Bruce Duffie:     First, let me ask you about winning the Pulitzer Prize.  Has that had any great lasting effect on you or your composing?

Leslie Bassett:    It brought me a better salary at the University of Michigan, which is nice, but it didn’t bring as many performances of the Variations itself as you would have thought.  You would have assumed that the orchestra piece that wins the Pulitzer Prize then would be used.  And in fact, my publisher did send the score around to a lot of orchestras somewhat later, because it wasn’t published right then.  But it hasn’t had as many performances as you would have expected, and I found that disappointing.  I talked with Michael Colgrass not too long ago, and he was complaining also that his Pulitzer Prize orchestra piece had not been played a second time, or at least not more than once, until it was done by Louisiana State University when he was there as guest composer two or three years ago.  And he found this strange, a piece which presumably is considered good isn’t immediately grabbed by orchestras.  I think there’s a certain amount of promotional things that have to be done, and if you have agents and publishers who are very aggressive in this regard and feel they can invest throwing away most of the scores, then I think maybe there’s some chance of it.  But it’s a very touchy business.  But it has made a lot of difference, in fact, because when you go to a town and you’re discussed, or comments are made by local newspapers, they all know it’s the Pulitzer Prize, so they give it coverage.

BD:    How difficult is it to get second performances of anything, Pulitzer Prize or no?

LB:    It depends, I suppose, on an awful lot of things.  Young composers have an awful lot of trouble getting second performances if they don’t have a national name and if their piece was performed well by, let’s say, a good community orchestra or one of the minor major orchestras.  It’s very hard to get a second performance.  There are a lot of composers in the United States.

BD:    Are there too many?

LB:    No, not too many, but there are an awful lot of them, and they all have orchestra pieces!  There’s a lot of competition for comparatively few slots on an orchestra’s season.  Some orchestras are doing better than others, as you know, but a lot of orchestras play very little new music, even yet.  I think things are improving, but it’s not ideal.

BD:    Is there a Pulitzer Prize in music every year?

LB:    There’s a competition every year; they don’t award it every year.

BD:    I was just wondering if maybe some of the big orchestras should, say, six months after the Pulitzer Prize is normally awarded, play that work, and if there’s no Pulitzer Prize that year, then a previous one?

LB :    That would be a lovely idea.  I understand that the Albany Symphony intends to do some of the past Pulitzer Prize pieces over the next few years.  Somebody was telling me this.  It’s a good idea.

BD:    Are all of the pieces that win the Pulitzer Prize really worthy of winning?

LB:    This is a very subjective question, and a very subjective answer would be yes, I suppose.  But there’s an awful lot of variety in pieces that have won it over the years.  I think on the whole, they have all been really quite good.  I don’t know of any real lemons, for instance.  I know some that I like better than others.  There are always complaints by various people that the prize should have gone to something else, other than what did receive it.  Sometimes a very small piece of chamber music is pooh-poohed by people who wrote orchestral pieces; they think the orchestral piece should have picked it off.  The one this past year is a fairly modest score

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

LB:    Most of them, yes.  Usually an orchestra, if it’s going to do a piece, is very cautious about selecting it in the first place.

BD:    Are they overly cautious?

LB:    Well, I don’t know.  Maybe.  A lot of our orchestras, even the so-called amateur orchestras or community orchestras, are full of really professional musicians.  They may not seem like professional musicians to the world at large, but they’re fully trained and they are very good!  So they can do a very good job.  Sometimes I think the main problem can come from the conductor, if he’s not quite prepared or if he doesn’t have absolute metronome.  If he violates a metronome mark noticeably, that can ruin things.  Or if he just doesn’t really know the sounds and there are errors that are played by various people, he doesn’t catch those.  Especially in the professional orchestras, sometimes a player will deliberately play a wrong note in a conspicuous passage, just to check to see if the conductor if he’s on his toes.  He pretends to be innocent, of course, but nonetheless, these are some of their little tricks.

BD:    Let me turn the question around.  Do players or conductors find things in your scores that you didn’t know you had hidden there?

LB:    No, I don’t think so.  I’ve had wonderful relationships with orchestras.  I was trained as a performing musician.  I played trombone and cello.  I played all the instruments and I feel at home with instrumentalists.  So my music seems to be written in such a way that the instrumentalists enjoy playing it.  It’s idiomatically good for them.  I don’t write passage work that is impossible at the tempo that is given, so I don’t have any difficulties in that way.  There are always surprises with each performance because each orchestra is different.  They have different balance, different people sitting there in a different auditorium, different amounts of rehearsal time, so there’s always something that seems a little stronger in this performance than in the preceding performance.  But no, I’m not surprised!  I know what I’m doing! [Laughs]

BD:    Whom do you have in mind when you’re writing?

LB:    I always write an orchestra piece on commission, so I write it for the ensemble that has commissioned it.

BD:    Do you consider the audience or the critics or anything else?

LB:    Oh, sure!  Oh, yes.  And if I don’t know the people in an orchestra, I imagine what the typical first violin section is like, as opposed to the typical second violin section and violas and cellos and basses.  I know what the oboes are like because of my experience with oboes and their view of how they will respond to my music, as opposed to the flutists, for instance, and the brass and so on.  So I have sort of a standard stereotype of the various instrumentalists, and I sort of compose for that.  Then if it’s a phenomenally fine orchestra, I tune up the level of difficulty a little bit.  If it’s a little less impressive ensemble, I’ll squelch it a little bit.  If I do a piece for some community orchestras, I might write a lot simpler string music.  They’ll still be playing, but the intricacies are not quite so elaborate as they would be for another work.

BD:    It sounds like the technical difficulties and considerations are almost overriding your creative inspiration.

LB:    No, they create it, I think.  If you don’t have limits and givens, you can’t write.  You can’t sit down at a piano and just stare at eighty-eight notes.  You have to put your finger on one, or realize how wide you can spread you hands.  Or consider if you spread your hands, what are the notes you can play.  Just look at your hands; your thumbs are in the middle and your fingers are on the outside, so this gives you certain possibilities, and so on.  If you write for trombones, you know their register and the qualities of sound in these various registers, which can be very exciting.  If you write fast music for a trombone, but it’s way down low, it’s crazy.  It isn’t going to work.  But you can put it up fast, and they can do it.  So you have these things which say this is possible, and this is not quite so possible.

BD:    Are you always working within the usual strictures of music, rather than trying to expand the horizons of the technical possibilities?

LB:    Well, that’s not quite true.  I have, for instance, a solo clarinet piece called Soliloquies, which is fiendishly difficult.  It was written for a clarinetist who wanted to show off how good he was — and he was very good.  For several years the piece was considered unplayable.  It’s now published and considered standard literature ten years afterwards.  And it’s still tough.

BD:    Did you write it to be difficult?

LB:    Yeah.

BD:    Did you write it to be pretty?

LB:    I wrote it to be difficult and to be pretty, on occasion.  Quite a bit of it is nice, but there are places which are quite raucous, quite strident.  They’re very pushy; they’re very aggressive, very combative, and others are very, very gentle and very lyrical.

BD:    Who are the combatants?  Is it the composer versus the performer, or the performer versus the audience, or the performer versus the instrument?

LB:    All this stuff is in the music, and the performer is projecting the stuff that has been written by me.  It’s to give certain impressions, of course, like any other music.  You have some music which is very aggressive or very obnoxious, which is very noisy and very pushy, and other music which is lyrical and gentle, and so on.  These are not technical matters, although obviously you have to have a technical aspect of it in order to produce these reactions.  You have to write fast, shrill, aggressive music for the clarinetist to play in order to convey to the listener the impression of shrillness, aggressiveness and so on, which is a perfectly wonderful reaction to have.  Music doesn’t always have to be sweet and saccharine.

BD:    No.  Well, what is the purpose of music in today’s society?

LB:    Sometimes I think there isn’t any, when you realize that most of the music that people absorb around the country is not interesting for me at all.  I’m not interested in ninety-nine percent of the stuff that I hear on A.M. radio, for instance.  I’m not interested; it bores me.

BD:    Are you interested in the new concert music?

LB:    Oh, sure, but I would rather not listen to Muzak, for instance, while I’m shopping or dining or whatever.  That, in a way, is prostituting some of the most beautiful music that we have.  But I’m very interested in new concert music, new electronic music, new anything that isn’t marketed, and the product of the so-called music industry.

BD:    You don’t like the business of music?

LB:    No, not in the usual huckster-ish manner in which so-called pop music is foisted on our culture.  Turn on any A.M. radio, and what do you hear?

BD:    Rock and roll.

LB:    Yeah.  It’s okay, but it’s boring after a while.

BD:    Is rock and roll really music?

LB:    Yeah, I guess so. 

BD:    It’s just not to your taste.

LB:    Yeah.  I think mainly it’s something else.  People talk about the words and the texts and what the meaning of it is, the message of these pieces.  I’m a little disillusioned by these musicians who in fact very often are musically illiterate.  They can’t read music, you know.  Their composing is singing and playing into a tape machine.

BD:    So then the tape is the score?

LB:    Yeah.  Well, somebody else makes the score from it.  They give the tape to somebody else

BD:    Where is concert music going these days?

LB:    Well, I don’t know.  A lot of it is tied to orchestras, which means it’s tied to a big corporate financial historical thing that may not be a good thing to be tied to.  But orchestras still are a big force in our country, and they draw large audiences.  They wish they would draw more, of course, in order to pay more bills.  They’re terribly expensive and they’re sort of locked into a situation which has grown up over the past hundred and fifty years.  But nonetheless, it is exciting, and there are serious-music radio stations.  We have lots of orchestral broadcasts, thank goodness, which are marvelous!  We hear the Chicago Symphony and Saint Louis and Detroit and New York Philharmonic, and all these other orchestras any time you want.  Almost any evening you can hear an orchestra concert.  Now that’s marvelous, it really is!

BD:    Is there any point where it becomes too much?

LB:    I think so.  The problem is, if anybody is interested in orchestral music, he will have heard the Beethoven Fifth, Brahms First, the Schumann symphonies and the great C Major of Schubert dozens, if not hundreds of times, to the point where there are not surprises.  There is no magic left; it’s been beaten to a pulp.  That shouldn’t happen because those pieces are gorgeous and they should not be abused like that, it seems to me.

BD:    And yet the promoters say this is what the public comes to.

LB:    Yeah, well, in a way it’s like training people to want what you want them to want.

BD:    [Laughs]

LB:    And I think it’s just as easy to train people to want them.  I’m not for getting rid of them at all, but I’m in favor of balancing programs a little better than most of our groups do.  People don’t walk out on my music, you know.  They might walk out on it before they’ve heard it, but if they hear it, they don’t walk out on it.  I don’t find people outraged about what I have to say as a musician.

BD:    Does that please you?

LB:    Absolutely.  I want them to like my music very much.  So I think if orchestras can balance their programs better than they have, it’ll bring in people who are interested in new things, and not drive away people who are only interested in the old.

BD:    Would you prefer that your music be in the middle of a standard concert, rather than on an all-contemporary concert?

LB:    Oh, yes.  I want my music on standard concerts.  I don’t mind if it’s on contemporary ones, but that’s somewhat like ghettoizing.  You’re saying, “All the people who like contemporary music can come to this program, and all you folks who don’t like it can stay away.”  You never convert anybody by doing that.

BD:    How can we get the public, then, to be a little more adventurous?

LB:    You can do it by balancing the programs.  A balanced program ought to have a piece of old music that people don’t really know.  There’s an awful lot of music lying around that’s been performed and composed in the world.  We don’t always have to use the same older pieces.  You need a concerto so that young performers can come along and step into this business of performing.  You need a new work.  We certainly need to know American music, and if you don’t play a new American piece, you can play an old American piece, like one clear back by Anton Heinrich, for instance, the Condor of the Andes, which would be an absolute scream!  It would be wonderful!  [Both laugh]  We have two or three generations of composers in America from about a hundred years ago who are almost totally ignored in our concert life.  So that group should be done, and of course we need a warhorse.  We need a Schumann symphony, a Beethoven symphony, and so on.  Even if this didn’t happen every concert but happened every other concert, then you would have, let’s say, fifteen to twenty new works or unknown works played every season.  It would be the normal thing to expect this to happen.  I’m amazed, for instance, the frequency in which Mahler symphonies are played now.  Every orchestra plays Mahler symphonies, and of course this is wonderful because they’re beautiful pieces.  On the other hand, there are other things to be done, and there’s no real reason why we have to flood the market to the point where maybe in five years we won’t want to hear any Mahler symphonies.

BD:    We’ll get satiated with them?

LB:    Yes, too much!  That’s happened with me already with Bruckner.  I don’t care to hear anymore Bruckner.

the conductor’s baton ticked the stand or something of the sort, or you needed to move microphones or whatever.  So to get through an entire piece in two hours, with break along in there is very difficult.  I was fit to be tied by the end of that session, and in fact it did not get through it, because they were within about twelve measures or so of the ending, and the time was up.  Of course, orchestras are very unionized; you don’t go over time unless you pay.  So they finished the recording at the next recording session three or four days later and I wasn’t there for that.  So it’s really quite a trying experience; you’re not so sure whether things are going well, and if you record a piece section by section, you don’t have the view of the sweep of the whole thing, all the way through, which can be slightly detrimental.

BD:    Is there ever a case where a recording can be too technically perfect, and lack that spark of inspiration?

LB:    Oh, I suppose it’s possible.  I don’t know; I guess so.

BD:    What’s the role of a music critic?

LB:    I think he’s a publicist for music, a speaker for music and somebody who should let the public at large know that concert music

This interview was recorded in Chicago on June 11, 1987.  Portions (along with recordings) were used on WNIB in 1988, 1993 and 1998.  A copy of the audio tape was placed in the Archive of Contemporary Music at Northwestern University.  This transcription was made and posted on this website in 2009.

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.