Daniel Asia

A pleasure.

That's the toughest question there is for a composer, isn't it? I think it's the toughest question. So it usually has to do, I think, with figuring out the kind of piece that I want to write, what it means, what that means, I suppose, is let's assume it's a commission or assume you're writing for a friend if you're at the start of your career. Are you writing a short piece? Are you writing a long piece? Are you writing a multi-movement piece? Are you writing a single-movement piece? Is it about one mood? Is it about different moods? Different emotional states? Those are all questions that I think have to go into preliminary considerations. When you and I were growing up, there was a big deal about pre-composition and we did—or one was thought—it was thought that you did a lot of pre-composition of setting parameters or deciding, determining exact length, for example. I've never been good at that, I have to admit it. I pretty much wrote up until my early 30s at least, pretty much from beginning to end, because I never under—really understood the notion of sketching. I'd seen it. I knew what Beethoven's sketches looked like, but it had never entered my soul or my mind to work that way. I just didn't quite grapple with it. And then with a piece called Gateways, which I wrote for the Cincinnati Symphony for a bunch of fanfares that they commissioned for their 150th birthday, I thought, "Wait a minute. How about if I try and figure this out?" So I started writing in different ideas and did that for a while. That hasn't answered your question about the blank page. Sometimes I sit at my drafting table, and I will usually sketch or draw a particular kind of gesture, or I will think of a—or again, early on think of various pitches that I like that I was trying to think about how to make something from them. I'm still a—I'm old-fashioned, having been a revolutionary in my early years. What do I mean by being old-fashioned? I like the idea of a piece being about something.

We hear so much music now in our time where there simply is a vacuity. There's a lack of idea. There's a filling of time, but there's actually no idea that one can find in the piece, which is to say I love Beethoven's music. Yeah, you know, why not? A pretty good composer. And I think it's easy to say that all of his pieces are about something. It's the idea of motive. I like melody. I think Messiaen was right. I think melody is supreme. Even someone like, um... I'll get his name. Gunther Schuller, with whom I studied at Tanglewood. You know, he was a revolutionary and belonged to a revolutionary group of composers. And then when he hit middle age and got a little—he said, "We might have made one mistake. Maybe it's not so bad."

It's hard to write them. It's really hard to write them.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yes, I think—I think it does. I mean, look, I—I didn't—I never had teachers, fortunately, who were doctrinaire. My teachers, who I just celebrated most recently in a festival here at the university along with my music because I've turned 70 and I'm calling it quits in another couple of months. My teachers were a fellow named Randall Shinn, who I started with at Hampshire College, and Randall turned me on very early—we're talking about 1971—to George Crumb's music.

I'm sorry?

A lovely person and a lovely composer.

You know, it was the time that he was just starting to write things like Macrocosmos and, I think it's The Voice of the Whale or The Song of the Whale...

Ancient Voices of Children, exactly. And now, Randall suggested also that one needn't know too much music of the past, because what we're doing now is so different. I ended up rejecting that—that notion, which is to say much later that, well, along with Rochberg, who was doing the same things in the early '70s, saying, "Wait a minute. The notion of historical amnesia is an impossibility."

In other words, we are all the things that we hear and play and then—and then write, and that no composer can write out of emptiness. It's an absolute impossibility. And I—and I—now, Boulez, as you said, Boulez said, "You know, if you're not writing serial music, you ain't relevant." Right? That was—that was...

Yeah.

Yeah. Pierre had the best—he had the best hearing I've ever seen. Pitch and rhythm like nobody's business.

Yeah.

Well, as you know from my writing, I find it terrible for music, terrible for the culture, and terrible for the future...

Of what we—of what we—of what we like. Well, look, it took me a while, in other words, I was a renegade, which is to say I did fight against the tradition at the start. Composers that I—I loved early on were, for example, Druckman, with whom I studied at Yale.

Jacob Druckman. I liked Berio. I did some of Earle Brown's music early on in the history of musical elements. I was interested in Ligeti's music and in exploring what he was doing. And he's an interesting example—an interesting case, by the way, in all of this, because his early music is, of course, very much folk-like, in the style of a Bartók and dealing with his—his folk background. And never, I think, feeling settled in what he was writing. My guess is he was never happy, and I agree with him. There's reasons why his music mostly doesn't work. But there's also reasons why it's worth confronting. But you asked me a specific question. So what's—what's the problem with the scene, as we might call it, right now? The problem is, as I think Duke Ellington said, and Gunther subscribed to it, there's good music and there's bad music.

And most music is really bad. It just is. Come on, let's look at music history. How many great composers are there in any period?

Okay. Okay, that's right. But—but not a lot that—that have remained. That's the point. So you have a choice now. You can either play music that you think—and that we know—has stood the test of time. You can also find composers who you think actually have something to say, which is what an audience, as you described it, wants to hear.

They want to hear something that's good. Or you decide it really doesn't matter what music we play, we'll just play politics. We'll just play music of...

That is correct. That leads to marginalization of those who have something to say and have proven themselves in doing so.

Yeah, I know. It's completely isolated—I'm going to put—put you in my camp—older composers.

Right? We are now anathema because we're not part of that scene. We're still subscribing to the idea that there is a tradition that we are a part of, by the way. And we want that tradition of greatness to continue, and you only do that with really good music and people who are trying to write the best they can without politics.

Uh, so far, we have retained—you use the word rigorous, I can't—I can't say how rigorous it is—but a four—a four semester, which is to say a two-year cycle of theory, with accompanying ear training that goes with it. Now, is it done with the seriousness that I did it when I spent a year in San Francisco with a woman named Dorothy—Dorothy Parker? God, a wonderful Black woman at 8:00 in the morning. Oh god. Solfège at 8:00 in the morning, but damn did we learn.

You know? And I knew I needed to know this stuff. So, I don't think it's as rigorous as it once was. I think that's a real problem for us. Because music...

Yeah.

Daniel—I think that's right, danielasia.net, yeah. And they'll find it on YouTube, there's lots of—lots of stuff.

So, let me just step back just a tad. As I remember, I started with an article on John Cage, and that—I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea the effect of it. It's because I went to a concert of a friend of mine, a superlative pianist named John Milbauer, and on the program he played Cage's Sonatas and Interludes. And for 10 minutes I was really quite entertained. And after half an hour I was getting really bored and—and—and a little bit upset. And by the end, I was ready to pull out a pistol and shoot him. Literally, of course not literally, because I—I just couldn't take it anymore.

I couldn't take it. Well, what happened with that is that it—it went through Brooklyn and people said, "How can you—how can you shoot at our god?" Of course, with a small 'g'. And I said, "I'm not, I'm just—I'm just saying, you know, it's Stravinsky's centenary and it's the centenary of Cage's birth, which is more important for musical history and the musical legacy? Why is there every night a concert of Cage's music when it's just not very interesting?" I mean, I remember, you know, doing a concert or going to some concert with Cage and—and a couple of people joined me in the lobby outside, it may have been John Adams and—and somebody else, and said, "Well, yeah, he's a great guy and he's, you know, he's an interesting thinker, but nobody wants to listen to his music." Well, that's a problem if you're a composer.

It's huge. So now let's get to Carter. So, um, I had studied Carter's music and again, we play his music with my group in New York, Musical Elements. We played, um, The Four Orchestral Essays or Canon for Three... I can't quite remember, and I studied the music. And I'd also talk to colleagues at Oberlin, I remember one, you know, one was a conductor who shall name name—nameless right now, and he said, "Yeah, Carter was here as a guest and—and we played, um, the Double Concerto for piano and harpsichord." And he said, "You know, I couldn't really hear what was going on in the piece, and—and I tried something, you know, we changed some notes along the way to see if Carter would hear it or not." Now, it's not a nice thing to do, but—but that's what they did. And of course, Carter didn't catch any of the notes that weren't there. Now you could say, "Of course not, you know, who cares about the notes? It's about the gesture in this case, it's about density, it's about different densities." That's fine to a certain point. And then you want to say, "Yeah, but what the hell does it add up to?" If nobody can hear it, if he can't hear it, if it goes no place, if it comes from no place, if it has no beginnings and it has no ends, this is not music that most people want to listen to. So I'm kind of a common man in that respect, I just found the music unbearable. I like some of the early music. I mean, I think Carter was very talented. I just—I just think he went off the track. But I feel the same way about Boulez—very talented composer, but so talent doesn't mean that you're going to produce something really good.

Right, right.

He—he really couldn't answer, yeah.

Yes, they did.

We—we hope that for ourselves. We hope that for ourselves. Yes, let's talk about it. What's the question? Give me a good—give me a good question about that.

Or anywhere else. Uh, so look, we both have that—that issue.

Um, that's—that's going to be a question. So, I take a somewhat stoic view of the matter, um, which is to say I'm doing whatever I can now to keep my music available to people. I've set up my own publishing company after having left Theodore Presser a few years ago, with whom I was for most of my career. Uh, and for the same reason that I'm with Summit Records, most of my discs—most of my music is on Summit because I wanted to have control of my own destiny. I fear conglomerates, I fear the—the biggies. That might be a mistake, I don't know, we'll find out.

I'm sorry?

No one knows, exactly, exactly. Look, I—I... Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.

Yes, yes.

Yeah.

That's right.

Yeah.

So let me— I'm going to diverge a little bit from the question, and then we'll come back to it. So, we had Jerry Schwarz on our Cultured Mind Forum series, which is part of the Center for American Culture and Ideas. Jerry had some of his TAs look at the repertoire list of the top 30 orchestras, and none of them were doing a major piece by an American composer, period. Now, when I queried Marin Alsop just a few days ago about the same issue, she said, "Uh, that's not so surprising. How many American conductors are there who are running American orchestras?" And her answer was there's only one, and he's the new music director in Baltimore. So, these guys do not know American music, and they don't care about American music. So, one of the answers, I think, is to push the notion, one, that it's not a bad idea if you have more American conductors conducting American orchestras. Two, and this is something that I'll bring up again tangentially because it's something I'm thinking about for the next couple of—couple of years, or expect to. 2026, 250 years since the founding, and we still have not established, in any sense it seems to me, an American repertoire that all orchestras should say, "You know what? We have a legacy of music that is important to us." Oh, the people in Hungary they've got Bartók and—and—and Kodály, and in the Czech Republic they have Dvořák and Smetana, um, in Germany too many to even start to name. We don't know our own repertoire. We don't—we don't know Ives. We don't know Copland except for Appalachian Spring, which is the only piece they trot out every five or 10 years. And then all of the composers, the mid-century symphonic composers who should be part of a repertoire—Piston, I want to add Piston to the list that—that you already gave. And then of course, the simple realization for orchestras should be what I learned in Phoenix when I was their composer-in-residence. The year that I actually had some capability of working with the music director to create a season that would feature American music, we played all sorts of American music from Barber to Piston to Rouse to Beezer to Asia, etc. I'm sorry, I didn't know you then, Michael, so this was—this was a problem.

Exactly. No, no, exactly, exactly, exactly. So what happened the year after we did that? Ticket sales went up 25%. Now, why do you think that happened? I know, I think I— I know why I think it happened. It's because the audience said, "Well..." As Jerry—Jerry Schwarz would say, "You don't tell them that this is new music, you just say this is good music, and you're going to love it." And guess what? Of course they did, because it was really good music that spoke to them as Americans.

Um, from Ives to Copland, you have music that embodies a sense of what it means to be American.

And for most of our good composers, that has been the case, that is true. We haven't been international. So, we've expressed an American identity. So now the problem is for orchestras to realize it's not this complicated, but you have two problems. You have boards and you have marketers.

You're right.

Yeah, they seem to not know what they're doing. Then—then—then they're all idiots. I'm sorry to say that, but that's simply the case.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Well, but that's where we are now as American composers. We are not allowed another spot other than the opener, which can be no more than eight minutes long.

Right.

Oh, that—that so touches my heart. I—I can't express it. I'm moving to say thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank you for having me, I greatly appreciate it.