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Postprint : Author's Final Peer-Reviewed Version This item is the archived peer-reviewed author-version of: 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.
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