In anticipation of doing a program on WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago for her 60th birthday, I arranged to call Ruth Lomon in August of 1990 for an interview.  She was in New Mexico at the time, and we had a lovely chat about many musical topics.  When I dialed the phone, she picked up and seemed pleased that I was precisely on time . . . . . . .


Ruth Lomon:  Hello.

Bruce Duffie:  May I speak with Ruth Lomon, please?

RL:    Well, it’s ten o’clock.  It must be Bruce Duffie!

BD:    We radio people are so accurate...  [Both laugh]

RL:    It’s good that we can depend on something.

BD:    [With a sly nudge]  You mean to say that music is not dependable these days???

RL:    I think it’s up for grabs.  I’m sure I’m not at all aware of what might happen.

BD:    Well, let just start right there.  Since we’re going to be talking about all kinds of things musical and peripheral to music, regarding dependability, is there anything that an audience can really depend on as far as a composer who is writing today?

RL:    With a specific composer you might be able to depend upon some stylistic things that you will find in the music.  But I don’t think that you can depend upon music as it would have been in Mozart’s and Haydn’s time, that the gestalt will be pretty clear.  On the other hand, it’s a time when things are opening up very much, and that there are fewer “isms.”  That’s part of the fun now in going to concerts.

BD:    Is it the responsibility of the public to learn the new languages, or is it the responsibility of the composers to make sure that their languages can be understood?

RL:    It would be very nice to think that we met in the middle, that there was a little give on each side.  [Both laugh]  I don’t think it’s necessary for an audience to sit there and say, “Entertain me!”  You should be receptive, you should be willing to be enthusiastic about something new, to expect something new.  It’s like opening a new book.  It is to me, anyway.  I love going to concerts of new music.  You just don’t know what you might hear that will be very exciting.

BD:    So then it’s the thrill of discovery for you?

RL:    Yes.

BD:    You mention the word entertainment.  In music in general, or your music specifically, where is the balance between an artistic achievement and an entertainment value?

RL:    Just speaking personally, I certainly strive to be getting something across to an audience, something that I want to say.  I think the word “entertainment” might not be quite right, but hopefully I will have touched them in some way where there will be some emotional response.

BD:    Do you find that this happens in most of your concerts?

RL:    Yes, I would say that people have an emotional response.

BD:    I assume that you have the first emotional response to the music that you have written?

RL:    I hope I’m having it while I’m writing it!  [Laughs]

BD:    Talking about writing music, I assume the ideas for compositions are always floating around in your head?

RL:    Yes.

BD:    How do you sort out which ones will go in which specific pieces?

RL:    That’s a very good question.  It has a lot to do with the commissions that come up, so that often dictates the mood, and certainly dictates the instrumentation.

BD:    When you get a commission, how do you decide if you are going to accept it, or perhaps postpone it, or even turn it down?

RL:    In general I try to take the commissions that come my way because they’re challenges.  It keeps me a little breathless at times, but I enjoy the challenge of working with people.  This commission that I have at the moment, writing the music for the Thurber play Many Moons, has been an incredible challenge.  I didn’t realize when I took the commission that it would be so challenging, and for a while it was difficult for me to get those ideas that you were talking about... not that I didn’t have plenty of musical ideas that went with the characters and the piece, but it was a while before things settled down.  Who would be my orchestra, for instance?   What would be the numbers? 

BD:    Oh, the size and distribution of the orchestra?

RL:    Yes, and whether there would be actors, or if it was just going to be narrated by one person, or whether the other parts would be read, too.  It took a couple of months for everything to be decided, and so it took longer for me to get into that inner stream of musical gesture that usually goes with the beginning of a new piece.

BD:    I assume that now you have gotten into it?

RL:    Oh, yes, very definitely!  I’m in the home stretch.

BD:    When you start a piece, do you know where it’s going to wind up?

RL:    Generally, yes.  I usually have a very clear gestalt in my head before I start working on a piece.  This was not true with the piece that I’m talking about, Many Moons, but in general, yes.  Even if it turns out to be different from my first idea, nevertheless I work from something that is quite definite, and this helps me very much.  If it turns out differently, that’s perfectly all right, but at least I’m working against that pattern and at least it’s motivating the material.

BD:    You say that if it turns out a different way, that’s all right.  Are you making it turn out that way, or is it turning out that way of its own accord?

RL:    Sometimes of its own accord, especially in lengths of pieces.  I’m thinking in particular of my piece Five Ceremonial Masks, which is based on five masks from the Yeibichai dance ceremonies.  This is a cleansing and health-giving ceremony.  The middle movement on that is called Spirit, and is done entirely inside the piano.  That turned out quite surprisingly from this point of view.  I had thought it was about half the length that it was, but when you’re working inside the piano, sometimes it takes much longer for the sound to decay and die.  Working in this way, the piece became much longer than I had at first anticipated it would be.

BD:    But it didn’t wind up being too long?

RL:    I hope it isn’t too long!  [Both laugh]  It doesn’t seem too long to me.

BD:    When you’re working inside the piano, does that require a harp technique?

RL:    Yes.  Some of it is using the thumb and the fingers directly on the strings sort of the plucking motion, and sometimes it’s more of a strumming motion.  Sometimes I use a plectrum, and the thing I use most often is harmonics.

BD:    Are all the techniques are explained in the score?

RL:    Yes.  There’s always a recipe page in the front.

BD:    So an ordinary pianist, who may never have placed his or her hands on the strings or the dampers before, could play the piece?

RL:    Yes, but people are very wary of moving inside the piano, unless they’ve been given permission and had it explained to them.  I find people are very wary.  I played for many years, professionally, as part of a two-piano team with my partner, Iris Graffman Wenglin, and a couple of pieces that I had written are specifically for us.  One is called Soundings for piano four hands, and another one, Triptych for Two Pianos.  At that time I was doing quite a bit of writing inside the piano, and she was very loathe to get up and down and into the piano.  Pianists are usually wedded to the piano bench, and they’re very reluctant to move off it.

BD:    Then why do you demand that the pianist get off the bench?  Are the possibilities from the keyboard just insufficient?  [I meant the need for interior techniques as additional tonal colors, but she interpreted my question as being about the ability to play inside the piano while seated on the bench.]

RL:    Yes.   In general, if you’re just leaning into the piano that way, unless it’s in the deep bass where you can work around the side of the piano.  Otherwise you’re coming into the pin block, and then you come into it just at the small ends of the strings, so that there’s very little sound there.  You wouldn’t be able to work on the harmonics, for instance.

BD:    I see.  So, you’ve got to get out of the chair and go around?

RL:    Generally speaking, unless you’re very tall and have long arms.  I was very fortunate when Rosemary Platt was recording the Ceremonial Masks.  [See photo at right]  She hardly had to move because she’s a tall woman with long arms, and she was able to manage.  She still had to get up, but a lot of it she could do just from the bench.

BD:    Is there a possibility that you might eventually demand piano four hands, with two on the keyboard and two inside the guts of the piano?

RL:    As a matter of fact, parts of this duet that I had written for us is done that way.  One person is up and one person is down for part of it.  But I haven’t been writing very much that way these days.  A couple of years ago I got a commission from Dinosaur Annex, which is a new music group in the Boston area, a very good group, and they had asked specifically for something with live electronics because they were doing that kind of a program.  So I got my feet wet for the first time with the electronic music and enjoyed it very much.  Of course, you can do so much more!  When you program electronic sounds to the best of your ability, it’s much less iffy than working inside the piano because of the poor pianist!  Every time the pianist opens the lid of a piano, they’re faced with something a little different depending upon the model and the make.  I just found it very satisfying, and I’d like to do more in electronic music.  I programmed seven sounds for that particular piece, and used them in conjunction with the live instruments of the group.

BD:    Are these sounds that you heard and tried to duplicate, or are these sounds you discovered and held on to?

RL:    They were sounds that I wanted.  It’s a little bit like asking whether it was the chicken or the egg that came first.  I was looking for new sounds to work with, and I’ve never been interesting in duplicating instrumental sounds.  That’s never been my bag, but I got some sounds which, for me, were satisfying.  One of them was like a descending staccato sound that was almost like the sound of dripping, but going the full length of the sound spectrum.  Another one was a falling sound, and I had a good space voice sound. 

BD:    When you discover something like this, do you think you must use it in this piece, or could you, maybe, save it and use it in another piece?

RL:    As a matter of fact, in this piece, Many Moons, I’m using a couple of the sounds that I had programmed.  One is a general harpsichord sound, the grand harpsichord with doublings.  That’s a commercial sound, but we can’t afford to hire a harpsichordist, so my DX-7 is going to come to the rescue.

BD:    Just as we have the virtuoso pianists and oboists and violinists, are we going to get virtuoso DX-7-ists?

RL:    Good synthesizer players are very perceptive, and they have a wide range of coloration for the notes.  They can add vibrato, and not only can they can assign different parameters to pedals, but they also have something called the breath control, which you plug in and your breathing can effect one of the parameters.  It might be the vibration or it might be the crescendos and diminuendos, but there are many possibilities and many shadings in the touch, too.  The notes can be made touch sensitive.

BD:    So we’ve moved away from purely electronic sounds to where the electronics are responsive to the live performer?

RL:    I think that’s the big interest, especially at a place like MIT where they’re making these very sensitive instruments that are able to be controlled by the computer, and in turn they give so much information to the computer.  But the electronics that I do is very crude.  I’m not in that league.

BD:    The crudeness, I assume, is just the lack of detailed technical ability?

RL:    Yes, that’s right.

BD:    Does your piece of music today have to have this immense technical facility, or can it be just the way you hear it, and have you manipulate it the way you want it now?

RL:    Well, it’s got to be that way because I can’t do it!  [Laughs]  If I don’t have the information, I can’t use it.

BD:    So then, you’re constantly learning?

RL:    Yes, that’s right.  And that, of course, is wonderful.  That’s a great joy.

BD:    I trust that you don’t write music that’s complicated just to be complicated...

RL:    Oh, I hope not.  As a matter of fact, the challenge that I accept every day is to try to be more simple and more precise in what I’m trying to say.  To this end I’ve been very much helped in my enormous interest and long love affair with the Native American music and folklore, the designs, the patterns, the dances.  It’s all part and parcel of the life.  There’s not so much separation between one art form and another.  I find this very inspiring because I think it touches me at a special level.  It’s just like you’re saying, to try to be simple and not to make things complicated for the sake of being complicated.  It’s not that I even tried to write music that in any way sounds like Indian music, but it sets the imagination free and has you looking inside.  The response to these things is part of the collective unconscious.  You come in contact with a real kaleidoscope of images and fragments of your own personal-ness.  I don’t mean it in a biographical sense, but what you think of as your self, which isn’t necessarily a truth.

BD:    Do you find when you write using these Native American ideas that the Native Americans who have grown up with them respond, perhaps, particularly well to your music?

RL:    They’ve been very encouraging, and they like to see this happening.  But again, I don’t even know if you’d be aware of it; perhaps in a piece like Imprints, which I wrote after having been invited to a peyote ceremony.  I was very moved by the whole ceremony.  It was very beautiful and deeply religious, and I’d never heard such fast drumming.  They used the water drums, and these drums they tune with their tongue so they can vary the pitch as much as an octave.  They use gourds and the bells, and particularly the drums.  Each person sings their personal song — not each person, but anyone who wishes can sing their personal song.  It was a very moving experience.  After that I wrote this piece.  It’s a piano concerto for piano with four percussion players using a whole battery of percussion!  It’s something just to see the set-up for the piece. 

BD:    You get so many of your ideas in the southwest, where you are right now as we do this conversation, but you spend much of your year up in the northeast.

RL:    Oh, yes, definitely!

BD:    Does this make you at all schizophrenic?

RL:    [Laughs]  I guess, perhaps, anybody who writes music has to be a little crazy.  [Both laugh]  I had a commission for an organ piece, and a relative of mine said, “Aren’t there enough organ pieces already?”  [Both laugh]  The idea of something new being written for the organ seemed very strange to him.

BD:    This idea occurs seems to a lot of regular concert goers

above each quotation of this little theme.  You can imagine my enormous surprise when I was listening to the take they sent me, and the first violinist cried out, “GERONIMO!” as he played the first entrance of the theme.  [Both laugh]  He thought that because it was written out, that it was meant for the performer to say it out.

BD:    Play it like a war cry going down on the white man?

RL:    Exactly.  So I’m awfully glad I heard the tape before the performance!  But you can imagine the shock that I had.

BD:    Let’s turn the question around.  Are there times that performers find little brilliances in your score that you didn’t even know you’d hidden there?

RL:    Yes, I think that’s quite possible, especially in the piano music.  Having been a pianist, I probably write with most skill for the piano.  It’s my great ease to write for the piano, so perhaps there’s more flexibility in what the pianist can do with the music.

BD:    Because you are both a fine performer and a composer, are you the ideal interpreter of the music you write for your own instrument?

RL:    By no means.  By no means!  As a matter of fact, I’m always hesitant to play my own pieces for this reason.  My inner clock is entirely different when I’m playing as opposed to what I’m hearing in my head in my own music.  I don’t know why this is so.  Maybe I get very excited, but I think that the idea has certainly gotten across because it has for me, so I don’t allow enough pause; I don’t allow enough time between ideas, between statements, enough decay for a harmonic progression.  It’s very strange, but when I’m working on a piece of my own I have to work particularly for this.  I don’t allow enough time for the listener to absorb the gestalt.

BD:    Is it possible for you to approach a piece that you wrote a few years ago as though it were a piece by anybody else?

RL:    Oh, yes.  I have to.  You talked about schizophrenia before.  This is something I have to always do.  I have to divorce myself entirely from the piece, or I would be re-writing it.

BD:    The performer in you is screaming at the composer in you?

RL:    That’s right!  [Laughs]  I don’t perform very much anymore now.  I guess the reason that I would give is that it takes me so long.  If I were a fast study it would be different, but particularly with my own music, I can write so much in the time that it takes me to work on a piece.

BD:    One last question about performing.  When you were playing the piano regularly, were you a better interpreter of other people’s music because you are also a superb composer in your own right?

RL:    Well, that’s a loaded question!  Let me put it this way

BD:    You’re approaching your sixtieth birthday.  Are you today about where you expected to be, or where you want to be in your career?

RL:    No.  I always feel like I’m struggling to finish the next piece, or I always feel like I’m behind.  It comes from the years when I wasn’t able to get to do much composing, and so I have this desire to catch up.

BD:    Do you think you ever will catch up?

RL:    No, I don’t imagine that’s possible.  I’m trying to learn to live with the angst!  [Laughs]

BD:    There are some recordings of your music.  Are you pleased with those particular recordings because they have a wider circulation than a single performance?

RL:    Oh, yes.  Yes, I certainly am.  Particularly Rosemary’s performance of Masks has certainly interested people to buy the score, which is put out by Arsis Press.  The same was true for the piece that Susie Allen has put on her record of new harp music, but you probably realize that the label, 1750 Arch, has gone under.

BD:    [Being hopeful]  Yes, it is now defunct, but the record is still around, and we will be playing it on the radio.  People occasionally can find it in used record stores, and there’s always the possibility it will be reissued at some point on some other label.

RL:    Yes, but it certainly is helpful to get your music out on recordings.  I think that’s very helpful.

BD:    Are there more recordings coming along?

RL:    Yes.  There is going to be one of an organ piece called Seven Portals of Vision, and that will be performed by Dr. Joanne Vollendorf who is at Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I met her at a conference that was held at Michigan University on Women and Music.  She was one of the performers, and I was just bowled over by the performance and the music that she was playing.  So we collaborated on a piece the following year, and out of that came Seven Portals of Vision.  Part of her doctoral thesis was on working with composers.  That was a very fine collaboration, and since then Arsis Press has published the piece, and it will be going out on a CD.

BD:    You mentioned Women and Music.  You’re a woman composer; you can’t get around that.  Do you want to be referred to as a woman composer, or just a composer?

RL:    I think anybody would just want to be referred to as a composer, but in the numbers there’s strength, and certainly by banding together and producing concerts, and also making the public aware of the fact that there are women composers and always have been women composers, we’ve helped ourselves.  For instance, our mission statement of American Women Composers is to put ourselves out of business.  In other words, it shouldn’t be necessary to have a group called American Women Composers.  You should be able to make concerts in any form that you want.

BD:    Are we getting closer to that goal?

RL:    It would seem so at the moment, but it just takes a small reversal in the economics of a country to have things change very radically.  When times are good, things are good for women.  You know how it is in the art world at the moment, with all this problem with funding the NEA.

BD:    It becomes very tenuous.

RL:    It becomes very tenuous, and everybody’s scrambling for the crumbs under the table.  I think that women are probably scrambling a little bit more.

BD:    Is this particularly a women’s problem, or is this just a problem that all contemporary composers have?

RL:    At the moment it’s a problem that everybody has.  I don’t think this is something that’s related to gender.  But on the other hand, it has been only recently that it’s been recognized that there is a large body of work by women composers, and even young women that I teach are not aware of how much difficulty there was, say, thirty years ago.  They take it for granted that this is their right, which of course they should, but also there’s the danger of history repeating itself if they aren’t tuned into the fact that women have repeatedly been written out of the history of music.

BD:    We’ve got to remember Mary Howe and Miriam Gideon and Louise Talma, and all of those who’ve gone before!  [See my Interview with Miriam Gideon, and my Interview with Louise Talma.]

RL:    Yes, and I’m thinking of periods from the Venetian and the Florentine school of music, and people like the great German, Hildegard von Bingen, of the eleventh century.

BD:    Who has just gotten some recordings!

RL:    Yes.  Exactly.  The ones you’re talking about are people who are still very much with us

This interview was recorded on the telephone on August 9, 1990.  Portions were used (with recordings) on WNIB in 1990, 1995 and 2000.  A copy of the unedited audio was placed in the Archive of Contemporary Music at Northwestern University.  The transcript was made and posted on this website in 2014.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, 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 now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.