Hello and welcome to Part 2 of our enlightening interview with Joshua Bornfield. In this round, we talked about the role of new music, rejection, Thomas Ades, and more. Please enjoy. Full transcript after the break...
JB: Forgive me. Let me clarify the question. This is the business of music? Or is this the emotional integrity thing with composition?
SY: Well it’s all
the business. It’s all a means to an end. If your biggest struggle in
composition is emotional, then that can be the question. How do you overcome
those emotions to continue to produce music? Or it could be a time that you
were rejected from something…?
JB: Oh!
Rejection! Yeah.
SY: How do you
overcome rejection?
JB: Yeah okay so
there are two different kinds of rejection. First there’s the kind of rejection
you get which is a letter that says “I’m sorry to say that you have not been
accepted as a member of our faculty/summer program/camp counseling/whatever.
I’m sorry. You are probably a valid person in some capacity, but not for us.”
And those letters… The best thing you can do is just make wall paper out of
them. That’s it. Just pepper them around the room.
SY: Because you
will have enough to make a nice wall paper.
JY: If you’re
doing it the right way… You’ll have plenty of paper to keep warm for the
winter.
JB: Totally. You
know what? Make them into blankets. And in fact I think you could do the wall
paper with just the letter head portion of the letter. Wouldn’t’ that be a
great idea? Yeah it would be awesome. Look at this one. I’ve been rejected from
USC, UCLA, from Cal Arts. I’ve been rejected from Michigan FOUR TIMES. No joke.
I’ve been rejected from Michigan four times. I’ve been rejected from Bowling
Green State twice. But the letterhead is so beautiful. It’s embossed and in all
these beautiful colors.
JY: There’s got
to be a DIY project behind that…
SY: It’s nice
because those letter heads do cost some money. And they send all of them out…
JB: Yeah. Those
schools spend a lot of money… Nooooo… Well in the grand scheme of things…
Anyway that’s neither here nor there.
As far as personal rejection goes? That’s funny… Rejection
on a personal level as in when people choose to reject what you’re saying or
when people choose to reject the way in which you’re saying it, I do everything
in my power to listen to those criticisms and to listen to them without
cynicism. Listening to them completely honestly. For god sake I’m a student.
This might be my twelfth year in college… Not might be… IS. But I’m still a
student. I’m here to learn. That’s the objective of my time here. And when I
finish in school the one thing that I’m really going to take away from the
doctorate is the recognition that I don’t know everything. The most important
thing that I can do here is to figure out the nine percent of the total number
of things that exist within my field and know them as best I can and to place
them in a wider context with the other ninety-one percent of stuff that
everyone else understands better.
So if people have legitimate concerns about my music (and
when I say legitimate I don’t mean “Hey man I think that was a pretty cool spot
that time where you brought in that snare drum. I thought that was pretty cool.
I like the way it sounded. It’s good.”) I don’t mean “I like it because this is
good because I like it.” I mean… Listen. That person might know the six pieces
by Berlioz or by Schuman that may help you to better express the thing you are
expressing. So go listen to those pieces. Pay attention to the criticism and at
every level.
JY: So do you
care about an audience?
JB: I care about
myself as an audience member. I want to like the music that’s coming forward. I
don’t have to like it because it’s beautiful. So I guess in that respect, no.
JY: So your ideal
audience is you?
JB: My ideal
audience is a room full of people who are as willing to experience any emotion
in a concert hall as they are in a movie theatre. Does that make sense? You go out to
the movies and you have a general sense of the tone of the movie you’re going
to see. And it’s not always pleasant. Sometimes it’s a horror film.
 |
| A potentially terrifying film: The forthcoming A Late Quartet |
JB: I think that
the role of new music right now is the same kind of role that music has always
had. The same role of all the arts: you take a mirror and you hold it up to
society. That’s a cheap answer because it’s one that gets used a lot, but I
really like it. I really, really like it. Music is kind of an arbiter of where
culture is. And by that, I mean, we have this high art form, we have classical
music with a lower case “c”. So we have music from 1600-2012, right? But more
importantly 1600-1911. I’m calling it 1911 for Das lied von der Erde: the
last symphony that Mahler wrote. Like that’s it.
I think that since then, Rite of Spring and Pierrot Lunaire.
There just “That’s it we’re done, the old is washed away,” despite what Strauss
was trying to say thereafter. But what Pierrot did this more than Rite of
Spring, I think… It showed the people a clearer window of the things they were
experiencing at the time and it did so in a language that was appropriate for
the people to hear then. Can we imagine what it was like in Germany immediately
before World War I? Do we have any idea what that’s like? I imagine that would
have been terrifying.
JY: So what is
the importance of Pierrot Lunaire today?
JB: Pierrot Lunaire
reminds us that that’s possible. Like the powder keg that was society at that
point… By listening to that piece we are allowed a witness to that time.
JY: We’ve been
talking a lot about dead composers, Josh, who’s your favorite living composer?
JB: God, that’s a
crazy question. I haven’t the foggiest idea.
JY: It is. No no
no, just tell me.
JB: Ades…I listen
to…
JY: Alright. What
is it about Thomas Ades that you like so much?
JB: He’s
inventive. He’s inventive and the
older he gets, the more clearly he says what he needs to say. He’s got this great catalog of pieces from the 90s and the early
00s like Living Toys and the Concerto Consiso and These Premises are Alarmed and there’s all that crap. I mean, it’s
not crap. It’s great. It’s awesome. I love listening to it, but among all that
stuff, the most sincere piece of music that I hear from that time is the string quartet (Arcadiana). And the string quartet is a magnificent piece because it’s not afraid to be less then bombastic.
It’s a piece that allows itself true contrast by sitting in whatever space is absolutely necessary for the moment of the piece.
And now with that freaking piano concerto. Oh my god it’s
amazing. In Seven Days, right, this piece, In Seven Days, let’s see if I can
sum this up. Okay so the thing about Ades’s music is that it’s always been… The decoration has been so perfuse
that it’s really easy to confuse decoration with function in his music. It
always has been, and that’s part of the reason why it sounds so novel. Why it’s so fascinating: you could just
sit there and listen to it over and over again because there’s always something
else to hear in the music, and when I say that I don’t mean theoretically
like getting a level deeper. I
mean there is an instrument that is playing here that you didn’t hear playing
last time, because there are so many things happening at any given time. It’s
just incredibly fascinating music.
But then comes the later stuff, in which he distills more
and more of that stuff out, and In Seven Days, he has this thing happening in
the piano all the time. The piano plays the whole piece, with the exception of
maybe 2 minutes out of 26-27 minutes this piece takes. But the piano is not
responsible for the orchestra just like the orchestra is not responsible for
the piano. These are just things that happen to be occurring at the same time,
and they’re speaking generally the same things. But they’re not necessarily
intended to be a unit, not even in the way that Schumann had in his concerto,
or either of the Brahms concerti where you have soloist versus orchestra.
No, in this case, you’ve got the skin of the music, which is
the orchestra. It’s like the crust of the Earth, and then you have the pounding
heart beneath it, which is the piano. It’s like the core: the magma at the
center of the earth that just churns out and makes it possible for the
orchestra to do what it does, which is a really beautiful thing, you know. And
he never has to stop the motion. He just keeps all of the motion very simple.
Because he shows up right up front what he’s going to use, and then every time
he varies it, he varies it in a way that we find interesting but not alien. He
can say whatever he wants, and he does. He goes everywhere in that piece, and
it’s magnificent. You follow him to every single place.
Yeah. I heart Ades.
Music Credits:
Vessel - Joshua Bornfield
Triskaidekaphobia - James Young
Pierrot Lunaire - Arnold Schoenberg
In Seven Days - Thomas Ades
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