Episode 32
Jan Swafford
Michael Shapiro talks to the extraordinary Jan Swafford whose remarkable biographies of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Ives are irreplaceable. No one can talk like a great biographer, and when that writer is also a fine and highly expressive composer, there is simply nothing like it. Not to be missed!
Find out more at www.michaelshapiro.com
Jan's website: www.janswafford.com
Transcript
Michael Shapiro:
Welcome to Interplay, conversations in music. This is your host, Michael Shapiro. Today, I have a most special guest, because I'm a great fan of the composer and the writer, Jan Swafford. Jan, thank you for joining us.
Jan Swafford:
Great to be here, Michael. Thanks for having me.
Michael Shapiro:
You know, this goes true for your compositions and also your writing. And your writing of uh not only pieces that introduce people to music, but also for me, the things that I love as a musician and as a writer myself, is the wonderful biography—biographical talent you've got. Because we're going to talk about why I believe you're the finest writer of musical biographies I have ever read, and I've read most of the great ones. You write in your most—well, it's true. You write—
Jan Swafford:
Hi. Yeah. I've always said that most to people who write musical biographies are either musicians who don't write very well, or they're not or they're writers who don't know that much about music. And I don't claim to be a great writer, but I claim to be a very good writer for a musician. And I I'd like to think that that's my edge. And I'm also a composer, and nobody has tried to write who has written as much music as I have has tried to write biographies of composers.
Michael Shapiro:
That's quite true. I don't know of anybody else, and I've read a lot of biographies over the years. We're not going to include Mein Leben by Richard Wagner, which is a horrible book. (Shapiro laughs)
Jan Swafford:
(Laughs) And there's a good question as to how good a writer Wagner was, if you call—call being lucid, being a good writer. (Swafford laughs)
Michael Shapiro:
I want to read something from your latest book, which I am in the—just finishing up The Marriage of Figaro section, and I've got about 40% left of the 700-page biography, which is flowing beautifully as I read it. Jan, your mu—your style of writing is so musical. In the words you choose, you've got the ear and it comes through in the music. But I want to read this, which I sent to my students to look at. And I've been doing it, by the way. I've sent them three emails with sections from Jan Swafford's Mozart: The Reign of Love. Let me just read this:
It's reasonably clear how words create meaning, character, situation. But how does music amplify those things? In speaking, we articulate feelings partly by what we say and partly by how we say it. There's an interaction between those two things: the what and the how of words, and sometimes a deliberate contradiction. Take the word 'fine.'It can be said in a businesslike way: 'Fine.'I'm adding that.
Somewhere between casual and involved: 'Fine.' showing simple approval. It can be snapped out abruptly, meaning approval as if in passing: 'Fine.'Not important.
Or it can be pronounced warmly or enthusiastically, conveying an involvement by the speaker: 'That is fine.'The word can be stretched out with an upward inflection: Fine? meaning, All very nice, but—. It can be said with a smile or a chuckle as an ironic quasi-approval. It can be barked angrily: Fine!, by which is meant the opposite of approval: Nothing is fine, and you are in it—you're in for it.
Each of these implications can have myriad shapes. In an opera, the music provides the implications and the shades, implies mood and movement for every movement—moment of the text. It is the job of the singers.So, Jan Swafford, author of Mozart: The Reign of Love, written by a composer for this composer who loves this book, what were you thinking when you wrote that?
Jan Swafford:
I was thinking about the word fine to start with, but I was also thinking about just how meticulously a good opera composer—and Mozart is the best opera composer—art—ar— expresses words. And his ability to express every moment of the text. And he does it differently than Beethoven. Beethoven will tend to pull out a single word and and go after that. Mozart is expressing the general feel of the— of the— of the emotion of the text and the rhythm and everything. And his ability to do that in in logical and coherent musical forms at the same time is just incomparable. That's what is unique to him. Whereas Wagner is expressing the words minutely and beautifully, but it— it's within this kind of mush, in a way. (Swafford chuckles) There's a feeling it could sort of go anywhere, anytime, and—
Michael Shapiro:
Like a— like a miasma. M-I-A-S-M-A.
Jan Swafford:
A Wagnerian miasma. (Swafford laughs) That's a good term. Whereas Mozart is still thinking classically in in— and in concise, formal musical patterns, which nonetheless, he manages to turn emotion into musical form, in effect. And that's— that's just unique to him.
Michael Shapiro:
No, it's breathtaking. To add to my study of your section about Le Nozze di Figaro, The Marriage of Figaro, with the libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. And I love the way you describe Da Ponte, too, which is perfect. I watched the, uh, Ponnelle video of Le Nozze di Figaro with Hermann Prey and Fischer-Dieskau and Mirella Freni.
Jan Swafford:
Oh, Freni, yeah, yeah. I remember that from many years ago.
Michael Shapiro:
Wonderful.
Jan Swafford:
Yeah.
Michael Shapiro:
And of course, Kiri Te Kanawa. So, let's talk about Le Nozze di Figaro, which he wrote when he was about 29, 30 years old, quickly, from what I can tell.
Jan Swafford:
Uh, relatively quickly. The old— the old story that he wrote it in about six weeks is not true. And I don't really remember, but it was not— it was— it was medium fast for him, I guess. But, you know, he's perfectly capable of writing an opera in six weeks. He— he probably wrote um, uh, Titus, the Mar— uh, The Clemency of Titus in about that amount of time. But—
Michael Shapiro:
It— well, it shows. (Shapiro laughs) If I may.
Jan Swafford:
It does. There's, as you will know as a composer, as I noticed, there are lots of corners cut in that— in that piece.
Michael Shapiro:
Oh, yeah. I just don't feel anything from the characters in that piece at all. But I— but, you know, in Nozze, my god, every note.
Jan Swafford:
Well, yeah, he— by that point, he was in his later— in his life, he was almost not capable of writing anything that wasn't marvelous. Even a little piece like Eine kleine Nachtmusik, which is a to— a throwaway, and it's— it's immortal, it's fabulous. It's not profound, but it's just fabulous. (Swafford chuckles)
Michael Shapiro:
Now let's talk, if we may, about a word that you use a lot in the book, is beauty. Talking about beauty was verboten when I was in school. And it was verboten for composers, too, because it was considered to be a bourgeois, trivial value. Um, and I believe, similarly—
Michael Shapiro:
Jan, Jan, just pardon me a second. Wasn't that confused, though, with romantic melody? That always got to me, even back then, and I never followed it. I did— never wrote, uh, 12-tone music, ever, as you were opposed to do when I was at Columbia. I said, "Screw it. I'm going to write my music," and I have always done that. It sometimes was a little angular because I was listening to Siegmeister's, going through his craziness at the time, trying to be au courant. But I never bought it, you know?
Jan Swafford:
I never never written serial music either, and, uh, less be— not because I don't believe it's possible to write good serial music, but I don't think most of it's any good. (Swafford chuckles) In fact, almost all the serial music I— I appreciate and like was written by Schoenberg, and not by a whole lot of other people. I love early Webern, for example, but I have no use for his serial music. Anyway, that's a whole other issue. Um, I got tired in graduate school of what I call the petty revolutionaries all over the place. Everybody was trying to revolutionize everything, and I just found it artificial and wearisome and and and quit thinking in those terms. But beauty, it took me a long time. The trouble with beauty is that it's very difficult to think about and it's very difficult to write about it, partly because we haven't, in school or anywhere else, been given the tools with which to write about it and think about it. We have models for writing about music to a degree, though that's difficult, too. I find it very difficult to write about music in words. Uh, even though I do it all the time, because I have to, that's what I'm paid for. But I found it even more difficult to write about beauty, and yet I believe the issue of beauty with Mozart in particular—I don't think music always has to be beautiful, I think it can be horrifying.
Michael Shapiro:
Yeah, yeah.
Jan Swafford:
I mean, King Lear ain't fun. And sometimes music can be horrifying, that's perfectly legitimate. But when it is meant to be beautiful, it— it is— it is, and Mozart— sometimes I think the effect of Mozart's music is primarily simply in its extraordinary beauty.
Michael Shapiro:
Now, Karajan used to say—he said it to Rostropovich when they were doing a rehearsal of, I think, Tchaikovsky um Variations—that at one point Rostropovich hit it really hard in his Russian Rostropovich way, and and Karajan, I think, said, "You know, can you not make that more beautiful?" And Rostropovich, "But it's not meant to be beautiful." He says, "Even when it's not meant to be beautiful, it should be beautiful."
Jan Swafford:
Karajan said that?
Michael Shapiro:
Yeah. Which I find—
Jan Swafford:
Oh, that— that is the most— Do you like that statement?
Michael Shapiro:
Oh, I do, because I think it is— there's a po— there's a point to it. There's a point to it. I'm not saying you're going to make the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima beautiful, but it can be made beautiful if you do something to the sound the way Stokowski would have done.
Jan Swafford:
It partly depends on how you define beauty, of course. And there's a problem— there's a creative problem with this. Yeah. I wrote a piece for cello and electronic tape. And at one point, I wanted an explosion of terror in this piece, that just blows the piece apart. It's a roar that comes in and all the lights go out and this horrible, wild sound is roaring around. And the trouble is, in the electronic studio—this was the— these were the analog days—the more I worked with that sound, the more beautiful it sounded to me. (Swafford laughs) And there is a problem from that, you know, pieces that when I first heard them, like the first movement of the Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, which I— when I first heard it, I found it very difficult and off-putting harmonically, though I was fascinated by it, but it became more and more beautiful the— the more I got... So, there is a problem with that, I agree. But I— what I do think is that when we're trying to be beautiful, we should call it beauty and we should do it well. When we're trying to be horrible, horrifying, we should do th— and ugly, even, we should do that well, and we should— and it should be what it is. And we should not make everything beautiful because otherwise, we rob ourselves of a whole expressive category.
Michael Shapiro:
Even—
Jan Swafford:
Many expressive categories. We can't make King Lear beautiful.
Michael Shapiro:
But some of those words—
Jan Swafford:
Some of the words are extraordinary. And the fact that Caliban says some of the most beautiful things, and—
Michael Shapiro:
Oh, in Tempest. No question about it. Now listen, the great thing about Shakespeare that we must learn from, I think, and the best guys like this guy knew innately, was the, you know, light and dark, funny, sad, all together. And you can't just be dark. There's got to be lightness to shine on the dark.
Jan Swafford:
Well, there's another thing that I read—and this was not of my idea, but it's in the book—that in the past, especially the romantic view of Mozart, tended to— to privilege his minor-key pieces, the sort of Sturm und Drang pieces, as his most profound.
Michael Shapiro:
D minor Piano Concerto.
Jan Swafford:
D minor Piano Concerto, C minor Piano Concerto, G minor Symphony, and so forth, and so on. G minor Symphony. Um, and to deny happy pieces profundity. And and the person writing this article, he was probably more of a postmodernist than I am, but still, I thought he or she, I don't remember who it was, had a very good point. That we must not just say that the— the dark pieces are the— are the profound ones. Some of the light and bright and beautiful ones are as well. I mean, to me, as much of a cliché as it became after the movie, the 21st Piano Concerto slow movement is just uncannily and and sublimely beautiful.
Michael Shapiro:
It is. And for the people who don't remember it, because we're both old guys, that's Elvira Madigan concerto.
Jan Swafford:
Elvira Madigan, as the— as the— as the record still says.
Michael Shapiro:
It still says, to sell it. I want to— I want to jump off of this in the words of Jan Swafford in Mozart: The Reign of Love, your new book:
To make a broad generalization, music needs both simplicity for coherence and expression, and complexity for depth and durability. It does not so much matter where the simplicity and complexity lie. Bach's surface is often complex, a texture of dense counterpoint. But under the surface are simple formal outlines. Mozart's surface is often deceptively simple, but often in his finest works, such as the D minor Piano Concerto, the material is richly varied in shape and rhythm and expression, and this variety is managed by subtle and complex form.I love this paragraph. Now—
Jan Swafford:
And that comes from being a composer. This is what I know from being a composer.
Michael Shapiro:
That's right. And Jan, I have to say, I've read Tovey's works, most of them, and learned a lot from Tovey over the years. I read, you know, the great poet, uh, George Bernard Shaw's writings on music.
Jan Swafford:
I did, too.
Michael Shapiro:
Of course you have. Nobody writes like you do.
Jan Swafford:
Well, Shaw writes better than I do. (Shapiro laughs) I would claim to be one of the very best writers in English on music if it weren't for Shaw. I'm not in his league.
Michael Shapiro:
Well, he's funny. You're— maybe you're not as funny. (Shapiro laughs) But I'll tell you—
Jan Swafford:
If I'm reviewing, I might be, but (Shapiro laughs) who knows? Maybe so.
Michael Shapiro:
Maybe so, but my god, Jan, what a thing you've written here. Let's talk about music needing—
Jan Swafford:
By the way, it's great to hear somebody else, and especially you, read them because you read them very expressively. It's great to hear somebody else read them.
Michael Shapiro:
I lo— I love it, and I'm— I'm... you know, there's a line in The Producers when they go to the director to look at the score, he says, "I didn't read it. I devoured it." (Shapiro laughs) So I'm, you know, you know, so I'm devouring your book, like I devoured your Brahms book, like I devoured your Beethoven book, like I devoured your Charles Ives book. So let's talk about Charles Ives, who I know is somebody that you and I both love as a human being.
Jan Swafford:
I started with him as a teenager. You know how I got started on Ives?
Michael Shapiro:
No, please tell me.
Jan Swafford:
These things are so random at first. I was getting interested in classical music, I was in my mid-teens. I was star— I may have started to compose a little bit, and I saw the old cover of the Leonard Bernstein recording of the Second Symphony, which was just one of the classic pictures of Ives, just sort of hanging in space. And I simply looked at this—it was in a magazine, it was the Columbia Record Club or something like that—and I simply said, "Gee, I like that face. I like that name. I bet I'll like that music." And I went out and bought the first record I came across, which was Three Places in New England. Is that— is that Ormandy's recording? It was the old Howard Hanson, Eastman recording. Oh wow, yup. And—which is a classic of its— of its kind. And, um, put it on and said, "Oh my god." And I simply kept listening to it until it made sense, and I liked it. And I went on from there, and I would play this— things for friends and they would tell me I was crazy. So Ives is a great hero of mine. By the time I was in high school, he was one of my heroes.
Michael Shapiro:
Uh, but then you learned about his life, which I find fascinating.
Jan Swafford:
Yeah. Well, I wrote my senior honors thesis on the Fourth Symphony at Harvard, and Ives was not well appreciated at Harvard in 1968.
Michael Shapiro:
I'm shocked. Is that really true? Leon Kirchner was there at the time.
Jan Swafford:
Leon Kirchner had no use for Ives at— nobody did at Harvard at that time. They still gave me a magna for it, to my great surprise. Because the fact is, I could already write, and I already had a certain gift, I think, for analysis. Um, and I really to— I think I figured that piece out pretty well.
Michael Shapiro:
I want to stay with Ives, but I must ask you a question. I just said that I love reading your— your words on music, and it's so sincere and true, like I just read those two sections. You don't do the typical thing people do about writing about music. I don't think, as a composer and also published author, that one can write about music so easily.
Jan Swafford:
No.
Michael Shapiro:
Especially music of the— of the level that you're talking about. You know, you can—
Jan Swafford:
Mozart is the hardest.
Michael Shapiro:
Yeah, it's so slippery.
Jan Swafford:
Yeah. Slippery is a good word.
Michael Shapiro:
Right?
Jan Swafford:
Um, you cannot pin him down often emotionally. He doesn't have the— the dramatic— implied dramatic narrative that Beethoven does. Except maybe in the Sturm und Drang pieces, you can talk about that. But—
Michael Shapiro:
But even in the D minor Concerto, it goes in and out, it goes side— and then it's—
Jan Swafford:
It does go in and out, but I think there is a darkness hanging— haunting that whole piece, and I think— But um, you can— you can find musical connections, motivic connections, and things like that, and I— but in this book, I didn't want to be that technical. And— and um, I finally decided not to use musical examples, it just had to be in the writing, and I— I felt ultimately defeated by it because I just— you cannot— he's slippery. He's too slippery to capture in words, really. Um, and Beethoven, I realized how eas— I realized how easy— comparatively easy it was to write about Beethoven when I star— tried to write about Mozart. And actually, I went to my publications boss, Mark Mandel at Boston Symphony, and was— was tearing my hair about this, and he said, "I know, I know. You can't write about Mozart." He said, "How are you going to do that?" (Shapiro laughs)
Michael Shapiro:
When you were writing—
Jan Swafford:
I said, "But I have to. I— I've got to. So what do I do?" I mean, it— it— Yeah. It— I would need to be more of a poet than I really am, I feel, to truly— I think I had some good— I think I got some good things in, but—
Michael Shapiro:
But Jan, there's great melody in your writing. In some biographies, I've heard some biographers say that they read aloud what they've written to maybe a spouse or a friend to see the response. Do you read aloud what you've written?
Jan Swafford:
I tend to whisper it as I write.
Michael Shapiro:
I see.
Jan Swafford:
I used to go back and read it aloud when I was revising, I don't do that anymore, but I— I'm very— I'm extremely aware of the sound and the rhythm. And um, and I'm very aware—in other words, I'm— I'm— I'm aware of the music, and and that's what you're saying, and—
Michael Shapiro:
But I'm hearing it, and that's why I enjoy it so much. I find it fascinating talking about writing about music, about writing about anything. But music, again, (Shapiro clears throat) is an abstract form that we hear. So I tell my students, when you write, yes, you should use your brain, but don't rely on the brain telling you what to do, because then the writing is mechanical. Use your ear to listen to the sound, and the sound will inform you. Also, sing what you're doing, sing it so that the lines work vocally, even if they're instrumentally being written. You'll find that the things are more flexible if you do that. The more— the more I get older, the more I think of these things, of not relying on the stupid brain—"stupido io," as Toscanini used to say, (Shapiro laughs) you know? This is what tells me. Now, it's different when you're writing a biography.
Jan Swafford:
I— that's my disagreement to one degree, which is that when you're writing history or biography, the music can mislead you. You can write yourself into things that aren't true, because I've done that many times. (Shapiro laughs) And that's why getting the music is harder. If you're writing poetry or or fiction—I've experimented with fiction, and I wrote a poem to a girl once, um— so I'm— I'm— I— I just feel freer when I'm doing that, and I also free— feel freer when I'm— sometimes when I'm writing a program note, because I'm— I'm not burdened by mountains of material. The Beethoven, sometimes I would just sit in front of the computer for an hour trying to get a handle on all the elements from research that were going into a paragraph or a page. I don't have to do that when I'm writing about a program note, because I'm usually writing about things I already know a lot about. Um, so I can follow the language better and I can come up with a good line once in a while. I have a— a note for Ives's Ragtime Dances. And I was talking about how funny they are, and how funny Ives was as a person. His wife said she used to just kind of go off in places in the house to laugh at— (Swafford laughs) and I ended the thing by saying, "Charlie could do it with a word or a glance or a ragtime dance."
Michael Shapiro:
Oh, that's beautiful.
Jan Swafford:
And that, um, if I ever publish my collected essays—I hope I get a chance to—that will be the title. But that's a case where the music just came out. Um, and there's a— there's a line I've remembered for many years. He's talk— when Gunther Schuller in his book on jazz is talking about a jazz drummer, I always meant to ask him about this and never remembered. The line is, "He brought it off in a manner on a level with the best."
Michael Shapiro:
Yeah.
Jan Swafford:
And that is a— that is a jazz drum lick, and I don't know whether he knew that or not. (Swafford laughs)
Michael Shapiro:
I want to get back to Charles Ives, shifting to your other book about him. Why do you and I love him so much?
Jan Swafford:
He is singular, he is an individual, he is a maverick. We love our mavericks. He went his own way at first because he didn't know how strange it was, and when he realized how strange it was, it shook him up and he— and he went into the insurance business so he could make a living and still do what he meant to do. It was not a straight-line path by any means. No. Something that Copland said once, I didn't take seriously when I first read it, it's one of those simple things that you realize later how profound it is. He said for to do what Ives did, and do all he did without having an audience, you have to have the courage of a lion. The courage of a lion. And that's what Ives had. But it was not easy. And as he said, he had times when he was in despair, and he thought his ears were on wrong.
Michael Shapiro:
I know that. I felt it personally. I know it quite well, this feeling.
Jan Swafford:
And when professional musicians, famous musicians in some cases, are telling you that you're out of your mind over and over and over, it does not do good things for you.
Michael Shapiro:
Oh, yeah.
Jan Swafford:
And yet, he persevered. Osip Gabrilowitsch. Gabrilowitsch and the— his friend, the— who was actually— he played concerts with, the— the concertmaster of the New York Symphony, must have been a very fine musician. They played recitals together.
Michael Shapiro:
Yeah. I want to talk about the inflection and influence of From the Shadow of the Mountain, Adirondack Interlude, Late August, After Spring Rain, Landscape with Traveler—these are all titles of orchestral works of yours. Point, Genesis, Matrix, Music from the Mountain. Now, what do I notice about those titles? (Shapiro laughs)
Jan Swafford:
(Laughs) Well, you notice that I'm an old hiker, is what you notice. And that— that religion, that my— to the degree I have a religion, it's nature. Um, so that's been the main inspiration. It also came— it— it began to come in a way when a friend of mine, John Himmel Farb, started doing in college—he's a painter, artist—drawings based on nature, which were enormously complex and and based on text— and creating texture. And I began to realize that that's the texture of nature, and how complex that texture was. And I began to think of my music in terms of those kind of textures. But—and for a while that meant I wrote a very great many notes on the page. Mhm. Because I— I had an experience once hiking, I was hiking in autumn in Vermont, backpacking, I'd been out for a couple of days. And I walked around a corner on the trail and was faced by this incredible hillside, an absolute primo autumn, multicolored, Vermont, lot of um, hillside, that just took your breath away with the complexity of it, and in— and in, um, my piece, um, Mountain Music— no, my— the orchestra piece, um, Landscape with Traveler, I really tried to duplicate that moment in sound, and I didn't succeed. But there was a moment when I tried— I tried to get that effect of multiple colors in the— in the orchestra at the same time.
Michael Shapiro:
But Jan, isn't it funny, sometimes when one has this thought that, I'm going to go there, but then some other thought comes in and dominates the conversation? And you never expected to get that, I— you know, I thought I was going there, but, oh my god, this came. And it— this came seems much more right than what I thought using the old brain might be the way. And that's why this guy is, to me, very interesting. Because sometimes he'll go off on a tangent, perhaps.
Jan Swafford:
Are you talking about Ives again?
Michael Shapiro:
Mozart. No.
Jan Swafford:
Ah! Okay.
Michael Shapiro:
He'll go on a tangent, and then you say, "Where's he going?" And, you know, couldn't he have gone there, like a Salieri might have? Or even Haydn? But he doesn't. And that gives him a color that I find to be miraculous and fresh.
Jan Swafford:
Yes, I— and the way I've put that, which is the same thing in another way, I just— he has this extraordinary continuity in his music, and he has an ability to go from anywhere to any place else, seemingly with ease, which is not easy to do, as you know as a composer.
Michael Shapiro:
It isn't.
Jan Swafford:
And, I— one of his ways he did that, though, I learned of all people, though I— sure, it wasn't an original thought with him, from Karlheinz Stockhausen. Who in an interview pointed out that Mozart will tend to increase the speed of— the rhythmic speed toward the end of a phrase, creating more energy goes to the end of the phrase, which then carries over into the next phrase.
Michael Shapiro:
You— this is in your book, in The Reign of Love.
Jan Swafford:
Yes. And that's something I learned from Stockhausen, though I— I imagine he learned it from somebody else, but it's mostly true, I think.
Michael Shapiro:
That's a very good comment.
Jan Swafford:
And that's— that's part of his extraordinary continuity. And you know, continuity is very difficult. You know that. And we, if we're not writing standard harmony, I don't know if you do, but I mostly don't. Um, you— you get so involved in— in the trying to shape the sounds and have the sounds make sense, that it's very hard to get a— a sense of the overall continuity, the way Beethoven could do doing sketches in one line. Continuity sketches, so he could get the flow. He was hearing the whole piece in that one line, but he could get the flow and then he had to— didn't have to worry about the harmony all that much. I can't do that, because I'm writing constantly new harmony, so uh, I look at Mozart and his ability to— to go from— from one idea to leap from one idea to another, leap from one rhythmic situation to another. Uh, everybody else, I think, even in the same period, seems almost crude compared to him. I think sometimes Beethoven, in that respect, seems almost crude compared to Mozart.
Michael Shapiro:
To end this wonderful conversation, I must talk to you about something. I spoke to a composer in his 90s, a well-known composer who's written also texts on music writing. And he is worried at his age that although he has written a large amount of music, the only thing he's going to be remembered for is his book on music, not his music. What—
Jan Swafford:
I don't worry about that.
Michael Shapiro:
Okay, but—
Jan Swafford:
Do you?
Michael Shapiro:
Well, as a composer, absolutely. So, but so I have a question. Absolutely.
Jan Swafford:
Well, there's the internet, so our music is never going to die.
Michael Shapiro:
Well, recordings are really important, and I— I am on a— I am on a quest to record as much as possible, or get it— get it recorded. But let me just—
Jan Swafford:
And then, the future can sort it out.
Michael Shapiro:
I can't deal with it. I do have kids and grandkids, thank God. But the point of the matter is as follows: why certain music lasting, and certain music not? What makes a piece last?
Jan Swafford:
Well, if I knew that, I would be a much better composer, and or a much more famous one. I don't know. Um, I wish, I deeply wish there was some kind of objective criteria to judge art, because I think mostly there isn't. I think you can judge— you can't even— there's no way to judge anything anymore when we— when we're in a situation where anything goes. Where you can scrawl a political slogan on a— with a crayon and a childlike way on the side of a box and get into a major museum, because I've seen that in a major museum. Yeah. Um, it— it— it is much, much harder, and therefore, it's much harder for all kinds of nonsense to get through the door, both in artistic terms, and in academic terms, and in critical terms, and in all these terms, there since there there seems to be no criteria of judgment left other than success, in effect. Um, and— and which in academe, you no longer have to— you can— you can make a very good academic career attacking your art now, um, and tearing it down in favor of one other, you know, one agenda or another, uh, tearing down the past, and— and you can do very well doing that, and get paid quite well. Um,
Michael Shapiro:
But it's a very small— yes, your audience there is minuscule. I'm talking about, I've noticed as a composer that—
Jan Swafford:
The reality of musical world, which has nothing to do with academe.
Michael Shapiro:
And also— also show— fortunately. show business, too. We're talking about—
Jan Swafford:
And show business.
Michael Shapiro:
We're talking about The Reign—
Jan Swafford:
I know, I know. I don't— Do you have any theories— do you have your theories about that, because I don't, really?
Michael Shapiro:
Well, I do.
Jan Swafford:
I— I do think that there are some objective criteria why, um, you know, Street Fighting Man, a tune I like by the Stones, is not as profound as the G minor Symphony. I think there are some objective reasons for that. Yeah, there are. Have to do with richness and complexity and and things like that. Um,
Michael Shapiro:
I— I— I want to interrupt by telling you that the richness and complexity, the simplicity and the difficulty of life have been explained so beautifully by you today. I tell our watch— our— our readers and the people who listen to this and watch this that they must go out and buy your books and listen to your music because I find them to be thrilling. Jan Swafford, extraordinary composer and writer, thank you so much for being on Interplay.
Jan Swafford:
Thank you, Michael. It's lovely to talk to a composer, too, in one of these things. That's new for me.
Michael Shapiro:
Well, I'm happy to do it. This is Michael Shapiro, your host on Conversations in Music. Thank you for joining us.