Robert Xavier Rodríguez Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Composer Robert Xavier Rodríguez

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

[Photo taken at the Copland House, Peekskill, NY, 2001]

Robert Xavier Rodríguez is “one of the major American composers of his generation” (Texas Monthly). His music has been described as “Romantically dramatic” (Washington Post), “richly lyrical” (Musical America) and “glowing with a physical animation and delicate balance of moods that combine seductively with his all-encompassing sense of humor” (Los Angeles Times). “Its originality lies in the telling personality it reveals. His music always speaks, and speaks in the composer’s personal language.” (American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters). Rodríguez has written in all genres — opera, orchestral, concerto, ballet, vocal, choral, chamber, solo and music for the theater — but he has been drawn most strongly in recent years to works for the stage, including music for children.

Rodríguez (born June 28, 1946) received his early musical education in San Antonio and in Austin (UT), Los Angeles (USC), Lenox (Tanglewood), Fontainebleau (Conservatoire Américain) and Paris. His teachers have included Nadia Boulanger, Jacob Druckman, Bruno Maderna and Elliott Carter. Rodríguez first gained international recognition in 1971, when he was awarded the Prix de Composition Musicale Prince Pierre de Monaco by Prince Rainier and Princess Grace at the Palais Princier in Monte Carlo. Other honors include the Prix Lili Boulanger, a Guggenheim Fellowship, awards from ASCAP and the Rockefeller Foundation, five NEA grants and the Goddard Lieberson Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Rodríguez has served as Composer-in-Residence with the San Antonio Symphony and the Dallas Symphony. He currently holds the Endowed Chair of University Professor at The University of Texas at Dallas, where he is Director of the Musica Nova ensemble. He is active as a guest lecturer and conductor.

Rodríguez’ music has been performed by conductors such as Sir Neville Marriner, Antal Dorati, Eduardo Mata, James DePreist, Sir Raymond Leppard, Keith Lockhart and Leonard Slatkin. His work has received over 2000 professional orchestral and operatic performances in recent seasons by such organizations as the Vienna Schauspielhaus, The National Opera of Mexico, New York City Opera, Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Repertory Theater, American Music Theater Festival (now Prince Music Theater), Dallas Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Pennsylvania Opera Theater, Michigan Opera Theatre, Orlando Opera, The Aspen Music Festival, The Bowdoin Festival, The Juilliard Focus and Summergarden Series, The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Mexico City Philharmonic, Toronto Radio Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, The Baltimore, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Knoxville, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Boston and Chicago Symphonies, The Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Louisville Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra. Rodríguez' chamber works have been performed in London, Paris, Dijon, Monte Carlo, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, The Hague and other musical centers. His music is published exclusively by G. Schirmer and is recorded on the Newport, Crystal, Orion, Gasparo, Pro Arte, ACA, Urtext, CRI (Grammy nomination), First Edition, Schott, Naxos and Albany labels.

== Text of biography from the composer’s official website [with correction]
== Names which are links in this box (and below) refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website. BD

In November of 1998, Robert Rodríguez was in Chicago, and I had the pleasure of sitting down with him for an interview. The conversation centered on his works, as well as his thoughts and ideas about music in general. There was quite a bit of laughter, as well as deep emotional and intellectual thought.
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Portions of the chat were aired on WNIB, Classical 97, WNUR, and Contemporary Classical Internet Radio. Now, as he continues into his 80th year, I am pleased to present a transcript of the entire encounter, along with images of a few of his many recordings.

Bruce Duffie:   You are both a composer and teacher. How do you divide your time between those two taxing activities?

Robert Xavier Rodríguez:   I spend most of my time composing. I’m lucky to have a good situation at the University of Texas at Dallas, in which I do a little bit of teaching. The teaching I do is enriching to me, because our university does not have a music degree. It’s a very unusual university in that it was basically a science school years ago. Then it added arts and humanities, so I teach humanities, and aesthetics, and the creative process. I do a good deal of team teaching with scholars from other fields. I teach a course right now with the head of the psychology department called The Psychology of Music, and I also teach a course called Decadence and Transfiguration with a literature specialist. We look at Vienna and Berlin from the death of Wagner to the rise of Hitler through literature, philosophy, music, visual arts, theater, and history. So that kind of teaching I find very enriching to me as a composer, because I’m basically a theatrical composer. I deal with extra-musical ideas first, and I find myself writing music to express those extra-musical ideas.

BD:   Do the ideas that come to you then influence how you write, or just what you write?

Rodríguez:   How I write. What I write is always a mystery. What anybody writes is always a mystery [both laugh]. The extra-musical idea that gets me started is the most important thing for me.

BD:   When you’re putting notes on the paper, are you controlling where that pencil goes, or are there times when the pencil is leading your hand across the page?

Rodríguez:   As I mentioned before, the word ‘mystery’ definitely applies. My teacher, Nadia Boulanger in Paris, used to play for us the first few notes of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, which is essentially a D major scale essentially, and she would say, “It’s a scale. I could have written that. Anyone could have written that, but it’s a mystery that someone could have put that scale in such a way that makes it unforgettable and distinct from any other use of that major scale.” So how to do that is essentially a mystery, and I revere that mysterious side of composition. One acquires as rigorous a technique as one can, and then becomes inspired by ideas. The rest is really, I feel, out of my hands. In fact, very often when I’m working on a piece, I can’t wait to get back to it. The way I read a mystery novel to see how it’s going to come out. I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen to it. I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen in the next chapter, to see ‘who dunnit’!

BD:   [With a wink] Do you peek at the last page?

Rodríguez:   [Laughs] I don’t peek at the last page, although sometimes I start at the end, and work up to it. But even that’s a mystery!

BD:   Once your piece has been heard, do you think that it’s no longer a mystery to the people who have heard the ending, or are we talking just about the compositional process?

Rodríguez:   I’m talking about the process, although if a piece is any good, it retains some element of mystery about it. The people who hear it will hear new things in it every time. It won’t reveal the totality of itself the first time, so they won’t feel they’ve got the whole thing.

BD:   Have you, the composer, got the whole thing?

Rodríguez:   No! No, not at all! In fact, I do a good deal of conducting and coaching performers in my own music. I know what I want, and I’m good at getting what I want from performers. When people ask me whether I am as effective getting what I want from performers working in standard repertoire, I always say that I’m much better with standard repertoire because I know it better. I’m just learning my own music, and I’m just figuring out what can be done with it, because there are layers that I have yet to discover about it.

BD:   Have you yet written any piece where you’ve discovered all the layers?

Rodríguez:   I hope not! [Both laugh]

BD:   Have we discovered all the layers in the standard works?

Rodríguez:   Again, I hope not! [More laughter]

BD:   When you’re writing the piece, do you consciously put in these layers, or is it just part of the mystery?

Rodríguez:   It’s part of the mystery, because it’s certainly not a matter of complexity. By having multilayers, I certainly do not mean complexity. There are just some pieces of music that one can hear every day, and still hear something new in them just because they’re endlessly fresh. Nadia Boulanger used to say there was more genius in the little song Tea for Two than in all the symphonies of Bruckner put together, and I would tend to agree. So it’s not a question of complexity, but rather a mysterious freshness, or a mysterious attraction. Thomas Aquinas talked about the magical combination of three simple ingredients in beauty, which are unity, clarity, and proportion.
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BD: But you have to know when to add a dash of this and a dash of that ingredient, do you not?

Rodríguez: Yes. One knows, and then one doesn’t know why. One just does it. After all, if you knew why, and you’d do it every time, it wouldn’t be worth doing, because then anybody could do it. I don’t know why things work, or why they don’t work. They just do or they don’t.

* * * * *

BD:   Let me ask you a different ‘why’ question. Why do you do music?

Rodríguez:   I write music because I like to listen to it, just the way a chef cooks, if he’s any good, because he likes to eat. I never trust a skinny chef, and I write the kind of music I want to listen to. I write pieces that if I didn’t write them, I couldn’t listen to them, just as a chef makes something that he wants to eat.

BD:   I assume you’re a fan of your own music.

Rodríguez:   I am! I like my own music, yes, I do!

BD:   Does it surprise you at all that there are others who are fans of your music? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at right, see my interviews with Robert Linn, and William Kraft.]

Rodríguez:   I’m more surprised when people don’t like my music, but I like to think that I’m effective at communicating. After all, when I’m speaking to one audience, I’m speaking to that audience and not to another audience. The way I would explain something to a six-year-old would be different from how I would explain it to a college professor. So what I would write for one kind of audience would not necessarily be the same kind of music I would write for another audience. I like to try to communicate with the kind of audience I’m specifically addressing in the piece I’m writing for. Actually, I’m kind of greedy about that too, because I really want it all. I’ve written a lot of pieces for children’s audiences, that orchestras play on children’s concerts. I realize that those symphony players are going to have to play those pieces over and over, because children’s concerts are not just something you do once. Sometimes you do two, or four, or ten, or twelve of them, and I’m very pleased when players tell me that they’ve played something of mine twelve times, and they enjoy it more every time. I have a children’s opera called Monkey See, Monkey Do!, which has had over a thousand performances. One company in particular did a hundred performances, and one of the cast members said he enjoyed it after the hundredth time! Obviously, in that situation I’m speaking not only to the six-year-olds in the audience, but to the jaded professionals who have to perform it.

BD:   Also to the parents who have brought the kids?

Rodríguez:   Right, exactly!

BD:   I can imagine the professionals enjoying it, and I can imagine the kids enjoying it, but the parents who may or may not rather be at the ball game?

Rodríguez:   I don’t expect everyone is going to get everything about it, but I try to provide something for everyone. So there will be surface clarity as well as richness of construction, and games that the professionals will recognize.

BD:   Are most of the pieces you write on commission?

Rodríguez:   Everything I write is on commission. I do this for a living.

BD:   When you get an offer of a commission, how do you decide whether or not you’ll spend the time on it?

Rodríguez:   I’m lucky about that. Most of the people who come to me for pieces have some room for discussion about what they want, so I can often lead a commissioner to something I want to do anyway. One of my favorite Mexican jokes is of the general who was riding through the countryside, and saw a series of targets painted on the wall of the public square. Each target had a perfect bull’s-eye shot in the middle of it. The general called the town elders and asked who this marvelous marksman was. An elder replied that anyone can do this in our village. It’s very simple... We shoot at the wall, and then we draw a target around it! [Both laugh]

BD:   Wherever they’ve shot is the bull’s-eye!

Rodríguez:   Exactly! So, when I try to develop projects, and find things I want to do, then I find people who will want me to do them.

BD:   Do you find that most times the performers hit the bull’s-eye with your music?
rodriguez

Rodríguez:   I think so. After all, performers are ultimately the most important audience for me in particular, and for music in general, because if the performers don’t enjoy playing it, they’re not going to play it, and if they do enjoy it, they’ll play it well. Then the audience will receive it because the performers will have played it with conviction. The critics and everyone else will follow. Without the performer, nothing happens, so almost exclusively it’s about communicating with the performer. I really don’t think about audiences.

BD:   [Surprised] Not at all???

Rodríguez:   Not to that extent. I think of the performer in the situation of getting up in front of the audience, and how well that performer is prepared with my music.

BD:   Once you write the music, and you give it to the performer, is it still your music, or does it become either the performer’s music or the public’s music?

Rodríguez:   Jorge Luis Borges said, “Anything good belongs to everyone,” and I think that’s true.

BD:   [With a gentle nudge] Is your music good?

Rodríguez:   [Smiles] Of course it’s good! So, if it’s good, then it doesn’t belong to me anymore. It’s funny, when people talk to me about my music, they talk about it as if it were written by somebody else. They’ll say to me, “Now in the Rodríguez, we need to try this,” as if Rodríguez were some other person! There’s proof that it doesn’t belong to me anymore.

BD:   Is your music great?

Rodríguez:   Well, that’s not for me to say! I like it, and I’m very critical of it. I revise it all the time. I’ve withdrawn pieces from my catalogue. I once withdrew a piece the night before a premiere because I decided it just wasn’t good enough. So I’m critical.

BD:   Have you withdrawn or revised pieces after a first performance?

Rodríguez:   Yes, I’ve done that.

BD:   Does that drive the performers and the publishers crazy?

Rodríguez:   Yes, it does. [Laughs] In fact, one group commissioned a piece, which I wrote, and they liked it perfectly well. Then I decided to rewrite it, and they didn’t like it.

BD:   Who was correct?

Rodríguez:   I was, of course! [Both laugh]

BD:   We’ve been immersed in original versions of this and that. Should there be an Original Rodríguez Performing Society?

Rodríguez:   Hmmm... You have to consider the circumstances of the revision. So many revisions of distant history were not necessarily because of the composer’s wishes. They were just circumstances. If Verdi did a version for this or that artist, or had someone who wanted another aria, or if an opera was produced in Paris and it needed a ballet, these things were done by circumstance rather than by choice.

BD:   But your revisions are by choice not by circumstance?

Rodríguez:   Exactly, by choice not by circumstance.
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BD:   If someone comes to you and says “We like your piece, but we’d like an additional thing here, and little bit taken out there,” you’d decline?

Rodríguez:   No, I’m accommodating. I’ve learned a great deal from performers. I listen to people’s advice, and revised accordingly. With musical theater, that kind of fine tuning is enormously important. For my opera, Frida, we took it on the road from Philadelphia, to Boston, to Vermont, night after night, trying it out with audiences to see where the yawns, and where the laughs, and where the tears would come. By the time it got to New York, it was fine-tuned. Then my librettist colleagues and I continued to revise it up until it was done at the Houston Grand Opera. So the advice of colleagues, and the experience of trying it out on audiences is very much a part of the picture. I consider the music a collaborative experience. I even used wrong notes from time to time. If a singer is singing something I wrote, and sings a wrong note, sometimes the wrong note is sung because it felt right, and I’ll take it and use it.

BD:   That becomes the right note?

Rodríguez:   Then it becomes the right note. I’m very open to the ideas of performers and collaborators.

BD:   Tell me the joys and sorrows of working with the human voice. [Vis-à-vis the recording of Frida shown at left, see my interview with Angelina Réaux. A later recording of Tango (again conducted by the composer) was made by tenor Paul Sperry.]

Rodríguez:   I love the human voice. The human voice is my favorite instrument, and if I had my choice, I would only write operas. Voices are so individual, and they give you so much feedback. You know instantly whether a piece is working in a voice. The dangers are so great, and the rewards are so great. The stakes are higher with voices, and with comedy. My favorite medium to work in is comedy, comic opera, because there’s no net. You make a joke, and they laugh or you die! There are no other possibilities, especially with children. Children are not polite. If children are bored, they’ll wiggle, and talk, and run around. So a piece of music to keep thousands of six-year-olds quiet, and laughing, and interested, is a challenge, and I enjoy working with that kind of judge.

BD:   I take it you’ve met that challenge many times?

Rodríguez:   Yes, those pieces that I’ve written for that medium tend to get played and played. So I feel that I’ve contributed something to the repertoire. I like to feel that I’ve addressed a need. Stravinsky always used to use the expression ‘who needs it?’ when referring to other people’s music, and I think about that phrase very much in terms of my own music. Who needs it? After all, if there’s going to be 104 symphonies of Haydn, and so many operas by so many great composers, why should I bother to try to write a single note? The answer is that I will write if I can address some specific need to create something that doesn’t exist, but somebody needs, and that somebody wants, and can play again and again.

BD:   Speaking of the six-year-olds that you captivate with one of the opera performances, ten years later are they going to be the sixteen-year-olds that come to a teenage concert, and ten years after that will they be the twenty-six-year-olds that come to a big concert hall for one of your pieces?

Rodríguez:   That’s my hope, and that’s the hope of the people who put on those kinds of productions. Children’s concerts are the research and development of the music field, and it’s a big mistake to treat that field as a step-child. Most symphony orchestras and opera companies will spend ninety-plus per cent of their budgets producing their subscription season — what they call the mainstage — and then they’ll have a step-child outreach educational program, which is often very good, but it’s clear that they’re giving it a very small percentage of their budget, and their attention, and their emphasis. I think that’s a fatal decision. Youth concerts should be produced with all of the splendor of the mainstage concerts. I remember those marvelous productions that Leonard Bernstein used to do at the young people’s concerts with the greatest guest artists in Carnegie Hall. They were giving the children the very best, and it showed. Now, my generation has grown up loving music as a result.

BD:   You want to make sure that the seed money is there for the next generation?

Rodríguez:   Right! That’s a very important field, so I’ve devoted a great deal of my energy to that field.

BD:   Are you trying to get them to come to concerts that has music of Rodríguez, or concerts that will have Rossini and Berg, and all of the others?

Rodríguez:   It’s all the same. Anything that helps one of us, helps all of us. I’ve been very active as an administrator and advocate in the cause of new music, working with Texas composers for raising money and giving concerts, and giving grants to other composers. If the pie gets bigger, we’ll all get bigger pieces of it.

* * * * *

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

Rodríguez:   [Smiles] I like Copland’s answer, which is to show what it feels like to be alive today. It is just as a dog barks to say, “Dog here!” [both laugh], or a bird chirps to say, “Bird here!”

BD:   Are you saying, “Music here!”?

Rodríguez:   Perhaps I am saying, “Human being here!” because the greatest gift a composer can give an audience is the expression or his or her personality, We know what it’s like to be Mozart as a person by hearing Mozart’s music, and to know what it felt like to be alive in 18th century Vienna. Peter Shaffer, in his play Amadeus, asks the profound question of the audience. He had his Salieri character turn to the 20th century audience, and say, “And who in your day is going to represent you? Who is going to show what it was like for you to be alive? What have you left behind?”

BD:   You are one of those representatives?

Rodríguez:   I think so. The artists of a generation hold up a mirror to the society in which they live, and they show the people what it’s like to be themselves.

BD:   Do they hold up a true mirror, or is it one that they bend and shape a little bit?

Rodríguez:   It’s a little of both. Accuracy is always in the eye of the beholder. One can see what one is looking for. After all, one can shine the mirror on different aspects of the society, because societies are vast. So where one shine the mirror tells a great deal.

BD:   Are you part of a lineage of composers?

Rodríguez:   I think of myself in terms of my predecessors, because I’m very conscious how my music fits into the continuum of what has gone before. When I write a piece for children, I think of what else has been written in that genre. Is there any room for me in this continuum? I don’t want to waste my time, and waste other people’s time creating something that’s going to end up played once, and stuck away in a closet. I’m in this for the long-term, and try to write pieces that will get hundreds of performances.

BD:   How do you balance being part of this line, and yet be original?

Rodríguez:   One can’t really think about being original. One either is or isn’t. You can’t say you’re going to be original, or you’re going to be funny, or you’re going to be brilliant, or you’re going to make someone fall in love with you. Those are all mysterious things, which is where we began this conversation. Originality is something you just have to trust, like Queen Victoria, who never looked behind her to see whether a chair was there. When she would sit, she would simply gather her skirt and sit, being confident that every movement she made was seen by attendants, and that a chair would be there when she sat down.

BD:   If it ever wasn’t there, someone would be beheaded! [Both laugh]

Rodríguez:   Right! Heads would roll! I have to trust that originality and inspiration will be there.

BD:   And in the right balance?

Rodríguez:   Right, and if I fall, then I pick myself up and revise. There’s no other way to do it.

BD:   Let me ask one other balance question. In your music, where is the balance between the art and the entertainment?

Rodríguez:   I don’t see a distinction. Art is simply construction for aesthetic experience, and entertainment is also construction for aesthetic experience. I honestly do not make a distinction. There is good art and bad art, and that’s all there is to it. Art is engaging or it’s not. If there’s art some would call only entertainment, I would still call it art. I just wouldn’t call it especially good art.

BD:   [Gently protesting] There has to be some way of getting from a Rossini farce to Berg’s Lulu, and yet they’re both operas.

Rodríguez:   And they’re both great! I don’t think a Rossini farce is any less great than Lulu, anymore than I think Tea for Two is any less great than a Bruckner symphony! There can be magic in the simplest things.

* * * * *

BD:   Can one assume you’ve basically been pleased with the performances you’ve heard of your music over the years?

Rodríguez:   Yes. These days, I try to notate my music more effectively. The more I conduct, the more I try to make my scores foolproof, so that the performers cannot fail to do what I want by looking at the page.

BD:   Do you want them to do exactly what you want, or should they put something of themselves in it?

Rodríguez:   Exactly what I want is for them to put some of themselves in it. [Both laugh] If a piece is good, it’s not going to have just one way to do it. But there are many ways to be misunderstood, so I try not to be misunderstood, but to provide a framework in which the performers can exercise their own creativity in ways that still says what I want to say.

BD:   So you’re littering your scores more and more with notations, rather than leaving them more and more clean?

Rodríguez:   As Stravinsky said, “Chains are liberating.” The more precise I am, the more the performer knows what I want, and if the performer knows what I want, then he has a clear framework to do his thing. If he doesn’t know what I want, then too much freedom is madness. I suppose I could give a performer a blank page...

BD:   John Cage already tried that!

Rodríguez:   [Laughs] That would give a performer complete freedom, but it would also be maddening because there’s no structure to work from.

BD:   I asked if you were pleased with the performances. Have you been pleased with the recordings that have been made of your works, because those have a little more permanence and universality?

Rodríguez:   Yes, very much so. I’ve been pleased to have supervised many of those recordings, and often they’re made by close friends and colleagues. So they represent not only a musical collaboration, but a long-term friendship.

BD:   What advice do you have for the next generation of composers coming along?

Rodríguez:   Listen to performers! Keep in touch with performers. That’s certainly what I tell my students. We’ve seen the unfortunate results of generations of composers who have lost touch with performers, and who went their own ivory tower way. If every component of the experience keeps in touch with every other component — composer/audience/performer — then everyone will profit.

BD:   What advice do you have for those performers?

Rodríguez:   To be in touch with composers, because, as I said, everyone suffers when any one component is missing. Audiences and performers without composers end up reproducing the top forty, and you get musical boredom. You get a museum that doesn’t show it all of what it’s like to be alive today. I’m afraid that attitude is part of the reason why symphony orchestras are folding right and left, because they’re not engaging with the audience in showing them what is to be alive today. People like to go to the theater and the concert hall, and say, “That’s my life up there,” and if they don’t, then they won’t go. It’s as simple as that.

BD:   Are you optimistic about the future of music?

Rodríguez:   Yes, I am, very much so! I am glad to see that when orchestras and opera companies and chamber groups do new music, and do it well, the audience does respond. I’m very encouraged about audiences. I’m less encouraged about managers. It’s the administrators of arts organizations that have both eyes on the box-office, and are terrified when attendance goes from 98% to 97%. Somebody gets up and goes to the john during Beethoven’s Fifth, and nobody thinks anything of it. But if somebody gets up during the premiere of a new piece, the manager is terrified. He thinks they hate it! Audiences have more sensitivity and receptivity than most managers give them credit for.

BD:   So, you trust your audiences?

Rodríguez:   Yes, I do.

BD:   You also trust the musicians, so it’s just the management you don’t trust?

Rodríguez:   Some management! [Both laugh]

* * * * *

BD:   Do you like to be known as Robert Xavier Rodríguez, or just Robert Rodríguez?

Rodríguez:   There are two different people. Robert Xavier Rodríguez is the composer, and I’m Robert Rodríguez. I make it possible for him to write those things.

BD:   It doesn’t make you schizophrenic?

Rodríguez:   No. Most people are like that. They just don’t have two different names for it.

BD:   [After asking his birth-date] You are 52. Are you at the point in your career that you want to be at this age?

Rodríguez:   It’s never enough. I see other composers with more opportunities, and naturally I want more opportunities, but as my friend and colleague, Eduardo Mata, who was for so many years the conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, put it, “I’m pleased but not satisfied.” [Both laugh] He was a great musician, and a great human being.

BD:   Was he an inspiration to you?

Rodríguez:   Yes. He was very much an inspiration and encouragement. He played a great deal of my music. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra has really been a musical home for me. Over the last thirty years, they have played twelve of my pieces, and the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra is surpassing it this season with thirteen.

BD:   You’re composer-in-residence there now?

Rodríguez:   Yes, and I was composer-in-residence with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. I treasure those long-term relationships, and those long musical collaborations. Great things happen when people believe in each other. Texas has a great deal of musical activity in Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and San Antonio, and many smaller towns. That’s another encouraging sign of our times. Fritz Reiner said it very well, “What this country needs is more lousy string quartets,” and I think that’s absolutely right.

BD:   Just to get the music out there?

Rodríguez:   Just to get people out there, trying it for themselves.

BD:   One last question. Is composing fun?

Rodríguez:   Oh, yes! Composing is great fun. As I mentioned, it’s like getting up and wanting to see the next chapter of a page-turner murder mystery. I can’t wait to see the next piece, and to see what happens in it. I enjoy writing my music, and I enjoy listening to it, and I enjoy rehearsing. I enjoy every stage of it.

BD:   When you’re writing the piece, if you want to turn another page, you just write another page! Is it already there in your mind?

Rodríguez:   In a sense it is. Like the old joke about the sculptor who said, “To make the sculpture of an elephant, you just take a block of marble and cut away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.” I do think that for every piece I write, there is something there that I’m looking to find, and I have a general idea what it is.

BD:   Do you always know when you find it?

Rodríguez:   Yes, I know when I’ve found it.

BD:   Do you always find it?

Rodríguez:   No, I don’t always find it, but I always find something! [Both laugh]

BD:   I hope you keep finding lots more pieces.

Rodríguez:   Thank you.

See my interviews with Frank Ferko, Joan Tower, Jennifer Higdon, and Gunther Schuller

In addition to those names already linked, see my interviews with John Harbison, Charles Wuorinen,
John Adams, Christopher Rouse, Elizabeth Larsen, Tobias Picker, Stephen Paulus,
Joseph Schwantner, and Stephen Albert

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on November 19, 1998. Portions were broadcast on WNIB the following year; on WNUR in 2011, and 2014; and on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio in 2011. This transcription was made in 2025, and posted on this website at that time. My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

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

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

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