Richard Einhorn: Yesterday Is Not Today

Richard Einhorn: Yesterday Is Not Today

Richard Einhorn Editor Frank J. Oteri visits Richard Einhorn at his studio. New York City — Friday, August 10, 2001, 2:00 P.M. Interview Videotaped and Transcribed by Amanda MacBlane FRANK J. OTERI: I wanted to talk to you about what the past means in terms of how the present is affected by the past, so… Read more »

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

Richard Einhorn
Richard Einhorn

Editor Frank J. Oteri visits Richard Einhorn at his studio.

New York City — Friday, August 10, 2001, 2:00 P.M.

Interview Videotaped and Transcribed by Amanda MacBlane

FRANK J. OTERI: I wanted to talk to you about what the past means in terms of how the present is affected by the past, so let’s start with a really tricky question. What is new music?

RICHARD EINHORN: Oh, boy. That is a good question. Um, I think the best way to answer it operatively is to say that new music is music written in the past x number of years; name the number of years that you want, or name the number of months that you want. But one of the things, you know, that I was thinking about after we started to talk about this is the fact that on another level, even something by Machaut, in some way is new music, if you haven’t heard it or haven’t really encountered it. You know, the twentieth century was the first time that you had access to records and you had access to the entire history of music as it eventually got released, which would be toward the end of the century and suddenly rather than having the demands of a certain kind of fashionable present, you had an opportunity to poke around as much as you wanted, in any kind of music you wanted, in any era of music as well. I don’t know…new music is basically just music that we write now. Nothing terribly special about it, I guess.

FRANK J. OTERI: O.K. So what is old music?

RICHARD EINHORN: Old music…Frank Sinatra, that’s real old music! Barry Manilow

FRANK J. OTERI: He’s still around!

RICHARD EINHORN: He’s still old! Who’s that guy? Harry Connick? That kind of strikes me. I guess that’s middle-aged music. I guess that being middle-aged, I am supposed to like it, but I can’t, you know. I can’t answer it any other way… Old has a connotation for many of us as being old and tired. And so to some extent if you take any kind of emotional spin on it, at least for me, in terms of a connotation, it turns out that it’s basically music that I’m just not interested in. “That music is so old.” And technically, of course, it can be music that is, you know, music that’s thirty years old or more. In a sense, the seventies are ripe for the Academy of Ancient Music now. You know, Christopher Hogwood could have some fun, you know, resurrecting Berio! So, I don’t know… I think that when it gets into something like Perotin, for instance, I remember the first time that I heard that, when I was in college… I had this course in music history and Ernest Sanders was my teacher. He handed out these print outs but you weren’t ever supposed to go through them all in terms of records that you were supposed to listen to, so of course, I spent the entire time in the library listening to as much music as I could and I came across Perotin for the first time and I couldn’t believe it! Here was this music from the thirteenth century and it sounded like something that had been written, you know, a week ago or two weeks ago! It had this kind of sane, kind of strange, modal, rhythmic harmony that I’d always found attractive in the popular music, in the rock n’ roll that I’d been listening to and even in the jazz. And suddenly here it was in this, like, pure form. So on one hand, it was six hundred plus years old. On the other hand, it sounded as fresh as something that was made yesterday. So, I’ll go back and say Barry Manilow, Frank Sinatra, that’s old music.

FRANK J. OTERI: What rock groups were you listening to at the time?

RICHARD EINHORN: Well, in the late sixties and early seventies, what happened was that I was in high school with another composer by the name of John Luther Adams. And John and I were drummers in rock bands and John would join a band, you know, then he’d move on to a better band, then I’d join the band, you know, and the band would break up. And this went on and on and finally we met and we discovered that we both had developed a real taste in what was then the avant-garde in terms of rock n’ roll and jazz. Both of us loved Zappa, both of us loved Captain Beefheart. You know, and then we’d go on to The Fugs and, there was a band that used theremins called Lothar and the Hand People. Do you remember them?

FRANK J. OTERI: I know of them but I don’t remember them. I’m too young to remember them!

RICHARD EINHORN: Yeah. And then John moved down to Georgia and he found a band called the Hampton Grease Band who I was never able to find recordings of.

FRANK J. OTERI: There was only one record called Music to Eat.

RICHARD EINHORN: Yeah, yeah. I heard about it, but, like, never really knew their music. But then what happened is that Zappa, as I’m sure you know, had a quote on the early Mother
s records
, which was, you know, from Edgard Varèse and it got me intrigued as to who Varèse was and that got me interested in the whole, you know, the whole spectrum of modern music, contemporary, twentieth century music and I sort of, like, left rock n’ roll behind, as did John. You know, we went our separate ways but then ultimately we’d ended up actually at the same place. You know, both of us basically gave up drumming and gave up pop music and just got very interested in this other stuff ‘cuz it was more challenging, more interesting, more enjoyable.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, that Varèse quote on the Zappa album is an interesting quote to talk about: “The contemporary composer refuses to die.” And in terms of what we’re talking about now, we live in a society, a cultural society, on the one hand we have pop culture which keeps changing everyday, and you know today’s star is forgotten. You know, Britney Spears is the star of the moment, but who remembers Paula Abdul at this point? I remember she was the Britney Spears of her day and she was everywhere and it’s all you heard and now she’s “old” music. But then we have a classical music culture that really tries to hermetically seal itself from letting the new stuff in. Now, when you mention older music, you mention Perotin, you mention Machaut. It’s curious; you didn’t mention Beethoven or Tchaikovsky or Dvorak, or any of these people who, I would dare say, appear on concert programs instead of music by people who are alive today.

RICHARD EINHORN: Right, that’s right.

FRANK J. OTERI: But the period instrument movement has thrown a wonderful monkey wrench into all of this by saying that the way Beethoven has been played on concerts isn’t the way it would’ve been played in his time. And, oddly, the period instrument groups…you mentioned Hogwood… are somehow closer in spirit to the new music aesthetic than they are to the standard repertoire aesthetic. What a wonderful disconnect.

RICHARD EINHORN: I just don’t think that much about Tchaikovsky. It’s not very high up on my list. Beethoven is higher up on the list, but it’s not music that I tend to engage with. I think that the issue of why our music is not being played as much as it could be is a very, very, very complicated issue right now. Ultimately, I think it’s a cultural and social situation in which there’s plenty of blame to spread around equally; not only amongst the administrators but amongst everybody else. The reason why I write music is that at some level I know that there is some sort of desire to have this music as part of our culture, and as part, and a desire to, you know, as Frank Zappa would say, consume it. I think the tragedy is that a lot of really wonderful experiences are being passed by for a variety of very complicated reasons.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, what are some of these reasons?

RICHARD EINHORN: I think that one reason is that there is a real disconnect between the kind of aesthetic that you were talking about with Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, or even a composer as quote-unquote modern as Debussy or Ravel and the kind of music that’s going on today. I think music of that time was written primarily by people who were trained in a very quote high musical culture that was very different from the musical culture that you or I come out of in which there was a mingling of different styles, of different ideas, of different kinds of music without a preconceived notion of one being better or worse than the other. And so what happens is that when composers like us suddenly start to write and confront an audience and a tradition and administrators and musicians and conductors and singers, when you confront that, it’s like literally coming from two different planets.

FRANK J. OTERI: What’s weird about that though is that those administrators, those orchestra players, and the audience attending the concert are living in the same time we are.

RICHARD EINHORN: Yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: They’re getting that same mixed-cultural message as well, so why hasn’t it affected them?

RICHARD EINHORN: That’s a very good question. I wish I had an answer. I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand how people can take so little interest in their own time. I just know that they can do it and they do. And you can talk to them, you can talk to people who literally have no idea who the Talking Heads are and they’re my age! A friend of mine, who in fact is a well-known composer herself, had never heard or heard of Patti Smith until very recently. This is really a shock. I think we can turn the tables around and say the other thing, which is that it’s a disgrace and it’s terrible that composers like Arvo Pärt and Giya Kancheli and Morton Feldman are completely unknown to everybody else. I think it’s disgraceful that these people have their heads in the sand, but I think the rest of the world has a lot to discover in terms of really, really fine music and fine composers.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s weird because that same audience, theoretically, would go to the Museum of Modern Art and go to a Jackson Pollock retrospective or go to the theater and see the latest David Mamet play.

RICHARD EINHORN: OK, that’s another one of those complicated reasons that we’re getting into, which has to do with the chauvinism of the music community itself and rather than insult my colleagues, I’ll say the twentieth century music community rather than the twenty-first, because we’re hopefully better.

RICHARD EINHORN: What happened was that in the early days of the century, music took a turn, or at least contemporary music composition, took a turn with the works of Arnold Schoenberg into the so-called atonal music, into serial music. And, as I’m sure you know, Schoenberg and his friends set up a society for the private performance of music. They turned their back on the audience. They said, “We don’t want you to listen.” You know, or that famous phrase “Who cares if you listen?” you know, from Milton Babbitt’s article. And basically they set themselves up as the highest…they were self-described as the highest spiritual level in terms of music, the highest musical level and anything that didn’t meet their stan
dards and didn’t meet their musical stylistic demands having to do with certain kinds of structural and harmonic procedures that Schoenberg inferred from Wagner and Strauss wasn’t modern, it wasn’t contemporary, it wasn’t new, it was old! And so what happened then over the course of the twentieth century, because Schoenberg and his buddies were very smart people and very influential, was that basically you can look at the music of the time as an argument between the assertion of this big idea and people who said “No, I don’t want to be part of it.” But those guys won, the Schoenbergs, for a long part of the century, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. After that it was their followers, particularly the followers of Webern, people like Stockhausen and Boulez, etc. Those were the big names, but there’s a whole alternative history of new music in the twentieth century that was underground at least in terms of my training and probably in terms of yours and other people’s as well.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, what’s interesting about that, though, is the same thing happened in painting—the non-representational, the abstract artists said, “Any kind of representational art is a throwback to the past, we need to abandon this…” And this whole movement in the late forties led to the ascendancy of abstract expressionism and painters like Thomas Hart Benton or Joseph Stella being discredited—they won, and the audience went with them! The audience goes to Pollock retrospectives and even goes to a movie about Pollock. I wonder if people would go to a movie about Schoenberg…

RICHARD EINHORN: Well, you know, it depends. You know the Richard Gerstl incident? His wife ran off with a painter…

FRANK J. OTERI: Right, yeah.

RICHARD EINHORN: As long as there’s a painter…

FRANK J. OTERI: It would be a great movie, but he’s not a household name. Abstraction happened in art, and the audience went with it. It happened in music and the audience didn’t. You mentioned Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, but Berg’s music has very strong ties to the past, more so than the others, and Berg’s music now is done at the Metropolitan Opera. Next season, they’re doing both Wozzeck and Lulu.

RICHARD EINHORN: Yeah, that’s true; Berg was rooted in the past. But I imagine it will be a long time before they do Berg and Schoenberg in the same season together. I think the point though is that the audience may have followed at first, but my recollection from back in the 1950s, which I can barely remember, but I remember people talking about those paintings and thinking that they were totally ridiculous and that, you know, a child could do them. I could do them, anybody could do them, why are they worth any money at all? So I think that they were very controversial. Now, of course, everybody goes to see a painting by Pollock and it doesn’t have that same kind of contemptuous dismissal. It doesn’t have that meaning anymore. So I don’t think the reception of that stuff when it first came out was any different. I think it’s the extension, I think, do you know what I mean? Schoenberg never caught on, Pollock eventually did, you know.

FRANK J. OTERI: But that’s interesting. Now that we’re at a safe distance from Pollock, we can say, “OK, this is great, this is wonderful, but Schoenberg’s now dead fifty years and it’s still allegedly box office poison.

RICHARD EINHORN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there are many reasons. I’d like to suggest that it is extremely hard to hear his music. I mean, it really is. It’s like listening to the Grosse Fuge compressed over and over again with no let up. It’s very, very hard music. It’s wonderful music, you know, for the brain part of me, for the part of me that likes the cerebral and loves that kind of challenge. It’s wonderfully rich and exciting music to contemplate, to think about, to listen to. The emotional part of me is oddly enough very starved because it’s always at the same emotional pitch. There’s always this intensity and anxiety that I hear in his music that is exhausting. You know, and one can say, “Well, you sort of read into it,” but then you read his essays and his essays are as exhausting and intense as his music is. And so, and then you start looking at the harmonic language and you realize that something like a shell game’s been played on you. Schoenberg came across the saying, “I am the inevitable, I am the future, I am the inevitable future. All I’m doing is what was inherent in Wagner and Strauss and Brahms.” And well, you know, that’s a bunch of bull. I mean, it just is. There are plenty of other solutions to that, you know, starting with Janáĉek, another part of that underground we were never taught. You know, you can start with Shostakovich or other people who were using that language in a completely different way, who found modal solutions. Or Debussy for that matter. I think that we’re now getting to the point where we can get away from the “Father Schoenberg.” You know, sort of deal with the Oedipus complex and, you know, kill him and, you know, marry our musical mothers. Which in some sense is world music influences and pop.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, it’s funny because Schoenberg’s original goal was to keep German music supreme for another hundred years.

RICHARD EINHORN: Right. But you have to look at that remark in context because Mahler said, “The only art is German art.” So he meant music. He meant music. Because there wasn’t anything else… I mean these were a bunch of very hermetically sealed people. If it didn’t come from Vienna and it didn’t come from Berlin, it stunk.

FRANK J. OTERI: So this notion of audiences going back to the past, ignoring the fact that the twentieth century happened in their concert programs, where they have a Rossini overture, Tchaikovsky concerto, intermission, then a Brahms symphony, which is typical concert programming all over the United States of America as if, you know, the twentieth century didn’t happen. You go to a piano recital program, some Chopin, a Beethoven sonata, maybe Debussy if they’re adventurous, but nothing contemporary at all. You know, you can go to a conservatory to
be a player and maybe do only one modern piece.

RICHARD EINHORN: Well, it’s weird. It’s just weird. People are being trained to be museum curators. They’re trained to curate the past…the modern frightens them perhaps. But the other side of the coin that’s rarely ever talked about is the quality of much twentieth century music, which is the thing, the subject that dare not speak its name—that there’s a lot of cruddy twentieth-century music out there. There’s a lot of really great twentieth-century music, which was buried.

FRANK J. OTERI: There’s a lot of really cruddy eighteenth-century music, too, and you can turn on the radio and hear it any day of the week!

RICHARD EINHORN: That’s true, except there’s one incredible difference, which is that eighteenth-century music, the good stuff and the bad stuff, say, share a harmonic language, a contrapuntal language that everybody knew. A lot of twentieth-century music is very solipsistic and inward, you know. It has to do with systems that are the private domain of the composer and whose interest in communicating them is rather minor. What many of the composers appear to be interested in is simply working out the implications of that. They’re not communicating it out to anyone else, including their colleagues.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, in some bizarre way, wouldn’t you say that composers turn that way almost as if they have to in order to deal with this heavy weight of the past that surrounds us in our music culture?

RICHARD EINHORN: Well, then it’s more people then who are hermetically sealed. This is my personal opinion, you know, and great music is written even with the silliest of systems. For example, Schoenberg’s music is great, but, if what happens is you turn inward and you are refusing to deal both with the world in which you are living in and the concert tradition which you live in, you know, then no wonder nobody wants to listen. If you’re speaking a language that’s so private that only you and your other autistic twin can understand it, no wonder there isn’t an audience. Most twentieth-century music deals that way. I think that it deals so poorly with the audience, but it is a tradition that we come out of, and it starts with Beethoven and ends with Schoenberg. The audience is really the least important part of the equation, the least significant bit and that’s, of course, bogus. I mean, first of all, on Beethoven’s part it was simple marketing. By showing contempt for his audience he was demonstrating that he was a hero, that he was an artist, the artist as hero, you know, that sort of thing.

FRANK J. OTERI: He was kind of the Miles Davis of his day…

RICHARD EINHORN: Yes, exactly, exactly. Turning his back on the audience. You know, it took a socially inept person like Arnold Schoenberg to take it seriously and to actually turn away from an audience.

RICHARD EINHORN: Unfortunately, everybody wants to be in the avant-garde. But everybody that’s a composer wants to do the best, wants to be, you know, the cutting edge in a certain sort of way, so yeah, who’s going to say, who in the twentieth century would say, “Yeah, you know, I’m writing all this stuff for an audience. You know, I just want to please people.”

FRANK J. OTERI: There are composers who say that.

RICHARD EINHORN: You don’t take them seriously. You couldn’t possibly take them seriously. Who were you thinking of?

FRANK J. OTERI: To some extent the minimalists said that.

RICHARD EINHORN: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: And at least to some extent, Copland would have said that.

RICHARD EINHORN: Copland said that there were two kinds of music. There was private music and there was audience music. Fair enough. But again, when you start thinking about the highest artistic values, anything having to deal with the awareness of the audience is considered as somehow a lessening… I mean that was the impression that I got. And, frankly, it wrecked a lot of music making.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now we’re faced with a weird scenario. The majority of people in this country not only don’t care about Schoenberg or don’t know who Arvo Pärt is, but they don’t even know who Mozart or Beethoven was and don’t care to. This was probably always the case in history, but now we’re aware of everybody as opposed to just the educated or just the wealthy. Classical music in total is irrelevant to the majority of the people living in the United States.

RICHARD EINHORN: That’s true. That’s true. That’s absolutely true. It’s a disgrace and one of the reasons, of course, is because they were, to use your phrase, hermetically sealed.

FRANK J. OTERI: But also because this music, this wonderful body of music, as great as it is, to the average American without any musical training is chronologically disconnected from their lives and geographically disconnected from their lives. I’ve gotten into fights with people about this. Why should a kid in the South Bronx say, “Wow, I really want to go to a Mostly Mozart concert?” The comeback is, “Well, it’s great music. They should want to hear great music!” Well, that isn’t enough. Sorry. “It should be enough,” they say. But it isn’t. “Should be” and “is” are not the same thing…

RICHARD EINHORN: Yeah, well, that’s a problem. Basically, by denying the present and trying to live in the past, classical music people have wrecked their ability to have even a marginal influence in culture. We’re the most marginalized, within a marginalized group. You know, we speak a language that very, very few people know. I have to confess that as a composer myself, my interest in writing music for us, for people like us, is not that great. I mean, my interest is in, you know, writing music for many other different reasons, but it’s definitely not to reach, you know, this very small, marginalized audience.

FRANK J. OTERI: So do you want to write music that audiences will love?

RICHARD EINHORN: Um, the answer is, “Who doesn’t?” But would I change a note? No. No. But on the other hand, the real question though is, “Why does one write music?” I can’t talk about what I need to talk about without writing music. There are things that I want to say that I simply can’t say any other way and they are very specific things to the people that I love, to the people who are my friends, to the images of the people that I love, to dead people. You know, to people who will live. And that’s basically it. If I could say it in words, you know, I would do it. I think though that ultimately there is a human component to it, but not an audience in the sense, in the sense of like, I try to write new music that I think my friends will love that of course I will love. But, and I think I’m savvy enough in terms of an audience to know when a piece will connect with a large audience and when a piece will connect with a small audience.

FRANK J. OTERI: So you do believe like Copland believed that there are small audience pieces and large audience pieces…

RICHARD EINHORN: Yeah. Yes, but with an explanation. I don’t think that stylistically I change as much as Copland does between pieces. I think that a piece like Carnival of Miracles, which for me is smaller, is definitely not a piece that would sell out Lincoln Center. That’s a piece though that stylistically is very close to Voices of Light and The Silence. I think that if you took a piece like some of Copland’s more complicated piano pieces and Billy the Kid, you know, there is just such a wide, disparate difference and I don’t think there’s that kind of difference in my music. I think that I’m consistent, more consistent, although not as good a composer.

FRANK J. OTERI: We’ve talked about hermetically sealing ourselves away from the past, we’ve talked about how you grew up listening to all sorts of music and playing in rock bands and how that’s affected your sound world to some extent and world music has crept in and hearing music going back a thousand years into our tradition is part of your language—is there a sound that is the zeitgeist of now in music? Is there a sound of today that some composers are hitting, that other composers are not hitting? Is there a sound that is not hermetically sealed?

RICHARD EINHORN: I think so. Yeah, I do. I think that, immediately, the moment I say it, I keep coming up with exceptions to the rules, which goes to show how plastic these ideas are. I think that in general you can say that any music will hit our time if it is somehow based on African American rhythmic traditions and African rhythmic traditions. That’s a fancy way of saying you have to know your blues, your jazz, your rock n’ roll, your funk, probably if you’re younger, your hip-hop. You have to know this music. Brazilian music. You have to know those rhythms. If you don’t know those rhythms, how can you even begin to put together a music that’s relevant?

FRANK J. OTERI: Do you feel that those rhythms are a part of your language as a composer?

RICHARD EINHORN: Absolutely. Totally. But not in the sense where I go out and say “I’m gonna write a samba.” I mean, that’s cheesy! Cheap. That’s like the classical music equivalent of a rock band, you know, of Paul McCartney writing a symphony. Rather than doing a samba, you have those rhythms in your head for part of your life and when you start to write rhythmically exciting music you call on a subconscious level for those kinds of music. You know, at the end of The Silence there’s a section that is very, very intense and very quote exciting: the violins are playing octave double stops in what appears to be, what sounds like a backbeat. The only problem with the backbeat is that the music underneath is moving around and scrambling about and changing meters and dropping eighth notes every once in a while, so although it sounds like 4/4 it really ain’t, if you ever try to tap your foot through it, it just isn’t gonna happen. And it’s that sort of thing that we’re talking about. It’s that sort of awareness, that kind of unconscious awareness, the same way that a dominant and a tonic were part of an unconscious awareness in the eighteenth century. You know, so that’s number one. I think everyone has to contend with electronic gizmos. Everyone. I mean, if you’re not dealing with electronic music on some level and computers, you’re just not part of the century, you’re not part of the twenty-first century. Music is going to have to deal with these instruments. They’re very primitive. We’re talking about the equivalent of a piano in the twelfth century. That is, we don’t even know what these instruments looked like yet, but these are the instruments we have and we have to deal with them. So people who are involved in writing music today, if you’re not plugged into this, it’s going to be very hard on many levels for you to understand it.

FRANK J. OTERI: There are quite a few composers who in some form or fashion, either by choice of design or by accusation from critics, are in some way ignoring the twentieth century and going back into the past. There is a guy out in Lodi, New Jersey, who writes symphonies that sound like middle-period Haydn.

RICHARD EINHORN: Oh yeah. I know that, I know that music. It’s hilarious.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, you know, and there’s this whole “Derrière Guard” movement of composers who write music that sounds like it could’ve been written at a salon in the late 1870s.

RICHARD EINHORN: I guess one could say they were ass backwards.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, that’s the logo on their stationary!

RICHARD EINHORN: Are you serious?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah.

RICHARD EINHORN: The marketing’s good!

FRANK J. OTERI: I got into a funny conversation about this the other night with Greg Sandow. He’s written operas that are very much in the style of Donizetti and Bellini. That’s what he does. What he’s doing is kind of avant-garde, in a way… It’s certainly going against the grain. And in the year 2001, how is that any less anachronistic than writing a hardcore twelve-tone piece?

RICHARD EINHORN: Mmhmm [nods].

FRANK J. OTERI: Now, in your music, that’s clearly not true in terms of the surface which is very rooted in the present tense, but the things that inspire it, the things that are underneath it, are very much a homage to the past. You’re very influenced by medieval music and you’ve written for one of the most outstanding medieval music groups, Anonymous 4. They are known for medieval music and yet here they are doing your music. That’s pretty strange. And there’re all these other composers, the Bang on a Can-ers just did a period instrument piece and it’s fantastic! These guys out in the Bay Area, American Baroque, commission all of these composers to write wacky pieces for Baroque period instruments. They sound great!

RICHARD EINHORN: Oh, yeah! Again saying something that’s probably a little outrageous, you know, the piano hit its maturity with Mozart. Then it got bloated into this ridiculous nineteenth-century thing! But these old instruments don’t necessarily evoke any specific period; it’s just that they sound great! The fortepiano is a wonderful sounding instrument. It’s the way that the piano is supposed to sound. A Baroque violin, you know, you tune it down from—what is it now? 443? You tune it down to 435 and you just go “Oh, gosh! Finally it sounds the way I’ve always imagined it!”

FRANK J. OTERI: And singers with pure tone.

RICHARD EINHORN: Oh, well yeah, of course. What’s this vibrato? You know, vibrato is an ornament. And rubato, you know… Basically a lot of the techniques of the Baroque and earlier times are techniques that make perfect sense to me emotionally, musically, dramatically, aesthetically. The nineteenth century and to some extent the twentieth century is an aberration.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s interesting, the music of the nineteenth century was the music that was heard on classical radio for the most part of the twentieth century. You know, even my growing up was sort of the tail end of it. But then suddenly it became the eighteenth. There’s more eighteenth than nineteenth century music on the radio.

RICHARD EINHORN: Right, right, there are a lot of reasons for that. Bad reasons and good reasons. The bad reasons, of course, are that if you don’t listen carefully enough, the music has a tendency to be wallpaper. The dynamic contrast is smaller. You know, that’s the main reason. But there’s another reason as well, which is the whole early music revolution. You know, suddenly, you could hear Baroque music! I mean, performances, performances by people like John Eliot Gardiner and Les Arts Florissants, and William Christie, you know, those performances, that’s a completely different Baroque music! That’s not, you know, that’s not my childhood’s Baroque music. This is great. That’s what’s so exciting about it, these performances! I mean, if only people would play contemporary music with that kind of commitment. You know, with that kind of phrasing, shaping, and that kind of intonation; it’s awesome!

FRANK J. OTERI: Quite a few of these early music ensembles are now playing new music. What has been your experience in working with Anonymous 4 that has been different than working with other kinds of ensembles?

RICHARD EINHORN: Oh, oh, well, they’re wonderful. I mean, the thing is that Anonymous 4 has been singing together for ten years and basically, a lot of that time, they’ve been singing Gregorian chant, which means that because of their aesthetic, they really do want to blend the voices as much as possible. And of course, musically and performance wise, they want to, you know, make sure they’re together and in tune as much as possible. But they sound like one voice, a mammoth hyper-voice in a certain sort of way. And so they come to pieces like Carnival of Miracles or Voices of Light with that and they plug that right into it and it’s amazing. Basically, there are several different kinds of musical groups. There are groups that can play anything and then there are musical groups that have developed their own style and do that style. And when you write for a group like Anonymous 4, you could play within their style, you know, but what you can’t do is suddenly ask them to do something that is far beyond their style.

FRANK J. OTERI: One of the most fascinating CDs I’ve listened to in the past few years is a recording of John Cage‘s choral music by this Danish early music group, Ars Nova. It’s one of the most stunningly beautiful recordings I have ever heard. They bring their early music sensibility to this very out-there music, really clean phrasing and pure tone singing.

RICHARD EINHORN: Suddenly it’s layered. It’s like that famous Pokrovsky Ensemble recording of Les Noces. A lot of the groups I knew and that I was involved with in the seventies and the eighties, you know, you’d go to the concerts and you’d hear one of these incredibly dry, dull performances and you know, you’d think that was the music in some sense or another. But I was also thinking when you were talking of this wonderful recording by Martin Goldray of the Babbitt piano pieces, you know, which is totally awesome; it’s, you know, like this most beautiful, beautiful record to listen to. And I remember meeting Martin and saying to him, “Listen, I have to ask you a question.” I said, “When did you analyze this stuff? I mean, did you go and look up the analyses?” And he said, “No.” I said, “Well, how did you play it, how did you decide to play it?” And he said, “What I did was, I just played it the way I felt it. You know, I did everything he wanted, but I played it the way I felt it and I made it have musical sense, in whatever that meant, rather than anything else.” And I thought, “Well, sure, that’s perfectly obvious.” But it wasn’t obvious for many years. I think to a great extent, you know, getting back to the twentieth century conversation we were having, you know, composers were ill-served by the performance tradition that came out, that had been developed in the middle of this century.

FRANK J. OTERI: So maybe in the twenty-first century there’s a lot that composers could gain from working with people who have an early music approach to new music.

RICHARD EINHORN: Oh yeah, definitely. First of all, there are the stylistic things that are so attractive to us. Second of all, there are also the instruments. I mean, not all of the instruments, I mean, god, you don’t want to write too many pieces for natural horn or natural trombone or whatever, but the gamba is one of the most exquisitely beautiful instruments around. All the different kinds… There are all these instruments that need to be rediscovered and that deserve an exciting repertory. And I think also we, meaning us composers and instrument designers, could also start thinking about what a twenty-first century gamba might consist of.

FRANK J. OTERI: Another layer to this dialogue with the past for you has been the subject matters that have excited you. A lot of your inspirations are from things that are deep into the past and, in a sense, we’re talking about history and sort of the ghosts of history onto the present. The work that you’re most known for was created to go along with this amazing, amazing Dreyer film from the twenties, which in itself is about something that took place about five hundred years previously. So you’ve got three layers of history going on and potentially four. You’ve got the Joan of Arc historical reality. You’ve got Dreyer’s interpretation of that reality from 1928. You’ve got your reality of it from the nineties and you have the perception of everyone in your audience experiencing this superimposition of three historical layers. By adding new music to this old film, is it a new film?

RICHARD EINHORN: Mmhmm. Well, answering that question, no it’s not a new film. Well, let me puncture everything and say that there is a reason why many composers are interested in old topics and that is that they are out of copyright.

FRANK J. OTERI: So is the Dreyer film out of copyright?

RICHARD EINHORN: It gets very complicated but to put it mildly, it has to do with the GATT treaty and everything connected with the project has that mysterious out-of-proportion aspect to it. I think the second thing to do to sort of puncture everything is to realize that none of what you’re talking about occurred to me when I was writing it or developing the project. The only thing that interested me was the fact that, there were two things: One was the fact that this was a great masterpiece, you know, the end. And the other was that Joan of Arc was a very extraordinary human being that I responded to on many, many levels. It never occurred to me that there was any kind of a joining of histories at all. And in terms of the general overall working of the project, taking Joan of Arc first because in some senses she’s a little bit easier, the film, let’s see, the music that I developed was an attempt to kind of deal emotionally with this person and she comes from a very simple background. I also had an amateur, a semi-amateur orchestra with some great professional musicians in it who were first-class, so what, what happened was that between the fact that Joan was a simple person with a great deal of subtlety, and the fact that I wanted to make sure that the orchestra could get through it and that we could rehearse it in a reasonable amount of time, the music has a very, very pared down, at least for my style and many other people’s styles, a very pared down kind of feel to it. It’s very stripped down and it was that way on purpose. The texts are, were really carefully researched. I love words; I love writing, so I do a lot of work trying to find the best texts I can and those texts are used to comment on Joan of Arc’s life in various ways and they are locked in the period from the fifteenth century and earlier. Basically, that’s about it. In terms of the musical language, it’s one of those things where what I wanted and what I love is music that kind of floats outside of a period, outside of a time. Where if you were listening to it on the radio or at home, you just don’t know when or where it was. I mean, some of it, some music has that ability for me. It has a sense of timelessness to me and that’s what I was going for. If you listen to it, you think, “Oh, you know, this guy’s just writing Gregorian chants.” Well, there really isn’t anything in there that could possibly be a Gregorian chant or anything Baroque at all. If you listen to it carefully, there’s only one time it could ever have been composed, which is in the twentieth century. To a great extent, it shows the influence of back then, but nobody could ever mistake it for anything else than what it was. I think that in terms of the film, I don’t look at it as an historical document. I look at it as something that’s living and breathing right now because that’s the way that it affected me. I don’t even know if I can come up with a contemporary analog ‘cuz it’s something that’s more present to me than a lot of other things are. I didn’t look at it as trying to resurrect an old film because frankly, I couldn’t care less. I mean, what I cared about was that I’d found by sheer accident what I knew was one of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century and I just wanted to bring it to people’s attention and write some music. So, sorry. I didn’t quite answer the question.

FRANK J. OTERI: No, it’s a great answer. But to take it further, what are the things in music that you feel are timeless? Is a string quartet timeless? Is a symphony orchestra timeless?

RICHARD EINHORN: Again, everybody answers this differently. You know, the media aren’t necessarily timeless, but the way in which the music is approached is, in a certain sort of way. You know, like if you listen to the Lydian mode movement from the Beethoven quartets. That floats outside of time for me. I just don’t know; maybe it’s modalism, I don’t know. But, but it sort of floats out of time. Or the Pavane for a Dead Princess by Ravel. You just don’t associate that with its time period, although it could only have been written when it was written. There’s some kind of emotional directness to it. Or Music for Airports, which is truly timeless in many ways.

FRANK J. OTERI: I want you to put on another one of your hats now. For many years, you were a very successful record producer and making records is, in a way, making something timeless that prior to the twentieth century was ephemeral. How did making recordings of people like Meredith Monk and Yo Yo Ma affect you creatively and affect your ideas about making music?

RICHARD EINHORN: Until I worked with some of the virtuosos I’ve worked with, I had no idea what was possible. And then there came kind of an epiphany, which is kind of an arrogant thing, but I was doing this recording of Karl Maria von Weber sonatas, and Jean-Pierre Rampal was playing flute and, you know, he’s a really good flute player and that’s really awful music. And I was sitting there listening, following the score, you know, listening to him perform and I said, “You know, I could write music much better than this.” And I realized that then I had to quit because I’m so mad that they would be recording Weber rather than my own flute sonatas. I still think that. I still think Weber is a terrible composer. But I think that, that was the other thing, I didn’t know anything about nineteenth-century music. I had managed in my background to know a lot about twentieth-century music and eighteenth-century and before, but I didn’t know how many violin concertos Tchaikovsky had written or Beethoven or Brahms and, or how many piano concertos anyone had written and I didn’t really care that much, so suddenly here I was suddenly thrust into this whole thing. And I suppose it got me interested a little bit in the repertory, but not that much and oddly enough I now listen, it’s like I was reading Jan Swafford’s book about Brahms and said “Geez, I better get out the old Brahms records.” And very little of it
I find connects to me. Some of it just blows me away, but a lot of what she gets very excited about I’d rather be listening elsewhere.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s weird, you know in a way, to kind of come full circle. I think some of that’s the ghost of Schoenberg. I think we’ve yet to come to terms as composers with the nineteenth century. We’re still trying to run away from it like Schoenberg did. And it looms over us because it’s the period that is still the most popular among people who run orchestras and what they say audiences like. You can’t really listen to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony without making all of these other associations, but it’s a pretty good piece of music.

RICHARD EINHORN: Yes. It’s a really good piece of music. But no, I don’t think so. I just don’t like it. I don’t like the sound. It has to do with the sound quality of it and also the attitude. You know I hear Brahms working through his psychological problems, but frankly, I really don’t care. I mean, I feel for him, don’t get me wrong. I’m an empathetic guy, but I mean, you know, it’s not really what I come to music for. I think there’s more emotional truth in Bach or something else.

FRANK J. OTERI: Have you heard the period instrument recordings of Schubert?

RICHARD EINHORN: I’ve heard Elly Ameling do something, The Shepherd and the Rock, but I am sure that was an early, early instrument recording.

FRANK J. OTERI: I have done a 180 on Schubert since period instrument recordings came out.

RICHARD EINHORN: Really?

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s fantastic. I couldn’t listen to that music when I was in college, but it’s wonderful to hear a group like the Hanover Band do the Fourth Symphony or to hear the impromptus on a fortepiano.

FRANK J. OTERI: But let’s talk more about your music. You’ve written film scores which raise another whole set of questions about large and small audiences. The Fire Eater is a work of yours I have yet to hear, but I was reading about it on your Web site and I thought it sounded fascinating. You incorporated Finnish folk music into that score.

RICHARD EINHORN: Yeah, what I did was we hired two Finnish folk singers, Anna-Kaisa Liedes and another friend of hers in the group and I wrote, in the film, there is this very enigmatic Latin quotation. And for some reason or another I started to get obsessed with it and thought well, that’s obviously important to the filmmaker and, you know, I know from Latin just a little bit, so I set that to music as a song and you know, in the style of a Finnish folk song sort of, and the two women started to sing it and it was just so, so great. It was one of those experiences where you know we were all going, “Oh my gosh, this is why we endure no sunlight and stay in a recording studio all the time.” And it was really, really a wonderful experience and it got me interested in going back up to Finland to record, to actually record some folk songs and also to study them. It’s really, really just wonderful. The whole score, the whole score was actually for the Voices of Light ensemble, if you will: orchestra strings with flutes and oboes, plus a chorus and then these two folk singers, which was really good.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s almost a Baroque orchestration…

RICHARD EINHORN: Yeah, yeah. I think that it was the right idea. I love the idea of bringing those kind of voices into a different kind of a world. I’m working with Kitka, I don’t know if you know them, they’re a San Francisco-based group of women who specialize in Bulgarian and Georgian folk music, and I’m going to be writing a piece for them. They don’t know what it is, but I do. But I’ll tell you. I’m going to use them, I’m going to write a piece, based on The Origin of Species, and it’s going to be for symphony orchestra and chorus and Kitka. At least the way that I’m conceiving it now, and Kitka will be used as the voice of the book, The Origin, and will only sing quotations from The Origin of Species.

FRANK J. OTERI: So another area. I have not heard your Freud And Dora opera.

RICHARD EINHORN: Neither have I.

FRANK J. OTERI: You were talking about psychoanalysis and I thought, “This is interesting. You’re not interested in Brahms‘ or Schoenberg’s psychoses, but you wrote an opera about Freud.

RICHARD EINHORN: Well, I’ve been living too long with Schoenberg. I’ve been studying him for about a year now, so like, I guess that’s the reason why I’m not interested in him anymore.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, I’m wondering, just in terms of this whole connecting with that period, does Schoenberg’s music have an influence at all on the score of the Freud opera, because certainly that was what was going on musically in Freud’s time…

RICHARD EINHORN: No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. It will be my music. Zero interest in that! The Freud opera… it’s about a case history that got out of hand for Freud. I’m in a minority about this but I think he ends up being laughably inept. Inept, everybody agrees with, or almost everybody agrees with. Laughably… people just don’t find what I find humorous in it. But then I have kind of a sick sense of humor. And, very, very briefly, what interests me about it is not so much the psychoanalysis, I’ve studied quite a bit of it and have actually done a lot of research, a lot more research that I actually should have done, on the Freud case history. What interested me was the confrontation between Freud and the seventeen-year-old girl that was his patient named Dora and the complications that result. Because the two of them desperately need each other for a variety of reasons. Freud needs Dora as proof of The Interpretation of Dreams which is his big book that was published the year before, and Dora needs Freud because Dora is terribly distressed, I mean, at her family situation, at her situation with a friend of her father’s who tried to seduce her. But her father is sleeping with this guy’s wife so Dora thinks that she’s being used as a swap to keep this guy quiet. He’s bribing her to do it. So she’s very, very distressed, so the two of them meet and they have everything to gain from a relationship and they do everything possible to screw it all up. And there’s a tragedy to that at the same time that there’s something very, very comical about it. Because, you know, Freud doesn’t realize that he’s falling in love with Dora, you know, he just doesn’t realize it and he stumbles all over himself in the case history, making it very clear that he’s unconsciousl
y in love. Dora doesn’t realize the amount to which she is undermining something that could be very much to her own good and to her own health. So as the two protagonists or antagonists, I guess, go their merry way. What we also realize is their particular relationship is really political. Their personal neuroses and problems and frictions and aggressions in fact, have large cultural implications, because of course the time, 1900, is of course, you know, the time when Theodor Herzl was in Vienna and the mayor of Vienna was a notorious anti-Semite. You had all the situations, philosophical and cultural. You had all the things in place to create a culture that would create havoc in the world and that’s exactly what happened. And Dora and Freud’s little relationship, their little problem, their little difficulties illuminate a lot of that.

FRANK J. OTERI: So it’s never been staged?

RICHARD EINHORN: No, no. Not yet. It’s a long story. I’d rather not get into it.

FRANK J. OTERI: We’re in this room with all this high tech equipment which you said was part and parcel of being a twenty-first-century composer and this conversation we’re having will be disseminated electronically on the Internet. When you were a record producer you disseminated information about music through recordings. A big part of the process of finding an audience nowadays and bringing your music to new audiences is disseminating prerecorded information through recordings, through the Internet, through whichever way you can electronically. Will that eventually usurp the concert hall? I’ve never heard any of your music live. It’s all been on recordings. That’s probably true for most listeners and for most new music. How does that make you feel as a composer?

RICHARD EINHORN: Well, there are two issues. Having your music performed live is really a wonderful thrill. Psychoanalytically, it’s a wonderfully narcissistic experience. I mean, it’s just great. It’s extremely exciting too because you get to hear your music in many, many different ways and I prefer that to a frozen performance on a CD. On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with CDs at all. I mean, I grew up with records. CDs are better. I know there’s an argument but they do sound better…

FRANK J. OTERI: I don’t necessarily agree with that…

RICHARD EINHORN: Yeah, let’s talk about that another time [laughs]. CDs are how 99 percent of all music is listened to. The other issue, which is the more interesting, is the whole issue of the gizmos and the gadgets and how to use them. My personal predilection at the moment is towards live performance and live shaping of the sound, and I’ve generally found that these instruments are wonderful compositional tools. They have their uses in some ways, but I’ve not yet really found a way to incorporate them into live performance except in the most minor ways, in a way that I find effective for what I want to do. That’s not to say that I’m not interested, it’s just that I don’t find what I’m looking for. What I love about hearing a violinist like Mary Rowell, for example, do Maxwell’s Demon, is that there’s an excitement and a struggle with the music and with the instrument that you just can’t get with these instruments ‘cuz everything’s too easy. You can do anything. If you’ve got a problem with it, just sequence it and your done. You can’t do it with an electric violin. And so I tend to use these for development, this is my piano.

FRANK J. OTERI: But an electric violin is already not the same as…

RICHARD EINHORN: You mean, not a real violin?

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s something else…

RICHARD EINHORN: But it’s an extremely expressive instrument because you’ve got the direct touch thing. You don’t have that with even with a really good synthesizer, you don’t have the same minute level of control and the sounds on the piano, I mean they’re great again for writing music for piano but the idea of substituting that or using these instead, I would never do anything live that would be not performed on a one-to-one basis. I’m just not interested, which is not to say somebody else doesn’t do a really good job doing that.

FRANK J. OTERI: And the Internet? Any thoughts?

RICHARD EINHORN: The Internet. The idea of disseminating music, I think that’s great. I mean, I really think that it will take off when broadband DSL is a memory. In other words, when we have really high speed Internet and you don’t have to worry about waiting even five seconds or ten seconds. In terms of collaborations, because I know there’s this thing called Rocket Network which lets people collaborate on musical projects over the Internet, I’m sure it will lead to some cool stuff, but it’s not my shtick. There’re other things that I’d want to do; I’m just not that interested. I’m just trying to think if there’s any…Yeah, I think that that’s about right. I assume that you’re not talking about things like Web sites, which are so obvious.

FRANK J. OTERI: No, but certainly your Web site is a great portal to discover your music through.

RICHARD EINHORN: Yeah. Andy Cohen, my assistant, designed that. He did a great job. So, if somebody needs a Web site design…

A Carnival of Miracles  Originally broadcast live on WNYC (11/19/1999)

Voices of Light  Film score for Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

The Silence  Performed live at Merkin Hall, NYC (12/8/94)

Fire Eater  Film score for Pirjo Honkasalo’s Fire Eater (Finland 1998)

My Many Colored Days  Based on the book My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss