Interview with Stuart Saunders Smith

Abstract

INTERVIEW WITH STUART SAUNDERS SMITH KRISZTINA DÉR INTRODUCTION AINE-BORN COMPOSER AND PERCUSSIONIST Stuart Saunders Smith has faithfully communicated his artistic voice—a receptive, eclectic aesthetic influenced by New England Transcendentalism— throughout his career.1 In this interview, he explains his compositional process in a discussion of his flute and light work The Circle of Light: A Ceremony for Solo Flute and Eight Luminists.2 This telephone interview took place on November 15, 2016. It has been edited for filler words, and unrelated portions of the interview have been omitted. KD: What was your compositional process in writing The Circle of Light? SSS: My compositional process is as it’s always been since about . . . oh, I guess when I was sixteen; and that is, I listen to what should happen. I don’t have any pre-compositional plans. I use my conditioning, the musicality I learned from playing over thirty Broadway shows in summer stock, to jazz playing, to commercial M 220 Perspectives of New Music playing, and knowing all those tunes in my background [from the Great American Songbook] . . . The whole world is vibrating at different speeds, and if you are attentive and at first non-judgmental, you will receive the sounds and proceed with what you’re doing. So, it’s a listening process, not a making process. It’s a receiving process rather than pushing things around with ego and engineering skills. So, I start with a pitch, I listen to that pitch, and of course it’s a vibration. . . . I listen to see what that pitch wants next. Then I find that pitch, and then I do the same with the two pitches. Then I hear another; and then once you have about three pitches, the rest of them come rather easily to form little phrase-lets and a large phrase. Then I do it again (and again and again) and then wonder how this all wants to cohere together formalistically. But, again, that emerges from the details. And then, I go back and I allow my listening to dictate the durations of all the different pitches. . . . I compose the entire work like that. Then I begin to add dynamics in order to let the player know what the small phrases are in their relationship to the larger phrase. But the first thing I come up with—I’ve neglected to say that—is the title. The title gives the ethos and emotional space that the piece has to be umbrellaed under. So, that even dictates the first two pitches. Then, I go over it at least three times, editing, trying to find places perhaps that are too clichéd and change those: manipulate them or just cut them out. . . . Over time, I’ve thought a lot about clichés; and clichés are a momentary thing, meaning: they’re historically defined, contextually defined. If our work together lasts several hundred years, we don’t know what the listener will consider cliché then—and not cliché. I’m thinking about the second movement of Ives’ fourth symphony. It’s full of all kinds of tunes that I can recognize; but I don’t think your generation can. You hear it differently because you can’t recognize the tunes. I was teaching one of my students, my only student right now, and I was saying, “I want you to listen with me to Ben Johnston’s tenth string quartet.” It’s microtonal, it has about a hundred and some-odd notes per octave. So, we’re listening; and then the last movement breaks into: [hums “Danny Boy”]. . . . She didn’t know the tune— never heard it before—and she said: “Wow, what a lovely tune!” And I said, “Well, that’s ‘Danny Boy.’ It’s from the Anglo-Irish tradition.” Then she said: “Oh, I recognized a hymn tune.” And I hadn’t. So, two hundred years from now, who knows what they’re going to hear? Over time, I’m less concerned about cliché. I’m reminded of a story I was told by a very fine poet. He was in a recording session reading his poetry to music, and during the break he Interview...