Interviews with American Composers: Barney Childs in Conversation ed. by Virginia Anderson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Interviews with American Composers: Barney Childs in Conversation ed. by Virginia Anderson Ken Smith Interviews with American Composers: Barney Childs in Conversation. Edited by Virginia Anderson. (Music in American life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022. [xiii, 428 p. ISBN 978-0-252-04399-4 (hardcover). $60.00. ISBN 978-0-252-05292-7 (e-book)] Back in the 1970s, young students were often invited to submit everyday items—a toy, a recording (inevitably pop music), an article of clothing—as part of ‘time capsule’ projects to be opened at some predetermined date. Perhaps it was their graduation, maybe the turn of the century, but the point was that the future audience had been established from the beginning. [End Page 71] In his back-cover blurb, longtime Mills College professor Chris Brown calls this volume ‘a unique time capsule of recent history of the state of the field of art music composition in 1972’. The irony is that Barney Childs had not planned an historical document but rather an immediate journalistic overview of the period. Armed with a faculty grant from the University of Redlands, Childs set out across the country to interview a broad cross-section of ‘important but not yet famous’ composers who had not only found their creative voice but also been pondering the place of their chosen art form in American society. Book publishers at the time, however, had barely caught up with John Cage and Elliott Carter, both born in 1912, a full generation before the twenty-three composers on Childs’ list. After repeated rejections, Childs eventually abandoned the project in the 1990s. In the intervening decades, some of those composers—ranging in age between twenty-nine and forty-six at the time of the interviews—had actually become famous; several others had passed away—including Childs, in 2000—and what was once a contemporary dialogue had become valuable documentary material. Editor Virginia Anderson, who also died in 2021, pairs these wide-ranging discussions with third-party contextual essays that, at the very least, summarise what the subject had done before and after 1972, and in a few cases help explain how and why the subject was chosen in the first place. Arranged alphabetically from William Albright to Charles Wuorinen, several of these composers had been active practitioners in other musical genres, predominantly jazz. Most of them had worked in electronic music, and nearly all were finding ways to disrupt conventional pitch relationships—not just upsetting tonality, but in cases like Ben Johnston’s micro-tonal subdivisions or Joel Chadebe’s electronic sound art, expanding or discarding the concept of pitch entirely. One common thread is the conflicting attitudes of music’s place in higher education and vice versa. Not all are as dramatic as Daniel Lentz, whose contract at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was not renewed after the premiere of his Love and Conception, where a pianist playing faux-Chopin pairs off with his page turner, dancing, undressing, and climbing into the piano for a tryst. More prevalent are sentiments like Sydney Hodkinson discussing ‘the insidiousness of the university setting’ in overanalysing projects in development (‘I talked myself out of some good pieces’, he recalls). William Bolcom, interviewed here shortly before accepting a longtime position at the University of Michigan, recounts fleeing the demoralising effects of teaching ‘music depreciation and gang-bang piano’ at Queens College, CUNY. Charles Wuorinen, even after being unceremoniously refused tenure at Columbia University in 1970–1971, imagines an academic environment where composers could maintain a certain artistic autonomy ‘not unlike the wandering scholars of Ancient China’. Another recurring theme is the changing connection between composers and performers, as well as the relationship between those who write music and those who listen to it. Rather than fast-fingered virtuosity, Robert Ashley much preferred players who ‘could do something unique with an instrument’. For Donald Martino, whose works are unapologetically demanding on the performer, too much virtuosity could destroy the dramatic effect. ‘A certain amount of feigned difficulty is required even in the Set for Clarinet, which I wrote as a clarinetist with the instrument pretty much in my hands’. He continues: In one place it’s...