 for being here. So maybe first I'll just ask everybody to introduce themselves and say a couple words about, I don't know, what they ate for lunch. No, maybe just a couple words about the festival and your experience here so far and then we'll open it up for questions because this is all about really trying to be responsive to what our audience is interested in. So Jonathan, why don't you start? Thank you, I'm Jonathan Newman. You know, as far as the Cabrillo Festival, it's this, when you're coming up as a student, as a compositionist, it's this mythic sort of mecca event that, you know, you watch with awe from a distance. And so to be part of it, there's still that sort of like 22-year-old in me that's still a little freaked out that I'm actually here, and that was longer ago than you'd think. But the orchestra is, you know, it's the finest in the land for what they do and to watch them be so prepared and to observe Maren know every score inside and out, it's just, it's an honor. That's nice. Now that I'm fooled again. So, and Sebastian is also brand new to the festival, so welcome to you. Thank you. Both Jonathan and, well, everybody puts the note this side of the table, their pieces are tonight, and then Nathaniel, both of his pieces are on Sunday, and David was last night, so just to get you acclimated. So, yeah, so it's been really great to be here, and of course the orchestra is amazing, so that just my personal experience of working with the orchestra with Maren is fantastic. But the other thing I've been enjoying, because I think it happens less and less, maybe when you're in school you go to a lot of rehearsals and hearing stuff, but these days, oh, you're not hearing me, sorry. When it's been years now, these days you go to an orchestra, you have a piece played, you come in, you go to maybe one rehearsal, you maybe talk to the conductor a little bit, believe it happens. But here it's been great to hang out with all of my colleagues, we all tend to know each other and get to hear pieces rehearsed and hear the details and stuff. I feel like I learned a lot from that, and it's been really fun, and it just hasn't happened for me, I don't know you guys, but it doesn't happen that often. Yeah, it is nice, isn't it? And Juan, we welcome Juan, a rollback. You've been here twice, or just one other time? This is my second time back. Juan also was in charge, responsible for the composer's workshop, so he selected the three pieces that the conductors worked on and performed last Wednesday, and he was telling me there were 175 applicants, and he had to pick three of them, so he was very happy that I liked all of them. Great job. Thank you. So my first experience was three or four years ago, and I was singing in my Chinese folk rock piece with American ducking, and that was so great. After that, I know what this orchestra and what this festival is capable of, so I bring in a more challenging piece this time. The orchestra is fantastic. I have so much great respect for being here at the festival, and every day I'm just counting down, oh, one day less, I'm leaving, I'm leaving. But being here, to me, I'm a very energy-oriented person. I feel the energy here is so positive for composers, for performers, for audiences as well. So it's a great harmony here. So it's a great joy to work with the younger composers who are uniquely different from one to the other, and when I was selecting their music, I also actually went to each of their websites as well, just to get to know them more and to hear their other works, so that I'm able to work with them closely before I meet them, I know them. So I hope this experience will just be a testament to many great ones about how great this festival, how great working with Marin and the orchestra is, and hopefully you will enjoy the rest of the festival. Thank you. David, welcome back. David was here 12 years ago as a participant in the composer's workshop, so it's nice to see that there is a future after the workshop. Definitely, and then the following year I was back on the festival, I had a piece called Screamer, which is very different than the piece that was played last night. And yeah, it's just been great. This festival is amazing, the orchestra is amazing, and it's so nice to be able to bring my work back to Santa Cruz, especially a piece that is so drastically different, you know, sort of like there's faith in the artists, whatever he or she may do, which I think is really special about this place, that you do feel like you have a relationship with the community and the festival and the orchestra at Marin. It's really unique, there's really nothing else like it. And Nathaniel, we're playing his piece at the family concert on Sunday. I think it's really, I know you didn't write the text, but I think the musical, the language is just brilliant, absolutely brilliant. The way you weave everything in, so you have to hear that piece. It's one of those, it's when you go to a great movie, you know, you take your kid to a great movie, but you really enjoyed it a lot. It's that kind of piece, you know, the kids will love it, but adults. And also we should say that one of your pieces is being performed by Chronos Quartet on Sunday night. So if you want to say something about that too. Yeah, I'm from San Francisco, so Santa Cruz has always been kind of a vacation destination for me. So it's great to be here. I tend to like to alternate between different types of projects and rarely work in the same medium more than once. So the quartet is a nice change. And Chronos, of course, comes here regularly. And the fact that last time I was here was maybe, anyway, they were here as well and they just commissioned me. So it's a nice connection for me because I remember being here at the moment they had commissioned me, and now getting to come back and hear the piece that they commissioned is kind of nice. That's great. So let's open it up to questions because I know that's what you will come prepared with. But the first one's always the hardest. No question? I can, yeah. Yeah, no, I promise I'll repeat the question. Yeah, the question is about what Sebastian said about having this experience of learning by being with many other composers and if he could articulate that and what the other composers think. You know, I just will say that for conductors and composers it's usually a very solitary, I mean, much more so for composers even than conductors, very solitary existence. And so it's rare that you, you know, when your piece is on a program everybody else's piece, they're all dead. There's not going to be another living composer except for a place like Gabriel, so you never have any company. So I think that's what's nice. I love watching the composers hang out. They all sit at a table in the rehearsals if you've been, you see them listening to each other's pieces and talking about, I don't know if you even have to talk about anything, just sort of assimilating. Right, I mean, I wish I could give you something more specific. I don't want to sidestep you, but it's a more general thing where you're hearing this rehearsal and it might be something that's like, oh, that flecks the tone, that works really well there. Oh, this, look at that, that's kind of awkward, isn't it, with that spacing and the harmony. You know, you're getting to see Mary take it apart and try. You see, oh, yes, it gets fixed simply, or oh, that's really difficult and stuff like that. And so in every composing, orchestration, it's complicated, it has different approaches and it'd be something to be a rather simple doubling that maybe I wouldn't use, but wow, that sounds great, you know? Maybe next time I will do that. So things like that, but there's so many little scattered things. So it's just sort of about watching that go by and some I remember, some I probably, the ones I don't remember are the ones I end up using. Right, that's a very good thing. So, yeah, so something like that. And everyone's language is so different. Very different. That's what I was going to say is that everybody's... Exactly. That's why it's so different. Because the approach is so different. And I think, you know, everybody's of a, you know, in a place where you look at something that you would never in a million years write yourself or even know how to write and you appreciate it and everybody sort of, everybody gets that. I think all the composer, I think that's part of the camaraderie that Sebastian's talking about. Also, you know, in many cases we went to school together and we rarely, you know, everybody, I'm sorry. And, you know, we all kind of know each other anyway. But it is nice to have an opportunity to hang out together. No, but three of you teach together and just fill that out, right? You... Well, Dave, yeah, I just succeeded David at Shenandoah Conservatory. I just moved into his office. No, no. Was there? Wait, you weren't there? No, my colleague is here. Mason and I and... Yeah, we were in Julian and Juan. Yeah, and Juan and I are now both teaching in Manhattan. So I just... I think you wrote the only West Coast person on... Sorry, you're kind of out on the link. I don't know these guys. Really mellow, so it's good. Well, yes, go ahead. I'm inspired by music and... Where did you grow up? When did you start to be inspired by music? And with whom? Yeah. Who inspired you? Yeah. Okay, should we start? When did we start here? I was born and raised in San Francisco. I would say I started to become inspired playing in the symphonies, and other youth orchestras. What's your instrument? Violin. Violin. So as I was realizing I wasn't probably going to be a good enough violinist, I was also realizing that I really liked everything that was going on around me. And when did you start? How old were you when you tried to compose? This is always curious to me. Well, I made a few minor efforts when I was young, but at 16 I really started composing. I really realized, wow, I'm not really a great violinist. Maybe there's something else I could do. That was 16, and I started writing a lot. Oh, that's cool. David? So I grew up in a town called Blairstown in New Jersey, which is probably most known for being the filming site of the original Friday the 13th movie. So I grew up a mile from the campsite, which is a little spooky. And I first started playing music officially when I was eight years old. I joined a fife and drum corps and played snare drum, rope tension snare drum, playing colonial and civil war music. And that was really what I did for many years. When I was 15, you know that I learned, you learned all my ear by road, so I couldn't read music. When I was 15, I went to see the Nightmare Before Christmas and sort of fell in love with Danny Elfin's score and I walked out of the theater and said, I'm going to be a composer. That's a job that people can do. How exciting. And then I needed to figure out how to read music and do all that, like the details that go into that. And so, yeah, early on it was just with the people in the fife and drum corps, just other kids. And then, you know, when I started looking more at composition, it became a little more solitary because I was trying to figure out, well, what does that mean? How do you do that? Who do I talk to? And really growing up in rural New Jersey, before the internet or the very beginning of the internet, it was really kind of hard to track it down. And so eventually I kind of found other people who were interested in it and kind of have just been continuing to do that ever since. So my father actually is a composer also. So I remember when I was very little, he always told me, you are going to be a composer in the future. And he tried to teach me which never works. We always argue this and that. So he got rid of me when I was 12. He sent me to Shanghai Concerts of Music to study music where he also got trained. He said, OK, I'll let my teacher to train you. So that starts my journey to be a composer. But actually one story I want to share is I grew up playing the piano and every semester there's a recital. You have to memorize. I played Bach. I really hated Bach at that time. So many fingers have to do a lot of those. And if you make one mistake, it's all over. So my teacher told me two things. He said, you know, number one, do not stop. No matter what you do, don't stop on the spot. Number two, do not go back to the beginning and restart again. Just go on no matter what. So I improvised in a style of Bach. So I came down, I had terrible stage flight and nobody noticed except my teacher. So she told my dad, say, you know, your son won't make a great pianist, but he can improvise. So I go to the compose. So anyway, so that was my little secret to them. Yes, so Wang and I were talking about this because actually my mom is a composer and my brother is a composer and my dad was a violinist and violist. So I grew up in this very musical family. And I remember early on my dad seeing things sort of tried to teach both my brother and I string instruments and failed miserably. So he left us to our own devices and then we started this rock band and I think we drove crazy with these big martial lamps, you know, in the basement of the attic. And my brother is my brother and we are totally into it. But my parents had this collection of records because they're both classical musicians. I went out with my brother and we both started listening to this music as much as I love the pop music we were doing. There was always this thing of this wider space you can go anywhere, just something about it that had to do with this idea of journey and the sort of expressive breath of classical music I was hooked ever since as probably as a young teenager or something like that. It's a great story, it's hard to talk. I grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania and I was mostly, I was first interested in jazz and the first, in fact the first music theory I learned was jazz theory and sometimes I still, it's the first instinctive thing that I think but then I was sent to, there's this program for young composers at Tanglewood in Massachusetts in the summer and when I went there and I pretended to know everything else that the other people knew and then I discovered who Schoenberg was and listened to Strauss for the first time and I caught up quick and I never looked back after that. The beginning particularly was really captivating and I loved the subtlety of that and I wanted to follow up on what you were talking about and ask each of you if you would think about what you see as your own particular musical strengths and if you're willing to go there what you see as your own musical weaknesses and how that forms your either composition style or how you approach looking at music. Did you get a question that if they would speak to if they're interested in divulging this what they consider their musical strengths and weaknesses and how that impacts their composition? Does that make sense? First of all, I was hoping to wait that long. I'll keep you guessing. Well, I could go weaknesses really easy. I think I struggle to constantly remind myself to think less about notes and more about sounds. That's something that I'm constantly striving to do. I don't know that the distinction might seem weird but everybody at the table knows what I'm talking about at least. Strengths, I feel very comfortable orchestrating and I feel like it's one of those things that it feels easy to me. I have to remind myself that just because it's easy for me doesn't mean that it's not valuable. Good question. Not sure. I look at things that way where it would be about strengths and weaknesses in that way. What I'd say, so I'm sort of answering your question, I think, is that one's always trying to do things that one never fully succeeds in doing. Every piece is that. That brings up certain failures and certain things you're successful with. And I'd say for myself, probably, I usually try each piece to do something different that acts as a challenge. So as a sort of general, I'd say, yeah, I don't know, many failures, hopefully a few successes. I mean, that's the way it goes really. In similar suit, it's hard to say that but I always feel being a commercial and the hardest thing is to find inspiration. I think that's the strength and also that's the weakness of being a creator. I feel thankful so far. It's like, you know, there's a well. So the well of my inspiration still has some water in it. I keep digging water out. So I told myself, if one day the well is dry, I'm not going to force myself to put water in that instead or to keep digging. So that's the blessing and I hope to be able to keep it creative. It comes in a great price because every day you face that pencil and paper is solitude, is a lot of loneliness, especially when you have a family and you always feel you're doing something terrible every day by not being with your family when you close the door and compose it. Anyway, so I hope in the future I could make it back. Yeah, it's, again, it's a tricky question to answer. I mean, I think sort of like what Sebastian was saying, I mean, for me, I can talk about what I've struggled with over the years and I think one of the early things I struggled with was really being honest with who I actually was creatively at my core and sort of getting rid of a lot of the noise about what new music is supposed to be. I think especially coming up in school, you know, you sort of, you first encounter certain composers who are either very complex or very gnarly or very whatever, you know, very intensely minimalist or any kind of thing and you say, okay, I'm a student, I want to be what they are and so I'm going to assume that what they are doing is the right way to do it and for me I got very obsessed early on with the sort of modernist aesthetic, which is great but is also not really me and so for many, many years I've been sort of, and the piece we heard last night, I think it's a great example of a kind of stripped away version of that that still has elements of that in the construction but is a more true statement I think of who I am creatively and along those lines I would say I'm also really interested in continuing to grow so techniques or aesthetics or sounds that I perhaps haven't worked with before I'm always interested in learning more about them and digging into repertoire that I don't know and that sort of, when taken with the sort of honesty pursuit, will hopefully continue to push the work in a good direction so I hope that kind of answers the question I guess I would have to say that as an orchestral musician and a violinist, my thinking is very horizontal I think in terms of line and voice and so my strength is also my weakness that I tend to think that way and unlike people who have a more vertical kind of thinking where they think in terms of event, sequence of events I am more like 40 people wandering around in a thicket trying to find my way out which can have its disadvantage It's interesting to listen to you though because I imagine, I wonder if I have a question Has the internet impacted how you compose or is it reserved more for the business aspect of music? I'm just curious, I mean, you know, do you because you have access to so much more music and so many more things Do I start this one? Yeah, that's right I can tell you, I have a strong answer for this one, the way it's impacted the way I compose is that it's a nuisance that I'm always trying to get away from I have gone to all kinds of lengths to wall myself off from the internet working in places with no wifi setting up like complex parental controls on my computer so I can't be distracted by it because it's always there and I'm sure there are positive aspects of it but for me it's just been like being hunted by this thing that I'm constantly wanting to pay attention to at the same time You mean because it's such a magnetic draw Yeah, it's excessive and addictive for me You know, I want to hear everybody I just wanted to share, recently I often conduct the finals of the Queen Elizabeth competition this year it was violin and they have a compulsory piece which is a brand new piece that's written for the contestants and they're taken to a chapel out in the countryside where there's no wifi and they have to hand in their telephones also so they have no devices whatsoever and they just have five days to learn a piece and they only have each other to rely on and it's so interesting even over the course of I've been doing it for maybe six years or so even over six years I've seen the change in the young people this year, I mean some of them seem to be in severe withdrawal they don't kids don't wear I didn't realize they don't even wear watches anymore everything's the phone so when you have to give up your phone I saw them at the beginning at the end at the beginning really they didn't look well at all and at the end it was great I came in and they were all playing pool together you know instead of like when my kids at home with his friends they were all sitting on the couch online together you know it's sort of like this but it's so interesting how it just in a few years even seems to have become such a part of what they do I mean I was sort of thinking from a different perspective I mean for me it's just an immense resource to be able to learn new things I mean the amount of music that we can access now it's never been like that so I can be working and this is often the way it is for me I'll be working on a piece and say this is an interesting thing and this composer I know of does this can I find his or her piece online and immediately most often I can and then I can sort of learn from it and then I can take whatever I was trying to understand from that and work that into the piece in my own way this is much healthier well but then there's also like resisting checking Facebook every 10 minutes I mean there's definitely that it's a discipline practice in a way but yeah I feel like it's and teaching also I mean having Spotify there to immediately call up an example when you're teaching as a student I think I think it has both benefit and it is a benefit and it's great to be updated to what the world is today if something happens I think as a composer you should know because we cannot totally cut off from our society whatever inspiration we have came from the society came from the environment and the people but when when I compose I do prefer to not to have internet or not to check email because I don't know how other people but if something get into my head I don't know how to get it out also I'm the type if I have something even in the afternoon at 5 o'clock the whole day I could not write anything because I always know oh my god there's something at 5 o'clock so you have to have a free day I would prefer that you too I can't have a free day free morning no free days for you I have kids everybody's got kids that's interesting I don't know if it affects me one way or another but I do the one really positive thing is the availability of resource and be able to check stuff and listen to stuff I'm not prone to the addiction part that I am oh quit bragging what do you think well I think business wise it's become invaluable and actually has made some things possible that were like self publishing possible where it was almost impossible before but as far as on a personal level I mean I do the same thing that David does you know where you you're just there you think of something you got it but all I think it does is it makes it easier it doesn't make it possible I remember before the internet right we all still did it anyway we did that it just was a little more difficult we got our butts to the library where we found the guy who had the score where we made the calls where we did the you find a way to hear the stuff that you need to hear you find a way to get your hands on the scores that you need to see and we did that now it's just a lot easier well I was thinking you know I try to tell young conductor stuff just don't maybe there's a different different dimension of the internet I find that it creates sort of this some kind of competition though that's a little bit insane at least for conductors because suddenly one person gets a job or something you know everybody freaks out and you know it's like this I don't know I find it so incredibly unhealthy I think I've managed to become successful simply because I didn't know what anybody else was doing you know and so I just carried on I feel like it's so invasive I tell them don't don't check these things like could I add one more thought to what you're saying so I don't going through the student age you know we all look at a lot of other people's work like orchestra you study every orchestra piece but I think for the past 10 or 15 years I just feel whenever I'm writing something I intentionally not want to do the resources to check out whatever genre I'm writing so that I don't get sidetracked or distracted to pull to some other people's work or something so in that sense maybe it's good to also just focus and not be influenced by yes go ahead did you have a question? yes I'm not sure how to phrase this but I wonder about the relationship with you American composers how it starts what happens to you because that's something you've known before but how does it come alive in the collaboration process in that sense I mean the first I think the first step is really for me to identify a piece that I want to perform or a composer I want to work with and that takes many different forms there are several publishers are here and they share a lot of new composers work this is a destination for publishers you know because these days are self-published but there are some major publishing houses that represent a lot of these composers how many of you have publishers? yes so you see the majority of composers have publishers so the publishers will often come out here and bring stacks of scores and well now they don't even have to bring that and just go online and look at it but they'll say well you might be interested in this I've received probably 50 unsolicited scores every month and I look at everything and I go through everything and often I'll have my assistant my assistant here, Alexandra will go through all the pieces and she knows what I'm looking for and if something looks like it's really beautifully skillfully created then she'll pass it on to me and then the next step I think I get to know most composers here at Cabrillo and then that translates into taking their pieces other places for me but I don't know it's hard to talk about how the relationship develops it's like friendship though for me friendships take a long time for me to develop it's slow growth is sort of my method so if people are interested in a fast connection seriously it just takes years and I think also every time you meet again you've changed I just see people for the second time and third time each time you say what have you been doing and what's going on I have a piece I'd like you to hear and then they show me a piece or send me something and that grows and over the course of the week I'm working with the orchestra I see how they interact with the musicians and I don't know it's a full experience but you can probably speak to a little bit more what do you think? I think the great thing of being in Cabrillo it is a very conductor and composer collaboration set up so from the young artist program you already see that seed is there you know what we do right we pair the young composers two young conductors each one has two conductors and one has three that they get to work with during the course of rehearsing their piece so we're trying to nurture that I will say this is almost every composer's dream to hear your piece done in the same concert by different conductors how rare I never had that happen to me so this is my second time coming back and David came back several times also and there are many other composers coming next week they also have been here throughout the year so you can see this track record of how this relationship really developed it's really a relationship it does take time composer grow I write differently from our past and Mary follow up with us and keep wanting to bring our new work for the future so I think this is a beautiful thing for you to also see how this relationship evolved we usually stay in touch Mary was welcome you can come back but I think also we stay in touch maybe not every day I think we keep track of each other if somebody writes something new you know it's like keeping up with each other to see what goes on and also the musicians in the orchestra I don't know if the composers have this experience but they often will take the pieces back to their own orchestras or to their own music directors and say this is a great piece can you program this so that happens frequently too I speak about the collaboration just a moment Mary and I were working together for the first time and so there's a moment the first reading where I'm terrified I don't know how this is going to go down I've never worked with her but then all it takes is the downbeat and I see her I watch her rehearsing for 20 seconds and I think oh yeah she gets it this will go fine so you never really know a relationship with the conductor as far as the composer goes where you're going to have to try and help the conductor figure the piece out the way you want it or whether it's like oh yeah they get it so it was a magical relief for me no but no me specifically right so you know sometimes they get your stuff and sometimes they don't that's okay when they don't there's plenty who don't it's not just taste but I think also you know it's I always like being close to the creators because I'm not a creator myself but that's my job is to somehow represent them and so the more I can hear different viewpoints the better informed I am when I come to do a Mahler Symphony because I'm understanding the psyche and you know I think how hard it is to be a composer I'm really glad I'm not a composer because it's a tortuous existence they all look quite calm today but it's hard work like being an author when you just get up and you have to write something maybe you don't you know God I don't know that pressure it's one thing to be an instrumentalist where you have to practice every day being a musician is really hard work you can't you can't take a week off you really can't because then it takes you two weeks to get back in shape as a player as a composer too you can't really take tons of time off you have to keep the thread going and you have to constantly be pushing yourself a lot of people that aren't involved in these kind of disciplines don't understand that for me a studying score it's a joy also but it's a big responsibility you have to sort of keep at it every day but I love also tearing things apart the composer's dream is having their piece taken apart by someone with care and hopefully put back together in a way that's even well balanced and you know well thought out and that's what I enjoy doing so usually it works out pretty well yes sir Alexandra who helps you she's waving now my assistant conductor okay so she you say she knows what you sort of what you want and I was wondering how you have all these scores coming to you all these things being submitted to you for the next year let's say it just seems to me to be an unbelievable thing of course you already have composers here that you could draw from but I'm interested in the newness of the scores you get and with all these scores with all these scores I don't know I'm starting to feel tired no but you know the reality is I think the reality is though from the unsolicited scores that come in I would say maybe it's a very very small percentage that I will pick but I do pick some of them some of the 500 scores maybe two that just come in randomly it ends up being more more through publishers more through other composers often composers who have been here Chris Rouse recommends many people to me John Corleano Jennifer Higdon they recommend composers that either have studied with them or that they heard someone, a musician will say oh you know will you have a look at this or have a listen to that in every orchestra I have an assistant conductor who is very very helpful Alexandra was actually my assistant at the Baltimore Symphony for two years also so they get to know you and they kind of know what vocabulary what language you're interested in so it is let's go here and then I'll come over to you as soon as you hear what David will say do you as composers feel if you need to ask what a superior sound might be for a united nation did you hear the question do these do these composers feel they need to have a signature sound to identify maybe that's a I think if you're trying to put a signature sound on maybe that's a problem but I think most composers end up having a signature sound if they're good composers I just want to not about me but when I first walked in here for the first rehearsal I wasn't sure if they were ordering and I thought maybe it was David's pieces it was supposed to be scheduled but I walked in and I listened to him and I thought God this sounds like Mesa and it was Mesa Bates actually indeed we all of course want that but the path to that is long and it also has to do with you as a composer I think you always feel you know and it's great when you get heard a lot somebody hears you once or twice when you say you have a sense of Beethoven's style because you've heard many pieces many times and in your mind you start putting together what it is that makes Beethoven Beethoven and most of us don't it just doesn't happen that way in terms of the amount of saturation it's not like it was so I think it's hard for us to do but we all want that I mean I'll let everybody all the composers speak but I think for me as a conductor that's why it's important to build relationships with composers so that you hear them year after year and you get to know their voices and I think that's what's been special about being here for 24 years is that you know there's certain composers whether you have ended up liking them yet or not I can't but you know my commitment to them is unwavering and also trying to build that bridge for you because if you know one contemporary composer it's also a doorway to other contemporary composers because you're open to a new kind of language but well you said something earlier about if you try and impose a certain style on that's a problem that could not possibly be more true and I can actually sometimes even from students you can hear that they're trying to do that but the key is actually truthfulness if you sort of let that go if you let what you were sound is like and just you write what you want to hear what is truthful to you whether or not it makes any difference to anyone else that's the style is there a moment though when you realize you have your own voice you know because usually you have to start by imitating do you know what I'm saying is there a moment when as a composer well there's also a big variation among composers they're composers who like Monet say had a lot of similar output they're composers like Picasso who deliberately have very varying output Stravinsky is a great example of the Picasso version someone who was not just wasn't happy doing the same thing again and wanted to do something completely different and it takes a lot more listening to hear to Stravinsky side by side than to Brahms side by side and be able to say oh that's definitely Stravinsky you have to know a lot about kind of down to the finger print level to be able to know sure that's Stravinsky but it's not necessarily an obvious thing and it's sometimes a deliberate choice on the part of composers to do to depart every time and there are other composers who like to stay in the same zone and develop it and really kind of grow that soil so I would say that's a very good question and it's a question every composer might spend their whole life to figure that out lot of us won't be able to but I think it is important for composer to have our own voice but your own voice is not something you could artificially as what John said to impose to it so it takes time to develop and take time for other people to recognize that we are the worst people to say what our style is and I mean yes we need to be critical to ourselves also I mean in my case I do remember which piece I feel that piece has more my own voice in that so in my college I only keep two pieces exist in the public and all the other pieces I won't let them perform I mean I won't burn it like Brahms did but I just don't feel that is enough quality to put it out maybe it's the quality so I like this idea of the fingerprint I mean I think you know for me as a composer I tend to work in material that might seem quite different on the surface but if you're listening to the harmony you're listening to the voice leading you're listening to the technical aspects it's all the same so I think Stravinsky is very much like that you can hear these very different pieces but you hear this wave as one chord is voiced by Stravinsky so there's someone here yes go ahead now we're getting back to that really got to watch these right but I think people are really interested in the process because you see the rehearsals and they see I think they see the inside of what's going on and I imagine it could be very frustrating if you turn over your piece to someone who really either doesn't care enough or maybe for Jonathan I can imagine if someone who doesn't have good internal pulse you know that could be something if you have a very rhythmic piece and you end up with a conductor who should be doing a Strauss piece you know not a not a groove piece that could be very frustrating I imagine is this kind of what you want to get into it that wasn't the question okay sorry no the question was have you ever been in that situation where you thought that and then afterwards you actually liked it or the audience really liked it and you were surprised I wish I could answer yes to this because that would be brilliant but the answer is no because it probably never got that far right it never you know I'm waving their arms around trying to get people to pay attention to them right so probably you know it gets close to the point where the person is almost to the podium with your score but not really quite and then you just can't really get that one person to be there with you and it's not you have to take it you can't take it personally it's not that I'm bad or that they are bad I don't blame anybody it's just the way that's just not their thing they want to do something else and I'm not speaking to them at that moment there certainly have been times when I wanted to rip the baton out of the person's hand but they're very, they're rare and you can almost you can almost always learn you're as you say a different interpretation of was there another question in here somewhere yes how when perhaps influences the other and what do you consider yourself as teachers or composers or both this question is the difference between being on faculty and academic and institution and being a composer I'll answer in a few years this is my first job I start next week is everyone on faculty somewhere no I'm not sorry where do you teach I teach at Madness and also SUNY Purchase I should say not everyone can teach and not every great composer can teach and not every great teacher can compose so that's the fact that some people can do both I do feel it is a calling and I feel strongly one should teach because contemporary music is already a very side not the mainstream so if we don't teach more younger generation they might answer be great composer but some might teach their students and so it takes a seed to start to spread so I say no matter how busy it's always good to teach and also keep ourselves young to exchange energy with younger generation generation XYZ so I like it I think part of it is also for me is about community I think that we as composers and sort of as you were saying we want to expand the community of people like what we do and part of that is certainly teaching doesn't necessarily mean teaching in the form of being a professor somewhere it could also mean organizing a concert series running an ensemble starting a nonprofit there are a lot of different ways that one can engage with various forms of outreach and I've had the experience of doing a lot of them I'm actually in a week stepping down from a position that John and I are trading this job so he's taking over at Shenandoah and joining Hongrui at Manus so I do teach but you know I think it's interesting to consider a broader definition of what that can mean Yes Actually I think what we were talking about what Mason asks he was mentioning that something bits of music be remembered I think he was referring specifically to within the piece so that in the last movement you would hear the certain things come back I don't think he meant in a remembered for all time in eternity Though that would be okay I don't know I think if you do something to be remembered that's the wrong motivation I don't think Beethoven wrote anything to be remembered I think he wrote what he had to write and he responded to his environment always and that's the thing to remember is that everything's a response as once to the world you live in and your experience in the world I don't know for me a lot of these pieces get stuck in my head and for days and days and days on end I think they're quite memorable I don't think it just has to be a melody that can be remembered a fragment I wouldn't say that Beethoven 5 has a very good melody it's just two notes one first one's repeated three times I mean it's not really a great melody and yet it's a great idea I do wish I had thought of it myself but you know that McMillan last night it's just that thing really it's two notes and it's making me insane still in my head as we're talking now now that I've thought of it again but things that are memorable are things that resonate with people and it feels like last night at the concert a lot of things resonated I think David's piece was spectacularly moving for people I could feel from the audience you know I think Jimmy McMillan's piece is very it's transporting in a different kind of way for me the way he brings the church the sacred element always into things it's something he's always thinking about and then Mason's piece you know a different world all together this magical kingdom so I feel like every experience is memorable in its own important way I just would urge people never to do things for for those motivations just do things because your creative spirit makes you do them it feels like it so let's maybe take a couple more questions and wrap it up yes over there we're not too strong on a pause and silence and I wondered although tonight I know that we'll hear some pauses but I wondered how now that we're more international and aware of other cultures where silence is found to be actually meaningful and nourishing so I wondered how you're dealing with silence perhaps more and more in your music a pause are you saying silence and pause or applause pause pause so the question is really about about silence and how that I guess are you thinking of John Cage I mean what are you thinking of just the world we live in yeah well I mean Sebastian Sebastian's piece is all about silence tonight we're gonna hear his piece and I think that's you know that's telling I mean there's nothing worse than going to a jazz club and hearing somebody fantastic play who forgets what silence is about it makes me insane you know they can play a thousand notes and there's absolutely no no reference to silence and silence is extremely powerful but we live in a world that is rarely silent and certainly we're not composers for silence but but yeah my piece has two measures of music and one measure of silence so actually by the end a pretty large percentage of composers is silent sorry and I like silence and great softness in a concert but it's a little very frightening because there's always noise it's always that little cough so there is this little thing where one wants to do it but then there's also this factor of negotiating it and some composers make it their world to do others don't I don't general but this piece does have quite a bit of it and I'm quite worried about it we only had the alarm last night did you hear that? the alarm going off yeah that was unfortunate yeah it's it's hard in this age we live in I think to actually capture silence but when it happens especially with a full house of people it's quite magical because everyone's almost taking the same breath it's a beautiful moment I had a teacher in grad school talking specifically about electronic music and he had a it was a sort of class people were showing their work and one of the my classmates had this big section of silence in the middle of this electronic piece and he said that's really interesting but when you're dealing with electronic music you have to create the silence you can't just let it be silent which is something I think about a lot so the idea that it might not actually be silence but that you are creating just like painting emptiness you know how do you construct that using some sort of what is actually sound and create the illusion I mean I think being a composer we kind of try to be magicians to a certain extent and that's I think one of the sort of magic tricks that is always interesting to pursue it's tricky but it's something I've always been inspired by I was at a celebration for Terry Riley's 80th that Kronos stayed up in the city maybe some of you attended and there was this wonderful moment where they had asked Yoko Ono to send them a guidelines and they were various sort of weather related things like a word and one of them involved snow in some way and the quartet had been making up various kinds of music and for this one they just didn't touch their instruments at all they played them without touching them and it was captivating it was really the highlight for me of the concert and there was no silence I mean there was no sound except for of course a lot of wrestling but largely because the rest of the concert you know because it came as a surprise because we were not expecting that we were expecting some other kind of snowy sound and the fact that there was no it was the absence of the sound that would make you excited one more thing to that is I think it also depends on what culture you are from and what tradition you are from I remember very vividly Weston College kept in China that's where I was born and raised they saw some theater they said oh why so quiet so zen I said well for us this is normal this is loud and I do think comparison and contrast in our eastern culture silence is not without sound silence is so quiet when a needle dropped on the floor and you could hear that so through that contrast we hear silence so at least to me when I write music I don't intentionally create ultimate silence but the contrast which tonight you will hear that after all the noise you will really achieve that silent moment although music is still going on but to me in my heart that is silence for me one more this is for the composers do you consider contemporary music melodic yes is that your answer I do yes it's one of many features one element at a waste but yes certainly and it's one of those things some things are not all are and I would argue you can go to the past one like the question about memorabilia there are pieces in the past that are not melodic in the traditional sense either in the language that we're familiar with but there are certain elements and sometimes in it's just like a story sometimes there's the development of a different aspect so if something is more rhythmically driven that becomes the leading factor doesn't have to be the melody I mean some pieces are melodically driven but some are driven by the other elements texture, rhythm harmony, orchestration so it depends on the balance of the particular piece I think there's melody in everything there's melody everywhere around us always one of the nice things about working now as opposed to when I was in school 20 years ago is that things are much less there's less defined thing of what contemporary music is it's much more about individual personalities which is such a relief for all of us because we feel that we just get to do what we feel like and there are composers who are obsessed with melody and who do nothing but that and there are composers who don't so I think that though you might find some music that isn't melodic to your ear that doesn't necessarily mean that we're all doing that or that we're all trying to do that and you might turn the page and find another composer who's doing something really different I'm not sure if melodic is the word you want to the word you want to use though I think by melodic you might be saying non-dissident I'm trying to think I'm not sure if it's just about melody maybe it's about access and also by melody maybe we're thinking words too, text or something like that yeah I don't know it depends really I do I hum these pieces so maybe it's just a difference in what you're exposed to if my 11 year old really if he hears these pieces that's what he ends up humming that day I think it's just a matter of how our experience is but I hope that you all can come to the concert tonight it's going to be spectacular performance and we look forward to sharing with you and thank you so much for being with us today and thank you to all my wonderful creators here at this event thank you