Composer / Administrator  Allen  Sapp

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie
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Allen Dwight Sapp, Jr. (December 10, 1922, Philadelphia – January 4, 1999, Cincinnati) was a composer of music for piano, voice, chamber, and orchestral music.

A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Sapp was a United States Army veteran who had served as a cryptanalyst in England, France, Belgium, and Germany during World War II. During the 1940s, Sapp earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Harvard University, having studied primarily with Walter Piston and Irving Fine, and privately with Nadia Boulanger and Aaron Copland.

Sapp married Norma Bertolami, a concert pianist and sister of the concert violinist Viviane Bertolami Kirkwood.

Sapp joined the Harvard music faculty in 1950.

After a brief appointment at Wellesley College (1958–61), he was appointed Chair of the music department at the University of Buffalo (later, State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo). While at Buffalo, Sapp presided over many significant projects promoting contemporary music and art, including the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts (with Lukas Foss), and helped build a significant music faculty including the Budapest String Quartet, musicologists Jeremy Noble and James McKinnon, and music librarians James B. Coover and Carol June Bradley.

He also served as director of major national arts initiatives, including the American Council for the Arts in Education (1972–74), and Project Arts/Worth (1971–74).

Sapp served as Provost of Florida State University (1975–78), and as Dean of the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music (CCM) from 1978 to 1980.

From 1980 through the mid-1990s Sapp remained on the faculty of CCM as "Professor of Music," teaching a wide range of courses from music analysis to the history of music theory, and various seminars on special topics. He also taught composition and musicianship in private sessions.

The first president of the board of directors of the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, Sapp retired from his position as professor of composition at the University of Cincinnati in 1993.



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In doing interviews for almost 30 years, the circumstances of gathering them have varied a bit.  Most were done in-person, usually at their hotel or backstage at the performing venue.  A few of my guests came to my home studio.  One, Jorge Mester, agreed to see me on a layover at O’Hare airport, so we met there in an unused conference room!  Several musicians of interest (mainly composers) were not coming to Chicago, so we chatted on the telephone.

Of the guests who came to my home studio for the interview, it was almost always during a visit to Chicago for business or pleasure.  But two actually made the trip specifically for the purpose of speaking with me about their music.  The first was Gene Gutchë, who flew in from Minnesota in June of 1986.  The second was the subject on this webpage, composer and administrator Allen Sapp, who made the journey from Cincinnati in May of 1987.  In both instances, during our initial contact I offered to do it on the phone, but these two felt it important enough to make the journey and speak face-to-face.  [See his letter to me shown at right.]  So, when it was all arranged, we spoke for about an hour-and-a-half, then had a nice dinner, after which we came back and conversed again for another hour or so.  [His warm and lovely thank-you note to me is shown near the bottom-right of this webpage.]

As usual, names which are links on this webpage refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website.


Bruce Duffie:   You’re a composer, and a teacher, and an administrator.  How do you divide your time amongst all of that?

Allen Sapp:   [Laughs]  Rather badly I would say, because the administration phase has ended for me.  I did administration from 1961 until 1981 with gusto, and excitement, and pleasure, and a lot of happiness, and a great deal of fulfillment.  The administrator phase was not only running a college and batches of departments, and doing the whole long-range planning and budgeting.  It was hard toil, not simply running a group of fractious faculties in the music area, but long-range institutional planning, including major campus expansions.

BD:   Did it always go the way you wanted?

Sapp:   No.  The fulfillment doesn’t come from all your plans maturing.   It’s the satisfaction of the give-and-take of battling with colleagues, fighting for your position — whatever it is — and the fun of seeing institutions which are hard to change and hard to move, bend a little bit, give a little bit, grow a little bit.  Sometimes you win some battles and sometimes you don’t, but administration is creative.  It’s satisfying.  It’s a lot of fun, and it brings you in touch with bright and sharp people of all kinds.  It also brings you a lot of opportunities to travel and meet people everywhere under very nice circumstances.  But it has its frustrations, including the inertia, particularly if you’re dealing with a State.  Most of my administrative work has been with State systems in New York, Florida, and Ohio, where you are dealing with the political process and educational policy in the State.

BD:   Are the States different?  Is New York different from Florida, and different from Ohio?

Sapp:   Yes, they’re filled with idiosyncratic differences.  New York during my time, which was 1961 to 1976, was under the helm of Nelson Rockefeller, who was governor all those years, and was enormously powerful.  He ran the State, period!

BD:   Did he have any interest in the arts?

Sapp:   A great deal, yes!  He had not just a little interest in the arts, he had an overpowering and consuming interest in the arts, with a huge private collection and a continuous concern.  So that was a very happy and flourishing time in which the arts in education were favored to a degree that I’ve never seen anywhere else.  It was a time of enormous growth not only in buildings, but in terms of refinement of curriculum.  Experimentation was not only encouraged, but demanded of us.  You could dream wild and crazy and wonderful dreams, instead of making things work in idleness and despair.  Many of these dreams came into reality.  Whole new campuses would be talked about at meetings, and five years later they would be built, and staffed, and devoted.  The whole general plan of the educational growth in the State of New York system was very sophisticated, with a layer of universities, a layer of colleges, a layer of functional service institutions, and a layer of specialized institutions.  There was a very sophisticated master plan of process, and that is what I really enjoyed, and where I had my fun, and my success, and my best and happiest times.  The administrator phase of my life, was not simply being an academic officer.  Unfortunately for my faculty and colleagues, I was the victim, to some extent, of a series of lucky accidents, with some real successes, and some real accomplishment.  But the victim part of it was that I got into positions where I was doing simultaneously three or four jobs at the same time.  I would also be in three and four successive layers of administration, which is an unhappy and difficult thing for anybody to manage.

BD:   You were a glutton for punishment!

Sapp:   [Laughs]  Not only that, but if you’re a chairman who reports to a provost, who reports to a vice-president, and you yourself are all three, you take off one hat, and with another you say, “I can do that!”  But it’s a great strain, and it was pretty tough and corrosive in some respects.  But I was happy and enjoying it.
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BD:   Were you able to continue your own music during all of this?

Sapp:   In a vicarious way.  Let me elaborate on that, because, as I said, there was not only the faculty institutional association, and all that went with that, but there was all the arts apparatus of New York State and New York City.  Then, as part of all this, I became more and more embroiled in the State Arts Council, and in foundations as a consultant, or as an advisor, or as a project director.  So the administrative phase that were talking about — particularly in New York — represented a whole complex of fascinating things.  This included running a big foundation (or two or three!), which I was doing in addition to all this.  The Creative Artists Public Service Program was the mechanism to distribute money to the creative artists, as distinct from distributing money to the institutions, which is what the Arts Council did.  I was the head of that for about ten years.

BD:   You were based in New York City?

Sapp:   Yes, in New York City.  I was chairman of the New York Foundation for the Arts, which was the mechanism that was set up to lend money to organizations before they could get their grants.  A lot of times, people would get a grant for a summer activity, and they wouldn’t get the money until January, and that makes cash flow a problem for small theaters.  Then I got involved in museums.  It is an active, and still ongoing program for museum support called Museums Collaborative, which was an organization of all the New York museums, including the Met, MOMA [The Museum of Modern Art], and the smaller museums such as the Brooklyn Museum, and the Puerto Rican Museum on 105th Street.  Big institutions and small institutions brought together in a consortium through exchange of educational services and ideas.

BD:   Having worked through all of this, where should the support for the arts come from?   This could be either the performing arts or arts education.  Should it be from the city, from the State, from the government, or from the private sector?

Sapp:   The simple answer that I could give after having functioned in all of this, and being very concerned about it, is that it is complex, and has to be a blend of partial government support — which should be more ignitive than it is, meaning more designed to start new ventures and let them be nourished for a while — and also some types of fixed subsidies.  This is, in fact, what has happened with the Federal government.  But the support for the arts has to incorporate corporate support, business support, and private support in various fractions, depending upon the basic wealth of the region that you talk about.  Long ago I made a commitment to the idea of regional arts entities, such as St. Louis, or Kansas, or Miami, or Tampa.  The way the government defines it is a statistical district, or it could be defined in terms of traditions, or people with common needs in the arts.  I feel that whether the proportions should be will have to vary depending upon the local circumstances.  But a situation which is totally private or totally government is doomed.  One will ossify, and the other will be too eccentric.  So it’s the question of the forces in balance in some way, with sufficient reins on the patronage apparatus, and support apparatus to make sure that everybody stays on it, and that the arts, which is the result of all this, flourish.

BD:   How do you get the guy on the street who goes bowling once a week or watches television after his job, to understand that there needs to be support of symphony, chamber music, and opera?  [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interviews with Bernhard Heiden, and John Harbison.]

Sapp:   One thing is to translate it into economic terms, which is what most arts councils and propaganda really do.  This is not about the value of Mozart symphonies, or the value of a Van Gogh art exhibition, but raising money and putting your money where it is, you can make a case in terms of economic factors — the money that such institutions circulate, which are multiplied by some factor, which is, again, variable with the region.  You can make the case in terms of corporate and medium-sized business recruitment.  It’s a very important factor in the recruitment of middle-echelon executives as to the kind of place they want to move into.  When an executive has options, he will choose a place which has decent schools, of course, but also cultural resources, and if those cultural resources languish, you’re simply one down in the list of deciders in terms of recruitment, and that can be understood.  You may not like your boss, but you know you’ve got to have a boss, and you better have a good boss rather than a weak one, or a dissatisfied and unhappy one, because that unhappiness will come back to you.  That’s a pretty good argument, and it can be very easily documented with lots of tales and lots of statistics.  You can also do it in terms of civic pride.  The blue-collar worker who goes to the White Sox, or spends tremendous psychic energy in making sure that the Bears are supported, can be brought into the notion that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is an important element in the fabric of the city.   You do it in terms of wanting the best, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is the best!  It’s as simple as that, and it’s nice to know that you’re involved with the best.  The guy in the street can understand that.  It doesn’t make any difference whether he likes the music, or understands it, or cares for it, but the fact that he is with No. 1 is important.  That makes sense, and you can sell that.  You resort to what might be called ‘lateral argumentation’.  I spent fifteen years in Buffalo doing all this kind of thing.  I was shuttling back and forth between Buffalo and New York most of the time, but Buffalo was my home.  It’s where my kids were growing up, and where my heart was really.  It’s a city with a very thin layer of leadership.  There are very few home industries, very little inherited wealth, and a poor layer of fading industrial base.  So the problem of trying to keep the cultural institutions going there was acute, and the challenge as I saw it was getting the spirit of the city going.  It became a matter of not so much raising dollars and cents, but raising the feeling that the city wasn’t dying, and could be re-energized.  Maybe other cities of the same size were going downhill, but that’s no reason why you had to pull the plug on your own dreams.  I know it sounds a little bit inflated, but that’s what I was very much involved in.  I went there at a very low point in 1961, and hit a bunch of people who were getting very desperate about the symphony orchestra, and very desperate about some of the other things that were going on.

BD:   Who was the director of the symphony orchestra when you were there?

Sapp:   Josef Krips.  He and I became very good friends, and we worked together very well.  Then I was responsible for bringing Lukas Foss and Michael Tilson Thomas, because by that time I had gotten into the central apparatus of choosing.  What I did in Buffalo was to say that we can’t have a world-class orchestra because we can’t pay the salaries for the principals, and all the other practical reasons.  But we could develop a thematic character to the city, and make it a place which would be lively, and exciting, and vivid, and that is what we did.  We had the tremendous good fortune that the relatively small art gallery, the Albright-Knox Gallery, was, in fact, a prestigious and marvelously put together collection of contemporary art.  It’s one of the great contemporary art museums in the world because of a particular set of circumstances of a private patron and a remarkable director who made it all work.  I knew I can do those things in music, because there was the art gallery with its powerful sponsorship and its ties to the leadership of the city.  So, we kind of turned Buffalo into a Darmstadt [see box below].  It became a place where all the European composers who came through, would go to New York and then come to Buffalo.  We had this great group of avant-garde people there, and that was all part of this general plan.

The Darmstadt School refers to a group of composers who were associated with the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music (Darmstädter Ferienkurse) from the early 1950s to the early 1960s in Darmstadt, Germany, and who shared some aesthetic attitudes. The term does not refer to an educational institution. Thanks to these courses, Darmstadt is now a major center of modern music, particularly for German composers, and has been referred to as "the world epicenter for exploratory musical work, which was driven by a younger generation mostly engaged with new sound technology".

Coined by Luigi Nono in his 1958 lecture "Die Entwicklung der Reihentechnik",), the Darmstadt School describes the uncompromisingly serial music written by composers such as Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Karlheinz Stockhausen (the three composers Nono specifically names in his lecture, along with himself), Luciano Berio, Aldo Clementi, Franco Donatoni, Niccolò Castiglioni, Franco Evangelisti, Karel Goeyvaerts, Mauricio Kagel, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Giacomo Manzoni, and Henri Pousseur from 1951 to 1961, and even composers who never actually attended Darmstadt, such as Jean Barraqué and Iannis Xenakis.


It was wonderful fun in those days.  Then I left to go to Florida to run what I thought was going to be the kind of Florida Central Institution for all the arts, including broadcasting.  I had a college of communication, including broadcasting in my general range of responsibility.  I thought Florida’s going to have a tremendous amount of money.  It’s going to be the third or fourth largest State before too many years, so that was the time to get in there and transfer all this experience that I’d gotten in New York.  My general plans were right, and it all happened more or less as I predicted, but it happened much slower than I predicted, and I didn’t feel like hanging around for thirty years to see it happen, and work myself to death again as I had in New York.  So, I left Florida with regret.  It wasn’t an unhappy time, but it was a time in which I clearly wasn’t going to be able to do what I wanted.  Also, the institutional situation was much less stimulating.  It became more a management problem.  There’s a leadership phase of administration, and there’s a management phase, and you have to do both.  But when it’s mostly management, and you’re basically arbitrating between factions, and contending with relatively small-minded people all the time, there’s not much fun in it.  I’d done all that, and it’s a game I’d played, and it doesn’t interest me so much.  I’m not saying it to excuse myself, because I left there really for a very simple reason, which goes back to your question about administration and composing.  During those twenty years when I ran Buffalo and Florida and the first two years in Cincinnati, I gave every bit I could to all these kinds of things.  I shuttled all over the country, and I was consulting with universities.  It was a very exciting life, and because I gave everything to that I had stopped writing.  I wrote one or two pieces during that time, more than anything else, to show that I still could, or that I still had some music in me.  But basically, the whole apparatus went into hibernation, and it’s interesting to speculate why.  Had I lost faith in myself?  Was I running out of steam?  Was I scared?  I didn’t know.
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BD:   It sounds like you were simply devoting your energies to another angle of music.  [Vis-à-vis the photo at left, see my interviews with Ralph Shapey, and Harold Shapero.]

Sapp:   Yes, that’s the way I felt.  I didn’t feel it was shunning the real task, but somebody is going to have look at my life and decide about that.  I didn’t really write any music, and what I did write was of certainly far less inspired, and far less meaningful, and far less successful in my opinion than what I’d done before or since.  This is because you can’t just take a weekend off from an exhausting schedule and pretend that you’re back to being a composer again.  There’s another factor, which was that I deeply believe in the institutional role of growth and support of new things.  That’s what I was doing, and so I made Buffalo a center for avant-gardism, for experimentation, for the mostly absolute outer fringe of musical, and artistic, and inter-disciplinary work.  I did that consciously, and it brought everybody that you heard of who has anything worthwhile to say, including very good friends and people that I admire, and would work with.  But basically, it was an artistic position I’m not terribly comfortable with.  It’s not that I don’t think Kagel, Pousseur, and Vinko Globokar and all those wonderful European composers are not writing wonderful music, and are not important.  I knew them all, and cared for them.  I entertained them.  I am their friend, and I supported their work, but it’s not me.  It is something which is I understand intellectually, and I can teach, and can fight for, and espouse with everything I’ve got, but it was not doing good things for me, because I don’t feel that way.  I’m not at all a stick-in-the-mud, and my music isn’t all that hopeless conservative.  It never has been, and I don’t think it is now.  But I never had that need to be an innovator, to be an iconoclast, to be the person that would go in and run a concert like John Cage, who was a dear friend, and whom I really loved dearly, and who supported many in the early years when he wasn’t the great figure he became.  He wasn’t recognized, and so we were very close.  But again, that support for him and what he believes in is firm, but it’s not the way I think.  It’s the way he thinks.  Doing that gets you in a role which is very hard for yourself.  This was particularly interesting during the time in which Lukas and Michael were running things.  We were very close.  Lukas lived next door to me in Buffalo, and our children went to the same school.  His wife, Cornelia and I were very close friends.  Lukas and I had been childhood friends since we were fifteen or sixteen. and Michael and I were very close, too.  But they were into whatever was new, the hottest, the latest and most topical fad.  That’s what they were interested in, and that has never interested me personally that much.  One of the things about my shutting-down period was that I felt a little out of joint with the times.  Having some sense of history, and some sense of the way things were, I decided my time would come when my work was going to be valid, but right then it probably was just not very topical.  I didn’t want to be on concerts in which there was a great deal of fascinating experiments going on.  For example, take the aspiring violinist like Paul Zukowski who runs the Juilliard orchestra.  He was a marvelous fiddler who had made recordings of the four Ives sonatas.  They’re magnificent.  He was one of the people that I brought to Buffalo, but he came out and played a piece for two-and-a-half hours on the open G and D strings of the violin.  [Laughs]  Those experiments should be done, and they’re important, and there should be money paid for those people, but they should be done in proper forums.  It has nothing to do with the way I feel.

BD:   What in music interests you?

Sapp:   The sense of discovery.  The thing that keeps me going as a teacher, and a composer, and as a person writing and thinking about music, is that I find something in every piece of music that I regard as having quality.  It’s real discovery, and the importance of that came so acute that when I went to Cincinnati, administration had lost its flavor.  I had become mired in a situation that was not only boring, but increasingly distasteful.  So, I really felt the terrible need to go back and teach honestly again, and to teach well, and to live with music, and to study it.  It’s wonderful to teach counterpoint, for example.  People look at me and say, “What in the world are you doing teaching counterpoint???  I thought that was for young guys who just were just putting in their time,” but I love it because it leads me back to this established music.  I play their music again, and study it again, and re-analyze it.  There’s a sense of discovery, whether it’s something in a Lutosławski symphony, or a first awareness of one of the Haydn quartets that I never understood, or never liked before.  All of a sudden, it dawns on me that it’s one of the marvelous pieces I should know.  It’s that sense of renewal in music.  I honestly believe that the reason music is important is because it’s life-renewing.  It’s an emblem of the force in human existence which is life-fortified at one level or another.  That’s what interests me most about music.

BD:   Does this show through in your own compositions?

Sapp:   I hope so.  I want music to be accessible.  I want my stuff to be pleasurable.  I want it to be a panorama of different moods and feelings and qualities.  I want it to have wit.  I want it to have irony.  I want it to have passion.  I want it to have pathos.  I want it to have affection.  I want to have feelings of torment and despair, and something of the human condition.  I want the music I do to represent as much of that as I can, and certainly represent the things that I feel.  At the same time, there is concern with structure, and classical feeling, and form, and design, and problem solving, and interesting puzzles.  I’m a person that’s got a lot of different interests.  I read voraciously.  I always have.  I’m interested in languages, and I feel comfortable when I read things in different languages.  I’ve traveled a lot, and I don’t think that makes you any better a composer necessarily, but it gives you a particular kind of slant on things.  I like French civilization, so I can occasionally write a piece which has a consciously French bias to it.  Or I can write a piece which is consciously connected with things about Germany that I like.  Mind you, there are things about Germany I don’t like!  [Both laugh]
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BD:   Being an accomplished composer and an accomplished musician, did that make you a better administrator in the particular area of administration you were involved with?

Sapp:   If you compose, you’re aware of time.  You have to be aware of time and design.  You’re aware of process.  You’re aware of competing values.  You have to decide if I shall do this, or shall I do that, and why!  All those elements are part of a style of administration, so the transition to administration and out of administration weren’t wrenching.  It wasn’t as if there was a complete Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll.  I never thought about it.  It just seemed like a natural thing, so while I was kind of blocked in this area, I did something else.  There are transferable skills, and that’s what I meant when I said that administration is creative.  I’ve never had trouble with business.  People ask me how I can get along with those business people, those terrible executives that I had to move with, and live with in order to keep my institutional connections going to raise money.  I never found that difficult because when you meet the real interesting executives, they’re fascinating people.  They’re the creative people.  They have ideas.  They do many of the same processes.
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BD:   Let me turn the question around.  Did being an administrator help you to be a better composer, either then or now?

Sapp:   [Laughs]  It didn’t help me to be a more successful composer, because I never had done all the merchandising techniques, and all the self-advancement techniques which I know about and can easily instruct others.  I suppose it would be very honest to say that the least impressive aspect of my interesting career is my ability to convert this music into the public domain.  It still rests largely in a dormant state.  One of my projects now is facing that, and spending time and money and effort to essentially remove myself as a laboratory curiosity among my fellow composers and peers, all of whom are baffled that I don’t get out and beat my own drum a little more.  I’m just not very good at it!  I’m in a curious position in which I can fight fiercely for the people whose music I don’t really much care for, but whose position I treasure and whose musicianship I admire deeply, but I can’t do it for myself.  At least I don’t do it very successfully.

BD:   Now you’re getting more into that?

Sapp:   Yes.  Buffalo wants to set up an archive.  They want all my manuscripts and papers.  I’m going to do it when I get it all organized.  I’m going to get my stuff published, and the recordings done.  Some of it has been an unwillingness to get engaged with all the critical play of forces.  That’s one thing you do get from administration, a tough hide.  You can’t be an administrator day after day, and get up and face the world with tears in your eyes!  You’ve got to tough it out, so it’s not that.  It’s a question of maybe needing a little more intuitive belief in things, like there’s a right time for things.  There’s a right time to act, there’s the right to wait, there’s the right time to bide one’s time and to consolidate one’s gains, and so on.  This whole life I look back on, really has four phases.  There’s a juvenile phase showing how bright I was, and all that nonsense, and then a bunch of my first twenty-five or thirty compositions.  Then came twenty years of relative silence, followed by this burst of forty-five or fifty pieces all written in the last eight years.  It’s a variable flood of all different kinds of pieces of every medium that are coming out.

BD:   Are they things that you’ve had in you for a long time?

Sapp:   Yes, and obviously there’s been a tremendous unleashing of the pieces that might have been or should have been, and they’re now being written.  People ask how I can be so prolific, because I’m teaching the usual full load.  I’m just not letting myself take it easy.  I’m not taking a light schedule, or pretending to be a grand old man.  I’m working hard! I’m working as hard as I did when I was a teaching assistant, and I like it.  I’m having fun.  I’m enjoying it!  I’m writing an awful lot, and it’s not stuff that’s coming out just fabricated.  Each piece is a different problem, for different media, for different things.  It’s considerable flexing of skills, and putting together things I wasn’t wise enough or bright enough to do when I was younger.  This period, from about when I was about thirty-five to fifty-five, or fifty-eight, was this desert period, when nothing much was happening.  So the music now is just a curious late-blossoming in a way.  Some of it sounds like late music.  There are some sober pieces that wouldn’t have been possible to write earlier, but there’s an awful lot of stuff which is very lively, and witty, and charming, and elegant.  That’s the way the things are going.  As to this interesting question of a dichotomous life that I’ve had, the easy explanation is that I reached a dead end, and nobody was paying much attention.  I wasn’t winning Guggenheims or other prizes, and since I’m energetic, and creative, and optimistic, and a hard worker, I just decided to shut that door for a while, and open this other door and see what happens.

BD:   Are you still optimistic about the future of music?

Sapp:   I’m optimistic about the whole field of electronically and computer-generated music.  I have a feeling that we’re well past the first stages of that being just gadgets and toys, and playthings of people who are by and large relatively untalented.  We’re now into a phase where good young musicians are coming along, who have natural tactile sense of the machinery, and the concepts.  In the next twenty-five years or so, we’re going to find a wonderful period of mastering that mold of composition, and the things that go with it.  All this early, rather embarrassingly naïve and amateurish work that has gone, and will be replaced as we get larger and larger storage capacities, and more sophisticated algorithmic programs.  We will also get away from the notion of aping and intimating a kind of music which has run its course, and I see a great happy breath of fresh air.  So I’m not at all concerned about the displacement of the performing musician.  They will never be displaced as far as I’m concerned, but the repertories will change, and the kinds of things you can do with smear techniques in the orchestras will be so much more effective.  We will manage all this with digital manipulations, and that’s going to happen.  I’m at a stage where I’m just debating whether to get into it myself.  It’s not a question of antipathy, or prejudice, or anything like that.  I’ve always been fascinated by it.  I have a computer, and am working towards a home synthesis-library.  My objection to it up to this point, has been that the apparatus has been too primitive.  I even think both synclaviers one and two are relatively primitive, and I don’t think the approach to digital and electronic music is sufficiently sophisticated yet.  To me, the real field for electronic music is not to do with types of synthesized sound, but complex rhythmic and time-displacement techniques, and space techniques, and multiple effects of that kind.  I believe they’re in the offing, so I see a very rosy renaissance coming along.  There will be some displacements, and there will be some problems of shift of emphasis, but it’ll be a good time, and that music will be much more like what the general population accepts as music.  What we hear on the average television program is mostly electronically produced now, and we will need scores and more that’s commercially effective.  The bridge between that kind of music and what we now call ‘commercial music’ is going to narrow.  We’re also in the middle of a very nice romantic revival.  There are composers like Joseph Schwantner, and Jacob Druckman, and Steve Reich, and Philip Glass.  That’s good!  That’s refreshing.  It cleans the air.  It’s a nice opening of the pores, and lets out a lot of nonsense and pretense.  I’m all for it.  I think it’s wonderful, but again, it’s not much to do with me personally.  My own viewpoint is more thematic.  Pieces have to have a thematic character.  They have to have themes in them.
 
BD:   What advice do you have for a composer coming along today?

Sapp:   That’s a very interesting subject.  First of all, learn all you can about technique.  Get all the technique you can because you can never have too much.  This means learning everything you can find out about every instrument, not by reading about it in the latest orchestral textbook, but by sitting at the feet of bassoon players, and horn players, and flute players, and learning all the multiphonics from a player who will show you what to do.

BD:   [Smiling]  So, honking yourself on each instrument?

Sapp:   Sure, sure, and all that.  It’s the ‘get your fingers dirty’ school of learning, which is very important to me.  When kids come to me, I make them write different pieces on a very restrictive basis at first, and if they know how to use instruments, then we move on a little.  If they don’t, I send them right out and tell them to spend some time with some players and learn how to do it.  Find out what an oboe is all about.  Sit in their classes, and listen to rehearsals.  Go and talk to the harp players and find out what you should write for them, and what you should not write for them.  That is nothing to do with composing.  It’s technique.  That’s stuff you learn how to do so you can manage your ideas.  That’s usually a very weak part of most composers’ training.  Some are lucky enough to get it by intuition or osmosis.  Good composers spend an awful lot of time listening and interpreting intelligently, but an awful lot of young ones listen to a new piece, and use one effect that they hear.  That’s not what I mean by technique.  That’s easy, but that isn’t allowed.  [Pauses a moment]  The second thing I would do is to get composers to start thinking about what it is they’re writing.  [Both laugh]  Get away from ‘I have this beautiful theme’, or ‘I have this wonderful idea for forty-eight violins, each one playing a microtone away from the other’.  Rather, think about what does this piece concern?  What is it trying to say?  If they say, “It’s just pure music,” I ask, “Why pure music?  What do you mean by pure music?”  We go through that, and finally people start to think about what it is they’re writing.  What mode of speech is it?  Is it an oration?  Is it a prayer?  Is it an intimate love letter?  Is it a piece of satire?  These kinds of things make people start to think about what they’re doing.  That’s another big thing to give composers to make them start thinking about what it is they’re trying to do.  Third, you teach composers as soon as you can about time.  What is time?  How do you time your pieces?  What is long enough, and what is not long enough.  Do you think about the time of a piece before you work at it, or as it gradually evolves?  Do you plan, or do you structure it?  You can approach it in dozens of ways, but if you don’t approach it, it leads to a very, very unsophisticated work.  Sometimes it is successful, but most of the time, over a period of years, at any rate, it produces an unhappy chain of events.  I work hard on that.  The last thing I feel about composing is the awareness of matching resources to intent.  You might need an architecture with eight horns, and six clarinets, and five oboes, or you might need a string quartet, or you might need a solo bassoon, or you might need an amplified guitar.  But know what the match is, and how to go about making that match.  That’s another aspect of composing, and it all is a relationship of a mentor to young disciple.  The communication is easy to do with some, and very difficult to do with others.  Composers come in all shapes, and jars, and bottles, and colors.  Sometimes there’s a quick and easy channel set up, and sometimes it takes two years before you can get to the real person inside that young violent kid who is struggling to get out of that shy psyche.  There’s wonderful things in there, but they’re all mixed up around the main things.  The great problem is not to get involved being an amateur psychiatrist, and getting involved too much in people’s lives.  But you have to get involved to such an extent in which the communicative channel is established, in which case they will tell you that they’re in the middle of a terrible blocked time, and they can’t seem to get out of it.  Then you can begin to suggest some remedies, some helpful things that will get them out of where they are.  The relationship has what might be called ‘noodle points’.  There are also times when it’s very important to know when somebody should work with somebody else, and sometimes that’s possible.  At a good institution, if you have good relations with you colleagues, you can go up to them and say, “I think it’s about time that Suzie Smith had a semester with you, because she’s picked up pretty much what she needs from me.  She’s fine, and we’re getting along great, and she’d be very comfortable to stay with me for the rest of the time, but what she really needs is your attitude about orchestration, or your attitude about form.  You have different ideas than I do, and it’s important that she gets that.”
sapp
BD:   I would think it should be mandatory that each one works with several different teachers, or whoever is available on each campus.

Sapp:   Yes.  We try to make that the case, but we have another value which we think is equally important, which is self-selection.  The way it works in our institution, and most of the ones that I’ve been connected with, is that we let students choose.  It’s an open-market.  Each quarter they make their choices, and we honor those choices if we possibly can... unless one teacher gets so popular that he’s overloaded.  When that happens, we have to sort it out, but basically, it works.
 
BD:   They have to re-choose each quarter?

Sapp:   They can re-choose each quarter.  They don’t have to, but they may.  The basic contract is for the length of the academic unit, whatever it is, and that means they don’t feel trapped in a situation which becomes emotionally draining, or frustrating.  At any point we can intervene and tell them you think it’s about time they went and worked with whoever we think they ought to work with, and vice versa.  Students get sent to me, and sometimes that’s done very nicely and casually, and sometimes a student will get a letter saying they’ve been assigned to Professor so-and-so.  Then they’ll come running and say, “What has happened???  Don’t you love me anymore???  I thought we had everything going fine...”  You try to do it before that happens, but it’s a delicate balance.  They get too comfortable, and then you need to shake them up for their own good.  Of course, there are other times when there is a big resistance to anything you try, whether it’s gentleness, or toughness, or oblique approaches.  When it fails with a case like that, you try to work it out as soon as possible to a mutual satisfactory disengagement.
*     *     *     *     *

BD:   Are there times when a young composer who wants to be creative, expects other people to listen to new things from him, yet is reluctant to try new things himself or herself?

Sapp:   Right, and that is out of fear.  With all his brashness and arrogance and self-directed feelings, the young composer often can be very frightened and afraid and very vulnerable.  Finding a cock and bull relationship becomes a convenient buyer of time, so to speak, so that they can do their work, but it doesn’t include that stimulus or that raising of questions which might change your point of view and your attitude.  I don’t think it’s profitable to get into all the individual things about each institution, but some of them have a monochrome character.  They have a strong personality, and people go and study there because of that strong personality.  That’s one kind of place, and it’s not altogether wrong, but I believe in the heterogeneous population.  Some people are classicists, some are very free, some are very experimental, some are very intemperate, some are wild and eccentric, and so on.  The mix is what’s important.  We have lots of opportunities for music to be heard, so the students are constantly hearing the music that we write, and we are constantly hearing their music.  This is all built into our formal structure.

BD:   Are we perhaps getting too many young composers coming along today?

Sapp:   [Sighs]  Maybe I could turn that question by saying we’re getting too many untalented and untutored composers coming along today, but that sounds arrogant, and I don’t mean it to sound arrogant.  Composers are, to some extent, in a business where there’s a certain amount of institutional deception, and also self-deception as to what it takes to be a composer, and what that means.  As to what is enough, what is too many, or what is too few, there are always too few good composers, meaning composers who are dedicated.  When I say good, I don’t mean there’s somebody out there who says they’re good, or that they are the ones who get platinum records, but I mean composers of quality, and integrity, and excitement.  I think there are too few, and there will always be too few for our scene.  We have a large scene, and it’s basically an international scene which, to a large extent, the American composer has hardly penetrated, except for the obvious major exceptions.  I don’t know whether it’s a question of quantity.  There’s the American Society of University Composers where you hear a lot of new music, and you see a lot of young composers.  We just completed a search for a young faculty member, and we looked at fifty applications, and fifty sets of scores and tapes and dossiers, and in that process you get a sense of the current level.  It’s certainly obvious that the technical level is getting higher, and higher, and higher.  People can make orchestras sound like nothing you ever heard.  Nobody writes impossible or bad orchestral music anymore.  They just know what to do.  They learn, and they’ve gotten better technique.  In the field of electronic music, there’s a higher percentage of attractive and interesting and sophisticated stuff now than there was five years ago, because studios are better equipped.  The X7s are more omnipresent, and people are using media systems in a more intelligent way, so the music is getting technically better.

BD:   Is it becoming more accepted by the general public?

Sapp:   I don’t know.  We still don’t have any kind of a natural sociological apparatus.  The large concert hall has all the problems of being associated as being a ‘class’ instrument, and an instrument of the past in which there is a whole set of conventions associated with it.  The little concert hall, which is devoted to experimental and new works, has the same devoted following of people that it did in 1910 as far as I can see.  To go to Weill Hall in New York, which is the former Carnegie Recital Hall [with 268 seats], I’m sure I would meet the same people that I met in 1937.  They form the faithful group that goes to all those concerts.  I do not think that the commercial broadcasting system in general is taking on its full measure and responsibility.  The public broadcasting system, which does the lion’s share of the diffusion and dissemination of music, is still reaching a pitifully small segment of the general population.  It is perhaps a larger segment now than it used to be, and as far as I can tell the producing stations WGBH [Boston] and WQED [Pittsburgh], and to some extent WGUC [Cincinnati] and WNED [Buffalo], are playing an important role in that whole process.  Your station, WNIB, is also playing an important role, but one which cannot be as large as I would like it to be as the mass communications apparatus for the ultimate solution to the problem of effective relationships between ‘serious’ composers and ordinary people.  The recording industry has all sorts of its own economic problems.  It’s hard to look around and find anybody like Goddard Lieberson, who made Columbia do things like put out the whole works of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, and so on.
lieberson Goddard Lieberson was born to a Jewish family on April 5, 1911, in Hanley in Staffordshire. His father was a manufacturer of rubber shoe heels who took his family to the United States when Goddard was a child. Goddard studied classical piano and composition at the Eastman School of Music in the 1930s, and after graduating he wrote classical concert reviews under the pseudonym 'Johann Sebastian'. He was married to actress/dancer Vera Zorina from 1946 until his death in 1977. They had two sons: Peter Lieberson, a composer, and Jonathan Lieberson. Goddard was noted for his personal elegance, taste and style, and was renowned as a wit, bon vivant and international traveler, whose circle of friends and acquaintances included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Richard Rodgers, W. Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward and John Gielgud.

Lieberson began working for the CBS group of labels in 1938 – the same year the company was acquired by the CBS broadcasting empire – and he began his career at Columbia as an A&R Manager. Before becoming president of the company, he was responsible for Columbia's introduction of the long-playing record. The LP was particularly well-suited to Columbia's long-established classical repertoire, as recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodziński, Dmitri Mitropoulos, and Leonard Bernstein. Lieberson was also a lifelong friend of musician, recording artist, TV personality and Columbia A&R manager/producer Mitch Miller, having met Miller when the two were studying music at the Eastman School of Music in the 1930s.

Goddard Lieberson died of cancer in New York City on May 29, 1977, aged 66.


What’s happening in that sector is sort of like what’s happening perhaps in news in mass communications.  We have an obvious crisis going on right now.  In Congress there is a debate about the integrity and the vitality in the network news.  [Remember, this conversation took place in 1987, but it is being posted on this website in 2025, when the debate is again being argued.]  We’re in a period of shift, and maybe the whole new thing will revolve around the ultimate next wave of reproducing instruments.  We’re just a hair’s breath away from digital home instruments, and from more elaborate optical audio systems combined.

BD:   Will this mean a return to hausmusik [music played in private homes]?

Sapp:   Gosh, I wish it would.  To me the great things of that time were the four-hand arrangements of the Beethoven symphonies and the Haydn quartets, which I grew up on.  I knew those from playing them with my father and my sister in the old Peters editions.  That’s the way music is at its greatest!  The magic comes when you make it yourself.  That’s axiomatic with me, and I don’t care about the arrangements.  When I see the arrangements of the Wagner operas, for example, they are incredible works of art in themselves, and also the work that people like Otto Singer have done in Strauss tone poems.  I played his arrangements of Ein Heldenleben and Death & Transfiguration as a growing boy, and became fascinated with that music as I played it.  I went down to Presser’s in Philadelphia, bought the piano music, and came home and struggled with it.  I couldn’t make the battle scene sound like a battle, but I could feel something, and, of course, that’s the right way to do it.

otto singer
Otto Singer (July 26, 1833 – January 3, 1894) was a German musician also active in the USA. He is best known for his piano transcriptions of orchestral works, including symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Mozart and Tchaikovsky.

Singer was born in Sora, Saxony. He was educated in Dresden, and later in Leipzig until 1865, and after a short residence in Weimar with Franz Liszt went to New York in 1869.

In 1873 he went to Cincinnati as assistant musical director, under Theodore Thomas, of the first May Musical Festival, in that year. He composed the cantata The Pilgrim Fathers for the festival of 1876, and Festival Ode for the opening of the music-hall in 1878. He also wrote a Rhapsodie for Piano and Orchestra in C major (1881) dedicated to Hans von Bülow. He remained with the Cincinnati College of Music until 1892, when he returned to New York, where he died.

He was an earnest and aggressive disciple of Liszt and Richard Wagner, both in his compositions and piano performances. He conducted various singing societies, and in addition to the cantata mentioned he composed some piano sonatas and a piano concerto. Otto Singer Jr., his son (September 14, 1863 – January 8, 1931), was also a composer and conductor, and produced piano transcriptions of all nine of Beethoven's symphonies, at least 57 of Liszt's songs, all four of Brahms's symphonies, vocal-piano reductions (vocal parts plus solo piano) of 12 of Wagner's operas (as well as instrumental solo piano versions for some of them), as well as transcriptions of other works by Richard Strauss, Brahms, Beethoven, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and Mahler, among others.


BD:   Now you’re talking about reproducing music of great masters, but the electronics are going to mean that each person can create his own new music, rather than just hearing works of other people.

Sapp:   Absolutely, and that’s already happening.  The little Casio keyboards are getting more sophisticated as the chip technology gets better.

BD:   Is there ever a chance that it might get too sophisticated, or too simple to make the big sound or the complicated configuration?

Sapp:   That’s what I mean by the troubles with amateurism, and the professional composers who get excited by all those possibilities.  They miss the point.  Composing is harnessing some energy that you have critically and sensitively molding you and shaping you.  Selecting the fragments is the same now as it was for Palestrina, and Lully, and CPE Bach.  The changes in sound possibilities, which have always been a technical feature of the history of music, don’t change the givens of composing.  They change the character of the musical product, but the selectivity, and the care, and the taste that go into making good music is the same whether you are dealing with a Synclavier Two or writing for a lute.  Young kids are always fascinated with effects, and why shouldn’t they be?  That’s what’s exciting.  “I can do something you can’t do!”  It’s part of the wonderful mystery.  I was always pretty contemptuous about the early kinds of electronic organs, for example, not because they were electronic but because they were so primitive in the range of sound possibilities.  Now you can buy something for $129.50 which can do pretty much what those $10,000 organs of the past could do.  You can even create the ambiance with these room-spaced mechanisms.

BD:   Now for that $10,000 you get something very sophisticated.

Sapp:   Exactly.  Electronic music in the home is good.  The other day I saw an advertisement for a full concert electronic piano made by one of the Japanese firms.  I can’t remember which one, but on the brochure it looked to be the equivalent of a nine-foot grand.  I don’t say it sounds like it, or should, and whether it sounds like something else is not the issue.  If you had something like this, which was a keyboard with all the facilities available, it would lead to wonderful possibilities.  A lot of young composers have adapted the marvelous sounds of jazz and commercial music to symphonic music, because it’s fascinating.  What you can do with some of these amplified double basses is marvelous, and we should use those things if we want to, and if we need them, and if they’re appropriate.  [Both laugh]  But electronic music in the home is wonderful.  I’m all for it.  I’d rather see people get the least expensive piano they can afford and struggle to learn it.  The obvious problem, and it’s a very complicated one, is that when you learn to play the piano, or the flute, or the violin, you put a lot of time and effort and work in it, and you have a feeling of satisfaction.  But if you get one of these machines where you can open up the box, plug it in, and can immediately become king of the mountain, there’s a problem!
sapp
BD:   You’ve literally short-circuited the joy?

Sapp:   To some extent, yes.  The argument that is made is that while you don’t need to know about the telephone, which is a complex instrument with fiber-optics that most of us couldn’t possibly understand, yet we couldn’t get along without it.  To me, that’s a specious argument, because you’re talking about different electronic things.

BD:   You’re not creating a work of art on a telephone.

Sapp:   Right.  Most of the time you’re not creating!  [Laughter]

BD:   Now you’ve brought up the word ‘appropriate’.  Who’s to decide what is appropriate in music?

Sapp:   The answer to that question means that the basic problem of matching resources and substance.  What would be appropriate for me would be perhaps totally inappropriate for somebody else.  That’s part of the mix-and-match, and cut-and-paste that goes into composition and makes it lively.  The happy thing today at the Convention is that you’re going to find more diversity now.  Fifteen years ago, the disturbing thing that I saw was that I would go around from college campus to college campus, and to concerts of young composers’ works, or faculty concerts, and there would be the grim and dreary sameness of everything.  That worried me.  Now, I’m much happier when it’s a pluralistic scene, which we really do have.  Who knows what we’re going to get when you go to a concert these days?  You haven’t the faintest idea what you’re going to be hearing.  You can hear everything from the most naïve sentimental claptrap to the most horrific cerebral things, and both might be marvelously expressive and appropriate in the growth of the particular person.  But we don’t have a mandatory coin-of-the-realm.  When I was growing up, you were either a complete neo-classicist aligned to Stravinsky and all his work, or you were a complete serialist and aligned to that school.  There wasn’t much else.  You were one or the other, and if you weren’t, then you were really not taken seriously.

BD:   So how do we get the public then to open its ears and minds to all of this new material?

Sapp:   Exposure in all kinds of ways is certainly part of it, and education.  I have very severe ideas, and I’ve said them in public often enough to be more or less banished from forums of the education fraternity, because I feel that educational institutions have failed conspicuously.  We have extraordinarily high professional education.  We can train composers, and bassoon players, and singers better than any place in the world, and we have been this way for the last twenty-five years.  But we fail miserably in what is popularly now known as General Education, which means the effect that music, or art, or even basic sciences have on the large population.  As are most, we have an institution that’s going through the throws these days, and wrestling with this problem of general education.  It’s a question of fighting the most entrenched and immovable baronies and fiefdoms within the university fabrics, all of which are preciously holding to their professional standard, and all claiming an unwillingness to dilute their standards to make possible any kind of transfer of mission.  But it’s not responsible for universities who have populations of 40,000 and 50,000 students to spend all their resources on the professional education of a few hundred, and throw a bone in the way of open-admission to a chorus, and a few free concerts, and say that it’s satisfying the general education of the rest of the college.  It’s not responsible to have business men, and nurses, and engineers graduate and have no literacy at all.  I’m talking about undergraduate programs now, not lawyers and so on.  That’s what presumably some kind of higher education should be doing.  So I have very harsh feelings, and very harsh things to say about the failure of the higher education in general to doing anything about this cultural literacy.

BD:   Are we perhaps expecting too much out of people today to understand the arts and the sciences, and still be able to cope with life as it’s going along?

Sapp:   Quite the contrary.  My position would be that the very things which help you cope with life as it goes along are understanding of those things.  In fact, the notion that getting along in life just means that the vocational skills necessary to produce your income is sufficient education, is unacceptable to me as an educator.  This is not because I’m arrogant about it, or because I think that the arts have everything.  I’m just as concerned about the fact that we’re mostly illiterate about science, and I don’t know what we can do.  We’re also illiterate in terms of the readings, and writings, and essential contact with any kind of literature.  I’m not talking about connoisseurship.  I’m not talking about developing people who are true connoisseurs or would be highly sensitive.  I’m talking about exposure, about acclimatization, about demystification, about giving people a sense of the joy, and freedom, and excitement, and discovery that I talked about earlier, which those of us who have any connection to the arts are aware of, and want to give that to people.  We want that guy out there to feel just the way we do when we hear the Schumann ‘Rhenish’ Symphony, or the Mendelssohn ‘Scottish’ Symphony.  It doesn’t make any difference if it has character and personality and meaning.  We want that to be shared.  There is a little bit of the ‘evangelical’ in me, and that’s hard to suppress.  I don’t intend to suppress it anymore, but I do feel that it’s the very problems of hurry, and of interpersonal relationships which are so savaging our society, and which have spawned so many talk shows, and counselors, and horrific books of all kinds on how to get yourself out of whatever jam you’re in.  If that energy was spent fostering the ability to sit down with the Mozart D Minor Quartet, or the [Schubert] ‘Death and the Maiden’ Quartet, people would receive spiritual fortification that comes from those works.  That’s what you have to do if you care about these things...  [Pauses a moment]  I’ve talked more about education than I have about my own music, but this happens naturally.  I don’t think of my music as being ‘educational’ or anything like that, but it is as a collective batch of pieces, and it represents some of these kinds of humanistic points of view that I feel.  These days it’s fun because I teach a number of different kinds of people, not just composers, and one of the happiest parts of my teaching is that I have freedom of being senior enough now that I can do pretty much what I want.  I teach a lot of the very advanced performers who come to me for tutorial work.  These are the best violinists and the best pianists, and they come because they have gotten curious about music at some point.  They’re playing all the concertos, but they don’t know what they’re playing.  So they come to me because they want to talk to somebody who is sympathetic to performers, as I am, and am known to be.  They know that they won’t be embarrassed or humiliated because they have to admit that they really don’t read the bass clef yet.  [Both laugh]  But the excitement of those people is very, very invigorating, and I’m finding that more and more of them are looking at my stuff.  They don’t look at it wondering if it is going to be concert-worthy, or if it is going to be a good ending piece.  They don’t ask if this is the modern piece they want me to put on.  None of that crap.  They just look at it!  They usually come to me to deal with repertory, such as Beethoven Quartets, or Bach Partitas, or the Dvořák Cello Concerto.  Stuff like that which they’re studying.  But then independently they’ll go to the library and get out my stuff and look at it.  They’ll come and say they would like to do this piece of mine in the program.  I have quietly found that these young people are not interested so much in whether it is the latest and brashest thing, or whether it is serial or not, or whether it is folksy, or whether it is inspired by this or that person.  They just look at whether makes sense musically, and then start to learn it and play it.  That’s a nice feeling, and it’s happening.  That’s one thing which being at a large-scale conservatory makes happen, and that can only happen when you’re surrounded by serious young professionals.  That’s a fun part of my time, and it’s also happening with colleagues who are ready to invest the time and the endless nights of work and rehearsal from busy schedules to learn things.  Next Tuesday I have a cycle of thirty songs which is going to be done for the first time by an associate of mine, who is a tenor.  They are very difficult songs, with a very complex musical idea.  They involve thirty settings of epigrams of the French writer Francois de La Rochefoucauld, who wrote little moral maxims.  They’re tiny statements, tiny little poems, and the pieces last sometimes just four or five measures!  [Both laugh]  They’re very difficult to turn on and off!  Thirty of them in a row, and it’s marvelously exciting to see that happen, and to have a colleague who begins to believe in you, and, by doing your stuff, understands what you’re about and why you do things.

BD:   When people come to you with problems of repertoire, do you encourage them to seek out other modern American pieces, or modern European pieces?

Sapp:   Oh, sure!  Lots of times, the doctoral candidates have to give four and five recitals, will come to me and say, “I’m in despair!  I can’t find any American music.  I sang Rorem songs in my last recital, and I’ve done the Copland Old American Songs, and I can’t find anything else.  Can you help me?”  So, I will talk to them, and find other pieces, and make some suggestions.  I might suggest that they look at some Hans Eisler, or some Kurt Weill of the pre-Threepenny Opera time.  I just make them look around.  As far as special repertory goes, each musician begins to develop at various times.  There are enormous prejudices about what is appropriate to their instrument.  Singers grow up, and they’re taught by their mentors from an early age to stay away from modern music as much as they can, because it will ruin their voice.  They are told it will do horrible things to you, and that nobody likes it, so it’s a waste of time.  So they come in with pre-conceptions.  Fiddle players are pretty much like this, too.  They are warned off.  They might learn the Webern Op. 7 pieces to play for six minutes on a concert, but they’re not going to sit down and learn a major piece.  It’s a very happy time when young independent musicians begin to search out those things for themselves, and find that joy of discovery.  Behind the symbols and the funny-looking marks on the page, all of a sudden it becomes real music, and the joy and astonishment happens.  This is the great fulfilling part of my life at the moment, and I know it is also that of my colleagues.   We all have this warm feeling when those prejudices suddenly are broken through.
*     *     *     *     *

BD:   You’re approaching your sixty-fifth birthday.  What is the most surprising trend that you didn’t expect would happen?

Sapp:   [Thinks a moment]  The aspect of the music scene that really surprises me the most is the amount of public discussion and public interest in the field.  I’m aware of more talk about music coming largely from the pervasiveness of the rock and pop culture, and the television extensions of that, where the saturation of music and its associated images in that particular area, causes a great deal of talk about music.  You can’t go anywhere young people are and not have talk about music personalities, and lifestyles, and about the idioms.  You’ll find young people who are having trouble in school memorizing a few French irregular verbs, will be knowledgeable about all kinds of nuances of growth and development of some favorite singer, or saxophonist, or whatever.  I don’t know what this has to do with a change in taste, but it seems to me that the pervasiveness of the concern with music cannot help but eventually have a good effect.  It will turn people’s attention to it.  At one point, about twenty years ago, I felt that we were in a rather gloomy stage, in that music was going to become less and less important, and be wiped off the map entirely by the visual aspects of our life and society.  I thought that the plethora of magazines, and the tremendous rise and domination of color television and all that it brings to our whole culture was going to make music recede further and further back, until it finally would become a museum situation.  I didn’t make predictions, but I had alarming feelings that this might happen.
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BD:   [Somewhat relieved]  It hasn’t, so that’s good.

Sapp:   Right, I don’t think it has.  Part of my fear had to do with nostalgic feelings about radio.  I feel so badly that radio drama, which was one of the grandest achievements of the 1930s, has been phased out.  I grew up on it, so I have a personal nostalgic view of it.  There were wonderful radio dramas, and they brought an exercise of the imagination.  There was the penetration into our consciousness which we don’t have now. We aren’t being exercised in the same way by and large.  In the early 1950s and late 1940s, I was pretty gloomy about what I felt was going to be an eventual decline in interest, and I have to say right now that I’m encouraged by the fact that even though I may not like all that is being discussed, or find it interesting or stimulating or very challenging, that discussion is going on in the general public, and it fascinates me a great deal.  As to major composers, I don’t feel so strongly about them as I did about there being a major style or a major common language.  Being involved in the War, I had a little bit of that idealism which goes into the United Nations, and the thought of maybe at one time that music would be the great international breaking of barriers.  To some extent, that’s happened a little bit, but I’m happier that we have a grand national figure.  The works of Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter, for example, represent an achievement in American music of enormous distinction.  We’ve passed through the stage of trying to find a serious American expression, and we have in the Sessions symphonies and the Carter pieces, enormous works of power, and beauty, and complexity, and seriousness, which bespeak the American spirit, and the complexities of the American life in a noble, and eloquent, and powerful way.  I am sorry that they are not played, and that they are not regarded as the monuments they are.  I think their time will come.  I gave some lectures here at the University of Chicago, and the title was The Search for Language in American Music.  It was a series of six lectures, and the title was chosen because I felt we had a history in American music, but we were still searching for a language.  I didn’t mean a particular language, but rather an instrument of expressing the American character and quality, the things that are important about America.  These include the realities, and the marvelous achievements of America, which are of the highest order.  We also have some music in which the range of intensity of the great tragic themes of America is apparent.  These include the Civil War, problems of race relations and social inequities, alongside wonderful glimpses into the regional humor, and wit, and diversity of America, which find their way into those works.  One doesn’t think of Elliott Carter’s Symphony for Three Orchestras, or the Piano Concerto as ‘Americana’.  They aren’t ‘Americana’, they are of America.  It can only come from a society where there is sophisticated literature, which is what Carter is to some extent.  So it can flourish alongside his fascination with craft.  It’s a kind of an American spirit which is from a tremendous search for wisdom and technological skills, which make the various industries.  This is all part of America, and it’s expressed much more adequately than it is as Americanisms.  I feel my music, for example, has a very high degree of Americanism about it.  Aaron Copland was my principal teacher, and he was enormously important to me.  I revere him, and I think he’s an enormous figure in the history of American music.  He liberated me from an academic bias that could have been fatal for me.  At the same time, I can’t relate his achievement, much as I admire individual works, with the kind of thing that I’m talking about.  But that’s in the realm of personal taste.  [Pauses a moment to reflect]  You asked of my sixty-fifth birthday, and at this time of recapitulation I know I’ve been awfully lucky.  I had a meaningful contact with Stravinsky as a young boy, an insight to him as a personality, as an influence, and as a working composer.  I had Hindemith as a colleague for a year when I was just beginning to teach.  I learned a lot from him about the functional craft, a no-nonsense, let’s get down and do it approach.  I had Walter Piston, and Randall Thompson, and Irving Fine, a wonderful composer who died prematurely.  He was a romantic, wonderful, and inspiring person.  Leonard Bernstein was a close friend of my wife, and at one time he was rather close to me... not in recent years, as his career has flourished in a majestic way.  But we were very good colleagues in the early 1950s, and saw a lot of each other.  My wife was one his assistants.  So I’ve been lucky.  I’ve had all these wonderful influences, and then the whole Buffalo episode, when I just brought everybody who was composing music to that city.  I had control of a lot of money, and I had a lot of power, and I could make things happen.  I could set up institutions and I could change things, and it meant bringing in a whole wave of people, such as Messiaen and Boulez, and all that group.  My education and my influences have been so diversified, and they’ve all played a role in the way I feel.  If I have a problem in my Americanism, it’s the problem of just old-fashioned wasps.  I didn’t choose my parents, and the fact is that I grew up in a suburban mainline, and had all the advantages of a good education.  I’ve tried to cast it off in various ways, but it’s part of my heritage, and it’s part of American music.  It’s part that New England East-Coast business.  Now I can laugh at it, and make fun of it, and belittle it...

BD:   But it’s you.

Sapp:   But it’s me.  Part of this business is that you look at yourself, and that’s helped the last eight years and this big rush of writing.  I don’t feel apologetic.  I don’t try to pretend that I didn’t go to private school, and didn’t learn Latin.  I did, and maybe I would have been better if I had gone to a tough public school in downtown Philadelphia, and had fought my way up.  It probably would have saved me a lot of grief over the years, but I am what I am, and I am putting that into perspective.  I’m writing the kind of music that somehow puts together all the things that I’ve been through, and stand for, and believe.  I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious, because I don’t know how to say it in any way.

BD:   Oh no, not a bit.

Sapp:   There’s a reality, and presence, and an individual style.  One of the things that has been fun is putting different pieces of music together, and thinking about some contrast, and themes.  For example, I take earlier and later pieces, and see if there is any kind of real community.  It’s hard to do that yourself, because you think of a piece, and then you think of another piece.  But I found that right from the early 1950s, and the good early burst of music I was doing then, and the music I’m writing now, there’s an enormous number of common factors.  The factors that make the music sound like one person’s music are much stronger than the differences, which are also obvious.  The derivative influences are weeded out.

BD:   [Noting the time, and that we had been talking for an hour and a half]  I do want to talk quite a bit about your music, so let us take an intermission and have some dinner.  Then we’ll come back and talk just about your music.

Sapp:   Okay, fine.
= = =   After our crockpot meal, we resumed our conversation   = = =


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BD:   Your wife, Norma, is a pianist, so tell me about the special joys and sorrows of writing for her.

Sapp:   [Laughs]  We met in college, and were married just before I went overseas in the War.  She was an active pianist in the Boston area, and we formed the kind of collaboration which is ideal in many ways.  She’s played all my piano sonatas.  I have eight sonatas, and she’s working on them now to play sometime next year.  She’s preparing the second, third, fourth, and fifth sonatas for a professional studio tape, and to make a commercial recording.  She’s been playing these pieces of mine over the years, most the first performance, and then follow-up performances here and there.  Of course, it is difficult on the relationship sometimes. There’s always good will, and there’s always intense commitment on both our parts to the occasion.  She is a performer, and thinks like a performer, and wonders why I do certain things.  [Laughs]  Often the issue is of proper evaluation.  How can I really help her to get inside the music when I am trying to stand back and be critical in a constructive way.  We’ve had our ups and downs, and to be perfectly honest about it, the most difficult thing for me was to learn how raw and vulnerable she was after these first performances.  When I was younger, and a little more callous, and a little bit less sensitive to her needs, I would come in with my machine guns flying and really destroy her sometimes.  I felt, not consciously, of course, but just the whole business of feeling so much involved that I wanted everything to be perfect, and wondered why she didn’t she make it just right, when it sounded so good the other night.  Now in the last fifteen years or so, we are constructive with each other, and we make things much better.  I’ve found out that the process of learning a piece of difficult new music is long and involved and complicated, and needs a lot of seasoning.  Now, when she plays my things, I’m looking much more for the inner understanding and projection of the piece, rather than the final detail.  I used to listen for details, and worry about them too much.  I don’t that so much anymore.

BD:   Is your music difficult?

Sapp:   It’s difficult.  Texturally, it’s difficult, but I don’t think it’s difficult pianistically, because Norma always tells me that my music feels comfortable, works out comfortably, and is graceful for the piano.  It’s the metrical and rhythmic aspects of my music, and the harmonic structures which are difficult.  She tells me time and time again that she finds it difficult to get the pitch orientation that is there.  Her hearing is impeccable, and very, very sensitive, and sometimes that, in a way, makes it more difficult.  If she didn’t hear so well, and didn’t have perfect pitch, it would be perhaps easier, but she hears so sensitively, and musically.  She hears chords as chords, and she knows where she’s going, and where the logic is, so what results is an enormously sympathetic and understanding performance.  But it has taken us years and years to work out an accommodation, so that in the learning process I can be a positive force rather than a negative force.  In the early years of our marriage, I was a negative force.  I wasn’t giving her the intelligent support that I now know how to give.  I didn’t do that when I was only interested in the final product.

BD:   Has she come around to your way of thinking a little bit?

Sapp:   [Laughs]  She understands that I am capable of learning, and am capable of change, so it’s a much easier and happier relationship.  The last version of the Fourth Sonata, which she just did this last year, was a lot better. We both really worked together positively on it.  I don’t write and ask if something is alright.  It isn’t that collaboration at all.  I do the writing completely independently, and then I present her with the finished work.  The only thing which was disturbing in the earlier days was that she would hear me occasionally play.  I don’t work at the piano but I would play a portion to test out registrations and dynamics, and that would get in her hearing system.  For many years, she would subconsciously try to imitate that.  I play roughly, and with a certain course brutality, and she plays with great finesse and power.  In trying to imitate what she thought I wanted, she wasn’t playing her natural way.  The best thing that’s happened is that she’s now playing my music her way.  It’s right, and of course it’s much better than trying to imitate what she thought I was trying to do.

BD:   Had you written with that finesse and power in mind?

Sapp:   Yes, and what she’s getting out of the music is a lot more successful.  Sometimes my coarseness was a person struggling to say more than was there, or trying to build in feelings.  She looks at the piece from a professional viewpoint, and shapes it, and works it out.  It’s a marvelous and wonderful sense of companionability, and joint professional association.  Her performances take into account more and more the whole of my music, which she alone really knows.

BD:   Do other performers find things in your music that you didn’t know you’d put there?

Sapp:   Sure, and that’s happening more and more as more other performers play my music.  That, of course, is a delight.  I don’t have this notion of there being a perfect performance.  I feel strongly that the score is a kind of a blueprint, and that the performer adds a whole dimension that I can’t possibly do.  That’s fine, and I am very happy with that.  I like the fact that more and more of the younger students who are playing my music, do it freshly, and have tempos which are different, and have peak times which are different, and have sudden dynamic declensions which are different.  I’m happy about that!  I write music with a considerable amount of detail, but it’s not fussy.  It isn’t that every note has a whole series of marks around it.  I’m really interested in long lines.  In fact, having very long lines is one of the characteristics of my music, and one of the performance problems is sustaining those very long lines, in addition to the metrical and rhythmical complexity.  It’s very joyful for me to hear different approaches.  The works of mine which have been done the most often are the violin sonatas.  They’ve been done by half a dozen different people over the years, who are bright young performing artists around the country, and I love the differences.  Those differences are sometimes of conception, but mostly there is as general agreement.  It isn’t as if one performance was totally different.  There is a general feel, but more variety will happen as soon as the music gets out more, and gets distributed more.
The five sonatas in this edition [four for violin, one for viola] exhibit Allen Sapp’s characteristic expansive lyricism and depth of expression. Violin Sonata I was composed in 1942–43 while Sapp was studying with Nadia Boulanger and Aaron Copland. Following his service in Europe during World War II, he composed his Violin Sonata II and Viola Sonata in 1948. Klaus George Roy, in his review of a Boston performance by Joseph De Pasquale, called Sapp’s Viola Sonata “a work of beauty and immediate emotional appeal. There is a genuine lyric line and warmth of expression, carried by a real mastery of the polyphonic medium. . . . Who says the moderns can’t write a melody?”

While these first three string sonatas were cast in a neoclassical style, Violin Sonatas III (1960) and IV (1981) are written with more chromatically complex harmonies and employ serial composition techniques, yet still exhibit a strong tonal orientation. Sapp considered Violin Sonata IV as the beginning of his late phase of composition, and possibly the most memorable of his works.

==  From a blurb about the publication of these works  

Even with just these opening fragments, one can see the change and development made by the composer over nearly forty years.


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BD:   Do you ever go back and revise your scores?

Sapp:   Very seldom.  I feel very strongly about that.  Works should be left with all their blemishes, and spots, and whatever problems you think there are.  Maybe this is the historian in me.  I don’t like tinkering with things.  You should work as hard as you can, and that’s the piece.  Then you go on and write other pieces.  If something is proved to be totally disastrous, for example if an ending doesn’t work after it’s been played three or four times, or if a section is clearly muddled in some way, or is too difficult to do, then I do those revisions.  It would be unintelligent not to do that.  But taking a piece and recasting it, and coming up with Version 2, and 3, and 4 is something I don’t do.

BD:   You’d rather do a new piece?

Sapp:   I’d rather do a new piece, but I’m perfectly willing to take critical suggestions.  I’m in the middle of some harpsichord pieces right now, and they will be played in about a week.  I’ve been to rehearsals, and there are some things that the harpsichordist is suggesting about the placement of some of the notes.  She knows more about that than I do, and that kind of revision is something I’d do.  She’s going to help me a lot to make a better piece, and sometimes in the piano sonatas, Norma has suggested re-scoring places which would be just as effective pianistically and less difficult.  But if you mean taking a piece from 1957 and going back and wondering how could I ever have done that, and making a change, no, I don’t do that.  I leave the piece the way it was.
*     *     *     *     *

BD:   When you’re working on a piece, how do you know when it’s finished?

Sapp:   [Thinks a moment]  That’s a very tough question.  I will say that my methods of work are long gestation, lots of long periods of thinking about the ideas, writing down fragments, letting them coalesce in a way, and so on, and then a rather sharply concentrated burst of putting it all together.  So there’s this long period of thinking about options, and possibilities, and variations, and then there’s the rather sharp pressure-cooker phase of putting the piece together.  This is not uncommon, but this is my way.  Most of the time, what actually happens is that after the pressure-cooker time, the pencil score is done.  Then I put the piece to bed for a while, and I come back in a month or so, pull it out, and look at it as if it was by some maniac from the thirteenth century to see whether it holds up.  There is that kind of revision and critical process, and most of the time it’s a question of changing notation.  I get into funny feelings about notation.  I’m like all contemporary composers in that I find our system doesn’t work all that well for what I want to say sometimes.  You get into paradoxical situations, and I find that the revision often straightens and fixes things that look funny, and would bother a performer, or seem illogical.
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BD:   Yet it would sound the same?

Sapp:   Yes, it would sound the same.  I don’t think there’s any major sound difference.  The revisions that usually take place then are insertions of diacritic markings.  I go through it, and I’ll suddenly realize that I need to change the registration, or get up a dynamic.  It’s the theatrical conducting stage, the pre-performance stage.  Then the piece is finished when I feel right about it.  I don’t have any system for that.  It just feels right and I put it away, and then it’s finished.  Then I make copies.  But those are the three stages — the long gestation, the pressure-cooker getting the piece done and letting it simmer, and then the final editing.  That’s pretty much the way I work on everything.

BD:   Are you conscious of the amount of time your piece will take to perform?

Sapp:   Yes, that’s almost the overriding guiding factor.  I work with the notion of a piece of a certain dimension almost from the beginning, and those dimensions are part of this gestation stage.  If it’s to be a piece of 18 minutes, or 20 minutes, or 25 minutes, that’s built into my thinking right from the start.  Very seldom do I write a piece that suddenly gets longer and longer and longer.  I talk to other composers who have said they started out to write a piece, and already they’ve got a 17-minute first movement!  I don’t think or work that way.  If I’m going to write a piece, I pretty well have the time dimensions in mind.

BD:   Then you control the piece, rather than the music controlling you?

Sapp:   To some extent.  I feel that’s part of the process.

BD:   Has your music ever taken you to a place where you didn’t think it would?

Sapp:   Yes, sure it has.  You don’t have complete control, and it would be a fool who thinks he does.  There are people who allow that intuitive sense to guide them, and there are people who, like myself, try to control it more.  A lot of my music is based upon mensural proportions of one kind or another — schematic situations in which one part is in the ratio of 3:5 to another part, which is in the relationship of 7:9 to some other part.  When you get into proportional relations of that kind in your structure, you begin to have time consequences as part of the basic plan.

BD:   [Mildly concerned]  Can we assume your music is from your heart rather than from your head?

Sapp:   I think so.  The expressive side to me is always more important than anything else.  But I will say that most of my music has in it, somewhere along the line, some conscious elements of mathematical or proportional or mensural control.  I don’t find those concepts inconstant.  The issue of mind and heart is, to some extent, an artificial polarity, because I don’t think you can write music without controls which amount to anything, and, at the same time, I don’t think with all the controls in the world that it would produce good music.  So where do you find the balance?  My wife thinks that the best music of mine is the kind that seems to come very spontaneously, and without these long periods of planning, gestation, and criticism.  She feels that this process that I’ve described often seems to be inhibiting those heart-feelings.

BD:   Might the pieces which are faster be simply more easily accessible?

Sapp:   More easily accessible, or perhaps there’s been a gestation that’s a little less obvious.  Who knows?  One gets into these processes.  I don’t find it difficult at all to talk about the creative side, because that’s what’s very interesting to people about music — where it comes from, and how it’s written.  I don’t have systems.  I don’t have methods.  I don’t have a point of technical view.  I basically like to make each piece a new set of difficulties, and I make some of the difficulties very hard sometimes.  Suppose I write a piece for orchestra which has a ritual character, a symbolic character, and it’s tied up with the notion of the conflict between religion and science.  It’s an interesting conflict, and so the piece acquires a name, which symbolizes science and religion, and the mathematical features in the scientific name.  Those might become part of the piece.  Then say it has a length which is governed by the atomic weight of the chemical.  I like those kinds of things because they make it more difficult, and in solving things like that, I feel as if I have a measure of control.  I’m being disciplined in my expression.  So does it become a better piece because it happens to be 133.4 measures?  No, of course, not!  It wouldn’t be any good just to be that.  But somehow, for me it’s part of the total piece.

BD:   It gives you satisfaction?

Sapp:   It gives me satisfaction, and I don’t care whether people notice it or, if they find out if it’s there.  It’s part of the curling substructure that work.

BD:   What do you expect the public to notice when they come to hear your music?

Sapp:   [Thinks again for a moment]  As soon as they can, I want them to be connected with the symbolic language that I’m using.  I want them to understand that the piece I’ve written is about love, or about sacrifice, or about worship, or about humor, or about laughter, or whatever it is, and the symbolic language that I’ve tried to use will, I hope, get to people, and make them realize what it is that I’m trying to say.  I hope that there will be other people who will be pleased by the juxtaposition of ideas, and by the play of those ideas.  I hope that there will be a sense of discovery.  In other words, in the hearing of a piece of mine that there will be a sense that the relationships of this piece to other pieces of mine, or of other composers, living or dead, will create a triangular feeling, so that the piece will connect back to a piece of similar character about somebody else.  I hope there will be a sense of understanding the piece better because they know what this fellow’s talking about!  We’re not talking about casual listening.  Casual listening is fine, but serious listening is like trying to figure out the way you’d read a serious book, or a serious novel, or a serious poem.  I would hope that listening to a piece of mine would have the same happy response that you’d get when you read stimulating poetry, or a thoughtful novel, which raises resonances.  Music has to reach into people and create resonances, vibrations, a sense of connection with that piece, and with the work as a representation of somebody’s view points on some subject matter.

BD:   Do you feel that you’re part of a lineage of composers?

Sapp:   I do a lot of the same things that composers whom I like, and respect, and have studied and known, do.  I don’t feel as if I’m part of a school.  There were a number of us who were working in and around Boston in the late 1940s who felt that we were had a kind of affinity relationship, partly because most of us had studied with Nadia Boulanger.  At one point we had something of a French orientation.  We had strong Stravinsky influence, a classical feeling, and yet we were all lyrical composers, more lyrical than some of the rather severe work of Stravinsky at that time.  I felt a sense of thread of Boston, and a thread of lyric quality.  We felt for a time as part of a collective group, but we all splintered and went away.  We have had very little to do with each other since, and we didn’t issue manifestos and all that sort of thing.  There wasn’t any propaganda.  It was just a group of us who happened to be contemporaries, and who felt rather much the same way for a while.  But, I know your question about lineage is deeper than that.  I love the craft of writing.  There’s a professional craft involved and I hope in most of my stuff that it’s pleasant.  I like it when other people find that sense of craft, because it’s a shared feeling.  The discovery of craftsmanship in works is part of the enjoyment of music.  I feel as if almost all my music involves the central commitment to melody.  If I were to be described, it wouldn’t be as a symphonist.  It would be as a melodist.  I don’t go so far as somebody like Harnoncourt who says that all music is reducible to melody, but I am pretty well convinced that somehow there is in each of my pieces, that melodic thread which is the beginning, the middle and the end, and which is the scaffold on which the music lies.  If there’s any one thing that gets the works of 1949 and 1987 in one bag, it’s the feeling of one melodic thread through it.  Back in the early 1940s, when I was first starting, I actually wrote that way.  I would take a piece, plan out a movement, and some sort of structure by time and designs, and I would actually write the whole melody.  This wasn’t a melody which you heard, but which is the thread.  I tried that for a number of years, and wrote a number of pieces that way, but that’s the only time I ever had a method that I used.  Ultimately, it seemed to be unnecessary.  I was feeling all that sort of thing anyway, and it didn’t seem necessary to me.  But what it made possible was for me to realize that this was a primary way of thinking, and that somehow in all this mass of detail and all the complications, and everything else, there was a thread.  To get back to what I hope people will hear, I hope people somehow get that thread.  Music has the continuity that you get when you have a sense that you know where you are.  It’s not because you realize that at every eighteen measures there’s a cyclical return.  It’s not that kind of thing.  Basically there’s one melody which goes, and when that thread breaks I feel somehow there’s something wrong.  That is the critical phase I talked about, and I wonder if I can find and reconstruct that thread for myself.  It’s a test I use.
*     *     *     *     *

BD:   Have you written music for the human voice?

Sapp:   Yes, I’ve written a lot of songs and some choral music.

BD:   What are the joys and sorrows of incorporating the human voice into your music?

Sapp:   [Laughs]  I should have realized it earlier, but I didn’t have the sense or the wisdom or experience, not to just think about finding a text which I liked and which stimulated me, and then having to deal with all the problems of transferring that into music.  In recent years, I found a particular singer who understands my music, who likes it, who is ready to work hard on it, and whose voice I know intimately.  So in the cycles and sets of songs I’ve been writing in the last seven or eight years, I’m writing very much for him.  Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears were in a relationship like that.  They had a special affinity.  David Adams, whom I’m speaking about, is a joy to work for.  So, in a sense, I’m not only setting text, but I’m setting text for David.  [See his brief biography in the box below.]  There are also some women singers who are the same.  I find a text without too much difficulty.  I have a certain way of knowing right away whether a text is right for me.

adams David Adams served as Professor of Voice and Head of the Performance Studies Division at the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati, before retiring in 2015. He has served on the faculty of the Aspen Music School, and has been artistic director of the Opera Theater and Music Festival of Lucca (Italy), and its successor, CCM Spoleto, summer programs of the College-Conservatory of Music. Prof. Adams is the author of A Handbook of Diction for Singers published by Oxford University Press (now in its second edition), and The Song and Duet Texts of Antonín Dvorák, published by Leyerle Publications. He has also written articles for periodicals, including The Journal of Singing. Students of his have won prestigious competitions, including the Metropolitan Opera Auditions, the Houston Grand Opera and the National Federation of Music Clubs, and have participated in the major summer apprentice programs. Former students are singing professionally in Europe and the US and are teaching throughout the US.

As a performer, specialized areas of interest included the evangelist roles in J. S. Bach’s Passions (A "superb diction and feeling,” Dayton Daily News), Czech vocal music (Janácek’s The Diary of One Who Vanished: “…a splendid performance. He evoked so much beauty from the vocal lines and the Czech text,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch), and contemporary music (Musical America called him "a compelling interpreter" of Elliott Carter’s In Sleep, In Thunder). His interest in Czech vocal music culminated in a CD recording of songs of Dvorák and Smetana in January 2005.

Before his teaching career, Adams sang as lyric tenor in opera and concert in Italy, Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, and the US. In Austria and Germany, he was a member of the resident ensembles of the Vienna Kammeroper, Kaiserslautern Pfalztheater, and Saarländisches Staatstheater, and also appeared on German television. In Italy he sang with the Opera Barga Festival for three years. He has performed as tenor soloist with numerous regional orchestras throughout the US. He has degrees from Indiana University and the University of New Mexico, and pursued additional studies at L’Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome, Italy as the recipient of a Fulbright Grant.


BD:   It speaks directly to you?

Sapp:   It speaks right away.  I can tell halfway through the first stanza, or through the first verse or set of verses, whether it’s my kind of thing.  I wish I could explain why that is, but that’s hard for me.  Most of the things that I’ve set, such as Robert Herrick or Thomas Carew, have been from the 1630 to 1660 period of English poetry.  [Herrick (1591-1674) obtained favor by writing verses celebrating the births of both Charles II and his brother James before the Civil War.  Among his famous lines is ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’.  Some of his texts are included in the vocal recital by Chelsea Hart Melcher, shown below-right.  Carew (1594/5-1639/40) was a Cavalier poet to court of  King Charles I.]  They were largely poets with a metaphysical persuasion.  I’ve set a lot of their poems, but the grace of the words suggests to me opportunities for double-meanings.  I can set the poems as trivial little love pieces, but underneath I can imply the deepest levels of affection.  I like to work in double- and triple-meanings that the text implies.  On the other hand, I would never set Dante, or Shakespeare, or Goethe, or anyone like that.  I couldn’t.

BD:   Why?

Sapp:   The words are self-sufficient. They don’t need any music, whereas I can do something with these little trifles.  There’s music already there, and it resonates with me in a way in which I don’t feel I’m violating anything.  I know right away whether the texts are right, and so I’ve set mostly that period.  Then I’ve taken texts and used them as the basis for several sets of piano music.  I have two sets of two pianos pieces which are basically related to Paul Verlaine’s poetry.  I’ve simply taken the poems and created little tone poems for the pianos.  That’s another way I use text.  As to the choral pieces, the most successful ones I’ve written are by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), and the poems I’ve set are not the famous ones, but are rather obscure.  One piece is called Five Landscapes, which are related to the last quartets.  Again, they’re metaphysical.  They’re poems about the landscape of mankind, and I’ve set the music very simply and very naively to let whatever Eliot wanted to say about those deeper religious issues come through, if one wants to find it.  But my music is rather consciously naïve.  I could have taken the other tack but I didn’t.
Five Landscapes, by assistant professor of Music Allen Sapp, made fewer requirements of range, and the chorus responded with far more attention to details of tonal quality. Mr. Sapp is blessed with a poetic sense to match his extraordinary musical gifts. Taking five poems of T. S. Eliot, he has not merely assigned each syllable a note and made the work a straight declamation. Rather, he has readily displaced certain lines to enhance the lyrical effect.

Glance aside, not for lance, do not spell

Old enchantments . . . . .

Lower voices repeatedly chant "glance aside," while the sopranos sing in a more sustained line of "old enchantments." And the evocation of magic "where the greylight meets the green air" ends with the climactic cry "Suddenly!"--a word lifted from the poem's opening line.

==  From a review by Robert M. Simon in the Harvard Crimson, November 23, 1954, of a concert by the Bach Society Chorus at Paine Hall  


BD:   [With a wink]  I trust you didn’t write it to be insignificant.

Sapp:   [Smiles]  No, it isn’t that.  In this case, the words are supported by the music, and they make good sense.  I took a lot of care to let the words come through, but the settings are essentially far from the complex nature of the thoughts in the piece, and they happened to turn out very well, and they work very well.  I’ve set some Thomas Malory, a whole chapter of The Death of King Arthur.  It seems like I range very far and wide.

BD:   You do expect your music to last, don’t you?

Sapp:   I want it to last.  I have no interest in what might be called the notion of disposability, temporality, or topicality.  I write it, and I hope it will last because I want it to be useful and pleasing, and that it will have value... or not have value, according to what somebody else thinks.  It’s obviously valuable to me or I wouldn’t do it, but I don’t have any aesthetic philosophy, which is that you write something today and it’s disposable like trash, so you throw it away.  You enjoy it, you eat it, you consume it, and you throw it away... no!  I don’t believe that.  At the same time, I don’t have a great overwhelming need or desire for memorialization or monumentality, or anything like that.  I write the best pieces I can.  I want them to be enjoyed.  I want them to be played.  I want them to be known because I want to share.  If the feelings are honest and interesting, I want them to be shared.  There is an interesting notion about extrudable music.  It comes out, and it’s used up, and more comes out.  I suppose that’s a legitimate philosophy, but it isn’t mine.  On the other hand, when I sit down to write a string quartet, I’m not so just overwhelmed by the Beethoven C# Minor String Quartet that I can’t move a muscle because it’s so great.  I just write my piece, and I want it to be as good as I can make it.  Maybe I’m a little bit unsophisticated about that, but I don’t have any thoughts about mortality or the adorability of the music.  I want that music of mine to last, assuming it is worthwhile and somebody likes it.  I’ve no complicated feelings about that.  I don’t think it’s bound up with the idea that you write some pieces which are unimportant and without value, and other pieces which are extremely important and valuable.  I think ‘unimportant pieces’ which may reflect fleeting moments of pleasure, or little ironies, can be just as important as works in which you labor for years in order to create some sense of mystery.  Who knows what will affect somebody at the right time?  There’s room for a wide-spectrum of emotions, and I find that in every one of the composers that I like and respect.  That’s part of what I’m trying to emulate.  It’s obvious from the way I’ve been talking that I’m not much concerned with issues like politicizing.  I don’t use my music to make political statements.  I’ve made political statements at the polls, and in my non-music writing, but I respect those who do it in their music.  If someone feels that music is the perfect vehicle to attack a social injustice, fine!  That’s okay.  I understand that it’s music which is expressing the true nature of the proletariat.  I don’t feel that is necessary, but I don’t think I’m dealing with unimportant issues either.  Perhaps they’re issues which are more pervasive or essential.  There are certainly less topical issues — not that social justice is not an important issue — but I’m more interested in simple things like love.  A lot of my music is an expression of romantic feeling with all sorts of variations, and that doesn’t bother me.  I don’t feel ashamed or upset, nor do I feel very old-fashioned.  Love has been around for a long time, and I hope it’s going to continue to be around.  When it isn’t around, then no one is going to like my music.

BD:   Is concert music going to be around for a long time?
sapp
Sapp:   In one form or another.  Its form may change, as the production of works before an audience in a concert hall may be replaced by other types of concert activity.  I’m not sure just what that form will be.  The symphony orchestra, and the opera are always threatened.  There are economic cycles, public tastes, and who knows what else.  I hope concert life is around for a long time.  Above all else, my personal hope is that there would be a restitution of music in formal circumstances.  I see that as the great problem.
*     *     *     *     *

BD:   Are you ever going to write an opera?

Sapp:   I have three librettos that I’ve been working on for a number of years.  One is on the death of Anton Webern, one is on the setting of Ben Johnson’s Volpone, and the other is a modern verse-setting of Sophocles’s Philoctetes.  The thing they all have in common is that they’re all about confidence men.  Philoctetes was not, though.  It was Ulysses (Odysseus) who was the great confidence man in that play.  Volpone is a confidence man, and in the case of the death of Webern, you might say that fate itself is the jokester of the confidence man, because there was never a more useless and pointless and meaningless act than that.  [On the night of September 15, 1945, Webern was outside smoking when he was shot and killed by a US soldier in an apparent accident.]  So, there’s a certain community, and certain underlying themes which interest me.  I’ve been thinking about these three for a number of years.  I’ve had complete finished librettos that have been done for me.  It’s very interesting that you raised this question, because I’m going to go off for another year of respite and change, which I hope will be in 1988 [the next year], and that’s what I’m going to be doing.  They will probably be operas rather specifically designed for the broadcast medium.  I’ve always been interested in the television kind of opera.  I don’t mean a photographed set, but rather something that would build into the resources of modern six-camera or eleven-camera television techniques, with cutting, and montage, about which I’ve been learning as much as I can over the years.  I find that an attractive challenge, and perhaps a little more workable and doable, given my resources and the regional resources that I’m involved in, than the kind of thing that can be done if you have situation like Indiana University.  I don’t think you have to be a specialist to write opera, and I don’t think you have to decide, as Ezra Laderman or Dominick Argento did, that you’re going to be an opera composer.  There’s obviously a danger with suddenly deciding that you’re going do this, but it has been twenty-five years I’ve had these librettos, and they have been moving rather slowly.  I love writing for the voice.  I write comfortably, and the singers who do my music, are happy with it.  They find it vocal.

BD:   That’s half your battle right there!

Sapp:   Yes, it’s half the battle!  The first music I wrote in 1939, which was any more than just childish piano pieces, was theater music.  All through college, I wrote the incidental music to the plays being done, which was a very unusual time.  We did the first performance in America of The Family Reunion, and Murder in the Cathedral [both by T. S. Eliot], and The Ascent of F6 [by W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood].  I wrote the music for those, and I realized right then that this was something I wanted to do.  But you’ve already discovered that I don’t feel that overwhelming sense of needing to rush things.  I’m perfectly happy to let an idea sit for a while until it’s right for me, until I’m in the right place, and it’s the right time, with the right resources.  Then I go ahead and deal with it.  I don’t have any problems about that, and I don’t find it at all anomalous that I’ve waited this amount of time.  It has nothing to do with anxiety about the medium.  I feel very comfortable with it, and I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about it.  I love opera.  I know a large amount about it, technically and everything.  I’ve thought a lot about it, and I think the time’s about right for me.  I now have a comfortable feeling of fluency and naturalness in my work, and what you have so many times is trouble finding really good librettos by skilled professional poets.  These three have been written for me, so I’m really ready to go.

BD:   Will they be three full operas, or three one-acts?

Sapp:   They’ll be three operas which fit somehow the television medium.  This is to say they’ll probably have a running time of about two hours apiece, and they would form a triptych.  Of course, that doesn’t mean they can’t be done on stage, but what I’m really trying to do is to think of some interesting and intelligent way of using modern studio technology.

BD:   Would you want some of that studio technology taken into the theater?

Sapp:   The logical thing would be to think of a second version that would not involve these techniques.  I’m talking about rapid cross-cutting and a lot of marvelous collage techniques, such as were used in Laugh-In... not that the subjects of my pieces are rather grim...

BD:   [Feigning alarm]  You’re not going to set Laugh-In, are you???

Sapp:   [Laughs]  No, but from a technical standpoint, I would like to use techniques the way that show did.

BD:   Also some of the techniques of Ernie Kovacs?

Sapp:   Exactly, but I’m not talking about the idea of an opera in which you just use two cameras and photograph what’s on the stage.  The scale of the pieces I could conceive is obviously not monumental.  They’re going to be sort of things which universities can do.  Whether they can be of any importance at a big opera house, or for big singers and big voices, I don’t know.  A TV production could lead to a finished video tape, which would be a good way of making it possible for a producer somewhere to look at it and say, “This seems pretty interesting, so maybe we could try it.”  I haven’t thought that far ahead, but I’m at the stage where I’m ready to go.  I have been thinking about opera for a long time, and I have some ideas about the technical aspects of the aria-recitative problem, and its solution.

BD:   What are your terms, or is that only answerable by listening to the music?

Sapp:   What I mean is I would like essentially to fuse this to make the differences less sharp.  Perhaps I might use all the resources of the various kinds of recitative, but blend them more with arias, and essentially deal with the structural relationship.  One of them would be rather classical, and one of them would be rather free.  In other words, one would have set numbers, and one would not.  This would make a point of that kind of variation.

BD:   Let me broach the subject of translation for opera.  Where do you stand in terms of that?

Sapp:   Ahhhh... it’s a sticky-wicket, isn’t it?  When I hear French and German operas that I know, translated, I feel a sense of loss.  For example, when I hear an opera in Czech or in Russian, such as those by Janáček, or Mussorgsky, or Rimsky Korsakov, and it’s translated, I feel a dreadful sense of loss of vitality and authenticity.  It’s not so simple for me to say yes, I like it, or no, I don’t like it.  When I heard La Traviata in German in Berlin, it was very upsetting.  It just didn’t seem right at all, and I hated every minute of it, and yet it would have been the same thing as hearing it in an English translation.

BD:   Supposing your operas get done in Berlin.  Do you want the people to understand the text?

Sapp:   I would want translations, yes.  I have no problem.  I don’t feel that the doctrine of opera in English in all situations is a way I would approach the problem.  In the first place, there are translations and there are translations...  [Both laugh]  If you can get an Andrew Porter to spend two years of his life working on an adequate translation, in which case it would be an elegant translation of the work, then that’s fine.  Obviously, the Victorian translations, which we all suffered with, were barbarous in many cases, and we had every right to dislike them and find them unsatisfactory.  [Wistfully]  One loves a fine, modern translation, like The Iliad and The Odyssey by Richmond Lattimore.  They’re great literature.

BD:   Do you like this new gimmick of the supertitles in the theater?

Sapp:   I don’t mind it.  I thought at first I would hate it, but I’ve been to a couple at the Cincinnati Opera, and it doesn’t bother me too much.  It doesn’t offend me.  I don’t ultimately find it distracting, nor do I find it ultimately all that useful, either.  Basically, in the theater the name of the game is review, revitalization, and new experiment.  I don’t like the concept of static art in the theater, which is not to say that I don’t occasionally like to see something done in the most orthodox, grand old-fashioned way.  I get a kick out of it, but I don’t want everything to be done with the sense of preserving the tradition, and making sure that everything is exactly as it was done in 1934 at Glyndebourne.  I don’t need that kind of approach, although I welcome it just in the way I welcome historical performances of instrumental music.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t like a Brandenburg Concerto, or a Bach Orchestral Suite done in a rather opulent nineteenth century way.  It’s a question of these things getting polarized, and people getting drawn into antagonistic positions on issues which are not that simple.  If you want to make a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and turn it into a space opera with the space ships, and heroines, and mad doctors, and evil scientists, I suppose it’s okay.  Why not try it and see what happens?

BD:   You don’t feel the stage director is getting too much power?

Sapp:   The fact is that most of those experiments, and most of those attempts to do interesting things, turn out to be disastrous mistakes of someone whose ego is selfish, vain-glorious, pompous, and inflated.  But sometimes they don’t fail.  Look at these attempts to make new things of the Wagner Ring, for example.  Over the last twenty-five years, we’ve had everything from Wieland Wagner to Chéreau.  I didn’t happen to like the most recent version of a nineteenth century bourgeois society, but the conducting [of Boulez] was so glorious and so marvelous, and it was nice to hear all the details.  Works of the theater must keep changing, and that change includes going back to the original as well as going forward to radical experiments.  Some of Franco Zeffirelli’s experiments in New York, during his time there, were extremely ego-centric and unsuccessful, but some were quite lovely.  So it’s not one or the other.  I don’t want opera, or symphony, or anything else, to get locked into a sense of tradition any more than contemporary music should be of one kind, or one approach.  We should always have a reliable capacity to go back and produce the works in an historical context which is as accurate as possible.  That’s one of the things we want to do and have available, but I don’t think it’s the only way.  I don’t care for wild experimentation with powerful stage directors and new conductors.  In the case of opera, you have the additional problem of the infinite number of technical excisions, and additions, and revisions which have been made to accommodate singers, or a chorus, or a director, which is another part of the whole problem.
sapp
BD:   In your music, whether an opera or concert music, how much leeway do you allow on the part of the performer?

Sapp:   In a theater piece I would take a pretty broad view.  I would feel that once the piece is out of my hands, I wouldn’t want to be the kind of person that would try to control every detail of the production, and be there saying what they may or may not do.  I would hope that once the work is out, I would have ideal performances which would please me and suit me, and make me happy, but I know there would be performances in which I would be very upset, and discontent, and feel that it was a misunderstanding or misinterpretation.  But it is necessary to prove a work, to test it out to see what it is.  If a work can’t survive those things, then it probably is not worth surviving.  I might be upset, I might be angry, I might be disheartened, but that’s what you do when you get a work out.  However, in the case of an orchestral piece or a string quartet, I’d feel differently, because there are enough symbols, enough marks, and enough clear instructions for it to be done at least as faithfully as possible to the score.  I wouldn’t be happy if a conductor decided that the second movement should really be the third movement, and so on.  But in the theater, I would feel differently.  That’s the big distinction between those kinds of things.

BD:   The eternal question is ‘how fast is allegro?’

Sapp:   Yes.  I would tell them how fast within a range which would accommodate the hall, and the temperature with the warmth of bodies, and so on.  I always give tempo marks.  If it’s a conventional Italian symbol, I’ll often put an English symbol as well, and I’ll give a metronome mark with ranges.  In other words, there will be a frame of reference which is reasonably accurate.  If I use a tempo mark like a Adagietto, it’s consciously relating this one to other significant Adagietti here and there around the landscape.  Musicians pick up on those code symbols... at least I hope they do!  The recent ones did!
*     *     *     *     *

BD:   Where’s music going today?

Sapp:   Well...  [Thinks a moment]  I really do believe that there is a kind of romantic revival.  People are much more concerned with reaching out.  I don’t mean the music is necessarily being made more simple or simple-minded, but the notion of music composed for a special category of knowledgeable people is being replaced by an idea of music which is frankly appealing, and that’s all for the good.  It can produce some vulgar music and some tasteless music, but it can also produce some grandly unified cohesive music, too.  We don’t have any patriotic music, for example.  We’re a country which has strong symbols and emblems of patriotism in many respects, and we have very little patriotic music.

BD:   Should we be looking for a new Sousa?

Sapp:   [Laughs]  It’s hard to beat The Stars and Stripes Forever.  I don’t know if we can find a new one, but I don’t find that music in that tradition to have any other kinds of iconography.  I don’t know if you can write consciously patriotic music.  That’s a difficult thing to say, but we have other areas of our own history.  We have struggles, we have battles, we have combats, we have issues.  Talk about operatic possibilities...  If I were thirty and just starting out, and decided that’s where my destiny lay, then how many things might I depict?  Maybe the agonies of Valley Forge, or the deviousness of Thomas Jefferson, or maybe the grandeur of Franklin Roosevelt.  There are so many marvelous historic issues of American history which are waiting, not necessarily for glorification, but they’re marvelous stories. 

BD:   Have we not gotten a few of them?

Sapp:   Very few.

BD:   Carlisle Floyd wrote an opera on Huey Long called Willy Stark.  [See my interview with Timothy Nolen, who created the title role.]

Sapp:   Yes, based on the book of Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men.  Carlisle and I were colleagues and good friends in Florida.  We talked a lot about this, and he’s a person who feels very strongly about this American idea, starting with Susannah, which was his first one.  This is the right way to go, but I was just thinking in terms of so many marvelous things.  We have our epics of the West and so on, but we don’t need to be satisfied with The Girl of the Golden West [Puccini] as our great Western.  We have a few, and there have been some efforts, but you can be as American in Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All, for example.  You don’t have to look for grand particular incidences, but I guess that’s what I would do if I were starting again, and were looking around for things to say and do.  I would deal with some of the great themes of my own country.  I think we need it.  I’d love to see it with this romanticism.  When you asked me where music is going, I see a period of the next ten or fifteen years in which there’s going to be a rising effort to deal with this.  It shouldn’t be left only to Philip Glass to deal with the Civil War!  There are other people with other ways of writing, and other approaches, although he is a remarkable composer for the theater.  I don’t know anyone whose theater music I respect more.  I don’t care much for the instrumental pieces, but those three works which have been produced and recorded, and presented on a number of stages in other countries are stunning theatrical works.  When people talk to me about Glass, and say they don’t care much for its roaring repetitious, most of the time they really don’t know the theater pieces, or the wonderful movie Koyaanisqatsi, which is one of the most powerful experiences you can have.  When you listen to Glass’s score by itself, it doesn’t always carry across.  But when you look at it in the context of that film, it’s great theater.

BD:   We’re getting his Satyagraha at Lyric Opera this fall.

Sapp:   You will see, it’s great theater.  So we have a tremendous opera composer right with us, and specifically about where music is going, I think we’re in for a really great period of American opera.  We have the big companies, the regional companies, the university companies, and we have a number of really first-class people who know how to write operas.  John Adams is another.  These are good technicians, good people, good composers, and we have this layer of people in their thirties who are coming along, and it’s going to be good.  So I look forward to sitting around and seeing a whole bunch of wonderful operas come up.  This has nothing to do with operas of mine which we talked about, because they’ve been simmering for me, and it really goes back to my old college days.

BD:   Thank you for being a composer.

Sapp:   [Laughs]  Thank you for having me here.  I really enjoyed this very much indeed.




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© 1987 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on May 2, 1987.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB in 1999.  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.