Sigma Alpha Iota

sai-national.org • WINTER 2017 • PAN PIPES 19 away from messages of that kind to messages of emotion — of things of beauty revealed to people, in terms of just beauty, order, balance, and so forth. Do you write for the audience or do you write for yourself? Do you have to compromise? Usually I have found it's not necessary to compromise. I am always challenged that what I have to say will be worth the other guy's listening to, you see, and I want it to be so. Therefore, I make every effort to make it a work which can give that other person something to think about, something to observe, something to enjoy, something to get something from. One has to assume that he may or may not fit into a picture at a given time. I think any artist runs this risk, and he's got to accept this as a risk. He's got to accept that maybe his public relations won't bring what he has to say into focus — ever. Or, it may eventually. If this is the case, there's not really too much you can do about it. I prefer not to spend time in this regard, and I would rather write what I feel I must and do what I can reasonably to see that it gets to the listener. But beyond that, it's a life work, and one simply runs this risk, that's all there is to it. I do not write for myself, I write to be heard. But I have to admit the possibility that it won't be heard, or let's say it won't be "dug" as much as I'd like. I'm finding, however, I must say, that I've been fantastically well fulfilled in this regard. Because just today, I've had three people speak to me about things they've heard, and what it meant to them. One is a student, and it turns out that he's been away for a long time, and has heard some stuff he just came back to say hello and to say what it meant. And over the weekend the governor gave me an award which indicates that people are recognizing these things. And the sale of the music, some of the choral music is now well over a hundred thousand individual copies — that's reaching quite a few people. So I feel well fulfilled in this regard, and I'm very grateful. But the person has to write for the other person with the full knowledge that it may not go home. We have to do it the way we feel it. Halsey Stevens wrote something with regard to Bartók — how "with no other composer do we find such adherence to an original approach or philosophy." Did you establish your own roots and continue along the same lines, or have you departed from these during your career? I think it's been fairly consistent with me. The philosophic views were not, maybe in the early stages, weren't verbalized as easily. Because there are times when you really don't know where you're going to go. How does one know? One doesn't. You have to go places to see how you go. But in retrospect now, I find that the whole thing has been a fairly straight line for me, and continues to be. And I feel that the line has got plenty of room to develop, too. It has not worked with me as it does sometimes with composers — they do very well in the beginning and then it seems to burn out. I feel very strongly that I'm on a good solid footing, and there's plenty of room to continue, without violent change in the overall view. How would you characterize your music? I'd characterize it first of all as being fundamentally lyric — songlike — that is, the melodic lines are almost always fairly conservative and sing-able. I prefer longer lines to a pointillistic approach. And I deal in phrases and paragraphs in a traditional way, rather than in disjointed sound patterns, generally speaking. And I think that I at least try to maintain a sense of humor in the music. And, therefore, I feel that pulse and rhythm is always important, and I try to get pulse into the music. I think we lose a lot when we eliminate some of the regular pulse. After all, our whole life, our whole physiological existence, is large and small pulses. And I think trying to get away from that, as so much music does now, is just a phase. But I'm not going along with that phase at all. And I believe a lot of this stuff will come back, and we'll begin to actually hear music again that has overall dramatic context, which has the long line, the long span which you find in symphonic literature. I see no reason why it's worn out by any means. Do you feel that electronic music lacks that kind of natural expression of emotion? I think there's a tendency to be more involved in varieties of sounds, and varieties of rhythmic combinations which are irregular, and which are hard to manage. A computer, for instance, can do an exact 17 against 7, you see — whereas in actual perception, we have a hard time to hear that or to perform it. Well, I have a feeling we're kind of in a neo-impressionistic era now, experimenting with sounds. My own feeling is that I'm now all the more amazed with the sounds that we've been using. I actually heard a piece of Liszt the other day, and I thought I never would enjoy Liszt again for a long while. But I heard this Liszt in terms of what we've learned from electronic sound, and it took on a new dimension for me. I don't think the music is any better, but the actual sound was fantastic. And to create those sounds electronically would be almost impossible. So I'm finding out, for myself at least, through our dealings with electronics, that we already have a fantastic palette of sounds. What about humor in music? That's also evident in Ives and Bartók. Sure, both of them, very good sense of humor. That's what I saw lacking in the Viennese school, was the sense of humor. There was a neurotic tinge to everything. You even find it in Mahler, kind of more on the sad, tragic side. I love Mahler at times, for his humanness, but the agony is just not all that necessary. Even in light of the horrible things that happen in this world — still, I mean the sense of humor does not deny the existence of other things. To me, the sense of humor is one of the saving graces and one of the noble feelings that we find in human beings. For a detailed biography and examination of his music, see Larry Worster's Cecil Effinger: A Colorado Composer (Lanham, MD and London: Scarecrow, 1997); Worster also authored the composer's entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. For a recently posted 1988 interview conducted by Chicago classical radio host Bruce Duffie, see bruceduffie.com/effinger.html. COMPOSING IDEAS 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.

• Cover