Ameen Muhammad Photo: Paul B. Goode ©1997

All these young people need is someone to tell them, "You can." Growing up in Mississippi in the early 1950s, "You can't" was a very popular phrase. The first two words I learned to distinguish between was "white" and "colored." I'm glad that challenge doesn't exist today for these young people, but that's the environment I had to overcome. Those experiences didn't embitter me, they just made me strive to fight against that kind of thing and deal with people on a more humanistic basis. The term is "human being," but being human is something you must acquire in order to be a human being.
AO: Does your music come from a source outside of yourself?
AM: Yeah. Oh man, I don't know nothin'! My music does not come from me, it comes to me. I can't take claim for it. The Creator is the source of my inspiration. I don't write for my own enjoyment, I write what I feel might influence someone else's enjoyment. Seeing them forget their day and let themselves go: "oh man, that excites me." It's a gift to be a conduit and to give, and it humbles you, man. When people appreciate what you do, there's no greater feeling.
AO: You refer to yourself as a Griot ...
AM: In ancient African traditions, Griots are educators, the keepers of history. The Griots are storytellers; they're also master musicians, and a big part of their function is to make people laugh. If I had not been a musician I'd have wanted to be a comedian. Red Skelton was my cat. There's no better feeling than laughter. Well, there's a few ... but even those make you laugh! I'm writing a piece now called Humor because laughter is what I 1ike. When you go out to hear music, if it's not to make you dance, it should make you feel good. I never had a childhood … growing up, I didn't know any one my own age until I was eight. I knew people who had been slaves, and who still had their freedom papers. That's why I like joviality. Give me some laughter; I can do the solemn stuff by myself. I believe that we're supposed to inspire each other to accomplish higher things than we would as individuals. Music has really allowed me to do that.
AO: Who and where were you in 1968?
AM: I was Curtis Chapman. I was waiting for a trumpet to come to me from Officer Williams. I was just getting into high school. I was affiliated with the Black Panther Party. I was crying tears over the murder of Martin Luther King. I recognized that I was a Muslim. I got a strong sense of what it took to get certain things out of an instrument. That was a big growth year for me.
AO: What were you going for in Bronzeville Suite?
AM: In the late 1940s and 1950s, Bronzeville had a hip nightlife: the Grand Ballroom, McKee's Lounge and the Rum Boogie. Jitney cabs would take you from 63rd Street to 29th Street for a quarter, and if you got off at any place in between and walked four blocks either way of South Park, you'd be in the midst of some great music. I just tried to grab a moment of that feeling in each of the compositions.
AO: The jazz audience responds to musicians in a way classical audiences wouldn't be caught dead doing.
AM: Oh, absolutely!
AO: Does that come out of the Church?
AM: It goes back further than that; gospel comes out of Africa. You see people in churches shouting and falling out and expressing themselves out of inspiration, not restraining themselves in any way. Jazz reflects those things. I don't care if you're a stuffed shirt: I listen to nothing but Beethoven and Debussy is my cousin ... You let Rahsaan Roland Kirk blow some stuff on you, you gonna holler. You let Charlie Parker start runnin' them riffs, somethin's gonna happen. If it don't come out externally, somethin' internally shouts. I believe in writin' for the shouts.
AO: An exquisite moment in your life ...
AM: When I cut my daughter's umbilical cord and she looked up at me like, "I got ya…"
AO: Is there something you'd like to be able to do just once?
AM: I would like to be able to take a group of young people with me on a world tour and let them experience what giving to others is like for a musician.
AO: If you could have dinner tonight with anyone who ever lived ... ?
AM: Louis Armstrong. I'd sit down with Pops.

For more info on Mr. Muhammad go to the Website of the AACM, of which he is a member.

Meredith Monk Photo: Paul B. Goode ©1997

"Take us to your leader" is what we always figured the first visitors from another planet would say when they got here. They should instead be taken directly to the Tribeca loft of Meredith Monk; she'll probably know exactly what to say and, more important, how to say it. Composer, singer, filmmaker, choreographer and director, Ms Monk has spent three decades making vocal music that is unconstrained by words but depends instead on phonemes (the smallest unit of words) that enable her to explore a more primal level of communication. She is the winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, three Obies and 16 ASCAP Awards for Musical Composition, and holds honorary Doctor of Arts Awards from Julliard, Bard College and the University of the Arts. Part of her Volcano Songs was heard in the motion picture "The Big Lebowski."

A child of New York City, Ms Monk's earliest sound memories are of sanitation trucks in the street, and of singing herself to sleep. Although she loves the sounds that birds and crickets make, with their complex rhythms and overlays of texture and pitch, the pet she adores is a turtle named Neutron.

Meet The Composer has awarded Meredith Monk grants in support of Volcano Songs and The Politics of Quiet. As part of Lincoln Center's "Festival 2000" Ms Monk recently performed many of her works in a retrospective program titled: Meredith Monk: Voice Travel.

AO: Did you choose composing or did it choose you?
MM: I think it chose me. Coming from a musical family, I guess it would be a very natural thing that I would become a composer, but I don't think I knew that; I had to take a little branch into movement and dance for a while to have a place within my family that I could call my own. In the mid '60s I had the revelation that the voice could have the flexibility and range of the body, and that it had limitless colors and textures and kinetic possibilities and characters and landscapes within it.
AO: Have you developed theories about the origin of language?
MM: From an intuitive point of view I'm always interested in considering the beginnings of human utterance, and when did utterance turn into language. I think that's why sometimes my pieces have the quality of language but really aren't language. You get the sense that people are communicating with each other, like you overheard something in the corner of your ear ... or looked into a window and saw people communicating but you couldn't make out the words; I always liked the fantasy of that. I choose phonemes for the particular sound world or colors I want in a particular piece and sometimes even the emotional resonance within those phonemes. I have a very deep belief that the voice itself is a universal language that bypasses discursive thought to speak directly to the heart. People can relate to voca1 and instrumental music very directly without having to sift through the particular meanings of language and without having something explained to them. That's the beauty of music.
AO: Do your phonemes change from piece to piece or is there a set vocabulary?
MM: There are a limited number of sounds you can make, but I try to create the world of each piece from zero. If there are overlaps of phonemes from one piece to another, I've failed. I haven't codified an emotional language because that would just be going back right into the same way of thinking, and I might as well be setting a text to mean this or that.
AO: Are you directly inspired by the specific vocal qualities of the artists you work with?
MM: When I'm working on new pieces I think of the people who will be in them and custom-make the work to the singer and their spirit, how playful they are, how rough they're willing to go, how far they'll push the voice.

When you discover something that you didn't know existed or that surprises you, you feel as if a little door has opened on the cosmos.

I'm interested not only in the vocal qualities but the human being and the generosity, the luminosity, the way they move, their emotional qualities.
AO: You've spoken of the vulnerability of performing solo works ...
MM: But on the other side it has a total freedom. There are two kinds of ecstasies: singing with other people: that musical and psychic connection is one of the great experiences of life; and the freedom to fly as a soloist, where you're able to account for every moment and you have pinpoint awareness.
AO: I sense you're not terribly concerned about how people will perform your work 50 years from now, but given the difficulty of capturing your music on paper, would you want someone to come at your work through the score or your own recording?
MM: I've been thinking a lot about it; when you've been working for a number of years you have to consider this one way or another. The part of me that relates very strongly to Buddhism would say it's good to leave without a trace, no footprints left behind. My work has a very ephemeral quality and if you try to capture it in a recording, sometimes it backfires; it's very rare that technology and inspiration have happened at the same moment. The other side of me wants to pass down some of the knowledge I've gotten over the years to another generation. That's the side that would like to open the music up to other singers. You don't get all the information about my pieces from the printed score, but I'm working hard on that. I think you'd get the fluidity and stability of the music from hearing three or four performances.
AO: Which of the impulses to compose is the most important to you?
MM: Exploration and discovery give me the most pleasure; they're the reason to compose. When you discover something that you didn't know existed or that surprises you, you feel as if a little door has opened on the cosmos. John Cage used to say that performance gives you a new way of looking at human behavior. It's very inspiring to see that generosity, non-manipulation, freedom and open-heartedness in action. Music offers an example of what interaction can be and how sensitive and supportive people could be to each other. Art has such a possibility of healing, and of renewing energy. In the Middle Ages people created art anonymously and didn't think of themselves as being separate from every other aspect of society. It was a devotional act to create.
AO: If you could have dinner tonight with anyone who ever lived ...
MM: The Dalai Lama, for sure.
AO: Where?
MM: What restaurant would I choose? I think I'd rather cook dinner for him. I'd probably be so dumbfounded I'd be speechless.

Please visit Meredith Monk's Website.

John Adams Photo: Paul B. Goode ©1997

No music by a living American is heard in the nation's concert halls more often than that of Grammy winner John Adams. His earliest memories are of his father playing clarinet and saxophone in an orchestra pit and his mother singing on stage. Adams earned his Master's degree at Harvard and moved to California in 1971. His Meet The Composer residency with the San Francisco Symphony from 1982 through 1985 became a model for orchestras all over the country. "During that time I was free to do nothing more than com pose, plan and conduct concerts," he once observed, "and God forbid, get paid for it." Mr. Adams's opera, Nixon in China, won two Grammy Awards; his Fearful Symmetries has inspired a dozen different choreographers to create dances. He began the interview from which these remarks are excerpted by apologizing that his Berkeley home "is not always this neat."

Mr. Adams was an early recipient of Meet The Composer's Orchestra Residencies Program in 1982 which partnered him with the San Francisco Symphony. MTC has awarded Mr. Adams grants in support of Harmonielehre and The Death of Klinghoffer, among others. Recently Nonesuch has released "The John Adams Earbox," a 10-CD compilation that includes almost all of the composer's music from the last twenty years.

AO:Do you remember the recordings you listened to as a child?
JA: "Chestnutissimos" like the 1812 Overture and Rhapsody in Blue. An album of circus marches was very influential. My grandfather owned a very beautiful dance hall in New Hampshire and all the big bands came in the summer starting in the mid 1930s. And I played clarinet in one of the very few professional marching bands in New England. I think that has come through in my compositions; lots of little flashes of American vernacular music come to the surface in many of my pieces: whether it's Grand Pianola Music or Nixon in China or Fearful Symmetries … and in the music I choose to conduct. I do a lot of Ives, and I've been very interested in Frank Zappa's orchestral music because it has that mixture of lowbrow and highbrow.
AO: You use architecture as a metaphor for composing.
JA: For some reason the contemplation of architecture gets my juices going. Going to Florence at a critical point in my young life was responsible for the first mature work I ever wrote. More recently I've been very affected by architects like Frank Gehry, with whom I once collaborated on a theater piece. For me he's the most important of the architects whose work has occurred after modernism.

...if opera's going to have any meaning for contemporary audiences it has to deal with contemporary subjects.

AO: Fifty years from now, what term to you think people will use to describe your music?
JA: This is a major problem; I can't find a word to describe my music. I view the period we're in as "post-style." I think there are periods in the history of art when this kind of post-stylistic point of view is the thing. I think one could even look at the work of Mahler from a hundred years ago and say Mahler does not represent any one particular style; he's really kind of a magpie, looking back over the entire 19th century European art music and you can find Wagner and Strauss, but you can also find Verdi and Bach, Austrian village band music and sentimental music. The same goes for Charles Ives. It's interesting that we're now at a fin de siecle again, the end of the 20th century, and people my age and younger seem to be embracing all sorts of styles, with a lot of influence from outside the Western canon. We're feasting on this enormous buffet.
AO: Your operas deal with newsworthy subjects where the ink on the front page is barely dry ...
JA: People always mention that. If I were a novelist like Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon or Russell Banks no one would make that connection; if I were a movie maker like Woody Allen or Oliver Stone it would be assumed that my subjects would be contemporary. I think it's more of a comment on the way we approach opera than a comment on me. We somehow feel that opera is this creaky old anachronistic vehicle and that to make it respond to a contemporary subject is rather shocking, but if opera's going to have any meaning for contemporary audiences it has to deal with contemporary subjects.
AO: I was awestruck at moments as I read the libretto of Nixon in China; this was newly-made history on a grand scale ...
JA: I shared your experience. I grew up in a small town in New Hampshire, the first stop on a very long road for any aspiring president, and my mother was active in the Democratic party. I remember shaking JFK's hand in Manchester a day or two before he won the primary. I've always had a fascination with American politics. Working on Nixon in China I was aware that this was an extraordinary story, and a metaphor for so many things in my life, particularly that I had grown up in the late 1950s and early 1960s being constantly reminded that Communism was this terrible dark menace and capitalism was the knight in shining white armor. Richard Nixon was the bane of my existence during my late teens and early '20s during the Vietnam era. The music I chose for him was essentially big band music from the '30s and '40s … the music my mother and father met over. So several aspects of my psyche came into play, and I had an opportunity to mine all these deep veins of my musical identity.
AO: Are you a different composer for having left New England and come to California?
JA: I left New England and the university life for very specific reasons. I felt that the American university composer was a kind of breed unto himself … and I use "him" advisedly because at the time there were no women in this fraternity … and that these composers were fixated upon a very tiny slice of European experience: essentially Stravinsky and/or Schoenberg. California seemed like a more open environment and by and large it was. I've been very influenced by the landscape here; you find in my music a sense of spaciousness, of landscape itself. And one can't help but be enchanted by the ethnic mix of Chinese, Mexican, Indian, Indonesian, Philippine and Native American cultures here.
AO: What do you think of attempts to invigorate concerts by the use of, for example, television monitors?
JA: There's a tendency to search for ways of making art more accessible and more entertaining by introducing new media; I'm not against that, but if music is really well played it ought to be able to survive on its own without a lot of rouge and makeup. The magnetism and brilliance Yo-Yo Ma or Pollini or Sarah Chang bring to the art is certainly enough to sell out a hall. So many orchestra players give off a kind of neutral, almost bored, sense and that contributes to the sort of dour feeling one gets in a concert hall. But I suppose if you had a hundred people behaving like Nigel Kennedy you'd have a major deportment problem on your hands.
AO: What's your predominant drive to compose?
JA: Composing is very much connected with my sense of psychic well-being, which might go back to my New England Puritan upbringing. When I'm composing there's a sense of psychological health at play, and when I'm not composing I feel like I'm not growing, but drifting. People often ask, do I compose for an audience or for myself, and I find that a strange question; of course people ought to compose for their audience. After all, you're dealing in a communicative gesture when you're making art. Dickens was an enormous influence on his culture in the same way Tolstoy was or Wagner or Verdi or Balzac, and there's something enviable about these 19th Century giants because they were great artists, they were generous artists, they made enormous edifices of their work, and at the same time they dealt with important social issues and had enormous audiences. The thing I really lament about my time is that classical composers have worked aggressively to marginalize themselves to the point where their audience is so small, one could say they have almost no impact on the culture whatsoever in the way that filmmakers and novelists and rock and roll composers have. How to rectify that has been one of the major themes of my life.
AO:What would you love to be able to do?
JA: Oh, I'd love to be able to play the piano. It's just killed me that I can't. I kind of taught myself and from time to time I use it when I'm composing or when I'm learning a score to conduct. It's a funny thing: I can conduct the London Symphony or the Philadelphia Orchestra but I can't play a Clemente sonata without having a train wreck!

Please visit John Adams' Website.

Shulamit Ran

Israeli-born composer Shulamit Ran was eight years old when she had the extraordinary experience of hearing her music sung on radio. It was the first of many wondrous accomplishments, which include winning a Pulitzer Prize. Ms. Ran was the first woman to be appointed composer-in-residence for one of the five major American orchestras, The Chicago Symphony. She is the William H. Colvin Professor of Music at the University of Chicago's Department of Music, where she has been a faculty member since 1973. Her opera, Between Two Worlds, based on the Yiddish classic, "The Dybbuk," was given its world premiere in 1997 by Chicago's Lyric Opera. A chocoholic by her own admission, Ms. Ran was asked whether she favored M&Ms, Milky Ways, Frango Mints or Godiva. "Godiva," she said, "but a chocoholic is a chocoholic and M&Ms will do in a crunch ... no pun intended."

Between 1990 and 1997, Ms Ran was the composer-in-residence at The Chicago Symphony, made possible by Meet The Composer's Orchestra Residencies Program.

AO: You seem to have defining moments every other month! Like the time you were eight and heard your music on the radio ...
SR: If I had to choose the one defining moment in the sense of having the most profound impact on the rest of my life, it would be that moment. As a child I'd sing anything I read that looked like a poem. I was sure the melody was somehow attached to the words and that everyone would have heard the same melody I did. Once I started studying piano I began making up tunes in a more conscious fashion. My teacher in Tel Aviv wrote them down for me and sent some to the Israeli Radio, and what do you know, two of them were accepted. And here we were, sitting around a big radio at camp, and out came my songs. They were mine and they were no longer mine; they had an independent existence of their own. That was the most thrilling sensation I'd ever felt and I knew right then and there I'd want to duplicate it as often as I could.
AO: At 14 you played your Capriccio for Leonard Bernstein on a televised "Young People's Concert"…
SR: At the audition there was an awkward moment when, as I handed the orchestral score to the Maestro, he said, in a slightly ironic tone of voice, "Oh, a score!" But at the end he leapt to his feet and said, "Bravo!" He was incredibly supportive and warm and down to earth. It was a very beautiful and simple interaction, and very special. To get encouragement from somebody for whom you have the greatest admiration and respect is a great gift.

As a child I'd sing anything I read that looked like a poem.

AO: You were the first woman appointed Resident Composer of one of the five major American orchestras ...
SR: The Chicago Symphony is one of the world's truly great performing institutions, in the city I love, with a music director for whom I have boundless admiration; that's an incredible combination. It's a great privilege to be able to affect programming, and have the opportunity to make some difference on issues about which I care a great deal. We live in an age of commercialism and we're bombarded by pop culture. Serious composers, serious thinking, is often devalued and marginalized. I relished the chance to open people's eyes to music they might otherwise not encounter. A problem that's unique to music among all the arts is that some people come to a concert hall expecting to be relaxed and soothed and made to feel pleasant after a hard day at the office … and music is ever so much more engaging and important than that.
AO: Soothing is certainly not your prime motivation in composing.
SR: I suppose one could say "soothing" in the sense that music can provide a real spiritual uplift, that it can transform, that it can take you away from the mundane things of life to another plane; but no, that really is not the word that comes to mind.
AO: Do you seek to challenge?
SR: Definitely. I would like my music to challenge both the mind and the heart, and do so in equal measure. Both are essential if there is to be a real balance, a sense of rightness and completeness. I believe in an active, not passive, form of listening. Music, to me, has the capacity to express the full range of the human condition. As listeners we need to bring all our faculties to the process of experiencing it.
AO: You've said that each instrument has a character and a persona.
SR: Yes, I see each instrument as having a soul or multiple souls, and that's part of what interests me about working with live sound. In many of my works I associate specific musical ideas, gestures, behaviors and emotions with particular instruments or groups. Part of one's evolution is that you always find something new that intrigues you. That also means that you keep falling in love with a particular instrument … say, the clarinet, which I have always felt was somehow my voice … but then after a while you suddenly find yourself smitten with the oboe. Or flute. Of course that's only one example, because many other things change too. Coming up with ideas is just the beginning of what creating is about. Real creativity, real inventiveness is about taking an idea as far as it will go and finding new and imaginative and special ways of making more out if it. "Organicism" is very important to me; the interrelationship between the smallest detail and the large-scale progression of a piece. The connectedness of it all, one idea being a seemingly inevitable outgrowth of another. Music is such an abstract art -- sound being totally ephemeral -- that I have a strong need to concretize it, to turn it into a virtual reality where it holds together as an object in time and space.
AO: And magic plays a role as well?
SR: There are miraculous moments when suddenly you know that something you just thought up is special; you can't explain how it came about but there it is. I suppose you call it magic. The balance of fantasy, over which we have so little control, and rigor -- the intuitive with the consciously thought out -- is what makes for a work of art. You can't wait for inspiration to come; you must invite it, which is where a composer's technique comes in. You also have to be entirely open to the work taking on a life of its own.
AO: Is there a composer somewhat off the beaten path who you'd recommend listening to?
SR:One whose had an incredibly powerful influence in this century, although audiences are not very aware of his music, is Varese; he was a visionary thinker and creator. Listen to Intbegrales; Octandre; Ionisation. It's not a huge catalog but what stunning music!
AO: What works move you most powerfully?
SR:Almost every composer has a work that does something very special to me. I admire Beethoven above all, so I could rattle off many of his works ... but what do you do with Don Giovanni, to me the greatest opera ever written ... and Bach's St. John's Passion. Schubert's String Quintet opens my mind and heart. The Rite of Spring. There's no end to this.
AO: What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?
SR:My next one. Maybe!
AO: What sends a chill down your spine?
SR:Looking at my two children. Reading books, which I don't have enough time to do. I love reading Hebrew literature; there's an incredible wealth of new Israeli writing.
AO: What would you love to be able to do, even once?
SR:I'd love to fly with my hands as wings. I'm a total klutz … I don't even ride a bike. I suppose it would be wonderful to ride a bike; for me that would look like a true accomplishment. I guess more than anything else I want to keep composing music and keep hearing it.
AO: If you could have dinner tonight with anyone who ever lived ...
SR:One doesn't have dinner with Moses ....
AO: You can in this scenario.
SR: Then Moses. That's chutzpah!

Gang Situ Photo: Paul B. Goode ©1997

Gang Situ was born into a family of musicians in Shanghai in 1954. Thus, two things were inevitable; he would become a musician, and during the Cultural Revolution he would be "reeducated" about the evils of Western music. His name, which means "steel," was chosen in the hope that a daughter would one day follow whom his parents would name Qing ("instrument") and the two names together would signify "piano." Alas, Mr. and Mrs. Situ had another little boy. Situ came to the United States in 1985. His Double Concerto for Violin and Erhu has been performed by 15 different orchestras.

In 1997 Mr. Situ was the recipient of a Meet The Composer New Residencies grant which partnered him with arts and community orgranizations in his home near San Francisco's Chinatown. The grant helped to fund his Common Ground, created in collaboration with Dimensions Dance Theater and Lily Cai Dance Company, fusing elements of Chinese and African music and dance. It has also fused friendships between the dancers, and that's as good a place to start as any.

AO: Did you choose to become a musician or did it choose you?
GS:I didn't really want to do musical things but I was born into a musical family so I had to do something musical. Then in 1971, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, I was sent to the countryside to be "re-educated." I was a farmer for four years. My father was affected pretty badly; he was thrown out of things because he was involved in Western music. He could not talk to the outside world for about nine months. He had to make a self-criticism, confessing to what he did wrong in the past. Then he was released, came back and started working again, but he could not perform anything from the West, just a lot of Mao Zedong stuff. Then everything went back and they started to perform the things they had done their whole life.
AO: Common Ground was a response to the riots in Los Angeles ...
GS: It was actually Lily's idea back in 1993. She saw performances by Dimensions and thought that the exciting and dramatic rhythmic movement would work well with the graceful Chinese movement. After the Rodney King riots she talked to Dimensions about a collaboration and they said, let's do it. My co-composer Gary Schwantes knew African music very well, and of course I'm familiar with the Chinese part, but putting them together is not easy. It is hard to describe how we collaborated. We have a section that has a Chinese pattern repeated underneath. Then a saxophone is played on top, something very African. Towards the end, all the dancers dance with ribbon, to an African drum. Melodically it is close to Chinese, but rhythmically close to African. Most people think Chinese music is just the pentatonic scale. It could be, if you want to let people know right away that this is Chinese stuff. But we still can use a complete scale, depending on the music we want to make. In my San Francisco Suite we have seven different small movements representing each different neighborhood. I went to jazz clubs quite often; by the end of it I was much clearer on what Common Ground could be. It is very exciting to not limit myself to Chinese music. Learning about those cultures is very important.

As a composer I don't have to face the piano four or five hours a day and I don't have to bring a violin here and there.

AO: Have you returned to China since coming to the United States?
GS:The first time I went back was for the Shanghai Philharmonic to record a big symphonic piece I wrote for by graduation recording. The second time I went back was for a memorial service when my father passed away. This last time was when Jimmy Lin performed the Double Concerto.
AO: Do you enjoy the process of orchestrating your work?
GS:Very much. I love the colors of all kinds of combinations. I love the symphonic form, and I love the orchestral sound, the string section and the color of the woodwind section. Rimsky-Korsakov's work on orchestration is my little bible. I like to create. The other reason I come to this country is I don't like to teach. I was on the faculty of the Shanghai Teachers University. Teaching theory every year is pretty boring. In China, the government sends you somewhere and you have to stay there a long time, even a lifetime. That is why I came here: I don't like to teach, I don't like to practice. As a composer I don't have to face the piano four or five hours a day and I don't have to bring a violin here and there.
AO: What classical composers do you enjoy listening to?
GS:I love Russian composers … Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky … as well as Ravel and Debussy. It is hard to say who is most influential on me. I would rather say which is my favorite composition. When I was in the countryside, one of my colleagues … at that time we lived together in groups of young people … had a tape of David Oistrakh playing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. That is the first time I ever heard the concerto. That period of time we lived very poor; in the beginning there was no electricity. There were rules; you had to work. So the music brought you to another world, to another time. That was the only music we had, and we had to close the doors to listen. I listened to it at least a hundred times during my four years living there. I loved it because I play the violin.
AO: If you listened to ten different versions of the Violin Concerto, could you pick out Oistrakh now?
GS: I think so, I can pick him right away.
AO: What would you like to be able to do just once?
GS:Have one of my symphonic works played by major orchestras around the world. Or have one of my pieces accepted by everybody. Any piece.
AO: If you could have dinner tonight with anyone who ever lived, who would you choose?
GS: It's very hard. I don't have a specific hero in mind. If I treat the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto like a person, I'd have dinner with that concerto.

Joseph Julian Gonzalez Photo: Paul B. Goode ©1997

On his way to a career as a classical guitarist, Bakersfield-born Joseph Julian Gonzalez took a left and wound up in Hollywood, where he composes both film and concert music. He traces his musical roots to Nashville, mambo and Mariachi bands. "Fusion isn't where I want to go," he says, "fusion is who I am!" Misa Azteca, one of his compositions for his Meet The Composer Residency in San Diego and Tijuana, combines elements of Mexican and Aztec music with the Roman Catholic Mass. The "Kyrie" section of that work came to him full-blown one day as he was driving on Interstate 5. He hummed the music over again … the musical equivalent of pinching himself. Just as he realized that this would be the start of a major piece, he was pulled over for speeding. Imagine the scene as a movie: The driver explains to a state trooper that he broke the speed limit because he was carried away by the Catholic mass he's just composed. The officer invites him to take a breathalizer test.

Mr. Gonzalez was a recipient of a Meet The Composer New Residencies grant in 1996, which in part assisted in funding his Misa Azteca, a staged concert piece for orchestra, choir, soloists and pre-Columbian percussion ensemble. Portions of Misa Azteca were performed at Carnegie Hall in March of 2000.

AO: Do you work differently when composing a film score as opposed to concert music?
JJG: When I'm composing a concert piece, I spend a lot of time trying out ideas, worrying if I'm going in the right direction, talking to people; in film you write against incredible deadlines so you gather as many ideas as you can, refine them as quickly as possible and immediately start crafting music. When you do enough dramas you know right away what's going to work; you even know what will work against the action. I joke: "minor chord means sad, major chord means happy, sax equals sex … it's easy to write movie scores!"

We're not as responsible for the creative process as we think. We receive these ideas from somewhere else, and we have a responsibility to see the impulse all the way through.

AO: Which composers from Hollywood's Golden Era do you admire?
JJG: My absolute favorite is Bernard Herrmann; he developed a new harmonic language, a new use of rhythm that greatly heightened the dramatic action, and he was the first to score the psychological underpinnings of a scene. It was fortunate that he teamed up with Alfred Hitchcock, whose movies were a perfect vehicle. In "Psycho," Janet Leigh is driving to the Bates Motel; she seems calm but you get an incredible amount of tension from the score. Erich Korngold, Max Steiner and Alfred Newman were the direct offshoot of the Romantic period … they came right out of Mahler and Strauss … but Herrmann was the first to speak in the modern harmonic language of the 20th Century. People ask what happened to the great composers of the 20th century. I believe they went to Hollywood.
AO: You studied with one of the masters, David Raksin, who wrote the score for "Modern Times," "Laura" and other movies.
JJG: Cute story: Hitchcock was filming "Lifeboat" when Raksin was at Universal Studios, and Hitchcock wasn't going to use a score because all the action takes place on the lifeboat, and where would the music be coming from? Raksin said, "Simple, the music will be coming from the same place the camera's coming from."
AO: Since your residency straddled the border, did you address "border issues"?
JJG: My best work comes from something I'm inspired to do, an issue where I think, Wow, that's a great idea. To say, I'm going to write a piece about border conflict ... that's a lofty goal but I'm afraid it would become didactic. If something comes from my being inspired and I follow it through with passion and make it as good as I can, it will make more of an impact than "Do-Gooder Community Theater." If you do good work, the community will come a long.
AO: After your incredible experience with the "Kyrie" from Misa Azteca, did you have a greater sense of a divine power or of your own abilities?
JJG: We're not as responsible for the creative process as we think. We receive these ideas from somewhere else, and we have a responsibility to see the impulse all the way through. It took about three years to realize the Misa Azteca, and I believe I was compelled to see it all the way through.
AO: So it had a divine genesis?
JJG: That's intense. Yeah, I think so, depending on how you define "divine." Whether the impulse is from my religious beliefs, from nature or from me as Nietzsche's "Superman," it comes from a source that no one can explain and that's fine with me as along as I stay in touch with that source. I know it's working when my music moves people.
AO: Can I say the "Kyrie" in Misa Azteca was divinely inspired?
JJG:Definitely.
AO: Tell me about some of the exquisite moments of your life.
JJG: Playing my first guitar concerto with full orchestra after I worked on the piece for ten months was one; that night was the best I'd ever played it. Another was when I heard my music for "The Cisco Kid" cranked full out in Dolby Surround in a theater with an audience. The first time Kronos played my music; I'd been a big fan and all of a sudden I was a colleague. Hearing Stravinsky's Petrouchka changed my life; if this was what contemporary music was like, I wanted to be part of it.
AO: What would you like to be able to do just once?
JJG: I would like to hear a world class orchestra play my music. I've always had a dream to write something for the LA Philharmonic and the LA Master Chorale. That would be the ultimate.
AO: If you could have dinner tonight with anyone who ever lived ...
JJG: Leonard Bernstein. America has produced many geniuses, and he was truly brilliant: his insight, his playing, his conducting, his passion for music. Someone who is that much in love wakes up every morning and needs to just bust out and follow his instincts regardless or in spite of what people think. He was a phenomenal individual and he's become my hero.

Please visit the Website of Joseph Julian Gonzalez.