An Interview with David Conte
Thomas J. Philbrick: The first piece of yours I came across was the second string quartet. In your comments on that quartet, you said that string quartet writing reveals the weaknesses and strengths of a composer. Why is that?
David Conte: Well, the medium that reveals the composer’s strengths and weaknesses most quickly is acapella chorus. This is because singers are vulnerable to pitch choice in a way that even strings are not. Strings are, however, more vulnerable than other instruments. Also, whenever you put musical material into strings, it elevates that material, giving it gravitas and weight and character. I learned this when I wrote my piano quintet for the Los Angeles concert series Pacific Serenades in 1990. I decided to do what Brahms had done and adapt my two-piano sonata (composed at Cornell in 1981) into a piano quintet. And I was amazed.
TJP: And string quartet writing is the second most challenging after a cappella chorus?
DC: Yes. I think you could also say that the medium of string quartet has evinced the greatest creative efforts from the greatest composers over centuries. My master’s thesis, in fact, was my first string quartet, and as a teacher, I encourage my master students to write string quartets. It’s a kind of graduation exercise that strengthens their technique in writing for everything else.
TJP: I was going to ask: is there a first string quartet? But you answered it.
DC: There is, yes. And speaking of adaptation, I’ve been doing the same thing with my second piano trio—adapting it for string quartet, that is. I have a suspicion it will turn into my third string quartet. Copland has been a model for me in this. The Short Symphony, which he wrote in 1933—a very rigorously reasoned, thorough sort of work—he later arranged for clarinet, string quartet, and piano. It is more often played in that version.
TJP: What makes a work adaptable?
DC: The lines. If the melodic through-line and the surrounding architecture is solid in a certain way, the piece is adaptable. Bach did this a lot. You know, it’s interesting that almost all of Bach’s music can be adapted for numerous ensembles. This is because it is conceived in terms of pure line. The colors of the Brandenburg concerti are, of course, fantastic, but in a way they’re secondary to the architecture of the piece. Ravel, too. Every piece he wrote for orchestra, he wrote for piano first.
TJP: Building from the ground up.
DC: Exactly. Although I don’t see young composers today doing this. They seem to be writing orchestral music from the outside in rather than the inside out. And as a result, they don’t release the full power of the orchestra, and their pieces end up sounding like strings of effects rather than actual ideas. I believe this is largely due to young composers doing their work on MIDI (a composing software) rather than at the keyboard. That is not how Rite of Spring was written. It’s not how Daphnis & Chloe or Tchaikovsky’s Romeo & Juliet were written. No, they were written at the piano.
TJP: It’s as if the music reflects the animation of the compositional process.
DC: It is. Pieces written on MIDI have rhythmic counterpoint that is layered, not interactive. Some of the most celebrated composers alive today write this sort of “MIDI music.” Their music doesn’t breathe. It’s a series of colors and gestures not harnessed to rhetorical organization, and I find it to be high-calorie but low nourishment. It has activity, but not direction. The minimalists are sometimes – not always – particularly vulnerable to this because each line functions by itself rather than interacting with the other lines. I’ve had players tell me (about minimalist compositions), “It’s easier to play this if I don’t listen to anyone else.” That seems to me to be the exact opposite of what music making is – musicians listening to each other.
TJP: Is this fundamentally about technique?
DC: Partially, yes. And also musicianship. For many centuries, composers were the deepest musicians. They were, almost without exception, phenomenal pianists and had phenomenal memories. My favorite story is Saint-Saens—a very underrated composer, in my opinion—who, by the age of 18, knew all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas by heart. He would show up at an announced concert and ask the audience which sonata they wanted to hear. This should tell us something.
I will often ask young composers to tell me their five favorite composers. When they answer, I tell them to learn about how those composers were educated. What kind of musicians were they? What training did they undergo? To what extent are you duplicating in your own studies and musical habits what they did?
TJP: Who are your five favorite composers?
DC: The composers that have influenced me the most are, in chronological order: Chopin, Vaughan Williams, Ravel, Poulenc, and Copland. Those are my main muses. I know I’m strongly influenced by Stravinsky as well, and a dozen other composers. Tastes can change, though. It is very rare for me to change my mind about a piece of music or a composer, but lately, though I’ve never been enthusiastic about Bruckner’s symphonies (I love his choral music), I find I’m warming to them as I get older, which is interesting.
Of those five, the one that I relate to the most is Poulenc. He was one of the greatest 20th-century composers, I think, because he was one of the few composers who could do everything. He wrote for me the greatest opera of the last century, Dialogues of the Carmelites; he wrote concertos; he wrote chamber music; he wrote some of the best songs anyone ever wrote. He did it all.
TJP: His violin sonata is one of my favorites to play.
DC: A wonderful piece, yes. Another wonderful composer I love is my former teacher at Cornell, Karel Husa. He was a towering musician with an immense memory, and vastly underrated.
TJP: You mentioned a number of composers who were masters of keyboard writing. Must a composer be a pianist to be an excellent composer?
DC: When you play the piano, you are playing a contrapuntal instrument where you have to make rhythmic counterpoint with your own body, particularly in the act of memorizing the formal unfolding of pieces for the organ or piano. Keyboard players have to internalize the contrapuntal relationships they encounter. Stringed instruments can play double stops, of course, but it’s not quite the same. And look at the historical record. Brahms learned the Beethoven symphonies by playing them through at the piano with Clara Schumann. Saint-Saens was a phenomenal pianist and organist. Yet a lot of American composers today can’t even play a Bach chorale on the piano. The training of composers, you see, has changed since World War II, and nowadays you see more and more composers who have never mastered a polyphonic instrument. And it shows in their music. They may have imagination and intelligence, but these are no substitute for technique and musicianship. Mme. Boulanger used to say this all the time, and I believe it is very important: “There are matters of technique that transcend style and taste.”
TJP: That’s brilliant.
DC: She was a brilliant teacher. She encouraged us to memorize as much music as possible. Memory training is another thing that has evaporated in our culture, largely due to the ease with which information can be accessed.
TJP: I’d like to ask you about your relationship with Copland. You lived with him for a summer, right?
DC: That’s right. I lived at his house in upstate New York during the summer of ‘82 and wrote two theses on his music. You can find an article I wrote about my summer with Copland on my website. He was 82 years old and had some form of Alzheimer’s, and had stopped composing, but he was in physically robust health, and we had many wonderful conversations and interactions over those months.
TJP: 82 is old for a composer.
DC: True. Mozart died in his thirties. So did Schubert. Tchaikovsky and Mahler in their 50s. Ravel made it to his 60s, but Verdi and Vaughn Williams are rare in that they lived and were active, unlike Copland, into their 80s. I feel lucky to have been able to compose for over fifty years. My grandfather lived to be 105, so I’m hopeful there will be many more years of composing. I feel I still have a lot more to say.
TJP: Here’s to many more years of composing.
DC: Thank you!
TJP: You spoke about memorization earlier. In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, T.S. Eliot talks about the importance of an artist immersing themselves in the artistic tradition out of which they come. For a composer, that means listening and studying the entire lineage of composers from Palestrina to Stravinsky and beyond. Eliot writes that it is only out of that immersion that an artist can create what is meaningful and original. I think this is the opposite of what we see in conservatories today, where the focus is on originality as an end in itself.
DC: The whole question of originality is very much a 20th century and now 21st century concern. Mlle. Boulanger used to remind us that one is not original by choice. “True personality in music,” she would say, “is only revealed through deep knowledge of the personalities of others.”
TJP: That’s a beautiful sentence.
DC: It is. And she’s right. As the French poet Paul Valery said: “In the past, one imitated mastery. Today, one seeks for originality.” And Ravel said it best: “You cannot do better than repeat what has been well said. If you do have something to say, it will be revealed by your unwitting infidelity to the model.” Once, when someone asked Ravel how he wrote the ending of Daphnis & Chloe, he said, “I was in a very bad mood about it. So I put the last movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade on the piano and copied it.” Of course he didn’t exactly copy it, but if you look at the two scores side by side, there’s definitely something about the unfolding of the energy curve that is similar. Stravinsky did the same thing. Rimsky-Korsakov made him write a symphony modeled after a Glazunov symphony, and the result was Stravinsky’s Symphony in E-flat. When you listen to it, you hear that Stravinsky has completely assimilated the tropes of 19th-century musical rhetoric and orchestration. It sounds a little like Tchaikovsky, a little like Glazunov, a little like Dvorak. It’s beautiful. Then, two years later, he writes Firebird. This is how a composer can build a technique that enables them to compose masterpiece after masterpiece, decade after decade.
TJP: Imitation of mastery is the road to success.
DC: Precisely. It’s all about knowing your musical ancestors. What Stravinsky did was imitate mastery, rather than worrying about seeking for singularity, which is what so many worry about doing. It is a red herring. And unfortunately composition teachers today are encouraging this, rather than steering students in a healthier direction. A colleague once said to me: “We sue doctors and lawyers for malpractice. One should do the same for many composition teachers.” After nearly 50 years of teaching composition, I agree with the spirit of this statement.
TJP: How do you teach?
DC: Well, often I suggest concrete revisions to my students’ music. Consider this, or try this—that sort of thing. I’ll tell them something is better in another way, not because I thought of it, but because it is truer to certain principles of music. For example, if I suggest a different harmony, I try to explain that it’s not that I like my harmony better than yours. It’s that my choice exemplifies a basic principle, such as having more forward motion and variety.
TJP: Which goes right back to what you were saying about how much music one has internalized.
DC: Exactly. When students first start with me, I tell them to make a list of the pieces they know by heart. When they’ve done that, I tell them: “This is a picture of who you are as a composer.” And again, it comes back to memorization and musicianship, which is a physical thing. In a way, the composer must be aware, and must have duplicated themselves, the dimension of music that is in fact athletic; they can physically render the pieces they write. A lot of music I hear being composed today I would describe as “armchair music.” It is written at a great distance from physical involvement with music making itself. We have a lot of armchair composers today.
TJP: The opposite of Chopin and Liszt.
DC: The opposite of just about everybody important and valuable historically, really. Is it possible that we’re in a new era in which the things the great composers of the past did are suddenly no longer necessary? I doubt it. For example, the great composers all learned the basics of Palestrinian voice-leading. This is absolutely essential for a composer. The Palestrinian principles of voice leading—the either careful handling or avoidance of parallel dissonance, voice crossing, voice overlap, melodic contour—all of these are still relevant to the human voice today. The overtone series has not changed. This is also why composing vocal music keeps a composer honest and connected to their ear. The human voice has no fret or key.
This, by the way, is why so much 12-tone choral music has not significantly entered the repertory, and never will—because it can’t be sung; it has to be “negotiated.” Even a choir of people with absolute pitch have trouble singing it. It often goes against the laws of acoustics. Upon deep reflection for many years, I have come to the conclusion that much of the aesthetic of the 2nd Viennese school was a cooperative delusion. There are a few masterpieces that came out of it, like Berg’s violin concerto, but they are the exception. None of Schoenberg’s claims about the importance of the 12-tone system in the future came true. He actually said: “I only want to be considered a superior Tchaikovsky; that my melodies be hummed and whistled.” But no one hums 12-tone rows; they hum melodies. This reveals a deep lack of understanding of Tchaikovsky’s genius, and it will never happen.
TJP: What about the so-called reactionary composers, the ones who fought to maintain the presence of traditional harmony and traditional melodic writing?
DC: That’s a good question. I can think of three—Elgar, Rachmaninoff, and Barber—who were considered reactionary in their time. But Barber had immense technique. Immense. He had the same teacher for eight years, Rosario Scalero, who made him do rigorous counterpoint exercises. This polished craft shows in Barber’s music. It is well made, to say the least, and that is why it has stayed in the repertory. He wasn’t building beautiful sandcastles; he was building cathedrals.
TJP: I recently learned his violin concerto. A wonderful piece.
DC: Agreed. A very beautiful piece, and still the most performed American violin concerto. My dear friend and long-time colleague the late Conrad Susa said two very witty things, among many, many priceless and wise quotes: “The problem with experiments is that they sound like experiments.” In reference to Webern (a prominent 12-tone composer), he said: “Webern’s alright, but it’s like having a vitamin pill instead of a meal.”
TJP: I’d rather have a steak.
DC: Of course. Now does this mean music shouldn’t have dissonance? Of course not. Dissonance gives consonance its meaning. But as Mle. Boulanger often said, when music is unrelievedly dissonant, one is unmoved by it because the level of tension never changes. She said this about many composers, even when she admired some of their works. About certain operas, she said: “Because the level of dissonance is so consistent, one is unmoved by the most tragic moments.” This is a very deep observation.
TJP: What contemporary pieces did she love the most?
DC: Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, I think, above everything else.
TJP: Oh, that’s a wonderful piece. One of my personal favorites.
DC: For me, too. He wrote 128 works, by the way.
TJP: That many?
DC: Yes, and over half of them include the voice. But I would certainly list Symphony of Psalms as one of three or four greatest works by Stravinsky.
TJP: The majority of your music also features the voice. One of my favorites is your Ave Maria. It is, in my opinion, exquisitely formed. It made me think of the Kyrie from William Walton’s Missa Brevis, to be honest.
DC: I appreciate very much your generous words. Conrad Susa gave me a high compliment about that piece. He said, “The Virgin Mary is standing right there in front of us when we hear this piece.”
TJP: I’m a Protestant, but I can see the virtue in Mr. Susa’s statement.
DC: At the time I wrote it, I was not as devout a Catholic then as I am now. But then of course, the Roman Catholic lineage is almost the same as the beginnings of Western culture. We forget sometimes the music notation we all use was invented by Catholic monks.
TJP: There’s a recent album out with your Sinfonietta on it. Can you say a few words about that piece as well?
DC: Of course. It was the thrill of my life to go to Abbey Road—I love the Beatles, and one of the most vivid memories of my youth is seeing them in 1964 on the Ed Sullivan Show—and have the Royal Philharmonic record my Sinfonietta there. The piece is written for double winds, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings—no low brass, no auxiliary woodwinds, no percussion except timpani. It’s the orchestra that a number of the Beethoven symphonies were written for. Partly for this reason, the Sinfonietta works just as well in my version for 11 instruments, which I did a few years after the premiere in 2013.
TJP: Like your Aria and Fugue: adaptable.
DC: Absolutely.
TJP: Did you come from a musical family?
DC: My mother sang under Robert Shaw in the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus and took me to rehearsals when I was 6 years old. She was uniquely supportive of my musical pursuits. My father played trumpet in the Air Force Academy Band and took me to hear many jazz greats as a young child. It’s interesting, you know, both Copland and Bernstein came from non-musical families. They have in common that they started piano at the age of 10, which is later than most people.
TJP: Much later.
DC: Yes, but Bernstein became a phenomenal pianist. And Copland was much better than people realize. There’s a video of him playing his piano concerto with Bernstein conducting. Apparently, his father did not want to pay for him to have piano lessons, but Copland refused to take no for an answer. He worked hard at the piano. At 18, he studied with Rubin Goldmark, who also taught Gershwin. At 20, he went to Paris to study with Boulanger. And after three years with her, he wrote his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra at the age of 23. A wonderful piece.
TJP: A true masterpiece. One of my all-time favorite pieces of music. I was recently studying that score in preparation for a hymn I’m arranging for trumpet, viola, and organ, and I was reminded again of how incredible it is.
DC: Indeed. But he could never have written that without Mlle. Boulanger. She truly was a great genius, easily the most important composition teacher of the 20th century. In addition to Copland, she taught Carter, Glass, Piazzola, Quincy Jones, Michel Legrand, an incredible range of composers, both classical and popular.
TJP: Copland must have been a big influence on you, given that you lived with him for a summer.
DC: Of course. I’m absolutely influenced by Copland. Have you played his violin sonata?
TJP: Oh yes, many times.
DC: Those opening chords are very original. I think the violin sonata is one of his greatest works, along with the Nonet, Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, and A Lincoln Portrait, which I believe is the most truly patriotic American work ever written. It’s also for me the most successful work for narrator and orchestra. Copland perfectly captures the character of Lincoln. And the orchestration is astonishing. He puts the trumpet above the flute and the bassoon and combines the woodwinds like Mahler does to get composite colors. It’s brilliant. And of course Copland learned a lot from Mahler, given that Boulanger made a thorough study with Copland of Mahler’s scores, in particular “Das Lied Von Der Erde.” Copland’s orchestration is greatly influenced by Mahler – as are Shostakovich and Britten – in that he has an immense range of different colors largely achieved through unusual doublings.
TJP: One final question. For those of us who want to delve into 20th century classical music but don’t know where to start, what would you recommend?
DC: Well, one thinks of a number of pieces. To name just a few, I think for orchestration Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” is terrific. Appalachian Spring is of the two or three greatest American works of the century. Copland is unique in that he expresses the American character in music more than any other single composer – both the skyscraper and the prairie. Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is a really great work. Those are three works to start with.
Related Posts
