Sigma Alpha Iota

sai-national.org • WINTER 2017 • PAN PIPES 17 write for. If somebody didn't ask me for something, then I would be cooking up a situation. But it was always a practical situation, and if you do this, one thing leads to another and you find yourself doing four or five works a year. After 30 years, you know, four or five works a year adds up. Is there something uniquely American about your music? Maybe typically American. I've been involved in a lot of American subjects. I've done quite a bit of work using folk music, the same as Bartók used Hungarian music. Quite a few of the works are based this way. And yet, on the other hand, for instance, the opera Cyrano is on a French subject. And yet I think the music itself is no different than some of the music that was written for American subject material. So what is American and what isn't is a little hard to say. And certainly, we can't say that, for instance, Delius was a French composer — because he lived in England, was English, and lived in Florida. Nor is he an English composer; it's kind of hard to define. I don't think about it too much. I am aware that some of our best music in the history of the Western culture has been along the lines of universal thoughts which are couched in one's own very close, colloquial language. When we do local music, which doesn't apply beyond the local area, then I don't think we're dealing with anything very important. Certainly it's pleasant, and certainly it's useful, and it deserves to be. But take Variations on a Cowboy Tune — to me, it's very important that that piece of music pay attention to the musical material in an exciting, interesting, appropriate way. But also, I feel that it should touch on some universal values — and if it does, then I feel that it becomes a "serious" piece of music. Naturally, one hopes to do it well, and sometimes it turns out well and sometimes no matter how hard you try, it doesn't turn out so well. You've been described as having been influenced by Bartók, Berg, and Ives. I think one of the strongest influences has been Vaughan Williams, actually. I think I've got a lot of English in me. Also, my early training was from an Englishman, who really took me through the mill, in a kind of solid writing, which is typical of English theorists, and which is very much in evidence in Vaughan Williams' writing, even the late symphonies, which depart much from anything even ecclesiastical or solid in hymn textures, you still find this. So I feel that's a very strong influence. I think Ives also exhibits some of the same things. I don't recall when I might have said that Bartók was an influence. This might have been at a given time, although I must say that my fifth string quartet has a great deal of Bartók influence in it. I think Bartók has some very beautiful hidden counterpoint in his work. It's an essential contrapuntal sense there that he has. It isn't single lines; it's very often masses of sounds which move in various directions. So you have the full contrapuntal texture. But instead of individual lines, it's rhythms and masses of sounds. And hidden within those dissonances are contrapuntal forces, very beautiful. As far as Berg is concerned, the 12-tone idea is bound to have influenced somebody of my time period because, in the Twenties, when I was first hearing more sophisticated chamber music, the Schoenberg influence was strong about then. And I felt myself leaning more toward the approach that Berg has for this than the Schoenberg approach, and certainly different than the Webern, because I seem to feel longer lines better than the short lines. I think Berg assimilated the technique and put it to his own use, very well, very beautifully illustrated in both the Violin Concerto, and in Wozzeck. Now, actually, I came at a time period when there was a tendency for me to rebel against the Viennese School — and I didn't know it, but also, a lot of other American composers were doing so. And so there's a time period through the Thirties in which you find the Copland influence, the Roy Harris influence, and also a surge in the music of Sibelius and of Vaughan Williams — which was really kind of an opposite direction to the Viennese 12-tone idea. And I got caught up in that. I had a predilection away from the Viennese originally, except probably for Berg — and found myself swimming in another direction. So, by and large, I would say that those influences are somewhat less — that is, the 12-tone influences. Now, aer the war and with the "discovery" of Webern and the mixing up of people between here and Europe, there became a rekindled interest in the 12-tone idea. A lot of young composers thought that it had just arrived, in effect. And then, in this case, I found myself a little further away. Although my second symphony is on a 12-tone theme throughout, it is treated tonally, and I've done a great deal of writing in this way. And I find myself involved quite naturally in the business of floating to all the 12 tones. But I don't do it by calculation. I do it rather by a sense, of feeling it. And there's hardly a piece I've written that doesn't float to all the 12 tones, in their original material, pretty quick — before the piece has gone more than a minute or so, why I have specifically hit all of them. I like the idea of composing by all kinds of formulas, it suits my interests very much, my mathematical interests. At any rate, one has lots of influences. I'm certain that one can't help but be influenced by Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and Schubert. And I find also that some of the pieces I've written have a strong kinship to Sibelius. I've been rather surprised to find this. Ives is close to quite a few of us who had a tendency away from the Viennese thought. Because he is strongly rooted in America — in the hymn tunes, and in the reflections that he poses in his pieces, of the countryside in which he was growing up and in which he lived. So I think any of us who began to feel about COMPOSING IDEAS I think that it's most important that we consider the writing of music as the creation of an entity which is functional, either in communication of an idea to other people — the listener is absolutely essential — or in the creation of just things of beauty, straight beauty.

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