Bruce Duffie:    How do you divide your time between playing organ and harpsichord, and composing your own music?

Anthony Newman:    Playing, of course, is something I’ve done for years and years, and composing has been more recent.  So in a certain way the playing, as you might say, was “perfected”, which is the wrong term, but it was brought to a reasonable level earlier.  It’s a matter of continuity, with developing new ideas about performance rather than starting from scratch.  With composing, that it is a process of trying to discover or create an aesthetic; in other words, a new way of expressing music, considering what we’ve gone through in the last sixty or seventy years of various kinds of experimentation within music.

BD:    You spend so much of your time, though, playing Bach and Handel and yet composing in the idiom of now going into the 1990s.  Does that make you schizophrenic at all to have this large gap there?

AN:    I’m very influenced by old composers in my composing, so I would say I’m a classical composer within a new kind of a harmonic framework.  I’m definitely a tonal, harmonic composer, though, rather than an atonal composer.

BD:    Old wine in new bottles?

AN:    Something like that.  The music I write has melodies and is tonal, yet not in any traditional way.

BD:    You purposely make it your idea of tonality then?

AN:    I feel strongly that the experimentation over the last seventy years of serial composition and atonality has not succeeded, and that people basically have not accepted that as a musical language.  Atonality is not a very likely solution for music, and also the idea that the melody part of the piece is unimportant, or whether it’s memorable or not doesn’t matter.  This is not a concept I agree with at all.  I think that music has to have memorable melodies and some kind of tonality within which it functions.  Of course it can be very wide, like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is tonal, but it’s a very wide version of tonality.  So I use substitutes, basically.  In other words, I feel that if one can have similar chords that function in a similar way to old music, that one can write on top of the melodies which, with whatever talent you have, will be either nice or not.  So within that framework I use a lot of older techniques, especially Classical Period techniques.

BD:    Who decides whether it’s nice or not

musical public, musical student, and musical professional.  I have listened to all three of that kind of person over the last ten years, and I have come to the conclusion that almost none of these people want to hear music that isn’t tonal, at least in the farthest reaches.  You asked whether the melodies are attractive or not.  I ask other people to tell me that or not.  I finished a new piece, my most recent piece, this composition [On Fallen Heroes] for the Milwaukee Symphony and Lukas Foss, and afterword I asked the audience and the orchestra players and the chorus singers what they felt.  I was very interested in what they had to say.

BD:    Was the response positive?

AN:    Oh, yes.  I had a good, very positive response to this particular work.  It’s a big piece.  It’s only one movement.  Actually it’s part of a three-movement symphony, but as usual with new music, you can only play a certain amount of time in a concert.  Otherwise nobody will attend the concerts, and probably rightly so.  I’m sympathetic with the listener’s point of view, and I think that in this country especially, audiences are frank rather than being polite.  In Europe audiences are maybe more polite, but I think atonality is a dead issue in this country.  To a certain extent — and this is not to sound savage in any way — its presence is there because of power issues rather than people saying, “Oh, I love that.”  In Mozart and Bach’s time you wrote to please whomever employed you, a royalty was most common, or the court or something.  But that’s not true of twentieth century music.

BD:    Who employs Anthony Newman?

AN:    Whoever employs me to play a concert or to write a composition.  That’s my employer.  So if they’re happy with what they get, then I feel that I’ve done what is my job to do.  Twentieth century music is a difficult situation because it is not a universal aesthetic.  It’s not just one way that everybody writes.  It has spawned all these little interest groups and power issues where people have created a certain kind of music and they say, “Well, here it is.  This is what it is.  This is what music is and you better like it because we’re in power and this is what it is.”  That’s very unfortunate, and perhaps an oversimplification of what the actual process was, because there were many gifted people who turned to what they thought must be it, because this is how people are writing. 

BD:    Have you basically been pleased with the performances you’ve heard of your music?

AN:    Yes.  I thought the Milwaukee performance was very fine.

BD:    Of course, you are the performer in a number of your pieces.

AN:    Yes I am, in solo pieces.  I have a new piano concerto that’s being done in San Diego in January, and I’ll be playing piano solo in that.

BD:    Are you the ideal interpreter of your music?

AN:    There are probably more ideal interpreters of my music than myself, but I haven’t found them yet because I’m not quite known as a composer the same way I am as a player of Bach and old music.  That’s where I’m known, basically.

BD:    Are you trying to shake that image, or are you trying to have two parallel images?

AN:    Ideally I’d like to have two parallel images, but I’m a poor promoter of my own stuff.  I have an agent, a manager that promotes concerts in general, but as far as my promoting what I do myself, I’m very poor at that.  I tend just to write music, and if someone says, “I need a piece for such-and-such so would you write a piece?” I would say, “Oh yes, sure.  I’ll write you a piece.”  But I’m not the kind of person who would go on and solicit a piece.

BD:    Are most of the pieces on commission, or are they just things you have to write?

AN:    I would say half and half.  The orchestra piece was a commissioned work.  There the vast expense involved in copying a composition is what you have to have somebody help you with.

BD:    When you get commissions, do you always accept them or are there some that you might turn down or, perhaps, postpone?

AN:    I’ve turned down one or two commissions, but if they’re for serious things like a string quartet or a work for piano, I’ll always accept that, figuring that if for some reason it doesn’t work out I still have the piece.

BD:    Are you a better performer because you are also a composer?

AN:    Oh definitely.  I’m a more interesting performer; I don’t know whether I’m a better performer.  On the negative side, people would say that I find too much to bring out of the music.  It’s a possible criticism, but I think I’m a performer that hears, in a composer’s way, the piece that I’m playing.

BD:    Let me turn the question around.  Are you a better composer because you are also a performer?

AN:    Only in this way that I realize what I’ve written has to be played.  [Both laugh]  I’m very careful in my composing not to write in a experimental way for instruments, in which way I don’t know whether they’ll work or not.  I tend to not do that.

BD:    So you’re more pragmatic?

AN:    I’m pragmatic for the most part.

BD:    That doesn’t inhibit you in any way does it?

AN:    Not at all.  When I write for myself, either for solo piano or organ, it tends to be more difficult than I would for like an orchestral ensemble or string quartet.  In a recent quartet I asked the players if certain double stops were playable.  I always do that.

BD:    Rather than just hearing something in your ear and expecting it to sound?

AN:    Absolutely because it’s unreasonable to ask.  But you see everybody who’s playing new music is struggling anyway, just trying to get the aesthetic of the pieces written in.  That’s already a major effort, and if you find a group of people are struggling, and then on top of that they have what they see as insurmountable difficulties from the score, it’s unfair to them.  So I don’t like to have insurmountable difficulties.  I change things right away if they say, “This is very hard to play.”  Then I just change it.

BD:    Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute.  The Rite of Spring couldn’t be played at first, and now high school orchestras play it every day.

AN:    Right, high school orchestras play it, but I’ll bet if you asked Stravinsky about the Rite of Spring and those sorts of pieces, he would ask players about things, too.  He was a funny man about saying those sorts of things, but I know from one person, Rafael Druian, who said that he had often spoken about things in his Violin Concerto, and that he said he would change things if they were impractical.

Rafael Druian was born in Vologda, Russia 250 km east of St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) on January 20, 1922.  With the upheaval of the Revolution, Druian's family emigrated to Havana, Cuba when Rafael was an infant.  In 1930, Rafael began studies with the Paris-born Cuban composer Amadeo Roldán (1900-1939), concertmaster and later conductor of the Havana Philharmonic.  In about 1933, Rafael was admitted to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia where he remained until his graduation in the Class of 1942.  When he served in the US Army during World War II, Druian played the mellophone (a 3 valved horn) in the Army band.  Following the war he was concertmaster of the Dallas Symphony from 1947-1949 under Antal Dorati.  Druian followed Dorati to the Minneapolis Symphony in 1949 when Dorati became Music Director.  Druian remained in Minneapolis as Concertmaster from 1949-1960, the same as Dorati's tenure there.  In 1960, George Szell appointed Druian to succeed Josef Gingold as concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra, where he served for nine seasons.  After Cleveland, Druian taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.  He returned to orchestral life, being appointed concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic by Pierre Boulez from 1971-1974.  Druian then pursued conducting, including festivals in New York and Alaska.  He also continued teaching conducting and violin at Boston University and at his alma mater, the Curtis Institute.  Rafael Druian died in Philadelphia on Sept. 6, 2002, age 80.

BD:    When you’re writing a piece of music, are you always in control of that pencil, or are there times when that pencil controls your hand?

AN:    That’s like asking whether your higher powers are working with you or not.  I feel that I often ask higher vibrations what the answer is.

BD:    Is there a spiritual quality to your music?

AN:    Oh definitely.  I rely on that kind of transmission for my own music, as far as what I think of as inspiration.  People that are musical have musical guides or spirits, and they simply give you themes and inspirations.  Say this piece is too long or this section’s too high or it’s too loud.

BD:    How do you know when to put the pencil down when you’ve reached the end of the piece?

AN:    I fit the form in advance.  I pre-set the form.  I use mainly triangle forms, where there’s three sections, and the sections are either balanced, or the outer sections are balanced and the inner section’s imbalanced by a triangle.  It was the favorite form that worked within the classical sonata and symphony, and the Bach fugue.

BD:    So you know when you come to the end because that’s the edge of your canvas?

AN:    Always.  That’s right.

BD:    Is it a visual kind of thing, or is it completely aural?

AN:    It’s visual in the sense that it’s mathematical.  As a visual, no.  It is mental, cerebral.  The mathematics is planned out as far as the size, but I wouldn’t say it’s like shackles or anything like that.  It just says that in this section there should be 162 counts, and the next section should have 142 counts, and the final section should have again 162 counts.

BD:    You don’t get to the edge and wish you could push it just a little farther?

AN:    You can always push slightly.  Even Mozart does it.  When Mozart writes piano sonatas, he’ll write in ABA form and it’s very balanced.  Then he’ll add eight bars of coda.  When Beethoven adds a coda, he changes from a triangle to a square or to a four-sided figure, because the codas are so huge.  Then you have, instead of ABA, you have ABAC.  He invented the larger forms that way.

BD:    You’ve written, I assume, in most all of the forms?

AN:    Pretty much, yes.

BD:    Vocal music, too?

AN:    Yes, a large choral work that was done in Minneapolis about seven, eight years ago.

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

AN:    Since I was a youth I worked in churches and choirs.  I’ve had so much work with them that I know what voices can do and what you can’t ask them to do.  I’m rather conservative with voices, and if you’re writing in a complex texture it has to be doubled in the orchestra.  The only other texture that you can write is this kind of Ligeti glissando where it’s approximate and I generally don

BD:    You brought up the idea of recordings.  Are you pleased with the recordings that have been issued of your music?

AN:    You mean the quality of them?

BD:    Yes, and the performance.

AN:    Yes.  I’m very happy with the recordings.  I think the Viola Concerto and the String Symphony are wonderful recordings, and the chamber music I think is very faithfully done.

BD:    When you’re playing a work that you have written, are there ever times when Anthony Newman the pianist or the organist, gets mad at Anthony Newman the composer, and says, “Boy, I wish that guy had done this or that instead of what he did”?

AN:    Oh, yes!  I’m always changing things, even things that are published.  It’s a terrible problem I have.  Someone’s going to play it and I’ll say, “Oh, no, no, wait.  Let me send you my own copy that has these corrections.”  I’m just an impossible dabbler in changes.  I always think this might sound a little better.

BD:    Does your publisher get mad at that?

AN:    I don’t tell him.  [Laughs]

BD:    Then someone will listen to it with a score and think there are mistakes.

AN:    It’s not usually so dramatic.

BD:    Just details?

AN:    Yes, little details.

BD:    Are there ever times that you go back and completely revise a score?

AN:    Yes.  I did because I was influenced by that school I’ve been talking about, especially when I was in my late twenties and early thirties.  I would say in three or four large works I changed almost every note.  I kept the rhythm, so the idea of the piece was the same but they weren’t tonalized properly.  These were the organ work, the work for chorus, and a piano piece.

BD:    So there are some early works that you’ve disowned?

AN:    That’s correct.

BD:    What happens when you hear  performances of those?

AN:    Hopefully, I never will!  [Laughs]

BD:    But you have really no control over a piece once it has been published and is out there.

AN:    Well, that’s true, but as I say, most of that kind of music has not become fashionable, did not survive, and has not become common repertoire.  I feel that’s the judgment of history.  It’s had its time and its length of time, but it will have to sit there for another fifty years just as it sat there for seventy years.  This is not my own music, but the style hasn’t survived.

BD:    So you really think that atonality is dead?

AN:    I do.  I think it’s dead, but it’s still in turmoil.  Some people uphold it and say, “This is what new music is,” and then, of course, it’s academic.  It’s within the confines of universities, and when it’s that, then it’s involved with power issues.

BD:    What advice do you have for younger composers coming along?

AN:    Write only what they like, and not write music they feel they’re pushed into writing.

BD:    How can the mind on such young shoulders know what it wants so early?

AN:    Well, it usually knows what it likes, but it may not know what it wants.  When they start writing and experimenting, if they seem to yield something that’s personalized

BD:    I want to talk a little bit about your playing.  You have to play on all kinds of different instruments, especially organs.  You can’t travel with one, but pianos and harpsichords you can travel with.

AN:    Well, it’s very hard to travel with harpsichords.  I never travel with them unless it’s a short distance.

BD:    You just rely on what the venues have?

AN:    Right.

BD:    [With a gentle nudge]  That must produce a few horrors.

AN:    [Smiles]  Oh, yes!  Yes.  Many, many, many horror stories!

BD:    Are you your own technician?

AN:    No.  I can adjust simple things in harpsichords, but it takes quite a bit of energy to do that, and I’ve got to play the concert.  So it should be adjusted already.

BD:    Do you find now that we’re getting into all of this, that the quality of the instrument or the maintenance of the instrument has been getting better over the years?

AN:    Yes.  Oh, definitely!  There was a time when really you would have taken your life in your hands traveling around the country with a harpsichord recital, but I don’t think that’s true now.  You get reasonable instruments.  They’re not at the level that pianos are, as far as the state of perfection, but the instrument is basically not in a state of perfection as is a modern piano, which been perfected for two hundred years.  It’s in so much demand and so much demand to be stable, to repeat well, to survive weather changes, so it’s all developed into this other thing.  But harpsichords are just copies of what instruments were at that time, so they were developed not to be that way.  They were simply developed to sound beautiful

but it doesn’t mean that they’re very sturdy, necessarily.

BD:    Are you part of this whole original instrument movement because you play harpsichord, or do you sort of skirt the issue?

AN:    I’m certainly involved with it.  I did the Beethoven piano concerto cycle with period instruments, and I tend to use whatever instrument was written for a particular time.  I hope to conduct some Schumann symphonies, and I’ll use the instrument style of that period, which actually is valve trumpets.  The orchestra did use valve trumpets and I think valved horns, but the string sound was much more like the Beethoven-Schubert style of the string sound, which is not our modern sound at all.

BD:    You don’t think that Beethoven would have jumped at the chance to have his concerti played on the modern Baldwin or Steinway?

AN:    No.  He would have written differently for the piano.

BD:    What do you say to the world famous pianist who goes around playing them on the Baldwin or Steinway?

AN:    Oh, it’s just fine!  Musical playing sounds wonderful on anything.  My interest is in hearing it as it sounded then in its best way, in other words without wrong notes and without things out of tune.  It’s very interesting to hear that, because then you can adopt tempos of that period and the kinds of sforzandos, especially in the Beethovens, were very fierce.  They’re all tempered now with modern playing.

BD:    So if someone who’s playing your music a hundred years from now when they have better instruments, do you still want it played on the old instruments?

AN:    I couldn’t say that for sure unless I would see what the new instruments were!

BD:    Instruments are always developing.

AN:    Yes, they are.

BD:    I hope we’re not going to stop dead still.

AN:    No, I’m sure we’re not, but that’s a very interesting question.  If I live another hundred years, I’ll tell you.  [Laughs]

BD:    If a synthesizer could recreate the sound that you wanted, do you want a synthesizer used, or would you rather have all the instruments used?

AN:    Well, I know that the synthesizer can make the sound, so I think that’s fine.

BD:    Are we really concentrating on the sound or the aesthetic?

AN:    Well, the sound is the aesthetic.  It’s the same way around.  How you get the sound doesn’t matter so much to me.  Take electronic organs.  There was one time when they just sounded just terrible!  Now they’re sounding much better.  Sometimes they sound actually much better than pipe organs that I’ve had experience playing.

BD:    Because they don’t go out of tune.

AN:    Yes, and they just sound very good

you don’t hear the music in the time it actually occurs.  You’re writing it hundreds of times slower, and therefore it has that tediousness of struggling on one page of a big score.  You feel around with six bars, and score six bars in three hours, and it’ll go by in sixteen seconds.

BD:    But I assume it must be worth it at the end.

AN:    It’s worth it in the sense that what was for the moment is now out, and you’ve learned whatever it is that you were to learn from it.  Hopefully someone will like to hear it, and then you’re on to the next thing.  It’s always this continuous thing.  That’s the thing about composing, it is never static.  Once it’s written, then it seems superfluous to the composer.  Beethoven always used to say about his early pieces that he wished he could destroy them all.

BD:    You don’t want to destroy your early good pieces, do you?

AN:    No, but I have no interest in them.  In a way, once you’ve finished the piece and you’ve heard it, you start to lose interest in it no matter what it is, even if you thought at that time it is my best piece.

BD:    But you hope the public doesn’t lose interest in it!

AN:    The public will lose interest in it depending on what its worth is.  If it’s a worthy piece, maybe it’ll be heard a little bit.  It’s just hard to say about the music.  The fundamental issue is that there’s no established aesthetic, so there’s nothing that people already have heard as they’re about to hear your piece.  They’ll say, “Yes, that’s blah-blah-blah,” or they hear [sings a melody] and they’ll say, “Oh, that’s nice.  That sounds like Haydn, or Wagner, or Brahms.”  They’re already struggling just to figure out what it is that the composer is trying to tell them.  That’s why composers are always explaining their music.

BD:    Do you write copious program notes?

AN:    No.  Very little.  I figure if the music doesn’t make it, the notes certainly aren’t going to make it.  Why bore everybody with long, turgid notes that are just telling you that the piece is no good?

BD:    You will be fifty in about a year-and-a-half.  Any observations on closing in on the big 5-0?

AN:    I don’t know whether that birthday is significant in that way to me, but as you grow older your experiments yield something that is rich in their outcome.  Not that you stop experimenting, but rather than being constantly experimenting, you find some fruits from the experiments which will bear some richness.  I came to the composing a little later in life.  I’d composed as a student in my twenties, and then I just gave up with the kind of new music that I was hearing.  I just thought there’s no way I can associate with this, and I started writing seriously again when I was thirty-five.  So it’s not like I’ve been writing constantly. 

BD:    But now you write continually?

AN:    Now I write continually, yes.  I think this change is going on now.  I think it’s possible to do this.

BD:    So we can look forward to lots more pieces coming from your pen?

AN:    I hope you can look forward to them.  I hope that’s what you feel.  I appreciate that you say that.  I don’t know if I can say that as I look forward, but if others look forward, then I guess I’ll keep writing.

BD:    Good.  Thank you very much for staying up late tonight.

AN:    Oh, it was my pleasure.

© 1989 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded at his hotel near the Ravinia Festival on October 20, 1989.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB in 1996.  This transcription was made in 2014, and posted on this website at that time.

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.

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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 now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.