Bruce Adolphe - Two Interviews with Bruce Duffie . . . . .. . ..

Composer / Author Bruce Adolphe

Two Conversations with Bruce Duffie

Bruce Adolphe (born May 31, 1955) is a composer, music scholar, the author of several books on music, and pianist. He is currently Resident Lecturer and Director of Family Concerts of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, where he has been a key figure since 1992. He earned a Bachelor of Music and a Master's of Music from Juilliard in 1976.

Adolphe has composed music for Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Daniel Hope, Carlo Grante, Sylvia McNair, the Beaux Arts Trio, the Brentano String Quartet, the Miami Quartet, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Chicago Chamber Musicians, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and many other performers and organizations.

In 2009, an evening of Adolphe's chamber music was presented at The Kennedy Center.

Adolphe is also known for his compositions for young listeners. These works are created primarily for The Learning Maestros, Adolphe's education company, which he co-founded with Julian Fifer, an impresario best known as founder and executive director of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. His compositions for young listeners are often interdisciplinary, combining music with science, literature, history, visual arts, and current events.

Many more details of his output are available on his official website.

== Names which are links in this box and below refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website. BD

While it is of no great consequence, there are not a lot of famous people currently named Bruce. There is, of course, Bruce Springsteen, and the actors Bruce Dern and Bruce Willis. In the world of classical music, I have had the privilege of interviewing tenor Bruce Ford, composer Bruce Saylor, and clarinetist John Bruce Yeh. This webpage adds one more, and presents my two conversations with composer Bruce Adolphe.

Our meetings took place almost exactly ten years apart, in 1990 and 2000. Parts of each were aired on WNIB, Classical 97, and now I am pleased to share the entire chats.

In August of 1990, Adolphe was at the Ravinia Festival for a performance of his First String Quartet by the Mendelssohn Quartet. Our conversation ranged through several related topics, but since this work was on his mind, it often came back in the discussion. A decade later, Adolphe was involved with Tyrannosaurus Sue, so that work dominated his thoughts. Remember that it was the year 2000, and we got into some really ‘heavy’ and future-looking ideas! As usual, there was also quite a bit of laughter throughout.

As we were setting up the first time to record, the subject of age arose . . . . .

Bruce Duffie:   Are you where you expected to be at thirty-five?

Bruce Adolphe:   I don’t know if I ever thought about exactly where I would be. I didn’t expect to be in Chicago necessarily! [Both laugh] I’m on a decent schedule for goals, but I don’t think about it very long term. That makes you worry. Let me say I’m not disappointed. I’m being played by the kind of musicians I respect, and I’m getting commissions by the people that matter to me. I’m doing just enough traveling, so things are basically good in that respect.

BD:   The fact that you’re in Chicago for a couple of days is almost irrelevant?
adolphe

Adolphe:   Yes, although this is very pleasurable right now, because this is a summer of a lot of performances that I can’t necessarily hear, because they’re around the country, and it’s expensive to go flying around to hear my music. But this worked out, and it’s a particularly important concert which I really wanted to hear. This First String Quartet means a lot to me, and they play beautifully. I wrote it for them [the Mendelssohn String Quartet], and I heard them play the actual premiere in New York, and they did a fantastic job. But they’ve played it a number of times since then, and I haven’t heard what they’ve been doing with it. I assume that they’ve examined it further, and just by physically playing it they’ve perhaps done some things with the tempos, and it may have settled in a way that may surprise me. So I’m looking forward to the rehearsal, even more than the performance. Then I won’t be surprised by the time the performance comes along.

BD:   You may not be surprised, but do you want your audience to be surprised by what they hear of either this piece or any other piece of yours?

Adolphe:   They always are! [Both laugh] I don’t know that audiences can possibly know what to expect from anybody anymore.

BD:   Is there too much going on?

Adolphe:   Yes. There are so many different kinds of pieces being written in so many different streams of music. The only time you’re not surprised is when you’ve heard something at least twice, or if it’s somebody you’ve been following extremely closely. It’s very hard for people to know, and that’s even harder than understanding where music’s going in a big sense. It’s just so diverse even for people who are really expert in areas of new music specifically. How can they possibly imagine where everybody’s going, when it’s a matter of personal voices now? I don’t think there’s any one direction, so they’ll be surprised, I suppose. [Laughs]

BD:   Should every composer be moving in the same direction?

Adolphe:   Yes, but that direction is not musical, it’s personal. Everybody should be following their own path. They should be maturing, so, in a sense, everyone’s on the same journey, but it’s so different for everybody that it doesn’t sound the same! [Both laugh]

BD:   Let’s talk a little bit about your particular journey. Where have you been recently, where have you landed at the moment, and since you’re always thinking forward, where are you headed?

Adolphe:   The part that I can articulate and that I’m very well aware of is rhythmic. I’ve been involved recently on a journey of opposing and simultaneous tempos, and this rhythmic journey has made possible for me to be less experimental, or complicated, or surprising harmonically in certain other areas. In other words, there’s a lot of rhythmic life, technical rhythmic things, and a kind of rhythmic imagination that I’ve yet to feel I’ve fully explored. I’ve been playing with it, and in order to draw attention to the rhythm of the piece, I’ve sometimes made the harmonies simpler recently. On the other hand, the String Quartet is a big slow movement. It’s about a year old, and it has a very broad romantic shape. It has a lot of this rhythmic life in it. The opening phrase, for example, is reminiscent rhythmically of Brahms, and by that I mean it actually has the kind of polyrhythmic sound that Brahms played with. It has 3 against 2, which is very simple. It has a certain kind of syncopation over the bar, and to people who really know Brahms, the first three measures sound rhythmically a lot like the opening of the slow movement of his Clarinet Quintet.

BD:   Is that intentional or did it just happen?

Adolphe:   Yes, it is intentional. It’s not in the program notes, which is also intentional, because if you know Brahms and you hear that, it’s really interesting. But just be told, like I am now, when you do not know the Brahms, it is meaningless. For example, I didn’t even tell the Quartet. Ida Levin, the first violinist, spoke to me right after the first rehearsal and mentioned that and she was unsure as to whether it was subconscious on my part, and I just loved having her rehearse it for two hours and then ask me about it without my having said anything. The piece develops those opening bars in all sorts of ways. They go very, very far away from anything Brahms would have ever heard or imagined, but there’s something always anchored by that opening phrase. The only reason for doing it was that I was obsessed with that piece at that time, and I had to do something about it.

BD:   Now, a year later, do you regret having been obsessed with that little motivic development?

Adolphe:   No, and in fact I’m glad that I got it out of my system in the String Quartet, because the piece I wrote after that for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center is a clarinet quintet [CD shown below- left], and that would have been terrible to use any vague reference of it. That would have been really cheap!

BD:   If you hadn’t gotten it out, would you have postponed it to the piece after that?

Adolphe:   I would have had to do something. But this kind of thing goes on all the time. Anyway, this Quartet is involved with the things I am doing right now, and I’ve written quite a few chamber works since. So it is seminal in some ways, and I can look back on it already and see some things that are different.

BD:   There’s nothing about it that you want to change?

Adolphe:   Not yet. I’m not very big on revising chamber works. I’d like to revise operas, and things that are really gigantic and complicated, but with chamber music, by the time the piece is finished I feel pretty secure about its separateness from me, and I don’t know how to tamper with it any more.

BD:   Is that how you know when to put the pen down, when you don’t want to tamper with it any more?

Adolphe:   Yes, usually. When I feel like all the details can’t be changed without wrecking it, then I leave it alone.

* * * * *

BD: As you start out on a piece, do you have a conception of the whole work, or just a general idea, or do you have no idea where it’s going to wind up?

Adolphe: I start out thinking I have the whole thing worked out, but that usually doesn’t end up being how it turns out. However, I can’t proceed without having an idea of the whole piece, so usually what I have seems to me clear, dramatic, emotional, and sometimes technical set of ideas for the piece. I then proceed as if that will be followed to the letter. I end up changing all sorts of things, but I can’t know what those will be until I run into the problems. For example, I did decide that I would use the rhythm and shape of the Brahms phrase. None of the notes are the same, but the rhythm and the shape are right at the start of the piece, and I knew that I would keep returning to the phrase, both as stated originally, and in all sorts of modified versions, and in different emotional states. Actually, that became the structure of the piece, in that every time it comes back, you realize how far you’ve come. That’s what the piece is about.
adolphe

BD:   You say you have an idea of where everything is going, and yet it doesn’t always work out that way. As you’re progressing from the beginning to the end, are you always in control of the pencil, or are there times when that pencil is moving your hand over the page?

Adolphe:   I just gave a composition lesson about two weeks ago where I said exactly that to a student. I asked who was in charge of this piece, you or your pencil? [Laughs] I would like to think that the pencil has never controlled me, and I use that idea with students. In this case I was working with a fairly young student who was very inexperienced in composing, and at one point when I asked him to change something, he said, “There’s no room on the paper!” I said, “You know, you could get more paper!” Then he said something about his handwriting, and that’s when I asked him, “Who’s writing this piece, you or your pencil?” The reason I think that I don’t let my pencil control it is that I actually don’t write that much down until I have the idea worked out. I write phrase by phrase sometimes, but I don’t write a note and then look at it. I don’t work that way! [Laughs] I don’t write a couple of notes and stare at them. I write down phrases after I’ve thought them through, and I erase happily, and I scratch out happily. I don’t have any problem with that. I don’t use the computer, which I may end up having to use at some point. But at the moment, it’s not pleasurable for me to do that.

BD:   Why?

Adolphe:   I just don’t find it as aesthetically pleasing as really nice music paper spread around, with my mechanical pencils and various pens. I have always enjoyed that so much. Even if the computer offers all sorts of speed devices, and you get your parts copied — which is why I may end up having to use it — it’s not a pleasurable thing for me. Probably if I got used to it, it could become easier, but at the moment I’m very reluctant to shift, because I find the pleasure of using the materials that I’m used to actually gets me in the mood to write. When I get a new stack of really good paper in the mail, I’m really pleased about that.

BD:   That presents all kinds of possibilities waiting to be filled in.

Adolphe:   Yes. I can’t compose on crappy paper. I like to have beautiful paper, which is a problem.

BD:   Even for sketches? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interviews with John Corigliano, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Joan Tower, and Bright Sheng.]

Adolphe:   For everything! I really enjoy good paper. It doesn’t have to be the best there is, but I do get that, which is expensive. I get it from England because I don’t think the paper in this country is as good. But I really enjoy using that great paper, and I know that I can’t stop.

BD:   Does it make the musical ideas neater, or is it just that the penmanship is neater?

Adolphe:   I don’t know if it has anything to do with being neat. It just creates an atmosphere, and I like that atmosphere.

BD:   Do you find that you can only write in one room, or in a certain couple of rooms?

Adolphe:   I haven’t tested that, but I do tend to write in one of two places where I live. One is on a desk in a very small room in a very big place. I live in a huge loft in SoHo [a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City, which, since the 1970s, has been the location of many artists’ lofts and art galleries.] I have a small room where I work most of the time. But actually, in the summer that room is kind of hot, and I work on the piano which is in the big room. For years, I’ve never written something that was not either at that piano or on that desk. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t I suppose... [Laughs]

BD:   How do you divide your time between the teaching and the composing?

Adolphe:   It is mostly composing. I’ve been teaching composition at the Juilliard Pre-college division for many years now, but that is only on Saturdays, and I’m there for eight hours. I’m not the only one who does that, but I’m the only one that I worry about. [Laughs] It doesn’t help me that other people are also there for eight hours. I teach a number of private students, and classes ranging from extremely simple things to extremely advanced ideas for their age, and I like that. But that all takes place on Saturdays, and I teach a little bit at NYU [New York University], and I’m the music director at a Unitarian church. Aside from those three sources of steady income, everything is freelance, and it’s almost all composing, which is better than I thought it would be. I don’t have to do a lot other than compose right now.

BD:   You have plenty of commissions coming in?

Adolphe:   Things are always coming in, and whenever it looks like they won’t, or are not, suddenly something comes in just when I think I’m in trouble! I’ve never had a whole year without two or three good commissions. I also recently have begun doing film scores, but not in the sense of commercial films. I’ve done two and I’m about to do a third one-hour film for PBS [Public Broadcasting Service]. Those are fun for me. I don’t know that I want to get into the big commercial stuff, because it takes away from my serious work, but the PBS things are fun, and the people that I’ve worked with have been very, very interesting and stimulating. The programs were the kinds of things I would probably want to watch, and it doesn’t take up anywhere near the amount of time one would expect.

BD:   Do you make it a requisite that it has to be something you believe in and understand, rather than just a topic that you might disagree with?

Adolphe:   So far, I haven’t had that problem because I’ve only done two and am about to do a third. The first one was the history of mental institutions in America, and a discussion of homelessness. It was very interesting, and it didn’t actually take any side. It was a very fair documentary. The presentation was very good, and I thought it was an excellent type of film. Then I did a science film, and now I’m going to do one on the life of Proust with the same people at Stone Lantern Films. I actually like these a lot.

BD:   Are turning into their resident composer?

Adolphe:   I have a feeling that this is going to go on for a while. We really enjoyed working together, and we’re getting the same kinds of amusement and fulfillment out of it without stepping on each other’s feet.

BD:   You said you want to get back to your serious work. Is film music not serious?

Adolphe:   In the best sense, for me music is serious when the product, the final result, is primarily about the music. When you’re accompanying images, you have to be careful not to overpower them, or not to draw attention away from them in any way. Or, when there’s narration, you have to write in such a manner so the narration cannot possibly be obscured. All that makes perfect sense, and I find it rather fun to do, but I don’t take it terribly seriously for music decisions. I might have a very good idea which I can’t use because you won’t be able to hear the narrator, or because the image will seem less important if the music is more important. I have no problems with that while doing work on a film, but it doesn’t feel like composing in the best sense, in the purest sense.

* * * * *

BD: When you’re writing a piece that is going to be in the concert hall, or the recital hall, do you find it to be completely serious and overpowering, or can it be fun too?
adolphe

Adolphe:   Oh, it’s a lot of fun. By serious I don’t mean somber, and I don’t mean that I sit around looking serious! [Laughs]

BD:   Then where is the balance between the art and the entertainment?

Adolphe:   It changes with different pieces. With this String Quartet, for example, the mood is not that of entertainment, whereas the last thing that was done in Chicago, which I wrote for Tashi, [the Tashi String Quartet] is much more of a light-hearted piece. It was kind of funny in some places, although the center of it was very still and dark, structurally speaking, and the outsides were jazzy and fun. I still do that plenty of times. This piece happens not to be jazzy or fun, because it was not the mood the work was conceived in. It has some very dark things in it, and it also has some uplifting and poetic sections. Some of it is very fast and flies by, but none of it is funny. So, it’s not entertaining in the sense that you can just sit back and be titillated by it. It’s not like that, but it is very sensuous and quite romantic.

BD:   Do your audiences get this sensuality and romanticism?

Adolphe:   The people I’ve talked to about it, do. Certainly, the members of the Mendelssohn Quartet do, and that’s always necessary. When you talk about audiences, the first audience, and the one that matters the most, is the performers. They have to work on it, and they have to like it or not. Then they decide whether they’re going to play it more than once, and they have played it quite a bit. So I take that as a compliment.

BD:   Do they simply like it or not, or do they have to like it or not?

Adolphe:   [Laughs] No, if they just like it or not, they play it like that, and they also stop programming it. No one told them they had to play it more than once or twice.

BD:   It was their choice to keep it in their repertoire?

Adolphe:   Definitely. They would not be playing it here at Ravinia if they didn’t want to, because they were not requested to do it. They were asked what they were interested in performing, and they made suggestions, which were okayed. But if they didn’t want to do it, it would never have come up to begin with.

BD:   Are there plans to record this?

Adolphe:   We have just begun talking about that. They have a contract with Arabesque Records, and I’m hoping that Arabesque will be interested. It’s way off because they have a very busy touring schedule and concerts, and some records that are contracted already have not begun to be recorded. So at some point, I hope that happens.

BD:   As long as we are talking about records, there is the one which has your Cantata.

Adolphe:   That’s an old one, yes [shown at the bottom of this webpage]. I just recorded something which will be on a CD coming out hopefully in the fall, and that’s a wind quintet on a recording of the Dorian Wind Quintet [shown at right]. It’s a piece called Night Journey — since we’re talking about journeys! — and it’s one my most-played pieces. It really is fun, actually. It’s very sparkly, rhythmically bustling, and somewhat jazzy. It’s a piece that has an entertainment value. They play that piece a lot, and they’ve just made a recording which also has works of Joan Tower, Lalo Schifrin, Conrad de Jong, and Lee Hoiby. The sessions were fabulous, and it’s going to be a terrific little record on the Summit label. They are a fairly new company, and they’ve already gotten an excellent reputation. I’m really looking forward to it. There was a brass quartet that came out on Sine Qua Non as a tape-only thing, and a lot of these tape-only things disappeared very quickly. [This work has been re-issued on CD, which is shown below-left.] But that’s actually all right with me, because I feel pretty confident that the music I’ve been writing in the last three years is far more interesting, and is definitely better music that what I had been writing before. That’s all you can get right now, and because of the changeover to CDs, so many record companies put a big hold on recording music unless you were Leonard Bernstein. This is because they didn’t know what they were going to be able to do with an LP, and they didn’t know whether they should make two or three formats for everything. Now it’s becoming easier again... not easy, but easier.

BD:   There are a number of little labels that have put out some very interesting things.

Adolphe:   Yes, and it’s now that CDs are clearly the market, they’re not as afraid to figure out what to do.

BD:   Have you been pleased with the sound that comes back to you either off the LP or the tape?

Adolphe:   Yes. I haven’t made a decision about CDs versus LPs in terms of real quality. I know certainly you can scratch a record very easy, but that’s all I’m sure about. I still think it’s the recording engineer who is more important, and the acoustics in the room seem to be more important than whether it’s on LP or CD, and even sometimes whether it is digital or not. There’s still an art there which is very mysterious.

BD:   If you get the right sound recorded properly, then no matter how you play it back, it’ll be at least okay.

Adolphe: Yes. Sometimes there’s a fanaticism about fidelity that has nothing to do with real quality of sound. It has to do with people’s ideas of sound in a living room. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with whether the piece is being projected well, or whether the instruments sound blended. I’ve heard people rave about recordings that sound very sterile to me.

* * * * *

BD: We talked about quality of recorded sound. Let’s talk about the quality of the music. You spend many, many hours laboring over the little black spots on the paper. Does the quality go in before the name goes on, as the old Zenith slogan said?

Adolphe: [Laughs] I certainly hope so! I certainly do not sign the top of the page and then start writing. I work very hard on a piece, and if that was the only piece of mine someone heard, I would like to think that they would get a good sizable taste of what I think music is about. Even though a piece doesn’t have that lighter side, it has things that are important to me, as does almost any piece of mine. It gets a little difficult. Some of them are seven or eight minutes, and some are half an hour, so you do get a real difference there. But even in the shorter pieces, the ones that I like, and I still allow to be performed, I feel that the test is the question of whether it represents what I think about music, even if it is just a tiny, tiny glimpse. But if it’s too small a glimpse, then I’m not pleased anymore.
adolphe

BD:   Then let me ask the real easy question. What do you feel is the purpose of music?

Adolphe:   The only way to answer that has to be a personal expression of an interesting person. We’ve come to a point where there is so much diversity that schools of thought can easily seem ludicrous. Because there are so many opposing schools of thought, you can only believe in a personal vision. I used to argue with myself and with other people much more about the values and negative points of Minimalism, or Maximalism, or Neo-Romanticism, or Serialism, and where they’re going or not going. But that is really futile. Personal taste and a voice that is meaningful is really all you can hope for, which is a lot actually, and has made me think more about the history of music. To talk about Romantic music, or Classical music, or Baroque music is not very interesting, but to talk about Bach is interesting. To talk about Brahms is interesting. When you really think about it, that idea of the personal voice has always been the only really sane way to look at music. To discuss Baroque concepts actually leads nowhere. To talk about Bach and only Bach leads to all types of interesting thoughts. To talk about Vivaldi does too. So music can be at its best when it is a very personal expression of someone who really cares a lot about sound, and who has a knack for expressing thought through sound, regardless of the style. If a genuine idea is carried through with care, any style can have value. I’m not personally fond of every style, but I don’t think that matters. I’m not going to go to war about it.

BD:   Are you fond of the styles that you write in? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interviews with Alan Hovhaness, and Robert Starer.]

Adolphe:   Oh, yes. I’m committed to what I’m doing. Some people say I’m a musician, or I compose this way because I have to, and I used to say that, but I don’t think that’s true. I know I can write in lots of different styles. I don’t have to write this way. I write what I want to, and that’s the point.

BD:   It makes a better product!

Adolphe:   It does, and it also means that I’ve struggled enough with what that means. I haven’t changed styles that often, but I have sat in my room and thought about why don’t I do this because this is more popular. Or, I can do this so easily, or all these different things, and I realize I’m doing what I want to do, and that’s what matters the most in terms of the satisfaction of composing. Obviously, if you want to make a lot of money composing, then don’t write string quartets! Write commercials! If you’re going to write a string quartet, you’d better damn well like the string quartet you’re writing for! I don’t know why else you would want to do it.

BD:   You spoke about other composers. Do you feel you are part of a lineage of composers?

Adolphe:   Yes. How many people are doing what I’m doing now, I’m not sure, but it’s not that isolated. The lineage is related to Stravinsky, but also Scriabin. I haven’t studied much Scriabin, but I certainly have heard a lot of it, and I found that harmonically there are strains of Scriabin in what I’m doing. Also, when I say Stravinsky, I mean both the early and the late Stravinsky, and not the in-between Stravinsky at the moment. In other words, the Stravinsky of Les Noces combined with the Stravinsky of Agon a little bit. There used to be some Schoenberg in what I’m doing, but there isn’t any left anymore.

BD:   Did you purposely try to eradicate Schoenberg, or did it just evaporate?

Adolphe:   No, it sounded to me old-fashioned, and German, and academic. I don’t mean that he was academic. It became a school of thought that was taught in this country, and I didn’t want to feel like I was doing that for that reason, which it did feel like a little bit. None of the music I’ve written since I can call myself a professional composer sounds like that thought. That was pretty much a student phase. But a lot of my music is influenced by things that are more heritage rather than specific schools of thought in music. This means Klezmer, like Russian-Jewish Jazz. There isn’t much of that in the string quartet, but there is in some other pieces of mine, and some of it is very conscious. In fact, the last thing that was done in Chicago was Troika [for clarinet, violin, and cello], which is by title, and rhythm, and the use of the clarinet is very Klezmer. I’ve written quite a few pieces where that’s true, however that does not lend itself to the moods of this particular piece. I tried to do that when the things have a little lunacy, and are a little crazy. This piece has that energy sometimes, but it’s not a light piece, so it doesn’t really fit. So that’s the lineage. It all sounds very Russian... Scriabin, Stravinsky, Klezmer sounds very Russian! [Laughs] One of my backgrounds is Russian, so that makes sense. In terms of people doing it now, I don’t feel terribly isolated, but I don’t worry about it, either.

* * * * *

BD:   This string quartet was finished about a year ago, so that’s really out of your system, and you keep moving on to the next piece, and the piece after that. Do you see yourself progressing in a specific direction, or just progressing?

Adolphe:   [Thinks a moment] I do find there are certain things that I’m preoccupied by when I start a piece. I’m still preoccupied with this rhythmic situation, which I can describe as hearing the same rhythms in very different speeds, sometimes at the same time, and sometimes one right after another. That can be a very funny thing. If you hear someone say something, and then you hear them say it twice as fast, that can be very comical, or it could be very absurd. I have been doing that very consciously in different ways in each piece, as well as the pieces I’ve just been working on. I try to think about all the things I can do with this, because I’m just fascinated by it. It seems like an interesting path for playing with rhythm, because it isn’t about complexity. It’s about easily perceptible aspects of rhythm that are not complicated, which is different than just being rhythmically complicated. I have no interest in being complicated for its own sake. I’m not sure anyone who is any good does that. Some people are very complicated, but that’s because it’s the way they are. I’ve had some people tell me that they thought certain pieces of mine were unbelievably complicated, and I just had to say each time I hear something like that, that it’s not me. I do not do that on purpose. Those are things which are complicated to the person listening, because, as we were saying before, they’re just unprepared for it. That’s all. Even Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter have never set out to be complicated, and I certainly don’t approach that complexity at all.

BD:   Do you feel that audiences should grasp what you have put down on the first try, or should they come to it three or four times before they can really get into it?

Adolphe:   It would be nice if they could come to it three or four times, but that’s not often the case. Tomorrow there’s this performance in Chicago, and that’s it for this area. When it’s recorded, it’s quite possible to hear again, but with so many concerts it’s just not possible. People want to come to a concert, and they’re not thinking that they’re getting a first glimpse of something. They like to hear pieces straight through. With every piece I’ve written, I feel that a first listening is a good experience, and if someone has willing ears, they can have a really good time. The language of the piece is accessible to anyone who understands chamber music at all, even if they’re not terribly involved in modern music in any sense. For example, someone who is involved with Brahms will hear that opening phrase, and they start to listen to it like a Romantic work. So they can get quite involved in this piece. I don’t purposely want to exclude anybody who is willing to have an interesting time listening.
adolphe

BD:   Do you feel that concert music is for everyone?

Adolphe:   No, but what is? [Laughs] Music that attempts to be for everyone is usually very uninteresting. Some pieces succeed, like hamburgers, perhaps, but there are a lot of vegetarians out there, and they may be very offended by that comment. I can’t think of anything that isn’t a biological necessity that is for everybody. You don’t need the arts, or even entertainment to live. There may be masses and masses of people who like a certain rock group, but it’s still not for everyone. Even the most popular music in the country is certainly not for everyone. Jazz, which is popular around the world, is considered by some people a fringe thing. I don’t think anything is for everyone, so why start out to try and do that? It would be suicide.

BD:   You have many commissions. How do you decide if you’ll accept a commission, or perhaps turn it aside?

Adolphe:   I don’t usually turn anything aside. There would only be two reasons... First, the players are not of the level that I would want to premiere a work of mine, but usually people like that are not in a position to commission, so that hasn’t happened. The commissions have come from really established groups who know how to get funding, and get presented well. The other thing would be if the money was terrible, and it would be some sort of insult. It might not be insulting to me, but if it was insulting to another group who had to pay four times as much for the same kind of thing, I can’t let that happen. Basically, if the money is reasonable, and they are the type of players that I would be proud to hear to play my music, then I say yes.

BD:   [With a wink] So, you won’t write a big orchestral work for Johnny’s third grade class for $35?

Adolphe:   That’s right! [Laughter] Maybe for $40... [More laughter] Now you’ve established my fee! [Even more laughter]

BD:   Is the fee something that enters into it a great deal, or is it just something that it’s there or it’s not?

Adolphe:   There are quite a few reasons it’s important. One is I need to live, but that’s obvious. The other is this business of being fair to musicians who hire you. The Mendelssohn String Quartet paid X amount of dollars for a twenty-minute string quartet, regardless of whether it was from their pockets or not, and in this case it was the Pew Charitable Trust. They could have done something else with this money, but this is what they wanted to do. I can’t imagine then writing another string quartet for another group for half of that, even if they were a great group. I can’t even imagine doing it for the Mendelssohn Quartet for half of that, because that would be unfair to me. The only way that I could conceive of doing it for half the money is with a guarantee of a recording, and a certain number of performances. You could start to negotiate but there has to be some way that’s fair. The Mendelssohn Quartet is a fabulous group, and there is no other quartet that deserves to change or tip the balance in some direction. Certainly, there are groups that are well-known, but they have no interest in new music. The groups that do play new music tend to know how to treat a composer, and they usually ask you the general area of your fee, and they don’t fight a battle.

BD:   What advice do you have for a chamber music group that is either just getting started, or has been established, that wants to commission a few new works, and build a repertoire?

Adolphe:   Getting a grant to commission is actually difficult no matter how impressive the group is. One way is if they have already done some new music, and can send a really fine recording or tape that shows that they will be serious about new music and can do it. If they don’t have that, there are other ways to commission pieces. One is to put aside a little bit of money every so often. They could probably do it sooner than they think, because commissioning chamber music is not the most expensive thing in the world. Also, it doesn’t often have to all be paid at once. They could make an arrangement to pay the composer in two or three installments. It’s usually done in two anyway, and these two may be as far apart as a year or more.

BD:   A down payment, and the rest on delivery?

Adolphe:   Yes. That is almost always the case, so that relieves a great deal of the burden. The other way is if they just take a little bit of money from fees and put it aside, very often you can get a good piece of chamber music for the price of the string quartet in its entirety for one evening. If it really matters to them, that can be worked out, and then if they get in the habit of wanting to do this, there are plenty of grants available from all sorts of organizations and foundations. Usually what they need to do is show that they’re serious, that they picked a good composer, that they play well, and that they have done it once before.

BD:   How do they know if they’re picking a good composer?

Adolphe:   They can only go by their own feelings. If they are really good players who have a lot of experience performing and hearing someone’s music they really like, it’s probably a good choice. Most people of that sophistication are not going to pick something that’s either trivial, or badly written for the instruments, or doesn’t sound professional. They tend to have at least taste at a professional level.

BD:   This is your first string quartet, so how do they know that you were going to be able to write for a string quartet?

Adolphe:   They didn’t know any other string quartet of mine, but for over years, Marcy Rosen, the cellist, had already been playing a piece I wrote for her, for cello and piano. She has played it at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., and in New York, so they all heard it. It was my impression that they were involved with the piece, plus they did have tapes. Also, even though they didn’t even need them, I sent them tapes of other pieces, mostly for strings. So they had a very good idea of what they were getting into.

BD:   It is great that you have tapes of performances of your works.

Adolphe:   I have forty chamber works on tape, which are all from live concerts. They’re not professionally recorded in the sense of studio recordings, but they’re good for other professionals to listen to. I never expect anyone to commission something who hasn’t heard at least one or two of those pieces, and maybe many more.

* * * * *

BD:   Tell me about your operas!

Adolphe:   I have three operas...

BD:   Are they big works, or chamber works, or what?
adolphe

Adolphe:   Two of them are enormous in terms of length, but not in terms of numbers of forces. I have a pair of two-and-a-half-hour operas, each of which is two acts, and the forces for both are about the same, which is about fourteen singers. One or two or three of them have to play more than one role, but that actually makes sense in the story in both cases. There needs to be a chorus in one of the operas, and for the other opera it could either have a chorus, or the cast could double as a chorus, which is how we did it in New York, and that was fine.

BD:   Have all three operas been performed?

Adolphe:   Yes. The orchestras for the two large operas are on the small side, and that is only because of the money that was available when we did them. The first of the full-length operas is called Mikhoels the Wise, and the most difficult thing about it is the name! [Both laugh] [Recording of an excerpt of this work is shown at right.] Mikhoels is a true person. His name was Solomon Mikhoels, and a lot of people who are involved in modern Russian history, or Soviet history, know who he is. He’s mentioned by Shostakovich in his book Testimony. He’s also mentioned in a book on Natan Sharansky that was recently published, and in almost any book about the history and the culture of the arts in the Soviet Union. He was a famous Jewish actor who was killed by Stalin, and my opera is about this actor, his comedic side, his Shakespearean acting, his appointment as an official in the state as a representative of Jewish culture, and his murder. So, it’s an opera that is a true historical piece filled out with a lot of music, and a lot of dance, but it’s all based on true incidents. The libretto, which is fascinating, was written by Mel Gordon and Louise Gikow, and Gordon also wrote the libretto for the second opera, which is about two and a half hours, called The False Messiah. That’s also a true story about Shabtai Zvi, who is known to Jewish scholars and to people who are really into that kind of history, which is obscure to some, and not obscure to people who really care about the history of religion in Europe, because it was a huge movement. It’s obscure now because it didn’t amount to anything. Nothing happened as a result of it. The story is very simply about a man named Shabtai Zvi, sometimes in English called Sabbatai Sevi, who was proclaimed to be the Messiah in the year 1666 in Poland. He had millions of followers in Poland, Amsterdam, and all over Europe. They followed him from the northern most point, which was Amsterdam, all the way down to Smyrna. In Turkey he was arrested and put on trial, and eventually, under pain of death, he left the movement by converting to Islam. It’s a horrible story, and because of that, a lot of history books burned his name. He was ripped from the books, was censored, and there are a lot of people who refuse to ever speak about him because he was considered such a catastrophe in the history of Jewish religious life. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who love to talk about him. There is a huge book by Gershom Scholem, which is fabulous, on which the opera was based, which is called The Mystical Messiah: the life of Sabbatai Sevi. There are also some short stories about him, and he’s mentioned by Isaac Bashevis Singer occasionally in some of the stories.

BD:   Now is this an opera that should be done at a temple, or should be done at the Metropolitan? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at right, see my interviews with Lucy Shelton, John Aler, and Gerard Schwarz.]

Adolphe:   I would like to see it done somewhere in between, because it’s not the kind of piece to be done in a temple. This is a real piece of music and drama, and it needs some serious forces. It needs some money and it needs great singers. When it was done in New York, it was a fabulous production done by the 92nd Street Y, which also did the other opera. They got great singers and a great orchestra.

BD:   Did you write for cantorial-type voices?

Adolphe:   No, it’s regular straight opera. The part of the False Messiah was played by a real basso. His lines as a prophet were as a baritone, and at one point he sings alternating a very low aria with occasional falsetto notes. It was very spooky. Aside from that, everything is very straight singing. Any bass could do that. The other opera was also written with a standard American regional opera company in mind. It’s not for the Met only because the stage is too big there.

BD:   It’s not intimate enough?

Adolphe: Right, and mostly because of the size of the orchestra. If we were going to do it at a place like that — which would be great of course, and I would never turn that down — I would have to punch up the orchestration just to make it work in the space of that enormous size. But the reason the operas were on Jewish subjects is because the 92nd Street Y specifically commissioned them and premiered them, and that was their stipulation. Luckily, I found this incredibly gifted librettist who had both of those stories in mind before I ever met him. He was working on them as plays, so they work out very well. Then there’s a third opera, which is in one act, and was written before these other two. I wrote it when I was twenty-one or twenty-three. I mention that because to me it’s musically much less satisfying now because of how long ago it was. I wasn’t as formed in many ways. On the other hand, a lot of people liked it, and it’s been mounted twice, whereas the other operas have not. It’s also only an hour, and only needs five singers and fourteen players. It’s based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. I rewrote it extensively because I didn’t want to write a one-character opera, which is the way it would have had to be set. Everything he talks about is acted out, and some other aspects of Edgar Allan Poe’s writing are in there, including several of his poems, which are used as aria texts, and some of the characters from other stories crop up a little bit.

BD:   What should be done on the other half of the bill?

Adolphe:   At the premiere, it was done by John Moriarty, who is a wonderful conductor. He has premiered an incredible number of operas. He originally set it as a triple bill of evil... my opera, with an opera of Hindemith called Sancta Susanna, which is a fabulous piece. But Hindemith withdrew it citing the fact that he was very young when he wrote it, which is absolutely like mine except that I was still young when this happened. [Both laugh] It wasn’t in his style as we think of Hindemith, but sounds like Wagner, and has a gigantic orchestra. It only runs about twenty-five minutes, and a school could do it. This was Boston Conservatory and the New English Conservatory combined, and they had no problem with the huge orchestra for half an hour. There was one other piece which was a comedy about the Devil, a French piece. I can’t remember the name of it right now, but it was amusing, so he did three short operas. Mine was also done in New York by the American Chamber Opera Company, and they paired it with Peter Maxwell Davies’ one-woman piece that lasts about forty minutes, Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot. They did that first and then my piece second, and it worked very well. That was a terrific idea.

* * * * *

BD: Tell me the joys and sorrows of writing for the human voice.

Adolphe: I love to write for the human voice, but there are plenty of sorrows in writing opera. When writing for the voice, there are no particular sorrows if you have a good singer. I understand the voice pretty well. I don’t write things that people would find extremely difficult to sing, but they can be challenging perhaps. It’s one of the great instruments, and I have no problem with writing for the voice, but operas can be incredibly painful to produce. There are so many people involved, and there are so many factors, so you get the ‘too many cooks’. There’s a conductor who may be great, and a director who may be great, and a set designer, and a costume designer, and a lighting designer, and they all may be wonderful, but everybody basically thinks it’s his show. [Both laugh] I hesitate to say ‘his’ because both my big operas were conducted by Amy Kaiser [brief biography in the box below], who is not a ‘he’, and she was fabulous. But even when they don’t consciously behave that way, it becomes a serious problem, and the singers also very often feel in opera — much more so than in songs or oratorios — that the reason for the opera is so that their careers will be furthered. So, when you’ve got all those egos flying, and bad budget — which is almost always the case — and not enough rehearsal time all that happening at once, it’s very impure, and it’s a mess.

The American choral conductor, Amy Kaiser, was a Fulbright Fellow at Oxford University. She holds a degree in musicology from Columbia University. A graduate of Smith College, she was awarded the Smith College Medal for outstanding professional achievement.

Director of the St. Louis Symphony Chorus since 1995, Amy Kaiser is one of the country’s leading choral directors. She has conducted the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra in George Frideric Handel’s Messiah, Schubert’s Mass in E flat, Antonio Vivaldi’s Gloria, and sacred works by Haydn and W.A. Mozart, as well as Young People’s Concerts. Guest conductor for the Berkshire Choral Festival in Massachusetts, Santa Fe and at Canterbury Cathedral and Music Director of the Dessoff Choirs in New York for 12 seasons (1983-1995), she led many performances of major works at Lincoln Center.

Other conducting engagements include Chicago’s Grant Park Music Festival, Peter Schickele’s PDQ Bach with the New Jersey Symphony, and more than 50 performances with the Metropolitan Opera Guild. Principal Conductor of the New York Chamber Symphony’s School Concert Series for seven seasons, Amy Kaiser also led Jewish Operas and many programs for the 92nd Street Y’s acclaimed Schubertiade. She has prepared choruses for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Ravinia Festival, Mostly Mozart Festival, and Opera Orchestra of New York.

Amy Kaiser is a regular pre-concert speaker for the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and presents popular classes for the Symphony Lecture Series and Opera Theatre of St. Louis. A former faculty member at Manhattan School of Music and The Mannes College of Music.

BD: Do you ever get too much rehearsal time? Is that even possible?

Adolphe: I don’t think so. You could perhaps have too much rehearsal time in a chamber work where the people are very good, and they know how to work together, and they have a lot of time, and they feel like they’ve learned the piece and need to perform it by now, so rehearsing isn’t going to help anymore. With an opera though, it seems like that would be an impossibility. At Glyndebourne, for example, they rehearse pieces like Così Fan Tutte for a month, or five or six weeks.
adolphe

BD:   Walter Felsenstein used to get six months for Carmen. [There is a brief biography of Felsenstein within my interview of conductor Lawrence Foster.]

Adolphe:   Yes, and that sounds a bit extreme. But for a new opera, six months might actually be a good idea, depending how long it is.

BD:   Just to let it get in everybody’s blood?

Adolphe:   So that it doesn’t feel hectic, and it doesn’t feel dependent on too many variables for its success. That way, people really do begin to know where the lights are when they’re singing, and they can get backstage without walking into each other. They also find that they don’t run out of breath. These are all the incredible things that you don’t really learn until you’ve done something a number of times. Some of it actually, of course, has to come from performance, not from rehearsal. There’s a big difference, because in a rehearsal nothing is as exciting and as pressing and as unstoppable as it is in a performance. So you really figure that out.

BD:   After you’ve got some performances under your belt, you really understand the work and how it goes.

Adolphe:   Yes, and that’s very hard with opera.

BD:   That’s true of performers. Is it also true of the composer?

Adolphe:   With opera, yes. I would love to rewrite the operas to a certain extent, but on the other hand, it feels like a tremendous task without a performance in sight, especially when I have other things to do. To sit down with a two-and-a-half-hour work and revise it when I don’t know whether it’s going to be done in the near future, is very, very difficult. It’s a big problem, and it’s not that the operas were unsuccessful. In fact, the reason I have any kind of career at all now is that they got me most of my first commissions for several years. It all was the result of these operas. But structurally they need a lot of cutting and some revising. That would be very easy to do in way, but it’s not something that I could sit down and get myself to do without knowing that there was a reason in the near future. I could probably do it in a month with motivation. Without motivation, I don’t know if I’d even get around to thinking about it.

BD:   Are there other operas in the hopper? [Notice that the title for the CD is taken from Adolphe’s piece. This happens again in another CD shown farther down on this webpage.]

Adolphe:   Not immediately. There may be some more dance works. I only have one that I wrote for Santa Fe last summer, and I love doing that. It’s a forty-five-minute dance-theater piece that had some acting. It was for two dancers and an actor who dances, and seven instruments based on Southwest American Indian Hopi and Zuni tales. They did it at Santa Fe very beautifully, choreographed by Lila York, with wonderful dancers including Gary Chryst. People who know dance all know who he is, and they toured it a little bit. We went to Denver Botanical Gardens, and Phoenix, and Carlsbad in California. It was a lot of fun, and I would like to do more of that. The dance actually is a nice, pure theatrical experience, unlike film where the music doesn’t come first, and unlike opera where it always turns out to be too many people, and too many variables. With the dance piece, the music can remain quite pure, because you’re only dealing with instrumentalists. The music remains as it should be, and the people who dance do not affect the sound. So you can have a very big theatrical experience without having that problem. By the way, I’m also getting married soon to a dancer!

BD:   So, you will write for her?

Adolphe:   I’d love to, but she’s too busy for me right now. She’s in the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and they tour all over the place. We’ll do some things together, but they have to be written around Paul Taylor, who is busier than anybody.

BD:   Is she completely cognizant of what it’s like to live with a composer?

Adolphe:   She is now! [Both laugh]

BD:   Is that completely impossible, as one would think?

Adolphe:   I don’t think it’s impossible at all. In fact, she keeps asking me what I do for a living, because she never sees me do anything! Writing is a pretty private thing, but it’s also very quiet. Nobody hears you do much. I don’t play the piano a lot when I’m composing. Sometimes I don’t play at all, so I could be writing for a long time and not make any sound. As I was saying earlier, I don’t need to use a pencil and paper until I’ve really thought a lot about the piece. I could be lying down and it looks like I’m sleeping, but I’m actually working on the piece. [Smiles] I might just be sleeping, but I could be working on the piece.

BD:   Don’t ever admit that! [Laughter]

Adolphe:   Right. So it’s hard to tell whether I’m working or not. When it comes down to the real stages of getting it done, that looks like work. But since she travels so much, she’ll probably never see that.

BD:   Can you organize your life in such way so that when she is home, you’ve got your work done, and then when she’s away, you can accomplish most of what you need to?

Adolphe:   Yes, so far, and I can imagine that not being too complicated.

BD:   [Surprised] You can organize the compositional process??? It doesn’t just permeate every moment of your life, and come when it wants to, and doesn’t let you go until it’s ready?

Adolphe:   It definitely is not a matter of coming when it wants to. That’s either a myth, or an inexperienced composer, or a mad genius. The way I work is quite the opposite of waiting for it to come around. I’m always thinking about a piece, and I mean practically every day. I sketch now and then. That doesn’t mean I’m working terribly hard on a piece, but if a commission comes along, or if I suddenly have a chunk of time where I’m alone and can write, I can write because I have some sketches. I have ideas that I’ve been thinking out. It isn’t something I’ve been waiting to happen.

BD:   Do you work on more than one piece at a time, or always just one piece?

Adolphe:   I sometimes work on a lot of pieces. I don’t always do that, but right now I’m working on two string quartets at the same time. I’ve never done anything like that.

BD:   Numbers 2 and 3?
adolphe

Adolphe:   Yes, [laughs] unless it ends up being 3 and 4, and there’s no 2. One string quartet was commissioned by Peter and Wendela Moes, who are luthiers. They make beautiful violas, violins, and cellos, and a lot of great professionals use their instruments. They had this crazy idea of commissioning a string quartet. They’re not necessarily expecting to hear it on their instruments. They don’t care about that. They just thought how nice it would be to commission a quartet, even though they are not themselves professional string quartet players. So, I’m writing one, and we don’t know who is going to premiere it yet. Some quartet is going to get to premiere this quartet without having to pay a dime for it! So that’s an interesting situation. The other quartet is being written for several reasons. One is that I have extra quartet music, so it can all go into this one piece, because the moods of the piece are going to make one quartet. There is a quartet that is considering something. I won’t say the name in case they don’t follow through, but I may end up writing these two quartets almost simultaneously. Plus I’m writing a piece for An Die Musik, which is a very fine ensemble for oboe, violin, viola, cello and piano, which is to be done next season. I’m doing that at the same time. So, this summer I’ve been writing the slow sections of all of them, and comparing them to each other. It’s kind of interesting.

BD:   Fifty years from now should we look back and see how the two of them gestated together?

Adolphe:   Why wait fifty years? It would be great if somebody was currently interested, but fifty years from now that would also be thrilling.

BD:   Do you not expect your music to last?

Adolphe:   I go through phases of expecting it to last forever, and then wondering about global warming! [Laughs] I don’t know what to say! It’s not a musical thought. I don’t like to project that far in the future when I’m really serious, because it gets scary. But just being playful, I would love to know that it’s going to continue to be played. That would be great. I like to think that’s true. I also like to think that good music will be around generally, and that people haven’t forgotten who Beethoven is. It depends where you put yourself in the scheme of things.

BD:   Would you rather be played on a program with Beethoven, or on an all-contemporary concert?

Adolphe:   Audiences prefer mixed programs, and so do I, because your concentration is better. Ironically, changing periods which are hundreds of years apart is easier than staying in almost any one period. An all-romantic concert is hard to take, compared to a concert with a classical work and a romantic work. For some reason the way we are now with our crazy world, and our attention spans, and various interests, we prefer to have eclecticism in a concert. So, it isn’t a matter of all new music, it’s a matter of all anything... unless it’s Bach. He’s about the only person who survives all of this.

BD:   Operas are one-composer evenings.

Adolphe:   Yes, but it’s a story, and a story gets you through the evening no matter what’s going on, unless the music is so great, and then you don’t even know what the story is, and you can’t understand the words! It’s one or the other.

* * * * *

BD:   Now you’re working on these two string quartets. Do you have other projects then lined up?

Adolphe:   Well, let’s see... There are the two quartets, and this quintet, and I have an orchestral piece that I want to write, but it’s not clear when I’m going to get to it. That isn’t a result of a commission. It’s just something I intend to do. I also have this Proust film score, which is not a serious work but has to be done sometime in the next two months. Then there are other things which various chamber groups have mentioned to me that might commission something. I can’t really know what I’m going to do about them until something is definite. On the other hand, I sometimes just write a couple of pages of music without knowing what it’s going to be for. I just write notes. I might say it’s for piano, when in fact it may turn out not to be for piano. I have an oboe concerto that’s being premiered in October in Florida with the Jacksonville Symphony, and when I started writing it I thought it was going to be a flute concerto. Then I thought it may be a violin concerto. Because no one was commissioning it, every time I caught an idea in the wind, I started changing what the concerto was for. Then I realized I can’t keep doing this! This is ridiculous, so I just wrote music with a solo line in the treble clef, and when it turned out that the oboe thing was the way to go, I went back and revised it drastically to make sure it was really about the oboe. Certain things ended up in the orchestra which had been in the solo line, and vice-versa, but the piece ended up as if it were conceived for oboe. If it had gone to another instrument, I don’t know what I would have done. But the same process would have been utilized.

BD:   Fatalists would say that’s the way it was meant to be.

Adolphe:   Right. You can change pieces if you get them early enough. I couldn’t turn this string quartet into a wind piece. That would be absurd, and it would be unplayable. It wouldn’t make any sense. But when you’re talking about a full orchestra and one soloist within a certain range, there are lots of things you can do if you have to.

BD:   Do you have to write music?

Adolphe:   [Thinks a moment] Do you have to ask that question? [Bursts out laughing] That’s a good question. It’s a question you could take years of therapy to answer. I used to immediately say yes, and the only reason I hesitate is that it’s more what I really, really want to. So if that’s the same as ‘have to’, then yes, but I’m not so sure it is. I could do other things. There are other areas that I’d be interested in.

BD:   [With a wink] You could drive a bulldozer...

Adolphe:   [Laughs] Yes, that’s the one that always comes to mind! Sometimes it’s just the idea of writing that I love. Maybe I should write books. I did actually write a book, but it isn’t a novel. It’s a book about music, and about writing music, so it isn’t really getting away from the subject very far. The answer is that I really know how important it is to me to do it, and I haven’t found anything else that is as challenging in the way that composing is, and that I’m as good at, and that I enjoy as much. So, in that way I have to write, but if for some reason I couldn’t, I would do something else, and probably get into it very seriously if it was creative. But this suits me the best. It came about in many ways rather easily, so it seems like it would be silly to ignore it. I haven’t struggled terribly much with it. I have struggled with other things, but not with this!

BD:   I hope the piece goes well, and that you’ll be back in Chicago again.

Adolphe:   Thanks, and thanks for finding out that I was here. It was a secret! [Both laugh]

BD:   I saw your name in the program, and made inquiry.

Adolphe:   There’s a lot of information in those things.

BD:   Do you like writing your own program notes?

Adolphe:   Yes, a little bit about the piece. It’s only two paragraphs, and I was glad to do that because otherwise who knows what somebody would say? I have seen program notes by other people that were fine, and usually after there’s a really good recording that’s possible. Right now, they would have had to get the information from me, and nobody asked, so I don’t know how they could have written notes. So I did.

= = = About three months shy of a decade later, we met again and continued our conversation = = =

BD:   You’re in town right now for the new dinosaur exhibit at the Field Museum which has just been unveiled, and you’ve written a piece for it. Tell me about how the piece came to be.

Adolphe:   The idea to write the piece actually came from the Chicago Chamber Musicians. When they picked me as a composer to write something about Sue, I don’t think they realized that for the last few years, I had been focusing on writing pieces for kids and families. It became an obsession of mine, and for the last ten years I had this job with the Chamber Music Society of the Lincoln Center, to create family programming, among other things that I did there.

BD:   Family Programming with a classical music bent?

Adolphe:   Oh yes, absolutely. I had been writing pieces that were meant to bring kids into the world of classical chamber music, so when the Chicago group asked me to do that, I asked if they’d been following my music for kids, and they said no! [Both laugh] They just thought I’d do a good job!

BD:   It was just a happy coincidence?

Adolphe:   Yes, so I was very excited about it. It so happens there was another coincidence, which was just at that time I was working Julian Fifer, who was the original founder of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and was its leader and executive director for twenty-seven years. He had asked me to write a piece for them about two years ago, also for family programming, which I did. Julian and I were talking about all the things we could do with it, and it occurred to us that the kind of thing we wanted to do was not being done for families and kids. At least they were not being done with a serious intention, and without dumbing things down, and being silly and dorky. We thought eventually we could start a company that would produce quality work for kids, including CDs, and books, and internet things. This was right at that time the Chicago Chamber Musicians asked me to write about Sue, so their project became the first one for Polyrhythm Productions, which is the name of the company.

BD:   It slotted in very well with what you want to do.

Adolphe:   Absolutely perfect!

BD:   Are you eventually going to become the savior of classical music by bringing it to the next generations?

Adolphe:   [Smiles] Well, I hope to help! I’m not theologically bent to think that I would consider myself a savior or anything else, but I really hope to give it my best shot. I’ve already been doing so much work in the area that I feel very involved in it.

BD:   I assume that salvation is something we really need.

Adolphe:   Oh yes, we do need it, and it’s a very important thing more and more. Over the last ten years or so, most ensembles and orchestras that have any idea what’s going on in America, have expanded their education programs, and have gone into communities and created outreach. One of the things that has been missing, is a good combination of new music repertoire and educational materials linked to it, that brings kids into a world they already understand through dinosaurs, or through stories that they can appreciate. I have a whole series of projects like that, so the content-providing is just like on the web. This is a serious issue. Many people want to do it, but they often just recycle the same old pieces, and have somebody tell you who the composer was, which is not good enough.

BD:   This is a completely different thing than Stokowski conducting Mickey Mouse?

Adolphe:   It’s completely different. They may have tried their best, but we live in a very different time, so it’s a very different approach. I don’t like to lie to children. I don’t think there is any reason to put in conflict what they may like or what they already know with what I would like them to hear, or to pretend that there are connections where there aren’t. Where there are connections, that’s fine. For example, in Tyrannosaurus Sue, ‘The Battle with the Triceratops’ has a pretty rock’n’roll beat in places, but it’s not a beat that sounds like it’s borrowed from some other kind of music. It’s a driving kind of beat that fits the energy of the dinosaurs. At the same time, it’s almost a synthesis of a rock beat in places with Stravinsky-esque music, and Gershwin, and all the things that I care about. But it’s synthesized into something which is much more about dinosaurs, and about the piece itself than it is a reference to anything else. I wouldn’t actually talk to a group of kids about that. I would bring them to dinosaurs, and to instruments, and to self-expression, and to how music works, and how it portrays things in order to create a piece of music.

BD:   You let them discover what they can?

Adolphe:   Yes, and if someone says it reminds them of something, for them that’s absolutely right, and that’s fine. I’m not going to force-feed them how to listen to the piece. That would not be an educational thing to do anyway.

BD:   You want to just get them to listen?

Adolphe:   Get them to listen, hook them with things such as dinosaurs that are outside the music, that pulled them into it, but not tell them what they should be hearing. That’s a very unfortunate way to teach music.

BD:   You have one daughter. Is she influencing how you do things, and why you do them?

Adolphe:   It’s a very good question. It’s hasn’t been true yet because I got into this business for writing for kids about ten years ago, and she’s only eighteen months old. So, it’s been going full steam ahead, and now that she’s born, I’m even happier that I’m doing it than I was before. I see her and I think this is great! I want to make sure she loves all these pieces, and the way that she influences me is that I think of all of these things as little presents for her, whether she’s ready to hear them now or not. A funny thing happened already. I do the narration on Tyrannosaurus Sue, so when I put on a CD for her, she heard my voice coming out of the speakers. She looked at me, and she looked at the speakers, and she looked back at me, and then she exclaimed, “Daddy!” [Much laughter] She loves dancing to that music, because at that age, kids dance wildly. They are so free. It’s like something Martha Graham could never think of!

BD:   You wanted to be sure to mention where you can get this recording. It’s not available generally?

Adolphe:   Not yet. We have a nice relationship with globalmusicnetwork.com, gmn.com, and it’s great. They have an amazing website, and what they’re doing at the moment is not only offering this CD of Tyrannosaurus Sue: A Cretaceous Concerto, but also our workbook which is called The Rexicon. It’s really not a workbook. It’s a game book.

BD:   It’s a fun book?

Adolphe:   It’s a fun book. It’s a book that has the Cretaceous and Crescendo Crossword Puzzle. It has a word-dig that is paleontological and musicological. It has a dig-tionary of things for kids to read about, all sorts of games to play, and some coloring. It spans a wide age-range of possibilities, from about four to twelve, and any adult can get a kick out of it, too. There are some fun things to read, and we also put up a very funny dinosaur puzzle on GMN which you can’t really see anywhere else in its entirety except in the workbook. It’s called Fossil Eyes.

BD:   [Making a terrible pun] Is it part of your mission to make sure that classical music does not become fossilized?

Adolphe:   [Laughs] Or a dinosaur itself! Yes, exactly. I don’t think it will. I’m not worried about it, but it’s good to be aggressively educational. I’ve always had an educational bent. I’ve always wanted to do it. Yes, it’s important, but I don’t think it’s desperate the way some people do, because I have concerts for kids all over the country. There are big crowds, and they love it, and it seems to be pretty positive right now.

BD:   Will they continue to love it as they get into their teens?

Adolphe:   Some will, and some won’t. Some will come back to it, and some will leave it because of peer pressure. But some will play an instrument because they get excited when they’re young, and they will stay with the instrument. It’s a different story for everyone, but if you light the fire early, you have a much better chance. Very often people have waited too long to do it, and many schools don’t have good education for kids at a young enough age. It’s too late for many people to introduce it in high school, not only because of peer-pressure and puberty, but also because it’s better to learn an instrument at a younger age. It’s more satisfying that way.

* * * * *

BD: You coordinated this dinosaur piece with the Field Museum. Would it be good for schools then to coordinate a science project with a music project, and hope that music won’t get cut as it often does in the budget?
adolphe

Adolphe:   This certainly is a really good opportunity. We have the Musical REXicon, which is already in the book, and that links science and music in a really fun way. It talks about how paleontologists measure time, and how composers measure time. Of course, the units of time are a lot smaller but we examine 67 million years versus a beat! It’s fun to think about, and we also link it in terms of the music portraying prehistoric information.

BD:   [With a wink] Some kids think that a Bruckner symphony would take 67 million years to perform.

Adolphe:   Yes, in real time, but in mental time I could certainly understand that. Bruckner did count the number of measures, and he always wondered whether he needed more. He was very involved in the numerics of what he was doing, and so on some levels he was also a kind of paleontologist, or at least somebody who counts like that.

BD:   Are you involved in numbers at all?

Adolphe:   Not in the sense that I have a mathematical approach to music. Music isn’t inherently mathematical, but it’s arithmetical, and I think it’s pretty easy.

BD:   There are a lot of mathematicians who get involved in music, or at least enjoy it on a very high level.

Adolphe:   Yes. We did a poll at Lincoln Center, and from the few bits of information we have on this, it was true that a high percentage of people who have subscriptions to classical concerts are interested in science and math. Many are professionals in math, and are doctors, etc. There are also some theories about it, but no one knows for sure. Sometimes it has to do with abstract thought and the way people use their minds. There is something pleasurable about it, but it also turns out that a lot of doctors have played instruments. It’s hard to know which comes first. You get a lot of failed musicians who go to medical school! [Both laugh] I hope they can count! [More laughter] It could be scary!

BD:   Do you want to make sure that your music is not scary?

Adolphe:   It’s funny that you should ask that. I think a certain amount of scary is good, because kids like that... not a lot, but a little. For example, in Tyrannosaurus Sue, ‘The Birth of Sue’, which is the first movement, has a little bit of menacing quality in it, and it’s kind of exciting. It gets your blood going. There’s also a little bit of that in the second movement, and in ‘The Battle of the Triceratops’, there’s a lot of scary stuff going on.

BD:   Are you directly competing with Jurassic Park?

Adolphe:   No! There’s a wide range of how music can do these things, and I don’t want to say anything derogatory about music for movies, but there’s a big difference between music that is accompanying a scene and which is meant to propel what is happening on the stage, compared to music which is completely self-contained, and is structured to stand on its own. It needs no images, and is not supporting anything. It’s just a higher level of the art.

BD:   You’re not conning the kids, are you? When they go to Sue they see a dinosaur, and then when they go to the string quartet, where’s the dinosaur?

Adolphe:   No. I really did feel like I was writing about a dinosaur, and it’s actually structured into the piece. The character of Tyrannosaurus Sue is represented by a trombone all the way through. When she chases the Parasaurolophus, the trombone is chasing a bassoon in the double concerto. When the Troodon dinosaur is trying to steal food from Sue, the clarinet is in counterpoint with the trombone, Sue, in a way that really does sound like they’re in a little contest. It’s pretty clear who wins these contests.

BD:   What happens when you get a twelve-year-old that comes up to you and says he liked the ‘dinosaur concerto’, so why couldn’t you put dinosaurs in your String Quartet, and have the violin sound like it was chasing the viola?

Adolphe:   I don’t know if they would ask exactly that question, but kids ask such great questions, as Art Linkletter used to say. I would take them very seriously. Maybe I could write a dinosaur in my next string quartet!

BD:   Which brings us to the big question. What’s the purpose of music? [Though I asked this question in the first interview, his response here takes a different turn on the subject.]

Adolphe:   To me, music is as essential as anything else that we supposedly know the purpose of. We know we need speech to communicate, and music is a form of communication that is very basic to human beings. It’s in every culture in the world. Most people feel it’s essential to their lives.

BD:   [Gently protesting] But it’s always different music.

Adolphe:   It’s different music, but its purpose is not different. It is both spiritual and intellectual. It actually organizes the brain. Music really feels like a necessary resonance of the action of our lives. It is the stories of our lives. It’s the metaphor for how we behave, how we interact, how we feel, and how we think about things without words. The Russian writer, Ilya Ehrenburg, said something which I think of when you asked that question. He says, “Music tells everything, but mentions nothing.” We need stuff like that. It’s kind of important.

BD:   Do you know what you’re telling, or are you just telling something and letting every listener interpret it?

Adolphe:   It depends on the piece. For example, in Sue, I really did try to tell the story, but I didn’t have every measure in every phrase have a detail... ‘Now Sue looks to the right and sees danger!’ It’s not quite like that because it’s not choreographed, but I certainly had the energy of what was happening. I felt it when the competition was with another dinosaur, what the feelings were, where the scariness or the horror or terror comes in, and where it’s resolved. In a string quartet, I might have some feelings of clarity in terms of a relationship to the outside world and not the musical world. Sometimes, in looking for a title of a piece, I suddenly realize what I might have been thinking of, but you can’t be sure because music, as Ehrenburg said, doesn’t mention it. You can reveal a lot about yourself and about how you feel, but you don’t necessarily tell specifics.

BD:   Is it good that you can call it String Quartet No. 3, rather than My Day Thinking About the White Mountains and the Clouds Above?

Adolphe:   Yes, I think that is good! [Both laugh] I do have titles for some of my quartets, but they would never be like that. One is called Turning, Returning [CD shown below-left], and that piece really was originally about how the music feels. It turns and returns, and it spins around. It’s kind of a description of the sound of it, but it also relates to spinning around in bed at night when you can’t sleep, and all the things that are metaphorically lent to turning and returning.

BD:   [With mock horror] It’s not just a big rondo, is it???

Adolphe:   [Smiles] No, no, no. Within every phrase you feel that things are being turned around. It’s like spinning.

BD:   Is there ever anything in music that turns you around?

Adolphe:   Do you mean in other people’s music, or in my own?

BD:   In other people’s music, or in your music as you’re writing.
adolphe

Adolphe:   I have little breakthroughs and moments of inspiration that come back to me from the page. That happened in Sue. Before I even started the last movement of the piece, I decided that it wouldn’t be about dinosaurs anymore. It would be about human beings who have the ability to discover, and imagine, and remember things. So I made it a little violin concerto. It’s almost five minutes, but it is a very intense violin concerto about celebrating the human mind, which is really even what the discovery of Sue was. She’s 67 million years old, and we know what it is, and that’s amazing. We found it, we fixed it, we put it together, we told the world about it, and then we can imagine what it was. It’s really about us in some way, so I thought we needed to end it that way. That movement kind of surprised me, because it really got to me. I almost felt myself very emotionally tied up in it when I finished it.

BD:   Assuming that animals, even extinct animals, had feelings and understanding, and assuming they go on to a next life as we believe we do, do you think that Sue is happy with what you’ve done for her with your music?

Adolphe:   [Laughs] When you ask that question, I have to tell you that the very first conversation I had with a paleontologist about this is sort of on this subject ironically. I had to speak to some people at the Field Museum, and paleontologists have their own territory, which is quite different than a composer’s. I had not yet thought about the piece, and I was just kidding around, but they were not. They asked what kind of music it was going to be, and I said maybe I’d write a tyrannosaurus tango. There was a long silence on the phone, and finally one of the paleontologists said, “I don’t think that would be appropriate for a dinosaur!” I said, “Well, what kind of music did Sue listen to,” and they didn’t think that that was particularly funny. They thought I was just a wise-guy. So I said, “Look, I’m just kidding around. I haven’t thought about it yet. Let me get back to you!” [Much laughter] So, would Sue like it? I don’t know what kind of music Sue liked, but I would imagine that, since there were no humans, the music that Sue heard was the sound of other dinosaurs pounding on the earth, and rain, and thunder, and lightning... and there is some of that in the score. I hope she recognizes it! [Both laugh]

BD:   Are you pleased with how it turned out? [Notice that the title for the CD at right is, once again, taken from Adolphe’s piece.]

Adolphe:   I am. I’m excited about this piece, otherwise I would have stopped talking about it a long time ago, and gone on to some other piece. For me it’s deeply satisfying to write something that I know kids will like. I’ve already seen reactions to the CD, and the Chicago Chamber Musicians have just been fantastic about it. They play it brilliantly. They rehearsed it a lot, and they’ve said wonderful things to me about it. They did a great recording session, and the feedback has been positive. I also feel it’s a piece for grown-ups, and for anyone who’s interested in music. So I’m very happy to find the spot that’s equally for kids and grown-ups, without having to make an compromises.

BD:   When did you finish writing this work?

Adolphe:   I think it was May, 1999, a year ago. [At this point, one of the dogs that lived at WNIB wandered into the studio (where we had left the door open).]

BD:   We’re getting the dinosaur to wake up!

Adolphe:   Great! You have your living animals in the studio?

BD:   Yes, we have several cats and a few dogs. It’s wonderful. They are never heard behind the recorded music, of course, but when the microphone is open for a commercial or programming announcement, the audience will hear the dog barking. [We both pet the dog for a moment.] One time, when it had been particularly quiet over several weeks, a woman called up almost in tears. She asked if something had happened to the dog, because she hadn’t heard it in a while. Naturally, she thought we had one, but at that time there were four. But she was afraid that the dog had died, and she was sad about that.

Adolphe:   It does lend a nice ambiance, I think. [Making his own terrible pun] It makes the show less dog-matic, I suppose!

BD:   [Getting in my own contribution] At least they’re not cat-atonic!

Adolphe:   [Continuing, amid much laughter] Right! You could play Mozart’s K. 9 for them.

BD:   We used to play the Cat Duet of Rossini a lot. My preferred recording is the one with Christa Ludwig and Walter Berry because I like having male and female voices.

* * * * *

BD:   We’ve been talking quite a bit about the dinosaur work. Are you okay leaving that piece behind and moving on to the next work in your cannon?

Adolphe:   Oh, yes. I have a lot of projects in mind. I usually write more than one thing at a time, anyway. For Polyrhythm Productions I’ve nearly completed a piece which I think of as the ‘never expected, and long unawaited sequel’ to Carnival of the Animals, which I may call Carnival of the Creatures, but I might change it. Without going into it in too much detail, it is many of the creatures that are not in Carnival of the Animals, and some of the weird ones that people would never expect, like the mudskipper, and also some fictitious ones, like the unicorn and the teddy bear. There are also familiar ones that are not in the Saint-Saëns, like an owl and a lobster. So, it’s going to be a pretty crazy piece, and the idea is that some of the orchestras who play Carnival of the Animals every year, could try something else and still have the same feel, and take us to a new place musically and in terms of creatures. Some of the creatures are more fun for kids anyway. They love mudskippers.

BD:   So, you’re back with kids again?

Adolphe:   That particular piece is, yes. I also have just finished a piano quintet, which is a regular old piece for Andre-Michel Schub and the Miami String Quartet. That is a co-commission from the Chamber Music Sociey of Lincoln Center, and the Waterfront Festival of Virginia, which is an international festival.

BD:   You’re writing so many of these kids’ pieces, and still some of the adult pieces. I assume you’re getting inundated with people wanting you do this and do that, so how do you decide you’ll do this, and you won’t do that?

Adolphe:   It’s very difficult. If I want to do something, I always want to start it right away, so we see how it can be worked out. Sometimes I’ll ask if they are all right with the piece being written two years from now. In some cases it’s fine. At the moment, I’m not only writing Carnival of the Creatures, but a small opera with someone, and several other smaller chamber works. So, I have a lot of things going, plus I actually have two full time jobs. I’ve got the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, where I give lectures, and run the Family Concerts, and program new music, and I also have my Polyrhythm Productions job, which is not just composing. There are a lot of other aspects to it. There is also my freelance work which I may take or not, depending, as you say, on whether I can! [Both laugh] Plus, since I last saw you in person, I wrote three books that I’m pretty excited about. I just find time for things somehow or other.

BD:   Do you get any time for yourself, and your wife. and your daughter?

Adolphe:   I have a lot of time with my wife and daughter.   I don’t have to go to an office. Even though I work at the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center, I go there to give a lecture, or maybe for a meeting or a concert or rehearsals, but I don’t have to go to the office every day. I write whenever I want to, so I do write almost every day. But I can go to the park with my daughter, then go home and write, and then go back to the park with her. I have very interesting days, and I could write in the evening, then get up really early and play with my daughter for a couple of hours.

BD:   When you’re sitting at your desk, do the ideas always come?
adolphe

Adolphe:   Yes, because I have a very professional craftsman-like attitude, which certain composers have had in the past. I model my sensibility on that a little bit. Stravinsky was one, also Hindemith to an extreme extent. I don’t have a chart that tells me what hours I should be writing, or for how many minutes, and how many measures to accomplish — nothing so German — but I do feel that if I have to write, and I have four hours in the afternoon, I will write something at that time. It helps if you have a lot of technique, and you know what you want. Technique means the ability to capture your ideas on paper, and I know how to do that. If I get a thought, I can write it down very fast.

BD:   Are there times when you’re in the park with your daughter, and you get a good idea, so you have to make sure you keep it in your mind until you get back to the paper?

Adolphe:   Yes, and I’ve lost things, I’m pretty sure of that. However, if I got the idea, I’ll either get it or one like it again. So I don’t kill myself over it. I don’t have a once-in-a-lifetime idea that tells me I better drop my daughter, or let her swing by herself, and go running. That’s ridiculous. I will get the idea again. Very often, I can actually think of a word or two, or a phrase in English to write down to remind myself of what it was.

BD:   If you carry a little notebook, you can write down a musical phrase, or a few notes.

Adolphe:   Yes, I’ve even written on the back of people’s calling-cards. But I don’t worry about it, because I know that when I get back to my desk I will think of something similar.

BD:   Does it always fit in, or do you have to shape it to make it fit?

Adolphe:   Oh, there’s a lot of work afterwards, but basically I’m very intuitive, and I don’t worry about it. Then I go back, and I work on it as if someone else had submitted to me as an editor. Then, when I look at it, I do cast a cold ear on it! [Both laugh]

BD:   [Surprised] You really are your own editor.

Adolphe:   Yes, I have to be, because musically no one ever is your editor. It’s not like a book where someone might actually look at it and make some suggestions. No one ever does that.

BD:   [Referring to Emperor Joseph II’s remark to Mozart] Didn’t somebody once say, “There are too many notes”?

Adolphe:   Exactly, and people make their opinions known. But no one is really functioning as an editor, so I do take that role quite definitely. But first I write without inhibition.

BD:   Didn’t you teach for a while?

Adolphe:   I taught at Juilliard for twenty years. I started teaching there when I was still a student.

BD:   Then now you’re becoming your only student.

Adolphe:   [Laughs] I still occasionally have some students now and then through the Chamber Music Society, but in a way I am my student, because when I write intuitively, I don’t worry about anything. Then, when I go back and edit, and look at it, I am very critical. I do think of things differently because I want it to rise and make sure I set the standards to which I would hold someone else’s music. It’s a strange process, but I think it’s important. I learned how to do that from Milton Babbitt, whose music sounds nothing like mine or vice-versa, but he is very good at that concept of being first intuitive and then analytical.

BD:   He is, perhaps, overly perhaps analytical...

Adolphe:   Yes, and I know why you say that, and certainly at some level I would agree.

BD:   I mean no disrespect, because it certainly works for him.

Adolphe:   Yes, and for him, being analytical is an emotional state. It’s like the separation of what’s intellectual and what’s intuitive. To some extent it’s just a feeling, because they’re both in the brain, and they’re both in the body, yet it’s the same person. It’s the way somebody gets an idea about science, and is extremely excited and thrilled, and then knocks over all the pencils, and walks into a wall. [Both laugh] That’s still an emotional thing, even though it’s a logical thought.

BD:   It’s interesting that you can separate yourself, the creator, from yourself, the editor.

Adolphe:   Yes. It’s absolutely necessary to keep the standard high.

BD:   Do you the creator ever fight with you the editor?

Adolphe:   [Laughs] I wouldn’t call it a fight, but I find myself stuck thinking I really want to keep this idea, but I realize I shouldn’t, and I always give in to the editor.

BD:   [Surprised] Really???

Adolphe:   Yes, because my feeling is that the emotional thing, as important as it is, needs to be held to some standard that I feel very confident technically about that. For example, I might write something that’s incredibly corny, and at the moment I love it, but my editor looks at it and says it’s corny. That’s the person I listen to, and I throw it out. The editor’s job is only going to be things like that.

* * * * *

BD:   I assume you’re pleased with the works you have put out so far?

Adolphe:   Yes. As time goes on, some pieces hold up better than others. I was very lucky in that I was getting published and recorded at a very young age, so some of the pieces that appeared in print when I was in my twenties, I’m not so crazy about anymore. But an older composer friend of mine, Nicholas Maw, said to me, “That’s the life of a composer. You just have to accept that. It’s going to keep happening the longer you live. You will change your ideas about music, and you can’t go back and change those things.”

BD:   Does that inhibit you from being open and free with your ideas now?

Adolphe:   No! I feel much better now, but I might not twenty-five years from now. Who knows?

BD:   We’ll catch up with you then!

Adolphe:   That’s right! It took 67 million years to get Sue unveiled, and it sometimes only takes five or ten years for a composer to become dissatisfied. [Both laugh] It’s a very different kind of time passing.

BD:   I usually ask if composers think their music will last into the next century, but after you’re gone, do you think your music will last 67 million years?

Adolphe:   [Both laugh] Oh boy, I can’t even begin to answer a question like that! At the Field Museum this morning, someone wanted to know what will happen to the humans, and if we will be here 67 million years from now. I think it’s much more interesting and wonderful to be here fifteen or twenty years from now, but the way we behave we’ve got to be careful.
adolphe

BD:   I usually ask if my guest is optimistic about the future of music, but I will broaden it to inquire if you are optimistic about the future of mankind?

Adolphe:   I actually am optimistic. It’s in my basic nature, no matter what you tell me! [Both laugh] I have a daughter, and I want her to have a great long life. I do worry about things like global warming, and the environment, and the new arms race that’s beginning again, and guns in the public schools. These things really bother me, but I’m still optimistic. [His views on world events are shown in the CD at right.]

BD:   But you’re not writing music to fight all of this, are you?

Adolphe:   I don’t think that’s the role of music in this case. If getting kids excited about music, however, can bring them to the arts of expression, that is the way to be violent without being violent. The battle of a triceratops with a tyrannosaurus rex can be fantastic, just like acting in a play instead of actually acting out in life is a great thing for someone to accomplish. Some great actors have been people who might have been quite dangerous, but managed to make it to the stage. The critic Theodor Adorno said a lot of stupid things, but one of the great things he said was that every work of art is an uncommitted crime. That’s pretty interesting.

BD:   [Ready to make a Citizen’s Arrest] Shall we put you in jail then?

Adolphe:   No, they’re uncommitted! [Gales of laughter]

BD:   Is music going to survive, and make the transition into cyberspace? [Remember, this conversation took place in 2000.]

Adolphe:   I don’t see why not. Music is an abstract phenomenon to begin with, whether it comes from a live violin, or if the violin has been digitally recorded, and downloaded from the internet onto somebody’s blank CD. In the long run that’s not going to matter. Technology is already bringing music to a lot more people. There’s more access and more choice. I don’t think it’s a substitute for live performance, but it is an enhancement, and is making things accessible in a very exciting way.

BD:   For the last of couple of decades, it’s always been possible that a musician can have his or her music put on disc, and it can eventually make its way all over the world. Does it rattle you at all to know that something you do can be heard anywhere in the world instantly?

Adolphe:   No. I can kind of like that. I don’t think about it too often, but anyone who creates something shouldn’t be upset by the idea that their audience is getting bigger. It is bizarre, though, to think that anyone writing today has a bigger audience than Mozart had in his lifetime, or that anyone and any trivial concept that’s thrown up on the internet is immediately seen by more people than probably heard all of Mozart’s work in his lifetime.

BD:   How do we make sure that the right stuff is sorted out?

Adolphe:   I don’t think we can do that.

BD:   So, it’s ‘natural selection’?

Adolphe:   Yes. We can’t control that at all, and there’s not much point in trying. This is still The Information Age, and it’s just flying around in cyberspace like crazy.

BD:   At what point is it too much... or is it already too much?

Adolphe:   It’s only too much when someone is not educated enough to know their own mind, and know how to make a selection. That’s why education is still really valuable. People can walk into a record store, let alone the internet, and be completely overwhelmed because there are so many choices. You walk in to buy a CD, and you see so many thousands of CDs that you walk out thinking you can’t even handle this. I know people who talk about that all the time. I’ve even walked in looking for one thing, but I didn’t see that. I saw so many other things, and I picked them all up. I’ve also walked out of there thinking I just don’t feel like this right now! There are too many things to think about. Or you walk out with 300 discs and you have no money left! [Laughter]

BD:   Is your music for everyone? Now we’re talking about 6 billion!

Adolphe:   I don’t think anything’s for everyone, although I wish the world understood that, so when you fly from New York to Chicago and Seattle, like I’ve done this week, that you don’t see all the exact same clothing stores and restaurants. [Both laugh] I was walking around Chicago earlier today and I thought, “Wait a minute! This feels exactly like Seattle from last week, and New York from the week before.” I won’t name all the various stores, but we all know what they are. There was a string of them, and they were exactly the same, in the same order. It freaked me out for a moment.

BD:   [Quoting the song Little Boxes] “And they’re all made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same!”

Adolphe:   [Laughs] It’s a little scary, and it’s much scarier because you lose the sense of place. It’s very dislocating. I know what they are trying to do is bring their wonderful product right to you, and some people find it very comforting. You fly to a place where you’ve never been, and you already know what it feels like, and that makes me feel better! At the same time, we lose the sense of individuality, and a sense that someone really cares who’s in that place, and know about what they’re giving you.

BD:   Do you make sure that you always care about everything you put on the page, so that everything you want comes off the page in performance?

Adolphe:   I certainly care about everything I write, very much so, and that’s an easy thing to control. That’s a very satisfying thing for a composer, because you make all the choices yourself. I have not written a piece where there’s any improvisation necessary, but there’s always a certain freedom for interpretation in performance. I actually don’t like to control interpretation unless I hear something I don’t like. I’ve heard different things that I like coming from the same piece, and I find that very stimulating. No two violinists are going to play a piece the same way exactly, and the differences are very hard to calculate, because it’s an entirely different human being. Just as casting an actor in the same role as someone else, you’re going to get a very different performance, even if they’re not trying because they are different people, with different voices, different looks, and with different emotions. Even if they are being directed in the same way, it comes out differently. I find that extremely stimulating, especially when someone plays and I feel like I’m hearing it for the first time. It’s been very satisfying.

BD:   [Harking back to my first question from the earlier interview] Are you pleased with where you are at this point in your career [now ten years later]?

Adolphe:   Yes, and more importantly, I’m pleased in my life and career. I am really glad to be able to say that. I was never sure I would have a child, but now that I do, it has made me extremely happy, and musically things have been going on a fairly steady course. I don’t know how normal that is, but I’m pretty lucky in that respect. I have a lot of friends in music who are fantastically talented, and wonderful people, and I see their careers going up and down, and all over the place. I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve always managed to have enough commissions, things to write, people who want to hear the music, and people asking to play the music. I have never had a year without substantial commissions. I’ve never had a year without some exciting performances to look forward to. The establishment of this new company, Polyrhythm Productions is giving me a new goal, which is to do this Family thing. I got the job at the Chamber Music Society in 1992, just when I needed something like that. I started the company with Julia Fifer. It was something we had talked about and we made it happen. No one handed us a company, and we had a lot of work to do to make it happen. The same thing is true with the Chamber Music Society. I didn’t apply for a position. There wasn’t one, but when David Schifrin became the artistic director, he said he wanted to do various things, and he wanted to have me on board. I was there, and I helped to finally create what I wanted to do, and it has become a job that I like. Recently I’ve redefined it. I’ve had about four titles in eight years. I don’t even care if the audience knows what they are, but I keep redefining my position so that I can still write and enjoy my life the way I want to. So yes, I’m very happy. [Both laugh]

BD:   That’s great! I hope it continues for a long time.

Adolphe:   Thanks.

These conversations were recorded in Chicago on August 9, 1990, and May 17. 2000. Portions were broadcast on WNIB 1995 and in 2000. This transcription was made in 2025, and posted on this website at that time. My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here. To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

* * * * *

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he continued his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago. You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.