Joshua Rifkin Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . .. .

Conductor / Pianist Joshua Rifkin

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

The American musicologist, pianist and conductor, Joshua Rifkin, studied with Vincent Persichetti at the Juilliard School of music in New York, receiving his B.S. in 1964. He also studied with Gustave Reese at New York University (1964-1966), at the University of Göttingen (1966-1967), and later with Arthur Mendel, Lewis Lockwood, Milton Babbitt, and Ernst Oster at Princeton University, receiving his M.F.A. in 1969. He also worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen at Darmstadt in 1961 and 1965.

Joshua Rifkin has won international acclaim as conductor, pianist, and harpsichordist for performances of music ranging from Monteverdi to Igor Stravinsky, J.S. Bach to Richard Strauss, and Mozart to Gershwin, Copland, and the most recent moderns. He led The Bach Ensemble from 1978. He is noted for his research in the field of Renaissance and Baroque music, but he became popular as a performer and explicator of ragtime.

Rifkin first made an impact in 1965 when Elektra Records impresario Jac Holzman asked for help in realizing a crazy idea of his, an album of Beatles hits as restated in the musical style of Baroque composers. Witty and unique, the resulting Nonesuch album The Baroque Beatles Book swiftly became a best seller, featuring Rifkin's clever take on Beatles standards such as "Help!" and "Please Please Me," and it was widely imitated. In 1970, Rifkin began an extensive project of recording Scott Joplin's rags for Nonesuch that stretched into 1974 and resulted in three LP volumes. With the release of the hit movie The Sting featuring Joplin's music, theretofore mainly known to early jazz buffs, Rifkin's recordings of the piano originals were thrust into prominence and also became best sellers. So enormously popular were Rifkin's efforts on behalf of Joplin that for the rest of the 1970s his was a household name among classical music fans as well as a cross-section of popular music listeners. Rifkin ended the 1970s on a high note with Digital Ragtime, an album for EMI featuring the first digital recordings of ragtime piano music; it also proved very popular.

Rifkin is best known to classical musicians for his thesis that much of Johann Sebastian Bach's vocal music, including the St Matthew Passion, was performed with only one singer per voice part, an idea generally rejected by his peers when he first proposed it in 1981. In the 21st century, the idea has become influential, although it has not achieved consensus in the field. The conductor Andrew Parrott wrote a book arguing for the position (The Essential Bach Choir; Boydell Press, 2000; as an appendix, the book includes the original paper that Rifkin began to present to the American Musicological Society in 1981, a presentation he was unable to complete because of a strong audience reaction).

See my interviews with Judith Nelson, and Julianne Baird

Joshua Rifkin has led and appeared as soloist with many prominent orchestras, among them the English Chamber Orchestra, Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Victorian State Symphony of Melbourne, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Scottish: Chamber Orchestra, Prague Chamber Orchestra, Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trent, Jerusalem Symphony, Solistas de México, BBC Concert Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, National Arts Centre Orchestra of Ottawa, and Houston Symphony Orchestra.

Beyond his work with The Bach Ensemble, Joshua Rifkin's activities in the world of early music have included an enthusiastically received production of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo at Switzerland's Theater Basel, the modern premiere of Alessandro Scarlatti's Venere, Amore e Ragione in Chicago, Mozart's Requiem and poly-choral Psalms of Heinrich Schütz at the Utrecht Early Music Festival, and guest appearances with the Ensemble Gradus ad Parnassum of Vienna, Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and St. James Baroque Players of London, as well as recordings of Mozart's "Posthorn" Serenade and several Haydn symphonies with the Cappella Coloniensis of Germany. Highlights with modern orchestras and ensembles include staged performances of I. Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat in the USA and Australia; the Melbourne premiere of Weill's Die sieben Todsünden; the European and Canadian premieres of Gunther Schuller's And They All Played Ragtime; J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244) in the 1911 version of Ivor Atkins and Edward Elgar; and the posthumous premiere and first recording of Silvestre Revueltas's theater music Este era un rey with the Camerata de las Americas.

Joshua Rifkin has taught in several universities, including Brandeis (1970-1982), Harvard, New York and Yale. He is noted for his research in the field of Renaissance and Baroque music, and contributed scholarly studies to many publications in America and Europe, among them The Musical Quarterly, Bach-Jahrbuch, The Journal of the American Musicological Society, Early Music Magazine, 19^th Century Music, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

In 1999 the University of Dortmund, Germany, awarded Joshua Rifkin an honorary doctorate for his contributions to Bach interpretation; he has also held guest seminars, workshops, and master-classes at universities and conservatories throughout Europe and the USA. In the autumn of 2001 Joshua Rifkin made his debut at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich with a new production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and George Frideric Handel's Acis and Galatea.

== Biography (with additions and corrections) mainly from the Bach Cantatas website.
== Names which are links in this box and below refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website. BD

In April of 1996, Rifkin was in Chicago, and agreed to sit down with me for a conversation. As we were getting settled to record, our chit-chat revolved around some recent ideas voiced in a major newspaper.

Bruce Duffie: Besides being a performer, you are also an historian, and a listener of music. Is academic serialism dead, as has been said in The New York Times?

Joshua Rifkin: It certainly is not flourishing as it once did, but I would hesitate to pronounce it dead, and, in particular, I would hesitate to dance over its grave and to indulge in the kind of joyful exhumations of obscurities that the Times wants to perform. The field in which I am mostly involved as a performer, namely early music, is another one that has seemingly over the years, aroused a particular enmity from The New York Times above all other organs of music criticism in this country.

BD:   Is it perhaps the difficulty to listening to music of the last twenty, thirty, forty years that has helped to foster the Baroque revival?

Rifkin:   That’s a very good question, and one that is of considerable uncomfortable concern to me, as someone who has his feet very much in what was once advanced new music, and who grew up cutting his teeth in that world. The idea that early music is in some form a retreat, or a safe haven from this so-called uneasy listening stuff, is one that I find troubling, though there is probably a certain measure of truth to it. It is one of the areas of finding something different and new, and yet which is somehow approachable, and thus it becomes a kind of substitute new musical experience. I like to think that there are much more positive sides to the flourishing of so-called early music, otherwise I would feel very, very uncomfortable being involved in it. But that element is certainly there on the part of certain segments of the audience, and I fear it probably can’t be denied. But, as I say, I like to think there are better reasons to it.

BD:   How did you go from cutting your teeth on the new music to wanting to be involved almost completely with the old music?

Rifkin:   I should say that I’ve not severed completely my connections with new music. When I am conducting modern orchestras, and able to do music other than Baroque and Classic repertory, I still try to do my share of twentieth-century music. It may not be the most advanced scores which are very, very difficult to do on rehearsal schedules that one has, and for which I probably have not had enough experience in recent years simply to step in and do. But I still do my share of Stravinsky, and recently in Mexico I had the pleasure of conducting Silvestre Revueltas and this repertory. I try to keep my hand in somewhat, and stay close to what I feel is almost my birth rite. But to answer the question directly about how the emphasis seemed to shift, first of all I was always interested in early music, even in the days when I was in Darmstadt studying with Stockhausen. I did keep a sideline going in Bach particularly, by performing it and getting very interested in so-called historically informed performance. As my life started to shift away from composition, which happened in my twenties, I must confess that I lost faith with European serialism. This interest in other music, particularly in earlier music, started to loom larger and larger, and I became very deeply involved in it as a researcher and historian, and also increasingly as a performer. Gradually, through a series of circumstances, I found myself landing in that world where we were doing this repertory with, of course, the instruments suited to it, and with the appropriate forces, which is a musical sub-world all its own. Without having expected to, I found myself a part of this sub-world, and it has loomed large in my life ever since.

BD:   It seems that there are lot of people who are interested either in performing or listening to Baroque and new music, leaving a big gaping hole in the middle. Is this an odd occurrence, or is it perfectly natural?

Rifkin:   I think it’s perfectly natural. This is, of course, part of the flipside of the question that you originally posed about early music as an escape. There is also early music as a second field of interest of people who had gravitated to difficult new music, and particularly interestingly enough, among many performers. There are many notable specialists in both fields, or people who had been in one and then increasingly became involved with the other. It’s not that well known that Sigiswald Kuijken, for example, was a specialist in advanced new music in his student days. Now he is involved mostly in Baroque violin playing. One of two violinists in the Bach Ensemble, Linda Quan, is noted both as a Baroque specialist and as one of the leading fiddlers on the New York new music scene, chewing up the most fearsome scores one day, and then playing most elegant Bach and Vivaldi the next.

BD:   But never Bruckner or Mahler?

Rifkin:   The gap is less something willed by people. There are some whose interests and sympathies seem to skip over that period. There are also many who don’t skip over that, and I would count myself among them. The great Romantic repertory is also very close to my heart, but then certain practical considerations arise as the circumstances and groups with which one is performing. One has more chance of playing Bach one day and Dallapiccola the next, than of doing those two and then conducting a Bruckner symphony the day after. But again, I must confess that when I do get modern orchestral jobs, I try to do my share of that repertory, because it is very close to my heart.

BD:   Should a program have both Bach and Dallapiccola, rather than all Bach or all Dallapiccola?

Rifkin:   I’m in very mixed minds about that. I’m never sure really, to be quite honest. It’s harder today, given just the questions of equipment. You play Dallapiccola on different equipment from that which you use for Bach, although in this age, where increasingly we do have players who can go back and forth, it does become more feasible. A colleague of mine, one of the members of the Bach Ensemble who is building a career as a conductor, has players in his ensemble who can do both. On the first half, they do one of the Brandenburg Concertos on original instruments, and the second half will have Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks on its original instruments. So, this may become more prevalent, but the practical difficulties still stand in the way. Sadly, although there is some overlap in the audiences, there are probably more different audiences, so it might be hard to get enough people who will come and want to hear both things.

BD:   Half the audience will be disappointed in one or the other half of the concert?

Rifkin:   At least a good percentage, yes.

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BD: You mentioned that you play Bach as authentically informed as possible. How much information is enough information?

Rifkin: There is never enough information. You can never have too much information. There are those who would contend that if you have too much information, somehow your own individuality and your own imagination will be impaired. But if anybody feels that his or her imagination would be impaired by this, then he or she probably doesn’t have that much imagination to begin with! The information one gets is crucial and inexhaustible. It does provide objective foundations for things in the sense of answering the basic level questions. We take those answers for granted, perhaps wrongly in much later practice, i.e., exactly what kind of instruments, and how many, and at what pitch? What are the tempos supposed to be? All of these things have to be rethought from the ground up in repertories that do not have a continuing performance tradition. Perhaps sometimes they ought to be rethought from the ground up in other repertories as well.
rifkin

BD:   Would it be helpful to have recordings conducted by Bach, and performance tapes from that period?

Rifkin:   Oh, absolutely! I would love to have them. I suppose there are some who wouldn’t, but I would thrive on them. When I conduct twentieth-century music, of which there exist recordings conducted by the composer, or done by artists very closely associated with the composer, I naturally snap these up, because they are so many questions that the score alone will not answer.

BD:   That doesn’t put you in a straight jacket when it comes to your own interpretation, and your own stamp of imagination?

Rifkin:   No, I don’t think so, and this is the second part of having the information. The information is always a challenge. It suggests new possibilities, and it makes my job more interesting. It pushes me to define better what my personality is and what my imagination is. I can get a more complex understanding of what I am bringing to a piece, and then what the composer has brought to it, and finally what the audience brings. That is how we all get together. I often think of Robert Frost’s line, when he was asked why he didn’t write free verse. He said it was because it’s like playing tennis without the net! For me, performing music without trying to get a handle on as much of the various elements that go into determining the original image of sound that the composer had as possible, is really being very lazy, and making things too easy on myself. I do this not because I have a modest perception of my own abilities and my own personality as a performer. If anything, it is for precisely the opposite reason. I have a fairly large ego, and a healthy respect for what I can bring to this process. So, for that very reason it is much more interesting to me to enter into a dialogue of some sort with a musician whom I hold to be great, and even a better musician that I. It’s no false modesty to say that I think Bach is a better musician than I am. I have something to learn from him, and I have something to learn from Stravinsky when I do his music.

BD:   Is this to say that you only play music of great composers?

Rifkin:   I don’t only play music of so-called great composers, but I have a certain weakness for the tendency always to come back to them. I am a very traditional canonist in that way. I try to play great music, and sometimes great music is written by composers who do not have a thoroughly great output.

BD:   Just a single stroke of genius, perhaps?

Rifkin:   A single stroke of genius, or in some ways great music, however we define it. It interests me perhaps less than strong music, or powerful music, or music that speaks and is beautifully imagined and beautifully made. I take as an example, again, recently of having done Silvestre Revueltas’s Homenaje a Federico García Lorca, and the pleasure of doing this in Mexico with Mexican musicians. Now is Revueltas a great composer in the ultimate canon? I don’t know, and I don’t care! Is he a special composer, or a composer with a special voice? He was a special force who wrote some wonderful music, particularly this piece. It is as perfectly imagined and realized as you could think of. He definitely is that, so this is real music and powerful music. So, if that’s the definition of great music, it’s great music.

BD:   So, great or not, it’s worth exploring?

Rifkin:   Yes. I always have to feel gripped by the music I am doing, and feel that the music is making a powerful statement in its own voice. There is some music that does not, but there is a great deal of music that does, and I constantly gravitate towards that music. It’s music that engages me and stretches me.

BD:   Can you tell that it does or does not grab you just from looking through the score, or must you actually hear it?

Rifkin:   Usually, I can tell by looking through the score. It’s part of the professional skill one has to have, but there are sometimes when you can’t tell. Let me refine that... one can always tell if a piece has something to it, but you can never tell quite all that it has until you’re actually hearing it. You can be the world’s best score reader, and have the most wonderful sonic imagination, nevertheless, the physical reality of the sound is something you can never fully know until you are experiencing it.

BD:   Let me ask the real easy question. What is the purpose of music?

Rifkin:   [Smiles] Ah, the really easy question! The really easy answer is none whatever, or I don’t know. I’ve never bothered with that question, to be quite honest, because if I really got serious about it, I might conclude that it has no purpose, and if it’s pointless, then what am I doing with it? I simply can’t stop doing it. I find myself compelled to do this strange and perhaps purposeless thing, and for me it has a purpose by virtue of its sheer necessity. So, I do it because I have to do it, and luckily I find that there are other people who also have to do it, and who have to have it done, and occasionally some of them and my own self come into conjunction. Then one has the really supremely marvelous experience of feeling that what one is doing with the music does matter to people and makes a difference in their lives. That is also an answer to your question, because that is about the best thing that I know of in life.
rifkin

BD:   You say that you and the audiences will intersect occasionally. When you make recordings, there’s more chance of random intersection over the years. Are you pleased with the recordings that you have made?

Rifkin:   Hmmm… I have very, very ambivalent feelings about the recordings I’ve made, because every recording documents a particular stage in your relationship to a piece, and of course you change, while the recordings are keeping your past sins alive.

BD:   Not your past brilliances?

Rifkin:   Everyone who makes recordings really notices the flaws in them. I sometimes think of the recording process as the ultimate Sisyphean experience. You’ll never get that stone over the hill. You have this dream of how this piece might go, and you seek to realize that in some way. Because of the level of detail in which you have to work, both in recording and then in editing, you are put face up against everything that goes wrong, and against everything that doesn’t succeed as you wish it would have succeeded. So, in a way, in trying to realize the dream you destroy it hopelessly. Having said that, I am pleased with a lot of my recordings in the sense that they have mattered to some people. They were the best I could do at the time, and they still preserve certain values. When I listen to them after a long enough interval, and I no longer am living in the horror of everything that went wrong with them, I can say they are really not so bad. Sometimes I can even have the feeling that I did have some talent once. [Sighs] Then I wonder where it all went. It’s a very mixed thing, but one tries to make the recordings honestly and do the best at the time. So for that reason, I am comfortable with them. I’m not ashamed that they’re out there, and I am very gratified that some of them at least have reached people. From what people sometimes tell me, they have made a difference in their lives. What more can one ask for?

BD:   Let me go back to some of your earliest recordings, the Scott Joplin Rags. These are still being listened to today, and yet they have a four-squareness about them, which intrigues a lot of people.

Rifkin:   Yes, but I’m not terribly competent to comment on them. I’ve also not listened to them in a very, very long time. I still do play these pieces. I have to give a handful of concerts each year, but at one point I did a cold-turkey withdrawal from playing this music publicly, simply because it was taking over the rest of my life. I felt that it would start to become a job, and if it became job, it would no longer be an activity of love and passion. But after several years away, I still received invitations, and finally decided I could go back to it. I still play them just as I did then, but I’m also aware that things have changed over the years. I can’t quite judge everything detail, but I’m only conscious of how I play them now. It may sound just the same to someone who doesn’t know them as intimately as I do, or they may sound very different. I really don’t know, but I can say that it’s pleasing to me. A while ago I also made recordings of some Brazilian tangos, wonderful pieces by a Brazilian composer named Ernesto Nazareth. One day I was at a party, and somebody told me of hearing these recordings. They’d never heard the music before, but knew that I was playing, and apparently recognized me by the sound, and the way the piano was being played, and the way the phrases were done. I find it pleasing that somehow there is something distinctive that this person would say there was a voice that was recognizably mine, even in pieces that people did not know. Going back to the relationship between how I might have played Joplin twenty-five years ago, and how I would play today, even if the voice has developed and evolved and changed, it is still the same voice.

BD:   At the time, was it pleasing to you that they were the first forays into Joplin to come out on recordings?

Rifkin:   They were not quite the first but they were probably the first of a certain kind, so yes, that was very pleasing to me. That was one of the reasons I did it. I recorded Joplin because I’d become very enamored of this music. I was playing it a lot, and wanted to see it get a certain kind of due that it had not got until then. I had the good fortune to be situated at a record company for whom I was making records of fifteenth century French secular music. So I had the ability to go to them and ask to record Joplin, because I felt that it was music that should be presented in a certain way on a certain kind of label. Luckily, they saw the point of this immediately, and supported the project. So I just had the good fortune of being in a position to carry this particular whim of mine to fruition, and see something happen with it.

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BD:   You’re a performer and a conductor and scholar. How do you juggle these various endeavors?

Rifkin:   It’s simply a job of doing what one is doing at any given time. I used to wonder about this to some extent, and it has become very simple. I go where the work is. I’m a freelancer, which means I’m dependent on the various jobs that come in. They can be going to play Joplin Rags or Nazareth Tangos, or they can be to conduct Billy the Kid, or the Bach B Minor Mass, or to attend the conference on problems of borrowing techniques in the fifteenth century! I have a certain measure of skills in those things, and a certain reputation in all those areas, so if I accept a job, I do it, and whatever I do must be done to the exclusion of everything else for that time. I become totally immersed in that work, or that job, and basically I shut everything else out. That defines my world. It is, and must be, a matter of sublime disinterest to anybody who is hearing this performance that I do anything else but the piece they are hearing. The fact that I may conduct other music is absolutely irrelevant, as is my writing a paper on Bach. The only question worth asking is about the experience we have at that moment in that situation, and what I am doing there.

BD:   I would think that if you were writing a paper on Bach, having conducted Bach would be a plus not a minus.

Rifkin:   It can be a plus, and it can help make the paper a better one. But the fact that I have done it does not make the paper any better. I would never want to be a good pianist for a conductor, or a good conductor for a good scholar, and a good scholar for a keyboard player. If I seriously felt that I were, I would have to quit tomorrow because it’s not really very interesting, and it is of no meaning, as I say to the audiences who are there with whom I am sharing the musical experience. The only thing that matters is getting great music here and now. Everything else is gravy. After all, I could be a nuclear physicist in my spare time, and that also wouldn’t have anything to do with this.

BD:   But it might help you encourage people not to blow up the rest of the world.
peanuts

Rifkin:   Well, I’d hope so, yes. If that enabled me to speak with a certain credibility on that issue, that my being a poor working musician doesn’t give me, I would hope to be able to use it to that effect.

BD:   When you perform, should your music bring it to life, and speak the same way to other musicians as it does to nuclear physicists, or the day laborer, or the academic?

Rifkin:   Music will speak the same way to everybody, but be heard differently. Music speaks a rich enough language, and speaks it in a rich enough way that everybody can take something different from it. Certainly one of the traditional signs of great music, or any great art, is that it allows many, many different possibilities. It is silly, and indeed bordering on the pernicious, to suggest that there are better ways of hearing it and receiving it. When I was a snotty kid growing up as a New York intellectual, I shared the usual attitude, and made the usual jokes about the old ladies who didn’t know anything about art, but knew what they liked. There is a Peanuts cartoon [shown at right] where Schroeder is about to listen to a record of the Brahms Fourth. Lucy asks him if he was going to dance to it, and he says no! Is he going to do this and that, and sing and jump? No, no! He was just going to listen to it. In both of these stories there is an implicit hierarchy of values.

BD:   I remember she was appalled that he would just listen and not dance.

Rifkin:   That’s right, but we were supposed to take the other side, and feel that. It’s appalling that she could be so dumb, but now, increasingly I’m on the side of Lucy and the little old lady. I feel that there is equal justice on that side, and that it is every bit as profound, and valid, and valuable experience for those who are experiencing it as the more academically knowledgeable. I think that each of those experiences, of dancing to the music, or cooking to it, or just going in and enjoying what one likes, is as valid and profound in its own way as the more traditionally acceptable ways of approaching art with sophisticated knowledge, which half the time turns out to be not so sophisticated anyway.

BD:   Is music the universal language?

Rifkin:   Some music is a universal language. One has to qualify obviously the term. I don’t think there is any one music that is appreciated by everybody all over the world, but there are musics which reach many, many different people all over the world, and very, very heterogeneous groups of people who go far, far beyond the particular place where that music originated. These can be particularly home groups to whom that music is most immediately speaking. I can cite a very lovely comment that was made to me by a musician with whom I was working in Mexico, the violist of the Cuarteto Latinoamericano, a wonderful string quartet there. We were talking about my doing Silvestre Revueltas there in Mexico, and my being someone from outside of that culture, and outside of that society. He said it doesn’t matter, that it doesn’t mean anything because we all come to feel and identify with music, whether we are from Mexico City, or Seattle, or Tel Aviv, or Moscow. When making music in any of these places, he said, the music is there, and I think this is very, very true. We can all achieve levels of identification with many different musics, and sometimes we know that the music with which we identify in a native way is not nominally our music. I suppose that is an aspect of the universality, and the wonderful thing about music which is that no music belongs to any given personal group of people. What may be their music, the music of their society or culture, is equally other people’s music, and what is each person’s own music may be this other music. But the music is always there.

BD:   I remember Dennis Russell Davies telling me that if the Beethoven Ninth isn’t a Japanese piece, nothing is!

Rifkin:   Exactly! It’s a piece with which they identify so profoundly and so deeply.

BD:   Thank you for coming and bringing your talent to everyone.

Rifkin:   Oh, thank you very much.

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This conversation was recorded in Evanston, Illinois, on April 30, 1996. Portions were broadcast on WNIB two months later, and again in 1999. This transcription was made in 2024, 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.

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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.

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.