Click play on the audio player above to hear our interview with composer Joshua Bornfield. The transcript, extra details, and pictures are after the jump. We had so much fun talking with Josh and would like to thank him a million times for being our first guest. He is a frequent consultant and supporter of Outerspaces and we love working with him! His depth of experience and knowledge are an inspiration. Enjoy!
Is there anyone you would like us to interview? Would YOU like to be interviewed? Drop us a line at info@outerspacesmusic.org.
Josh: I found that there were composers who were saying things that were relevant and that were meaningful, but very few of them. And when they were making meaningful, relevant statements it was always in commentary of other, previous music that had happened. I was not really fascinated with the idea of novelty and I’m still not actually, but a day came when I saw a piece of visual art that completely changed the way that I thought about all of the arts and our social interaction with them.
Susan: What piece of art was that?
Josh: The piece was Leda and the Swan by Cy Twombly. It’s on the 4th floor of the MOMA right after you get off the escalators you just turn a 180 and it’s right there, on the wall
Susan: This is the MOMA in NY?
Josh: That’s the one! Yeah, I got off the escalator. I was looking for the standard abstract expressionists, you know the American abstract expressionists. The 4th floor of the MOMA has all this Pollack and all this Jasper Johns, you know the stuff you go to the MOMA to see. And I was only familiar with Twombly’s work in a kind of ancillary way. And then I saw this piece and I was just moved beyond all belief. I couldn’t, I kind of couldn’t handle it.
Susan: What does that piece say to you?
Josh: That piece calls into question whether or not you are actually experiencing something, for me. The piece itself is a really violent expression. It’s like scrawling out graffiti and representations of weird sexual objects; there’s a penis that just comes out of no where in this piece. But that might just be an abstract shape and I might be making it into a penis, who knows? There are expressions of arms and stuff coming out of this massive globule of black and gray and red, just so much red all over this canvas.
But there’s this one other thing. There’s a window. There’s a box that’s bisected twice. Seeing that, it suggested to me, that as a viewer I wasn’t sure if I was a part of the malaise within the painting and that there was a whole world outside of it that I could experience, or whether I was on the outside of the world looking in on this event that was happening. And it was the first time I had ever experienced art in a really active way. I was forced to become a part of this piece. And so just by looking at it I was providing commentary on it because I am an agent of this work that’s already been done. It was magnificent. It was a revelation.
James: So do you find that visual art effects your composition in that way often?
Josh: It does now. It does now. After this Twombly, it has happened many times.
Susan: How old were you when you had that experience with the Twombly?
Josh: I’m pretty sure the date was May 29, 2010.
Susan: And that would be at what point in your musical education or career?
Josh: It was after my first year at Peabody. It was the summer after my first year at Peabody immediately before I turned 30. I didn’t write anything for a couple of weeks, and then two weeks later I wrote my Joyce piece. Which was not a response to the Twombly, but certainly influenced by it.
Susan: This experience was fairly recent then.
Josh: Yeah, I guess it was only about a year and a half ago.
James: So are you saying everything before this moment in your compositional output is not as valid?
Josh: That’s a good question. I don’t necessarily buy into the idea of validity or invalidity. I would say that… I can own that music in that I believe in it’s composition. I don’t necessarily believe in it’s musical assembly anymore. Things changed. They changed very specifically.
Susan: This reminds me of the experience you had with the piece that was promoted on NPR.
Josh: Oh yeah.
James: Let’s get into that right now.
Josh: Sure, let’s talk about that.
James: So you wrote a series of three pieces based on Radiohead tunes. Which… they’re pretty cool pieces. I mean they’re pretty well orchestrated pieces, and what you hope for out of a series of Radiohead pieces for chamber orchestra. But what’s your problem with these pieces Josh?
Josh: Yeah, here’s my problem. My problem is that across the 14 minutes that it takes to play that piece, I wrote about a minute and half of that music. And the rest of it is just direct orchestration of the Radiohead songs. Now this is a complicated question.
Susan: How do you feel about master orchestrators, like, I don’t know, Ravel, or…
Josh: Let’s talk about Mussorgsky/Ravel first because that’s a really interesting point. This is a unique piece. With Pictures at an Exhibition the piano work is so strong, it doesn’t require orchestration. But, the orchestration that Ravel did for it was so brilliant, and by brilliant I mean on the page. The craft in that orchestration is top notch. It’s textbook for how to orchestrate.
But what he did to that music in order to orchestrate it in the way that he did as in changing registration, changing the dynamic output, it was so original, so unique to the musical material that he was using. I’m willing to call that piece a piece by Ravel that was influenced by the music of Modest Mussorgsky, but that is actually Ravel’s piece. Now structurally speaking it’s Mussorgsky’s music but as a piece of creative output I have to see the orchestration as being “the piece”.
James: So are you saying you orchestrated the Radiohead pieces as if Radiohead had orchestrated the Radiohead pieces?
Josh: No, I orchestrated them in different genre styles.
James: But you’re saying that’s not your style? How do you say something is not your style? How do you make that designation?
Josh: Strictly speaking, while I was writing those pieces I had no style. I’m not saying that I didn’t wear a leather jacket. I mean I had no musical style. There was no voice that unified the things that I was writing. There are certain melodic terms or certain melodic choices that I like to use and sure people tend to call that your style, but that’s not your style. That’s your language. So each of these pieces were written in genres that may or may not have been appropriate for the original musical material. But it was important to me to craft a narrative out of those songs to make the piece into its own unique being, which is the only reason why I’m willing to call it something independent of Radiohead songs.
So that piece is, may as well get into the specifics, a three-movement piece. The three songs that are used are Bodysnatchers, Pyramid Song, and Mixamatosis. There’s an introductory forty seconds of material that I created that I really liked that’s kind of reminiscent of the introductory visuals from Fight Club: traveling through the central nervous system. It’s supposed to be kind of a reflection of feedback coming from the inside of a feedback loop out into the music and then have the music come and just destroy it, which I think is some of the most solid music in the piece…
James: Let’s move back to the beginning. We’re with Josh Bornfield who is currently getting his doctorate in composition studies at the conservatory of the Peabody of the Johns Hopkins of the Baltimore area…
Josh: Hello
James: And just quick, how old are you Josh?
Josh: I am 32 years old.
James: 32 years old.
Josh: Indeed.
James: Cool. And where did you grow up?
Josh: I spent twelve years in southern Arizona with my family and then five more years with my family in north central north Dakota in Minot. From there I left and started my undergrad at Minneapolis University of Minnesota. I was there in Minneapolis for seven years. I have a degree in Music Academia from Minnesota along with lots of other course work. Then spent 5 years in Michigan in the Ann Arbor area though I did not attend the University of Michigan. That’s fine. I have a lot of friends who attended the University of Michigan so I’ll give them this token “Go Blue.” That’s fine. I however went to Eastern so I have a bias against Michigan. They’re great people. It’s a great school. But as a matter of principle we’re gonna butt heads, but I can still like you and respect you.
James: Well that’s very generous of you Josh.
Josh: Hey you know I do what I can. Some great music has come out of that place and some fantastic composers. And I really have a deep respect for its associations. I have been in Baltimore for a little over three years, and yeah that’s that.
James: Why do you love it here? What is it about Baltimore?
Josh: I love about Baltimore that it doesn’t matter what you want to do, you will have an audience. People will come and check out what you do. I have seen phenomenal life changing art events happen here in visual arts, in theatre, and in music. And I have seen terrible awful works of apathy happen in all three of those genres also. And then I see some people who attend all of those events, and then I see people with nothing to do with any of those scenes wandering into those events. And it’s so encouraging to know those people exist. That’s I guess what I like best about the city.
Susan: Do you have a favorite event thus far?
Josh: Favorite singular event?
Susan: Yes… Singular… Or experience in general.
Josh: Yeah I do. Summer of 2011. The ten minute play festival that was held at the Bell Foundry was awesome. It was totally awesome. I got to perform in a play by Mason Ross. Weird little play… Funny little piece. That was a lot of fun. There were some great pieces on the program. There was a play by Dan Deacon that was just, like, blow your mind weird. I am still trying to figure out if it’s good or not. But there were elements of it that I really loved so I guess it must have been pretty good.
But the crowd was like… Megan Ihnen was there who writes the Sybaritic Singer blog who’s a new music champion, and she was the only professional musician I saw in the audience. But there were a bunch of people from the local pop music scene like all the guys from Loose Cannon… Or not Loose Cannon… Who are the guys… Soul Cannon! Sorry, Loose Cannon is a beer, Soul Cannon is a band. Soul Cannon was all out at the audience. I saw people from Every Man Theatre and Single Carrot Theatre and what was going to become Yellow Sign, and all those people were on stage together. And it was held in a dark, dank, musty basement, and it was put on by people who just wanted to see it happen. I guess that was like the fourth year of it in a row. It was fantastic. The crowd was amazing and the response was really awesome.
James: So when did you start composing, Josh?
Josh: That depends. Is songwriting composition?
James: Songwriting is composition.
Josh: Then I was thirteen. Yeah I started as a cellist. We all know the cello is obviously conducive to getting dates… Which is not true…
James: I see it all the time.
Josh: Absolutely. And I didn’t learn to read music so I did… I only improvised in orchestras from like… Youth…. Like fourth grade was when I picked it up until eighth grade my mother finally let me put it down in exchange for picking up a guitar. And then played guitar for a whole bunch of years without being able to read music. And managed to get into a music program without being able to read music. And then didn’t learn to read music for the first… Year… Year or so while I was there.
Susan: How could that happen?
Josh: Ear training. I was really lucky in certain respects. My Dad was an incredibly gifted pianist and my parents made the entire family go through a very rigorous boys choir in Tucson and so we learned British style solfege and hand solfege and all that stuff. So you could look at a line and have a general sense with how it should go and if you know solfege well enough you can essentially make it up as you go. Allow yourself to be corrected now and then, and memorize your lines after a couple of hearings. And it didn’t work in orchestra as well as it should have but that was essentially why I put it down. I didn’t want to spend the time to learn to read music. So I got a guitar and started teaching myself how to play it… Took six months of lessons and my teacher kicked me out. And I started writing songs.
James: So what got you into writing music formally, like, classical style.
Josh: That’s a really hard question… I guess I always…
James: And more so why didn’t you stick with songwriting. Why did you turn away from songwriting and into classical music because between what we consider songwriting and new music right now there’s…
Josh: There’s a pretty huge disconnect. Yeah I would say it’s pretty disparate those two musical styles. To say that I turned my back on songwriting I think would be a misnomer because I do think I’ll go back to it at some point. The things I want to express right now, I don’t feel like I can express them in songwriting, and I haven’t been able to express them in songwriting with very few exceptions for about the last thirteen years which was when I started writing classical music. You know what it was? One day I had just seen enough music, and sung enough music, and heard enough that I went to the music library one day after class and I could read it. It was like the strangest thing, like somebody flicked on a switch. And suddenly there was this new language and I could hear it from the page and it just made sense.
James: Do you remember what that score was?
Josh: Yeah. Tehilim. Steve Reich. And I went to it… No… And I remember pulling it off the shelf before I could really effectively read, and having memorized the rhythm, looking at the rhythm on the first page. You know just that introductory… Yeah of course [sings]. Can I map what I hear onto what I see? And I guess that might have been the breaking point because there was that day when I could pull out that score and follow it until I got to the first repeat sign. Because if you’ve ever seen the score for Tehilim it’s terrifying. The repeat signs fall 30 pages apart and the music travels at a lightning pace. So I spent all day trying to figure out how to read that damn thing.
Susan: At one point when we were talking, I wanted to see if you could expand a little bit on how you would describe your style as a composer.
Josh: Sure. Sure. Before I do that could I bring up something very briefly that just bugs me a little bit about the way people talk about composition?
James: Sure go for it.
Josh: Okay cool. This stems out of a conversation that I had with Sean Doyle, a composer who works up at Fredonia right now, a very gifted composer, about things he learned from Donald Boland, who was his composition instructor. That composition exists on a three legged… Or rather a better way to put this… There’s an equilateral triangle that is composition. Right? It begins with language. You decide how you want the music that you’re going to make to sound, whether you want it to be tonal or whether you want it to be atonal, or serial, or whatever criteria you want. That’s the least important part of the compositional process. And then there’s genre. Because you have these sounds that you really like so you decide you kind of want to make music that sounds like that because that’s really cool music… I like it because it’s good because I like it.
And then there’s the third leg which is style. Style has to do with, for me, a willingness to break the rules you’re setting up when you make the decision to be within a genre or have a certain language. When you’re writing a piece of music that’s based on a set class, and your intuition tells you that the set class that you’re using won’t satisfy the need for the moment, it’s your willingness to break your own rules to get a music that you want. So goals for my own music, that said, I like reaching in lots of genres and making them clearly audible, and I like it because of the historical associations of those genres. I think that music that is typical to a certain circumstance gives us, gives the listener, a kind of an agency through which they might hear a wider statement. So like… Purity! That’s a goal. That’s a major goal, and I think that it goes across all of the pieces that I do. That I don’t necessarily look for success or for beauty, but I do look for a distillation of something complex into very simple means.
James: Do you find you have reached that often?
Josh: No.
James: What would you say your biggest accomplishment in your compositional art has been?
Josh: Without a doubt the piece I did on James Joyce. Without a doubt.
James: What makes that as good as you say it is?
Josh: The text says something, and the music says something. And those two things are very similar, but the music doesn’t really require the text. The music is definitely aided by the presence of the text, but the suggestion of that music is so simple and so clear that it wouldn’t matter if you were singing the words to the Mouseketeers or the lyrics to a child’s song. It really wouldn’t matter. If that piece is performed in the way that I think the score asks the performer to read it, you can’t miss the idea. And it’s direct. It’s totally uncomplicated. There are some complex things that are happening in it, but I think looking at that piece and analyzing it for the complexity that does exist is just a complete misreading of the music. The object of the music is just to be direct and clear and simple and say exactly what you mean without being sappy about it. Just, own a memory and live in it’s space. Yeah. That piece works.
Music Credits:
Vessel - Joshua Bornfield
I SEE IT COMING - Joshua Bornfield
Tehilim - Steve Reich
Yes - Joshua Bornfield
Didn't get enough of Josh? Us either. Come back for Pt 2 next week!
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Hey look! You made it to the end of this very long post. So now we'd like to apologize for the wacky formatting throughout. We're having problems with Blogger today. We hope to have this corrected in the near future.
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