Martin Bresnick

Great pleasure, Michael.

Uh, yeah. I I I mean, you put your finger on a very important feature of my thinking about composition, uh that and it is something that I recognized quite early, that I was very eager to explore all sides of my musical personality without inhibiting myself by choosing a style or becoming completely uh captured by a single way of working. Um and as a result, I think if it can be said that I have a style, and I think in some sense it can be said that I have a style, it is only because of the because of the way I work and the interior of the work that the style becomes manifest. It's not in the surface. The surface may vary very widely from composition to composition. But it's an approach, and it's in the in the way in which I go about thinking about the the the way the music unfolds, not the not the surface of the music.

I mean, frankly, if I was only affected by the music inside of Connecticut, it would be Michael Bolton and uh Gene Tierney, a town without pity or something like that. And it does stretch a little bit wider than that. Oh, for sure. I mean, I I'm a New Yorker, really. I uh I grew up in the city, um and I was exposed to a very wide variety of music, and also in my family background, uh my my aunt was a professional singer, both folk music and uh uh Yiddish music, and also uh uh pop music and jazz. And, I mean, there was every kind of thing. I had cousins who who were interested in the musical field. Uh one one was a drummer with Vic Damone and and uh Billy Eckstine, and the other was uh involved with Langston Hughes, trying to get a a production on with Langston. So, I've been exposed to a lot of music and have always been quite interested in a lot of music, from my own environment and from from places much farther afield.

Mhm. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, Ishi's Song is actually quite unusual in my in my catalog, for any number of reasons. For one thing, uh the commissioner uh this was an Italian colleague who's in a pianist who is very interested in North American indigenous music, uh a kind of music in which I needed to acquaint myself with in a much greater way than I had up to the time he commissioned me. Um and uh when I when he suggested uh that, I at first was kind of at a loss. But I remembered a really remarkable documentary about the about Ishi, who was a member of the Yahi-Yani people of Northern California near Mount Lassen. And the documentary, which I saw sometime in the early 20th, or 21st century, it's from the late '90s when it was made, was very touching to me, and um because you know, Ishi, uh well, I won't go into the whole story of Ishi. People should find out. It's actually a very complicated story. But I was able I was able to, since Ishi himself was in contact and lived with the members of the Anthropology Department at the University of California in the early 21st century when he when he found, when they found him and he found them, he sang a number of songs that he knew, actually quite a few, which were recorded uh by the University of California Anthropology Department. And you could actually listen to Ishi singing them very much in the way the Edison uh wax cylinders were uh heard, were created in some ways by Bartók and Kodály. Uh and there, I was very touched by a little tiny fragment and and used that fragment, uh which was a part of his uh repertoire of songs, and um so, I said it was unusual because I don't, mean, it's not as though I don't quote other composers' work, but in this case, uh I not only quote that tiny fragment that they had at the time of that song, but I I was in consultation with Bruno Nettl, who was great, the great ethnomusicologist, who had done considerable research into Native American music. And I learned a lot about uh that music and way the way it's made, how how it's constructed in terms of its pentatonic structure and its also periodic structure, and I tried to make a piece uh for for Emanuele Arciuli, who is the commissioner, which would represent Ishi's song within a context of musical construction that he, Ishi himself, even if he might not have recognized it in the way that I did, but did honor to the procedures by which that music was created in the first place. But there's, not much of my music that actually does that in that way, but—

Uh, yeah. I mean, um that has been, I think you've put your finger on by saying that, a very characteristic feature of of how I go about composing uh and how my pieces are made, um I mean, if you look over my shoulder, there's the guy himself, uh who's who's the quite a guy.

An admirable person and a magnificent composer. Um Bartók's uh macrocosm and microcosm is an organization that he worked a great The architectonics of that uh are are very persuasive to me. Uh I think it's quite interesting to think that Bartók had actually very few followers who could be recognized. The ones who who imitated his style of folk music integration, you know, they they that wasn't as persuasive because, you know, if you try to imitate the surface of a composer like Bartók, you end up being very much a very low grade version of Bartók because pretty hard to be a high grade version of Bartók. But if you but if you penetrate inside the music and you kind of come to grips with the thinking that gives rise to this, and you try as best as you can to manifest some of that thinking in your own way, uh you have the potential of making something both personal and and architecturally objectively palpable and strong that that other people who are listening intelligently can respond to.

I did.

Yeah, I studied with him in Vienna. The story is, in briefly told, that I I uh actually had a a Fulbright and I was going over to study with Gyorgy Ligeti uh, but when I arrived on my Fulbright, Ligeti had accepted me as a student, Ligeti himself got a prize and grant and he left Vienna to go to live in Berlin for the year, which kind of crushed me. I was really distressed about that. And I ended up uh studying with the the people who are in charge of my Fulbright decided to connect me with the craziest composer, as they put it, that they could find in in Vienna at the time. And that was Gottfried von Einem um, and um it it turns out that I did end up with studying with Ligeti considerably, but that was a year or two later, back at Stanford where I was a graduate student. But while that spent that year in Vienna, I was um I was a student of Gottfried von Einem, probably the mo- one of the most conservative composers in Europe, with any reputation, at that time, which would have been 1969-70.

Well, you know, I'm I'm I was very fortunate as a kid to attend the high school of music and art, and uh at the high school of music and art, I I studied composition, you know, with at a at a rudimentary level with a very talented teacher, and I also worked at a music camp uh in the summer. I was a waiter and an oboe player in the orchestra, I had this kind of dual role. And while I was there, I worked uh in music with a Dutch guy, uh Misha Neamenvurth, who who was very strict in the kind of species counterpoint kind of style of thinking of things. So, my earliest connection with this was very, you know, support- it was kind of supportive but rigorous and I didn't yet have any real grasp of of what the world would look like, and especially the kind of world that you you describe, which was quite fraught ideologically. It wasn't until um uh a bit later, uh because actually my earlier influences there, I just gravitated toward what I liked, and what I liked at that time was uh Debussy and Prokofiev, kind of an odd connection of people in modern, well, for relatively modern music at that time. But once I got to uh the university uh, and actually it's interesting because I studied privately during the first year of my university because I was at Hunter College at that time, and I studied um for one year I studied with William Sydeman, who was at Mannes actually. Uh he probably might not have been there any longer when you were there.

And he, yeah, this would have been, when I studied with Bill Sydeman, must have been '64, so 10 years earlier. And Bill Sydeman's a remarkable guy in his own way, and I- you'll the pertinence of what I'm saying now will come evident in a moment because he just uh he said, "Hey, you know, there's a lot of music out there that you don't know that you should know, whether you like it or not, and I'm going to give you lists of pieces to listen to and then we can talk about them and how you feel about them, but you should get to know these pieces." And his list was very uh uh Catholic. He he sent me to Stravinsky and Bartók and Schoenberg and Webern and Berg, Carter, who, ac- at that time, in that area of the '60s, he actually lived across the street from Mannes, which was then on the East Side, interestingly enough.

Yeah. And um so I I got exposed to a whole lot of music uh, at I was at that time, you know, I was very young because I, after I entered high school at a very young age, I graduated high school at 16. So, I was studying with Bill Sydeman just turning 17. And it it wasn't until I got to uh the University of Hartford and the Hartt School of Music that the issues that you described were becoming, in my world, very, very prominent. Uh, my teacher, my the teacher I ended up with there, was uh very talented uh Italian uh guy, Arnold Franchetti, and he, Bill Sydeman actually had been a student of his and he said, "Well, you know, take what you can get from him." He was kind of philosophical. He didn't he didn't really warn me sufficiently because Franchetti was, in his own way, a a kind of a fairly tyrannical character, but not in the sense of, you have to write 12-tone music or not. He was kind of anti-12-tone music, but he wasn't exactly pro-diatonic music, either. So, in some sense, I escaped, I wiggled through that period, um experimenting a little bit with dodecaphonic music, not quite strictly 12-tone music, but that was the spirit of the times. I got to know my Webern and, you know, my my analysis. Yeah.

Well, for me, I mean, so, uh the turning point really is the the escape to California. I graduated from uh University of Hartford in '67. I'd been very active politically. I wrote for the paper. I put on plays. We went on demonstrations. Uh it was a very exciting time. But when I got to California, I I uh it was the Summer of Love in 1967. That's when I arrived, actually. And I was uh, you know, I I quickly uh gave up my folk guitar, got myself a solid-body Mustang Fender guitar, and joined a rock band, and I played kind of more psychedelic rock and I supported the dem- we, my band, used to go out and support the anti-war demonstrations. When they occupied a building, they'd call us and we'd go out and play. So, by nighttime, I was a kind of wild rocker. By day, I was a regular, you know, serious graduate student in music at Stanford, and I came under the influence of uh a person I whose whose whose whose mind and heart uh left a in indelible impression on me, is John Chowning, who is really the, in some ways, one of the most significant uh fathers of computer music in the world. And his kind of ideologically free, open, acoustically based, sonically based approach to music was incredibly liberating and allowed me, in a sense, to maneuver between the the stringent demands of total serialism, which, I mean, I I I was tempted by that. I can't deny it. I have the kind of mind that is intrigued by those kind of puzzle puzzles. But Chowning's uh insistence on, you know, how do you how is the sound made, what is the sound made of, in its in its kind of acoustical concreteness, you know, that was really uh very decisive. And, if I can add, it was Chowning who inst- who showed me the first score I ever saw of Ligeti's Atmosphères, and I kind of was knocked out. Uh I I saw that Ligeti was in some sense doing with this orchestra in a very humanistic way what we were trying to do with the computer by these, you know, fantastical subdivisions of instruments to make a very complex sound, and decided at that point that I had to study with Ligeti one way or another. And that opens the door to a whole other kind of discussion because Ligeti himself uh was extremely ambivalent about his relationship with the Darmstadt giants. He he he he did not accept them unequivocally and um a good deal of the rest of his compositional life from the time I knew him, which dates back to '60- '1970, '71, '72, is was a negotiation, uh uh with those ideas, some kind of dialectical negotiation with those ideas of dodecaphonic music.

Oh, yeah. He was. Uh uh, he— but I mean, he you, if a person could be said to be a complex person, he he is that complex person squared, you know. I mean, he or cubed or whatever whatever uh exponent you want to add to that.

He, you know, he you, when he was in— I mean, I I, this this we could devote the entire rest of this thing to my understanding of his character. But I should only say, he said that uh he wanted to write a kind of music, by the time I, you know, was really closer with him, that was, as he said in German, weder modern noch postmodern, which really translated to mean he didn't want to— he said it should be neither modern nor postmodern. He didn't want either of those. And he felt that the the concept of the avant-garde was, and that concept was a kind of a trap, which would inhibit his development. And, this was a big crisis for him, which came to a head in his opera, Le Grand Macabre, from the late '70s, and I think he resolves the conflict to his satisfaction and on to try to write some of the most wonderful music I think of that that era. But not always to the uh to the pleasure of those uh those high modernists that he, in a sense, tweaks their noses by writing the kind of music that has auto horns and, you know, all these kinds of things in it.

Well, if I may, if you let me go off on a little stream here, there— Go ahead. Go on a stream. Okay. The the, you know, this guy was very influential to me, uh um and he's a he's a great architect and a very impassioned composer, wonderful.

I have no resistance, no resistance to his music. And as it as his tradition comes to me through Ligeti in some ways.

I acknowledge that. But there's another composer who became more and more important to me and is and maybe even more important to me because of the way he works, or worked, and that is uh the great uh Czech Moravian composer Leoš Janáček.

And in Janáček you find that whatever architecture there is, is always in the service and completely in the service of some dynamic, almost theatrical circumstance, because Janáček is really a opera composer.

And as a result, he knows that you can't sacrifice that moment for some ulterior architectural resolution. He would not be delayed by such a an imposition. He would not be put away from put off from getting the dramatic circumstance that he wanted to illustrate.

And um you know, I I began to feel more and more that, you know, as smart as architectural music, abstract music is, sometimes it it doesn't take cognizance of the way musical time flows on its own meter and way of expressing itself.

Architecture sort of demands a perfect symmetry or some other some other thing, which I take as being coming more and more from the visual realm than the actual temporal realm. And so, you know, that was something Janáček seemed to have his finger on. That's why that music is so um it it's once that you get the point of what he's trying to do, he's almost Mozartian, to speak of the gentleman behind you there on your wall on your wall, in his ability to to create a a an a circumstance in a musical environment which is just unbelievably vivid and alive.

Yeah. Well, there's the, you know, it's a remarkable, I mean, it's a remarkable in every direction. And I teach that work to my students, actually, particularly—

Okay.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yes.

Well, uh you know, I I mean, this is a whole other area of my my personal life, which is so important to me, is my love of literature and theater. And um I've always felt that uh literature has inspired me, um I mean, from going from the very, very first works of mine, they often take a point of departure from some literary work or a poem. Um and I've always I've felt that that is a stimulus to think musically. So it's not as though I I'm a great I have a huge uh collection of songs. That's not that's not sort of my what I've done, although, I mean, I've written a considerable amount of vocal music, but that's not Schubert I am not. I mean, with that incredible gift that that he had. But uh I do think a poem, like Melville's poem Pontoosuc, uh makes me think musically. Um, you know, Heinrich Heine's uh great poem Wir weben, wir weben, gives me, which means we are weaving, we are weaving, is a stimulus for me,

Yeah, both of those pieces. Pontoosuc is a piece for orchestra that I wrote for the ACO. Wir Weben is a string orchestra piece in three movements. Um so, even works that have no that that are abstract works in music may be stimulated by something I'm thinking about about a a poem or piece of literature.

Yeah, used to be albums.

Yeah. Well, indeed. I mean, uh I my earliest, and and that's also connected with my uh very close connection with the performers who who made those recordings, whose whose whose artistry contributes so much to whatever I've been trying to do as a composer. Uh yeah, I mean, and in fact, uh Michael, I we I have another CD coming out very shortly, which will include uh the Brentano String Quartet performing a relatively, well, quite new work for string quartet based on the poetry of Wallace Stevens. So there you go, for that. And uh a piece uh for multiple cellos as performed by the great uh young cellist Ashley Bathgate. She kind of, by overdubbing, we have a little cello orchestra that's in a piece of mine. My my colleague, Waldo Parra so,

And then of a violin and a piano duo for my life, my wife, my life, my wonderful pianist wife Lisa Moore and my friend Ellee Toyota playing violin and piano. Beautiful. So, these musicians who who I value so highly, they they help memorialize the music in their version of it, in a very special kind of way.

Yes, very long.

Yep. You've recorded on their their Cantaloupe music.

I did.

No, no, not at all. Well, first of all, I teach I teach now at the graduate level, and these people come to me completely developed in many ways, and the trick is to try to figure out what they want to do, help them to achieve what they want to do, but also help them to understand that the horizon of what they want to do may be rather narrow, and to open up that horizon so that there's still much to learn.

Well, I, you know, I love so many different kinds of music and so many different kinds of music have things to teach that they don't know, so it's I don't I don't, particularly because the variety of things that are happening in music now are so, the variety is so wide, that to push people into, you know, the kinds of things that I had to learn young when I was younger may not really serve them very well. So I try to find the the the example, the historical example, or the actively still working example, of the thing they are doing or attempting to do, that would be most inspiring to them and get them get them going again. Now I teach a course—

Well, I try. I mean, I I had good teachers and I had terrible teachers and in a sense I try to learn from both of them, you know, from the from the good teachers what was good, and from the terrible teachers what to avoid, um and and I do teach a course now uh at Yale, which I've done for a couple of years, called Analysis of Western Music from the Composer's Perspective, which treats a whole range of music historically from the perspective of the composer, not from the perspective of a theorist, not from the perspective of a person doing uh musicology, for example. So if I'm teaching a piece by Perotin, or if I'm teaching a piece by Josquin, or if I'm teaching a piece by Bach or Schumann, I'm looking at it as I as much as possible from its interior as I understand it. And I can and so some of that, and I tell my students, you know, I I my annoy my students by by quoting Thoreau very often. Thoreau very famously said that uh "The enterprises of one generation are abandoned by another like so many stranded vessels." And I often am struck by how young students ride right past some of the difficulties that you and I experienced or or the or the or the contratemps or the the controversies that were so important to us. They don't they don't care at all about anymore. No. So the question is, do what in the older music is still living or valuable before those those vessels sink in the harbor? I say to them, let's go over, let's go on board and see what treasures we can still find and take with us before they sink forever.

Thanks for having me.

There's a phone.

Okay. All right. Bye. Bye, Michael.