robert Schumann, for example, famously completed a

“continuity draft” (a two-staff rendition, something like a piano reduction) of his first symphony in four days during January 1841, and then completed the orchestration by the end of the next month. Still, I think this is a mistaken conception, as any orchestration of preexisting material is a recomposition, and any choices made during orchestration have to be made within the constraints imposed by the instruments chosen, which often forces a composer to adopt novel solutions they may not have imagined when they first set out.

In my own compositions, I tend to take this notion to a further extreme. The first things that come to me are usually some kind of form, some surface features of the music, and some WSJ 43.2 Interview - 7

idea about instrumental combination, and most often all are fairly vague because they are interdependent and have to develop together. In some cases, I’ve been given the instrumentation, as is quite usual for a commission. What I try to do from the very outset--and I think I got this from Babbitt--is to devise a formal solution that is hidden implicitly in the instrumentation. That is, I try to find something that can be rendered only by that particular instrumentation and by no other. Sometimes this means that the tentative instrumentation I had in mind has to change a bit as well in order to accommodate some necessary structural or surface feature. In short, each piece is a solution to a set of constraints, each of which asserts itself in different ways and with different strengths over the course of the piece. This means that novel instrumentations tend to be compatible with novel structural or stylistic concerns, and vice versa. This variety of both process and product is my favorite thing about composition. I’m not sure why that is, but I will say that in second grade or so I was the kind of kid who would systematically try out all thirty-one combinations of the five flavors in a Skittles bag and make mental notes about it, so some of this is probably just part of my nature.

Using unconventional instruments is likely the product of the fact that I get anxious when

I’m surrounded by silence. Over the years, I’ve learned to produce many sounds just to break the silence, and some of those things find their way into my compositions. The handwhistle you mention is where you put your hands together, quasi-folded, and blow through the thumbs across the cavity thus created to make an ocarina-like sound. I perfected that over time and decided to write a concerto for it; and since it was so novel, I decided to go ahead and build homemade instruments of glass, where I could control the tuning. Electronics merely explodes all of these possibilities, and there is much to say about it. Let’s just mention that when I write for anything that requires electronics, I do so only when I have a commission or an understanding with a WSJ 43.2 Interview - 8

performer that they will perform it. The reason is that electronics is both logistically difficult for the performer and an order of magnitude more difficult for me compositionally speaking, so I want to be sure that something can come of it. When I do use it, all of what I said above about instrumentation comes into play--I never use electronics as an overlay or effect, but rather as a fundamental formal element that has to be integrated.

B.E.: Let’s zoom in on your selection of percussion instruments in a moment. First I’m eager to hear the story of your choice of texts. You picked four of the briefest lyrics in Harmonium: “To the Roaring Wind,” “Valley Candle,” “Fabliau of Florida,” and “Ploughing on Sunday.” Why did you turn to Stevens’s first book and how did these poems come together? Was there one poem with which you started and around which you then gathered other texts? How important was it that these were all very brief, sensuously evocative lyrics without any narrative element? Did you want them to cohere as much as possible instead of building contrasts? On the face of it, there are certainly a lot of possible connections among these poems. They all paint natural scenes, unpeopled except for the speaker, and they invariably insist on the dynamic quality of these surroundings, through which the wind blows over and over again. Nothing stands still in these landscapes, which we notice also grammatically from the frequent use of present progressives.

The final stanza of “Fabliau of Florida” may be most programmatic in its proclamation: “There will never be an end / To this droning of the surf” (CPP 18). As an aesthetic principle, such unstoppable movement seems to be ideal for turning into music, because music is arguably the most fleeting, most temporal art form. Its grammar is entirely in the present progressive, so to speak. Are such reflections farfetched?

WSJ 43.2 Interview - 9

M.B.: Not at all, these reflections are right on the mark, which I suppose means I’ve done my job!

First, you asked why Harmonium, and the answer is that because I didn’t have a great deal of time to compose the piece, we collectively decided that we ought to stick with public domain poems in order not to spend any time waiting for permissions.

I’d toyed with matching a pair of Stevens poems with a pair of poems from the seventeenth century, but that didn’t work nearly as well as the four I picked. I didn’t choose any single poem first--instead, I had a collection of maybe eight or ten that I winnowed to the four I chose. I considered at least “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Bantams in Pine-Woods,” “O, Florida,

Venereal Soil,” “Earthy Anecdote,” and perhaps “The Plot Against the Giant” or “Gubbinal.” I’d wanted to include a Florida poem because of the commission’s origin in Tampa, so a first thought was to include poems that provided definite locations--Tennessee in “Anecdote of the Jar,”

Oklahoma in “Earthy Anecdote,” North America in “Ploughing on Sunday,” Appalachia in

“Bantams in Pine-Woods.” Some of these texts are pretty long for an art song, especially for my compositional style. So, the temptation to set “O, Florida, Venereal Soil” had to give way to

“Fabliau of Florida,” which I like but don’t find quite as rich. Without the Florida connection,

“The Plot Against the Giant,” “Gubbinal,” “Bantams in Pine-Woods,” and “Ploughing on

Sunday” might have made a satisfying quartet of the yokel, gubbins, inchling, and ploughman; the former two with their off-scene oafishness and the latter two with their protests.

Here’s how I came to the final decision. The fabliau’s style, meaning, and imagery together demand a lot of musical time for reflection and depiction. You’re totally right to pick out the passage you did (“There will never be an end / To this droning of the surf”) as the key to the poem, because it provides a literal musical idea: there is a soft drone throughout the entire song, which is needed to provide that sense of eternity. It could almost take a place analogous to the WSJ 43.2 Interview - 10

slow second movement of a symphony. I began to think in those terms, and so the third movement would need to be something lively--a “scherzo,” perhaps. “Ploughing on Sunday” fits that role, both in terms of its roughly A-B-A form and its pecking short words. The wind is common to both of those poems, and is of course the one image that ties the four poems together.

Both “Valley Candle” and “To the Roaring Wind” came in then. They are both short poems that contrast with the other two and with each other, and they share the wind. There are others that could have fit--“The Wind Shifts” comes to mind--but in the end the ones I chose fit my purposes best. “Valley Candle” and “To the Roaring Wind” also seem to me to be ceremonial in quality; the former strikes me as something more to meditate over than understand, like a Zen kōan, and the latter is like a public prayer to the wind.

Wind is the most obvious connection among the four poems, but there are big themes that run through Harmonium which further bind these particular poems together. One of them is boundaries and separations--between Old World and New World, humanity and nature, individual and society, the inner life and reality--which are symbolized in striking imagery. The third stanza of “Sunday Morning,” which I had set in Severall Figur’d Atomes, has what seems to me the most iconic example:

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.

No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave

Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.

He moved among us, as a muttering king,

Magnificent, would move among his hinds,

Until our blood, commingling, virginal, WSJ 43.2 Interview - 11

With heaven, brought such requital to desire

The very hinds discerned it, in a star.

Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be

The blood of paradise? And shall the earth

Seem all of paradise that we shall know?

The sky will be much friendlier then than now,

A part of labor and a part of pain,

And next in glory to enduring love,

Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

(CPP 54)

The sky is portrayed as the boundary between humanity and deity, which will disappear when we no longer need any notion of god to accept the paradise of reality and human potential. It’s probably my favorite poem in any language. The imaginative separation of the candle from the immense valley in “Valley Candle” can be an illustration of mortality (one seems invited to recognize an allusion to “brief candle” even if it’s not explicitly there), or it might symbolize the perceived ontological difference between human life and nature, which gets confused as nature is reflected inward. In “Fabliau of Florida,” the lonely barque is like the candle in the previous poem, both enveloped in nature and set against it. The farmer in “Ploughing on Sunday” descends like an apparition to flaunt his brazen violation of the sabbath, asserting a separation between individual voice and societal expectations. And, I think, if one takes “To the Roaring Wind” in light of the naturalism of these poems and others in Harmonium, the poem accepts replacement of deity’s emptiness with reality’s fecundity; the wind is now “Vocalissimus”--the greatest voice WSJ 43.2 Interview - 12

(CPP 77). All of the “what do we do with our cultural and religious inheritance from Europe when we’re making art in America” ideas that permeate Harmonium are present in these poems as well.

B.E.: That makes your choice of the four poems understandable and convincing, so let’s now consider how you put them together. I’m struck by a few conspicuous and surprising decisions in this regard. First of all, there is your double use of “To the Roaring Wind” as both opening and closing text. Why did you want to suggest circularity like this, and why did you decide that in the first instance the text should be declaimed, in the second sung? This play with opening and closing is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that the poem serves as the conclusion to

Harmonium. Some critics have argued that Stevens’s placement is, in fact, ironic: as the poem seems to stand in the romantic tradition of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and typically apostrophizes the wind in a call for poetic inspiration, the normal place to expect it would be at the outset of a collection of poems, not at the end.3 The interesting thing about your choice is that you make us listen to the poem in both positions, as an opening invitation and a closing proclamation.

M.B.: Quite right. I’d thought of the poem “To the Roaring Wind” in terms of the verbs

“convoke” and “invoke,” and it serves both purposes equally well. Music is an art form that unfolds over time, and whenever there is a circularity like this, later occurrences take on new meanings and connotations after the intervening material. The soloist recites the full poem plainly in the prelude amid sounds from triangles and snare drums, which have no discernable pitch and no real connection to the words. It’s sort of saying, “Music is music; poetry is poetry; and we are WSJ 43.2 Interview - 13

not yet prepared to remove the boundary until after we’ve made our plea to the wind and had time to ponder over the interlude.”

The second time through, the soloist has long since found her singing voice. Her prayer to the wind for inspiration has earned greater sincerity in the interim, as she now seems to understand Vocalissimus. In my setting, she repeats the opening question, “What syllable are you seeking, / Vocalissimus, / In the distances of sleep?” (CPP 77), three times without answer, each time with more urgency and greater fragmentation of the words’ syllables, as though whatever is sought by the roaring wind is being blown away. At the end of this spell of longing, the soloist simply finds her voice and begins to sing ecstatically without words--something like the opposite of speaking the words plainly without music. She ends with a very clear and confident “Speak it.”

To my mind, its place at the end of Harmonium serves to recall the collection’s arguments about the splendor of human ability and the grandeur of nature, and to focus all of that into those two final, wonderful words. Insofar as this kind of poem would normally come at the beginning of a collection, at the end it invites a rereading--or a relistening in my case!

B.E.: I have a second structural question: could you explain your decision not to string the poems together but to insert an improvised interlude on every occasion? If you wanted to invest in the intrinsic connections among poems, why then did you include extended interludes? In this sense, and although your aesthetic is a very different one, I’m reminded of Ned Rorem’s Last Poems of

Wallace Stevens. There, too, interludes were used, though not systematically. Rorem likewise selected a batch of poems from one stage of Stevens’s life (in his case, the late lyrics), and he likewise set them for soprano voice and a small ensemble (cello and piano). Even if Rorem’s particular composition might be unfamiliar or unappealing to you, the question of how to link WSJ 43.2 Interview - 14

individual poems in an overarching musical architecture remains a crucial one to any composer of a song cycle, I should think.

M.B.: The interludes do three things in the piece. The first is simply logistic: these songs are difficult for the singer, and the interludes give her a break between movements to rest, drink water, prepare pitches, and so forth. Second, they are improvised by the percussionists based on some guidelines; I tell them which pitches they can play at a given time, and they are free to do anything that incorporates only those pitches. Thus they provide a sense of caprice that I think exists in the poems I chose, but that I didn’t quite work into my settings, which are fairly concentrated and exacting. Third, they enhance that “ceremonial” quality of the poetry I mentioned above. With the interludes, the piece becomes something more like a secular cantata than a song cycle.

B.E.: This is where we might turn to the issue of instrumentation. Except for the lines “Tum-ti- tum, / Ti-tum-tum-tum!” in “Ploughing on Sunday” (CPP 16), I don’t immediately see a strong percussive element to the style of the poems you selected. So how did you make the connection between texts and percussion? How much tension is there between the fleeting, flowing, windblown world evoked in the poems and the pinpointed intensities of percussion instruments?

Was this tension perhaps part of the creative challenge for you?

M.B.: This is an excellent question. “Ploughing on Sunday” is by far the most percussive, and of the four settings it’s the one I composed first, for that reason. In this song, I have the percussionists play a wide array of instruments and make a bunch of mouth noises that suggest WSJ 43.2 Interview - 15

various farm sounds, and the poetry is sung syllable by syllable in a rather percussive way in the gaps between the percussion hits. There’s a regimentation to Stevens’s portrayal of the farm that suggested this to me; placing the poem next to the “What syllable are you seeking” of “To the

Roaring Wind” was also a factor.

Elsewhere, though, you’re right: none of these is stereotypically percussive. One thing that isn’t always well known among non-musicians is that there are many percussion instruments and techniques that can sustain sounds as well as any string or wind instrument, and better even than piano, so we aren’t as limited in that way as you might think. In this case, it’s a matter of finding the right combination of sounds to go with the voice’s many registers and words from among the available instruments in the ensemble. The last song is a good example: throughout most of it the instruments are playing very tightly controlled harmonies with a sustained but shimmering texture, while the vocalist is developing her words with staccato coloratura. Over time, as the instruments get louder and the individual articulations are more audible, the shimmering texture becomes more agitated so that the percussion’s dense counterpoint as the vocalist enters her reverie seems like a natural transition rather than something brand new. It’s stepping over a line in a controlled manner rather than rushing headlong into the unknown.

B.E.: Your score prescribes four groups of percussion instruments, to be played by one or two players each. The hunger for variety in sound is almost gluttonous: we’re talking about literally dozens of instruments here, all with their own timbre. I hope the readers of this journal won’t be overwhelmed by the following Whitmanian catalogue, which is by no means complete; most

Stevens lovers are nevertheless bound to get excited, I think, by the sheer colorfulness of these names and the imaginary sound worlds they evoke even in their silent existence on the page: WSJ 43.2 Interview - 16

glockenspiel, crotales, conga drum, almglocken, cowbells, graduated triangles, wood block, glass wind chime, surdo, repinique, pandeiro, paint canvas and glass beer bottles (as found-object instruments), xylophone, chimes, timpano, sizzle cymbal, washboard, plastic bottle and paper bag

(further found-object instruments), wind gong, ratchet, guiro, newspaper (another found object),

China cymbal, caxixi, maraca, slapstick, bamboo wind chime, and bag of chips (the final found- object instrument). Could you tell us more about what drove you to explore and include so many instruments? And could you add how important it is to you that these come from all corners of the earth rather than from traditional Western orchestras?

M.B.: There are two things that caused the multitude of instruments. First, this was my first largescale percussion composition, and composers tend to get carried away when there are so many options to work with. In actuality, I could--and probably should--pare down the number of instruments just for purely practical purposes. You can often get the sounds you want by using two playing techniques on one instrument rather than two instruments. In any case, the second factor was just thinking carefully about the words and images in the poetry. For example,

“Fabliau of Florida” needs shore sounds, which in the gloaming seem to be distant and unidentifiable, so I have the percussionists play a paint canvas (thwapp thwap thwapthwap!), blow glass bottles, hit glass and bamboo wind chimes, and the like.

Tampa has a rich Cuban history as well, so I felt the need to include Latin drums (in this case, a combination of Afro-Cuban drums, like congas and bongos, and Brazilian drums, such as surdo, repinique, and pandeiro). That’s really the extent of my international allusions, despite the names of some instruments like “China cymbal,” which is used in works by Olivier Messiaen and in regular drum sets alike. The fact is that, over the twentieth century, standard percussion came WSJ 43.2 Interview - 17

to comprise collections of instruments from around the world. You really can’t avoid it. It’s interesting to note that even what we might think of as standard orchestral percussion in the late nineteenth century, such as drums and cymbals, had been used to evoke “Turkish” music in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It’s important not to fall into the exoticism trap, though, and in my music I’ve tried more to allude or refer than to mimic (feebly) or appropriate.

Sometimes, upon reflection, I’ve failed, but Stevens wasn’t immune to exoticism himself, and it seems to fit in the cases where I was perhaps careless.

B.E.: To a Stevens reader, your choice of instruments is full of echoes to instruments mentioned in his poetry--for instance, the cymbals and tambourines in “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” the tom-toms, drums, bells, chimes, and shaken bracelets elsewhere, or his references to vibrations and vibrancies. In addition, your found-object instruments seem to stand in the avantgarde tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, which Stevens as a onetime friend of Duchamp knew well enough. I wouldn’t want to insist on such aesthetic connections to the poet, but did

Stevens’s own immersion in musical and nonmusical sounds inspire you at all? Have you felt a desire to explore them further in future compositions?

M.B.: There are only a few connections between the found-object instruments and Stevens that I was thinking about explicitly, and those are likely arcane. As I’ve said, Stevens’s poetry has an inherently musical quality to it, and as you point out in this question, some of that musicality comes from explicit references to or evocations and illustrations of sound; and when those sounds are not musical on the surface, they are made so in virtue of their inclusion in Stevens’s intricate verse (Azcan’s “hoos” are perhaps my favorite example from Harmonium [CPP 60]). Underlying WSJ 43.2 Interview - 18

this, though, is Stevens’s philosophical outlook--especially present in Harmonium--which so often bids us to embrace the world as it is and not to cheapen it with any metaphysical overlay.

The world and all of its internal relations is quite enough, and it is richer if it is not a reflection of heaven or merely a divine creation. What I want to say is that from this standpoint, an object is musical if it makes sound in music, and not because it has been sanctified, as it were, a priori for use in capital-M Music.

B.E.: With so many percussion instruments sounding alternately or simultaneously, a reader who hasn’t yet listened to your composition might be excused for supposing that it came across as cacophonous and confusing. But much of the time the sound world you create is actually light, slender, and transparent. What were the main effects you were aiming at, and how do they relate to the text in the poems? In general, how important to you was it to align text and music, and how consistently did you look for such congruences?

M.B.: You could say the same thing if you looked at the instrumentation of works by Gustav

Mahler or Igor Stravinsky. One secret of orchestration is that if you have a ton of instruments at your disposal, you can find combinations of instruments that have just the right weight for the context, and sometimes that context will demand something very light. Some of the most dramatic passages in Mahler’s eighth symphony, which has a huge orchestra, three choirs, eight vocal soloists, and offstage brass, are places where he focuses all that potential onto a single violin or just a few instruments in combination.

I’ve already said much about the connection between sound and text in the foregoing, but

I’ll give a specific example here. Above I noted how the gradual change in texture worked to WSJ 43.2 Interview - 19

propel the vocalist into her ecstatic vocalise in “To the Roaring Wind.” In “Valley Candle,” I decided that a much more abrupt transition was necessary between the second and third sentences, where the beams of the huge night converge first upon the candle and then upon its image. In one reading, these are not so subtle hints of Kant’s epistemic distinction between a thing-in-itself and its appearances, the question being posed here about the human self.

That’s a lot to try to portray, and I felt that, given the precision of the text and its literal repetition of words with an abstract change in meaning, I should let the vocalist continue on her way without any change in affect or texture. In the percussion, however, there is a big change. Up to that point, the percussionists have been accompanying her playing instruments with definite pitch, some of them following the rhythm, contour, and intervals more or less exactly, and others either filling out the texture or punctuating the ends of rhythmic cycles with rolls on pitched cowbells, called almglocken. At the moment of transition, one of them pops a paper bag--this is

LOUD--and the players all do what they had been doing before, but now on unpitched counterparts to instruments they’d been playing. So instead of marimba and xylophone dutifully following the singer’s every move, now those players play her rhythms and contours on a set of graduated woodblocks. Instead of crotales (a kind of thick, very high-pitched cymbal with definite pitch), they play triangles, and instead of almglocken, they play regular cowbells. The point here is to symbolize the “candle” with pitched percussion and “its image” with unpitched percussion (CPP 41). If I may be so bold, the beauty of it is that the abrupt transition nevertheless happens seamlessly, and since “its image” occurs in the middle of the last sentence, the analogy

“candle : its image :: pitched : unpitched” is possible to understand only retrospectively, if at all.

WSJ 43.2 Interview - 20

B.E.: Especially in the case of fast, rhythmically complex passages, I was wondering whether you composed them painstakingly on the page or used algorithms on the computer. How slow is this process of writing fast music for a wide range of instruments?

M.B.: Although I do use computers to help with some of my music, I didn’t with this piece. So yes, I painstakingly composed the entire thing with paper and pencil before I entered it into the music-engraving software. All composition goes slowly for me, but what I take to be your intuition is right--that the speed of composition is determined more by the number of notes than the speed of the piece, so that it can take the same amount of time to write five seconds of complicated fast music as it does to write twenty-thirty seconds of sparse slow music. This often throws off a composer’s sense of how time unfolds in the piece, so it’s always necessary to step back and try to hear through the music with some detachment to recalibrate.

B.E.: In musical settings of poetry, textual comprehensibility is frequently an issue as well, and one often wonders to what extent the listener is supposed to be able to identify the words, let alone grasp their meaning. In the prefatory notes to your score, you admit yourself that the

“soprano vocalist may sometimes feel buried by the ensemble” (v). In “Valley Candle,” furthermore, hundreds of notes are being sung rapidly on a limited number of syllables, so that the words are hard to piece together in the mind. And in “Fabliau of Florida,” you stake a lot on enormous interval leaps in the melody while also asking that the singer switch between different kinds of delivery, from “Serenely” over “Expressively” to “sotto voce” and “Full voice, sensual”

(14-17). At what level do you believe an unprepared audience should be able to engage with the WSJ 43.2 Interview - 21

poems during the listening? Do you see yourself as primarily serving the original text or instead borrowing it as a starting point for an autonomous experience that largely bypasses the text?

M.B.: “Admit” is maybe a loaded word here; the point of that warning in the performance notes is to encourage the vocalist to use a microphone, which we did in the premiere. There are many reasons to do this. First, loudness is a function both of decibels and timbre, and percussion can interfere with or cover a voice in ways that are quite different than the other orchestral instruments, mostly because the vocal techniques used to project an operatic voice over an orchestra do not always work to project over percussion. Second, the singer can use the microphone as an expressive instrument, since it can pick up all kinds of subtle sounds and inflections that can’t usually be heard without amplification, and if it’s done effectively, pronunciation is much easier to follow. Jazz and popular music performers have known this for a long time, but we’ve been relatively slow to adopt microphones in classical music.

Still, I put in a lot of effort to keep the voice front and center. For the most part, I gave her a wide berth so that the register she sings in at a given time is not also active in the percussion ensemble. This is especially important for a voice like Jamie Jordan’s, whose sound I had in mind through the entire composition. She has a precise, limber, lyric voice that for my music needs space to shine far more than it needs support.

When a singer sings lots of notes on a single syllable, we call this a “melisma,” and

“Valley Candle” is extremely melismatic, as you point out. There are several reasons for this. The most obvious I hadn’t thought of until listeners pointed it out to me--that the voice sounds like it’s literally being tossed about in the wind. I think they’re right, and something like that was probably working on an unconscious level. More consciously, I was imagining the song as I WSJ 43.2 Interview - 22

experienced it upon first reading, like a look into a private ceremony, where the listener could tell that there are meanings and rules of progression and decorum, but not what any of those are exactly. This is how it is for most outsiders seeing a ritual uninitiated! The syllables unfold quite slowly, and I tried to subvert normal scansion in order that the singer not perform the linguistic meaning of the text, as happens in many religious traditions where text is sung in a way that makes it hard for the singer to impose meaning by inflection. However, the kind of music I probably had in my ears at the time was Carnatic--South Indian classical--music, which is similarly melismatic, and hard even for native speakers of Tamil and Telugu to follow at first.

For a taste, you could direct your readers to an unbelievable performance by one of the greatest

Carnatic performers in history, M. S. Subbulakshmi.4

To your last question, I’d say that there is a sweet spot where some kind of synergy is achieved between the text and the music. I have four-year-old twin daughters; they have all these needs that I have to take very seriously, but there are things I need from them as well. The constant give-and-take, picking of battles, radical mutuality--all of these are part of the essence of nurturing. Setting a text is like that: sometimes I have to lay down the law, as it were, as in

“Valley Candle,” and sometimes the nature of the text is so constraining that I can’t help but follow its lead, as in “Ploughing on Sunday.”

“Fabliau of Florida” is by far the most synergistic in the cycle. Each little stanza is bursting with its own emotional quality, and each has a different complexity. Some have almost a storybook nature, while towards the end the poem seems to verge on erotic fantasy and fulfillment. I stayed as close to the text as I could, accompanying simpler sentiments with simpler music and more complex ones with more complex music (hence the wide leaps you mentioned).

Because it’s so episodic, I could treat each vignette relatively discretely while attending also to WSJ 43.2 Interview - 23

how the song builds. And, of course, the “droning of the surf” is ever present and ties the collection of parts together.

B.E.: Finally, after the detailed and fascinating explanations you’ve provided, how would you still pitch To the Roaring Wind to the readers of this journal whose primary interest is in

Stevens’s poetry and who might still be in doubt about turning to your composition online?

M.B.: I wouldn’t presume to pitch my music in quite that way, but I might go with what I tell my students when they are experiencing something new. I try to foster an ethic of meeting all art half way, and if one really doesn’t like something, try to figure out what it is you don’t like and why.

You’ll at least learn something about yourself and what you bring to the experience, but sometimes upon further engagement you might start to understand more about what makes the art tick as well, and that’s good for everyone involved. I will be happy to share a score should any of your readers wish to study it.5 Many thanks to you and your readers for the opportunity to share my work and my love of Stevens’s poetry here.

University of Antwerp

Belgium

Notes

1See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n1plusX48g.

2See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ3h0Xk7qN4. WSJ 43.2 Interview - 24

3See, for instance, Cook 86.

4See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtayQialsJM.

5To obtain a perusal score in pdf format, please contact Matt Barber at [email protected].

Works Cited

Barber, Matthew. Matthew Barber. Composer’s website, ecmc.rochester.edu/mbarb/web/.

---. To the Roaring Wind for Soprano and Percussion Ensemble. Roaring Wind Music, 2011.

PDF.

Cook, Eleanor. A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens. Princeton UP, 2007.

Rorem, Ned. Last Poems of Wallace Stevens for Voice, Cello and Piano. Corrected ed., Boosey and Hawkes, 1991.

Stevens, Wallace. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and

Joan Richardson, Library of America, 1997.