Stephen Scott Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Composer Stephen Scott

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

Stephen Scott (October 10, 1944 – March 10, 2021) was an American composer best known for his development of the bowed piano. This is a form of extended technique which involves a grand piano being played by an ensemble of ten musicians who utilize lengths of rosined horsehair, nylon filament, and other utensils to bow the strings of the piano, creating an orchestra-like sound. Scott borrowed the technique from C. Curtis-Smith, who invented it in 1972. Scott founded the Bowed Piano Ensemble in 1977, for which he composed. His work is associated with the minimalist style of composition.

Scott studied with Homer Keller at the University of Oregon and subsequently with Ron Nelson and Gerald Shapiro. He taught music at Colorado College from 1969 to 2014, becoming a full professor there in 1989. He also taught at Evergreen State College and has served as visiting composer at the Aspen Music School, New England Conservatory of Music, Princeton University, the University of Southern California, and at several universities and conservatories in Australia and Europe.

Several recordings with Scott's Bowed Piano Ensemble have been released by New Albion Records, Albany Records, and Navona Records. Scott has performed and composed pieces in a thirteen limit tuning by Terry Riley.

== Names which are links in this box and below refer to my interviews elsewhere on this website. BD

Stephen Scott and his Bowed Piano Ensemble were in Chicago in March of 1998, for a performance of Vikings of the Sunrise at the Harold Washington Library. [Their recording of this work is shown at the bottom of this webpage.] On the evening before the concert, I had the pleasure of speaking with Scott about his work. Portions of the conversation were aired on WNIB, Classical 97, and later on WNUR, the station of Northwestern University. Now (in September of 2025), I am able to present the entire conversation on this webpage.

He was intrigued by some of my questions, and was very glad to be able to speak about his ideas and techniques. Besides the serious discussion, there was some laughter.
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Here is that interview . . . . .

Bruce Duffie: Whose idea was it to go inside the guts of the piano, and use something other than hammers to make the sound?

Stephen Scott:   Henry Cowell would probably be at least the twentieth century answer to that question. He called upon performers to use their hands on the strings in various ways, such as strumming, and rubbing, and drumming on the strings, and so on. His student, John Cage, certainly took the technique further with his invention of the so-called ‘prepared piano’ in the late 1930s. However, there may be precedence that we don’t know about of perhaps Charles Ives or some earlier composer. Certainly, some kid experimenting at some point reached in the piano. I did it as a kid without knowing Henry Cowell’s work, and knowing nothing about Cowell or Cage, or anybody.

BD:   What drew you to making this kind of a sound?

Scott:   There are several answers to that question, or several threads of the answer. One is that in 1970, I was studying African music in Africa, more as a musical tourist than as a scholar or an ethnomusicologist, just as a composer interested not so much in the sounds as the organizational principles of African music, such as short repeating rhythms stacking up on top of each other to make more complex rhythms. Of course, many composers and musicians in the twentieth century have been influenced by various African, or African-American ways of musical thinking, rhythmically especially. Also, I was interested in composing music for many performers, or several performers, using the same sound-source, meaning groups of players making music out of the same sound but with different pitches and different rhythms. In the mid-1970s, I happened to stumble on the work of Curtis Curtis-Smith, who is a Michigan composer, who, as far as I know, invented the nylon filament piano bow in some of his solo works in the mid-1970s. Besides doing other things inside the piano, à la Henry Cowell and perhaps preparations à la Cage, he also called upon performers to produce a sustained tone with rosined nylon. So I didn’t invent the nylon bow, but when I heard that sound in one of Curtis’s piano pieces, I was so taken by that. At the same time, since I was looking for a way to make group-music using the same sound-source but in different registers, it occurred to me that this would be a way to achieve that.

BD:   You came to it because of the unique sound?

Scott:   Yes, indeed. When I first heard it, that sound changed my life! [Both laugh] I was so taken by it, and I bonded with Curtis and asked him how he did it. So he gave me some ideas about it. He also made bows. Since then, I’ve adapted his techniques and changed them and elaborated on them quite a bit.

BD:   You have taken them another step or three?

Scott:   Yes, right! I invented, for example, what I call the ‘rigid bow’, which is a way of making short staccato, almost percussive sounds, or perhaps reed-like sounds. Some people hear harmonicas or clarinets, or something coming out of the piano.

BD:   When I first heard it, I almost thought it was a big accordion.

Scott:   Yes, it’s very accordion-like. My intention wasn’t to imitate any particular instrument, but I wanted some short staccato sounds that I could organize in little rhythmic patterns that were reminiscent of African music, especially Central African music where there’s a technique called a ‘hocket’ [used in the CD shown below-left]. This has individual notes and rests which are put together in a variety of combinations by different players to make a composite and more complicated whole. That’s why I needed the short sounds, and coming from the piano I discovered that Curtis’s bows would not produce that. They were just too unwieldy. It was hard to get good control, and good dynamics, and good precision. So I came up with the rigid bow, as I called it, which is horsehair on a stick with rosin, and it is rubbed against the strings. From there it’s gone on to several additional steps.

BD:   How is the horsehair on a stick different from what a violinist would have in his hand?
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Scott: It’s really quite similar except that we have eighty-eight strings... actually there are more than eighty-eight, because most of the pitches in a piano have two or three strings per pitch. So, it is really a couple of hundred. That’s one difference. Then there’s a soundboard. The inside of a piano is very much like a harp. It’s unlike a violin or fiddle. There’s no neck, and you don’t finger the pitches to change them. You change strings. So it’s a very different instrument, and the sound is not violin-like at all. It sounds like a reed instrument.

* * * * *

BD:   These works require several people gathered around an instrument pressing against one another. When you had this idea of the sound, did you also, at the same time, have the idea of communal performance?

Scott:   I did, to some extent. I was most interested in achieving a certain musical result, which, as I’ve said, had to do with rhythmic structures, and interlocking parts and notes and rests that would go together to make melodic and rhythmic figures. I discovered that in order to do that, I needed several players, and the very first piece I composed for a bowed piano and ensemble in 1977 required ten players just to make the notes that I wanted to make. It’s not an efficient way to play a piano [both laugh]. Sometimes it takes ten players to play the notes that one person could play with ten fingers, but the sound is quite different than one would get playing at a keyboard. It’s almost unrecognizable. Because of the sounds and the notes and the rhythms I was hearing, it became necessary to develop this communal aspect, as you put it, and then it grew from there.

BD:   Would you prefer it to be played by one person? Maybe you could make some kind of contraption that one person could use to manipulate all of the bows.

Scott:   I used to think so. In fact, I experimented with various devices to do that. For example, a separate keyboard, not the piano keyboard, hooked up to these rigid bows, as I have called them, that will saw up and down against the strings of the piano, and bowed in that way. That was a failure. [Laughs] It was sort of Rube Goldberg contraction that didn’t really work very well.

BD:   It sounds like something you’d see at a side-show, with all the pneumatic tubes and connections.

Scott:   Yes! If it had worked, it might have been useful, but it didn’t. It was even worse than a gimmick that works. I’ve also seen electro-magnetic bows which are similar to what the guitarists use, called an EBow. It’s an electromagnetic field that one places around the strings and gets them to vibrate. But I’ve discovered that I like the inefficiency, the labor-intensive character of this music, because it produces a different musical result. It is certainly a different social result, and the idea of organizing a group of ten players to play one instrument appeals to me in a certain bizarre aesthetic way. It’s a challenge that’s for sure.

BD:   How is it different with ten players playing one instrument, as opposed to ten players each playing their own instrument?

Scott:   Quite different. I like to use the analogy that if one were to try this in an orchestra, for example, or even in a string quartet, or in a smaller group than ten playing my music the way we do around the piano, since we all have to move and share sometimes the same strings, several of us have to use the same space sequentially, or even at the same time. It would be like a cellist putting down the instrument and coming over and taking the first violinist’s instrument from him, or coming and sitting in the violist’s lap, and using his instrument and music stand. We have to share our space. We don’t have our own space, so there’s a whole kind of logic to working out one of these performances. It involves physical movements and patterns, as much as the sounds.

BD:   Why do you have overlapping duties, rather than leaving it like a handbell choir, where each player plays two or three bells, and when a sound comes back to them they play, but they remain stationary?

Scott:   I do that when I can get away with it. For example, if there’s a melody with five notes or five pitches, and those repeat, or those are used over again several times within a short period of time, I will keep one player on the same pitch. Suppose I have a C, and you have a B-flat, and the next person has an A-flat. We will play those in our turn the way a handbell choir will. But it’s partly because I use so many qualities of sound. Some are percussive, some are plucked with guitar picks, and some are hammered with piano hammers that have been removed... not from the piano we’re playing, but from another piano that’s been refurbished! We use strumming, and these two types of bows I’ve mentioned. I will often want to introduce a new sound characteristic while the old one is going on. Then I need to send some person away from what’s been done, to pick up the new materials and the new tools, and that may be at another part of the piano. So there’s quite a bit of movement.

BD:   It’s really more like a percussion section, where everybody’s moving around a little bit.

Scott:   It is, but quite a bit more. If one were to see a percussion ensemble perform on more instruments than there are players, people are always moving and often moving as you suggest. It’s more orchestral than anything, because of the different choirs of sounds that I produce from the instrument. In this case, the whole orchestra is doing the moving. It’s a small orchestra, of course...

BD:   What’s the maximum number of players you can get at a piano?

Scott:   Just in experimental terms, I have attempted to get more than ten people around an instrument, but ten seems to be the practical limit for me. So I have settled on that number as a happy medium. I can get enough variety of timbre and texture and musical ideas out of ten people as I need, but I’m actually about to embark on a piece for two pianos and twenty players. So I’ll be able to produce quite a bit more variety of sound and mood and character with that many, but that’s not very practical as far as doing repeated performances, and traveling with the group. Music is not as portable when you have to get two pianos that someone will allow you to prepare in the way we have to do.

BD:   You’re always using a nine-foot piano?

Scott:   That’s correct. We’ve played just about every kind there is, from Petrof and Bechstein, to Steinway and Baldwin.

BD:   Have you used the Bösendorfer with the extra notes on the bottom?

Scott:   Yes, although I’ve never written a piece which requires those extra notes. I don’t have one myself, and on tour we’ve played several different Bösendorfers. But the pieces are already composed, so we don’t use those lower pitches. If I ever own a Bösendorfer, I will start composing for those lower tones.
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BD:   You’re working in tonal music with Equal Temperament. Has there ever been a thought of using your techniques on Ben Johnston’s piano which is tuned in microtones?

Scott:   As a matter of fact, I have done some work in Just Intonation, which is a branch of Microtonal Tuning. The tuning that I’ve used is not as elaborate as Ben’s, but I’ve worked with Terry Riley, and we’ve collaborated on a piece which has not been heard outside of Colorado Springs. We did the one and only performance of this piece, but it’s in what Terry calls a 13-limit Just Tuning. All the intervals are as pure as they sound in the overtone series, just as one can find in Ben Johnston’s work or other microtonal works. So it’s a very natural thing to do. It’s a very logical thing to do with this medium because the piano is so resonant, especially when one wedges the pedal down as I do, so that all of the instrument sounds. The soundboard is giving back all this resonance. It increases the resonance quite a bit if you tune the intervals according to the overtone series.

BD:   Would it not be better to simply make a piano to your specifications, leaving off the dampers and then travel with that instrument?

Scott:   It’s an alternative, but I thought about it and it would be quite expensive to do. However, we could do some things with a piano designed for what we do that we cannot do with an ordinary concert grand piano. I like the idea of being able to come to a venue like the Harold Washington Library here in Chicago, or the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, or the Sydney Opera House, or wherever it is, and transform a concert grand piano into a new and different instrument, on which we then play a unique kind of music, and then we put it back to its original state. We don’t permanently alter anything. We just take out our preparations, clean it up, put the lid back on, and you can play Brahms on it that same night. Very few of us have those grand pianos in our homes, but we hear pianos all the time, and many of us own them. It’s a common artifact, and to transform them into a kind of orchestral instrument, and then put it back to its ordinary use, appeals to me.

* * * * *

BD:   Do you write music for other than bowed piano these days?

Scott:   I do not do a great deal. I’ve had a few commissions for this or that piece that someone’s asked me to do, or occasionally I’ll write a piece for a friend who is not a bowed pianist. But that occupies most of my time and attention, and it’s the most fun for me. So I try to spend more of my composing time doing that than anything else.

BD:   Are you the only one around who is doing this?

Scott:   I think I’m the only guy that’s doing this, more or less, full-time as a specialty. Not in a pejorative sense, but I would say there are a few other composers who have dabbled in the techniques, but no one has been crazy enough to devote a career to this besides myself. There may be someone I don’t know about, and a few composers have heard my music and adopted some of the techniques for their own. John Cage was one. I like to think that I influenced John Cage in that way. He heard one of our concerts in New York, and then used a few piano bows. In fact, he actually rewrote some of his earlier pieces and incorporated bows in them.

BD:   Do you envision a time when there will a lot of people writing for this medium?

Scott:   No, I really don’t. For one thing, it’s essentially identified with me, and every composer wants to find his or her own voice, and expressive medium. This is not to say that someone else couldn’t do wonderful music, and very different music from what I do, but it’s a lot of work. [Laughs] This is not to suggest that people don’t want to put a lot of work into their art, but they want to put their work into something that is unique and challenging to them. So I really don’t imagine that there will be lots of people doing this. It took me at least ten years to figure out how to do it. It was a very long and laborious process, and I enjoyed it.

BD:   You must obviously believe in it.

Scott:   I do, yes. It’s been a lot of fun, and it’s still fun for me, and I still enjoy playing the music. That’s my favorite part, actually, playing the pieces and performing them.

BD:   Are there ever times when you’re not part of the performing ensemble?

Scott:   There have been a couple of times. Several ensembles here and there in the world have done my pieces, usually with some advice and coaching from me, but not always. A couple of groups have taken them on simply on the strength of some phone conversations and e-mails and faxes, with instructions and questions being asked and answered.

BD:   You should make an instructional video! [A few years later, he would do exactly that, and it is shown on YouTube.]

Scott:   I have thought about that. That’s one of the things I’ll do when I get around to it! [Both laugh] I do have pages of instructions, however, but the idea of a video is a good one, because so much of it is visual. You can demonstrate just how to change this bow so easily when someone can watch you do it. I’ve coached ensembles myself here and abroad doing my music. I always try to be part of the performing group if I can, partly because when any group is playing this music, it’s a closed system. The group of ten players surrounds the piano, all looking in, all looking towards each other in a circular formation. It’s not always a circle but it’s kind of like a football huddle. So an outsider, like the composer trying to conduct, or trying to advise or rehearse a group, is exactly that, an outsider.

BD:   Does anyone sit at the keyboard?

Scott:   Occasionally. I do use the keyboard, especially in the later and more recent works, like the work we’re doing tomorrow here in Chicago, Vikings of the Sunrise. The keyboard is only used when the strings are muted. I have specially designed mutes that I’ve made, that change the timbre and the quality of the instrument quite bit.

BD:   Like a piano tuner will use?
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Scott:   Somewhat like that, yes. The mutes that I use are made out of a kind of rubber that we make specifically for the strings of the piano, and are tailored to fit those strings. So it’s a different sound than the tuner’s felt. Usually for the keyboard player, that is only one of the jobs. A person will rotate to the keyboard and play three- or four-minutes’ worth of music, and then move on to a soft bow, or a hammer, or a guitar pick, or something else. In this piece, there are four or five of us who play the keyboard at various points. Whoever is available plays the keyboard when we need it.

BD:   [With a gentle nudge] Are you the thorn in the side of every piano technician in the world?

Scott:   [Laughs] Certainly with some of them, yes. There are some technicians who have been very skeptical, and had great reservations about what we’ve done. As a rule, we don’t perform anywhere where the establishment doesn’t know what we’re doing to the piano. They know what preparations we are using, and when asked, I will provide the technician with specific technical information about what we do. We’re very aboveboard about the preparations that we use. We don’t try to sneak anything by anybody.

BD:   I assume they’d be glad to let you use their $20 piano... [Both laugh]

Scott:   Because what we call an ‘extended piano’ is so common in the twentieth century, many concert venues, and particularly university music departments, will have a piano that is dedicated to this kind of performance. You can’t prepare piano A or piano B, but you can prepare piano C, and it’s usually the older one. It’s the one that the keyboard players prefer not to use, and don’t find to be the best piano. But often those are fine pianos for our purposes. They’ll hold their tune, and how well the keyboard action works is largely irrelevant to what we do. Mainly what we need is a nice resonant instrument that’s in tune, so often the old Steinway that’s been around for thirty or forty years is fine for us.

BD:   Do you take the action out so that there is more resonance inside?

Scott:   We don’t do that, largely because we do use the keyboard occasionally, so we need that action. But this was true even in the old days, when I used to have a principle that I wasn’t going to use the keyboard, and I was only going to make sounds directly on the strings. I’ve softened a bit, and have found there certainly is a use for all those white and black keys at that end of the piano.

BD:   [With a wink] You haven’t sold out, have you?

Scott:   No! [Much laughter] In order to sell out you have to become commercially successful, and that’s not a danger in my case! [More laughter]

BD:   Would you want your music to be on the charts? Would you want to be programmed everywhere? Would you want your music to be in elevators?

Scott:   [Thinks a moment] That’s an interesting question, because I hate elevator music, and I don’t pay much attention to popular music. I’m not interested in that, and there’s little chance of that happening with the kinds of music I do, which are large-scale compositions. They are symphonic, and require a pretty extensive understanding. I don’t want to say they’re challenging, but they require detailed and long-term listening. They require a longer attention span than one can devote to elevator music, or to Top 40.

BD:   [With another wink] Perhaps in the elevator of a very tall building? [Both laugh]

Scott:   Yes, a very tall building, or one in which the elevator gets stuck! [Returning to the topic] I write music that I love, and would be delighted if it had a wider audience. But I’m realistic enough to know that it probably won’t.

BD:   Let me ask the really easy question. What’s the purpose of music?

Scott:   [With a smirk] Oh yes, that’s an easy question! [Thinks again] For me, music is a way of getting out sonic patterns that are in my head. I don’t think of it so much as communication, although many people do. It’s almost a truism to say that music communicates, but what it communicates we don’t know, and we’ll never know. Music expresses beauty, and it expresses intellect, and the meaning is in the pattern of sounds. So anything I find attractive musically, or beautiful or interesting to listen to that comes out of my own head, I assume and hope that at least some of the people will enjoy listening to, and will find some kind of meaning, and have some positive responses to it. Most composers compose for themselves first, and they’re delighted if they have an audience. But they compose because they want to hear these sounds that are in their heads realized in real musical space, by musical instruments or voices in whatever way they want to hear these sounds. Particularly if a composer is writing for orchestra, there’s no way to hear that in your head. You can sort of imagine what it’s going to sound like, but it’s not like hearing an orchestra playing the music.

BD:   I assume you want your music for more than just the ten who are around the piano.

Scott:   Oh, indeed, yes. I love playing for an audience, and I find that’s part of the beauty of it. In fact, a great part of it is playing something for an audience, and having an audience respond to what they’re hearing, either through rapt attention, which sometimes happens, or through discussion afterwards. It’s great when there is interest in the medium, and interest in the ensemble, especially after a performance when the piano is mobbed by people who want to see how we’re doing what we do. There’s a curiosity factor.

BD:   I would think the best performing space would be where you’re almost in a well, with everyone in a balcony looking down, like an operating theater.

Scott:   That’s absolutely true. The traditional concert hall, with a proscenium stage or an elevated stage above the audience is not so good for what we do. Oftentimes, that’s where we end up performing because that’s the way concert halls are. You don’t need to see a symphony orchestra or a string quartet quite in the same way that you want you see what we’re doing. We do get to perform in some spaces like that, such as art galleries. We once performed in Berlin in an old military hospital that had been converted to, of all places, a Künstlerhaus [an artist’s house] where people had studio space. The audience was in galleries, and we played on a marble floor with a balcony supported on columns, and a complete surrounding balcony. All of the audience was in the balcony, directly overhead, and that’s probably the best place. The sound was great because of the marble surfaces, and the visual aspect was very strong.

BD:   For that performance, you dwelt in a marble hall! [Alluding to the aria, I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls, from the 1843 opera The Bohemian Girl, by Michael Balfe.]

Scott:   Yes, indeed! [Both laugh] I like that!

BD:   This is a question that I often ask composers, but it might not be appropriate here. Should your music be played on a concert that’s only your music, or should it be on a mixed program? Then, of course, is there any way to make it a mixed program since you will have doctored the piano?

Scott:   If there are two pianos, then you can have both kinds of piano music on the same concert.

BD:   How long does it take to put the piano back to where people can play Brahms?
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Scott: It takes about an hour, so it’s not practical to use the same piano on a single concert. In fact, it takes us longer than that to prepare it. It’s not practical to use a piano for anything else on a program besides our music, but shorter pieces of mine than the one we’re touring with now, go rather well in a mixed program of a variety of kinds of music. I worked with an ensemble in Ireland a little over a year ago on which the opening event was a Balinese gamelan, based in Cork, Ireland of all places! Then there was a string orchestra, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, which plays standing up, which is a wonderful way to watch a string orchestra play. Lully’s [1632-1687] players must have done that in France. Then we came on and played one of my short bowed piano pieces. Then the second half of the program was Evelyn Glennie the percussionist, who did a long solo set. That was a wonderful program. It was world music in the best sense of that word. So, it certainly can happen.

* * * * *

BD:   When you get an idea for a piece, do you know where it’s going to go, or do you wait and see where it takes you?

Scott:   Hmmm... These are good questions, central questions! This is not my idea originally, but other artists have had this idea as well. I like to think of the composition process as a dialectic. You make a sound. You’re perhaps noodling at the keyboard, or you imagine a little melody, and you play it at the keyboard, and it talks back to you. It says, “I want to go this way,” and it suggests a way to treat itself. The material speaks to you and says, “This is what I have in mind for myself.” Then you try that out, and it works, or it doesn’t work. You accept it, or you reject it. It all goes on in your head, but it’s kind of a dialogue I have with my material. So, I guess in that sense, no, I have no idea where something is going musically when I start. But the further I take it, the more I get an idea of the shape it needs to take, and the more I begin then to relate what I’m doing now with what I did earlier. The more I think about the structure of the music, and how this idea reminds me of that earlier idea, I look for the commonality between them, and I find it. I discover it in there, and then I make more of that. Then maybe I’ll go back and rewrite the first part based on what I’ve learned about it in this later section, and so on and so forth.

BD:   Do your performers ever discover things in your score that you didn’t know you’d hidden there... or are we not that far technically yet?

Scott:   I do find that. What I find in this medium is that my performers will think of ways to do things that I hadn’t thought of.

BD:   Ways to accomplish what you’re asking?

Scott:   Exactly. They’re hearing something in the music which is an ideal, or a perhaps an alternative way of orchestrating something. A performer might say, “Why don’t we try that pizzicato,” or “Why don’t we turn the hammers over, and use the wood instead of the felt for that section?” In rehearsals, we all are experimenting with ways of realizing the compositional ideas, and they have interpretive suggestions or ideas about dynamics that I hadn’t thought about, or hadn’t really paid attention to, or just ignored.

BD:   Do those ideas then become incorporated into the score for the next performance?

Scott:   They do, especially if I like the ideas! [Both laugh] Sometimes a player will be improvising something in a rehearsal, and I’ll say, “We’ll use that in your piece, but I don’t want that in here.” So, I do maintain that kind of control that composers seem to be after. However, because it’s more or less a democratic ten-member ensemble, there’s no one conductor. Sometimes I’m conducting and give cues, and sometimes other players do that if I’m busy, or if both hands aren’t free. I encourage everyone to participate in the process of learning the piece and putting it together by making suggestions. There’s a lot of collaboration, and often the composition does change during rehearsals.

BD:   Is everything in your piece notated?

Scott:   Not everything. It’s largely notated. In this current big piece we’re doing, there are two almost entirely improvised sections, and there are a few other passages where some rhythmic improvisation is asked for. Largely it’s notated, and I write it in scores that look very much like an orchestral work. [At this point his phone rings, and he speaks of his tour schedule.]

BD:   Is being a touring musician too much work?

Scott:   [Laughs] I wouldn’t want to do it full-time, that’s for sure. It is a lot of work. It’s demanding, and it’s tiring, so I travel two or three times a year with my music. Sometimes it is without an ensemble. For example, I was in Eastern Europe in November, and I worked with an ensemble of Estonian Conservatory students. We did a little tour.

BD:   So you did a bit of instruction, and then you put together the performance?

Scott:   Exactly, and that was a lot of fun and very rewarding. It was a two-week trip, which was about enough. I was happy not to be doing more of that after I’d done it, but I was glad I did it, certainly. I like to travel, but to do it full-time would be too exhausting.

* * * * *

BD: What kind of instrumentalist makes the best bowed piano player? Is it a pianist, a harpist, a percussionist?
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Scott:   That’s a good question. Not any of those necessarily. In fact, it doesn’t have to be an instrumentalist. Singers sometimes are very good bowed piano players. What it takes is musicianship, and that comes in all stripes. I also look for musicians with ensemble experience, that is playing with other people. You can be a solo pianist and never have played with other musicians in a chamber music setting, or a concerto. In that case, you don’t have to worry about tempo. You just set your own tempo, and if it changes, as long as it’s musical, that’s okay. I look for people who can count, who can keep a steady beat and subdivide the beat, and play complicated rhythms around and inside the beats and the measures. I also look for people who are able to listen and balance what they do with what else they’re hearing. I have a routine for auditioning, which tries to take account of their experience in various ways.

BD:   Are you finding enough, or perhaps too many of these people?

Scott:   It’s competitive. I always audition more than I can take, which is good. That’s the way to have it, but you never know how a particular ensemble will gel until you get them together. This particular ensemble works very well together. Everyone likes everybody else. The personalities meld very well, and everyone’s cooperative.

BD:   Are these the people on the record?

Scott:   Some of them are. Four of us on the record, and six of this current group are new to the piece since the recording we made. But this particular group works very well together. There’s great teamwork, and that’s really important for us in this kind of music. [At this point he recorded a Station Break, and I asked his birthdate (October 10, 1944).]

BD:   Are you at the point in your career that you want to be at this age? [Remember, this interview took place in March, 1998.]

Scott:   [Sighs] These are hard questions! Yes, I think so. I’m not really sure what a career is. For me it’s been largely doing what I want to do, which I’m very privileged and very favored to be able to do. I have a lot of support from the college where I teach, both in the sense that I have time, and the institutional support to do the kind of music that I want to do.

BD:   [With a wink] Are they glad to have a unique performer, or do they think they’ve just hired some nutcase?

Scott:   [Laughs] Probably both! It depends on what month you talk to them! I think the college is proud of what I do, and there’s some public relations value in what I do. I get a lot of strokes. As Bill Evans said once, “My ego is well fed.” That’s one of my favorite lines. I wish I could play the way he did.

BD:   What do you teach at Colorado College?

Scott:   I’m in the music department, and besides composition and running this ensemble, I teach an experimental course, which deals with the experimental music tradition largely of American composers including Cowell and Harrison, and going back as far as Ives. I also teach a couple of jazz related courses, since that’s a field I had quite a bit of training in... or I taught myself, largely when I was young. I occasionally teach other courses as well, but all related to music.

BD:   What advice do you have for young composers coming along?

Scott:   I would say simply do what you’re passionate about. If it’s composition, and you won’t be happy doing anything else, you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to figure out a way to do it. I would advise them not to be swayed by older people who say it’s not practical to pursue a career in music. It’s not, that’s true, and it’s difficult to do. It’s very challenging to do, but if you’re not going to be happy with what you’re doing, and if you will wish you had done such and such, then that’s not a very good way to spend your life. Since I work with young students all the time, I ask them if (1) they’re very passionate about music, and (2) they won’t be happy unless they’re doing music, then I advise them to do whatever they can and whatever they have to do in order to pursue that. I would also advise young composers, to listen to all kinds of music. Not just to classical music, for example, but to the Didgeridoo, to jazz, to Balinese gamelan music, to Indian sitar music, to rock and jazz and rap, and everything.

BD:   Are there students today who are just listening to classical music?

Scott:   [Laughs] There are a few, yes. As I am saying it, I realize that they are fewer and further between. I guess the reason I said there are a few is that our music departments still essentially says to them that this is music worth listening to. This has changed a great deal in the last few decades, and most respectable music departments and conservatories have courses in non-western music, and jazz, and rock music, and various kinds of popular music. On the other hand, those students who have only listened to rock music, or rap, certainly need their horizons broadened, I am encouraging those people to listen to Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms, but in addition these other traditions as well.

BD:   Coming back specifically to you, is composing fun?

Scott:   It is. I love to do it, I really do. I said earlier that the most fun I have is in playing the music, and that’s probably true because composing is very hard work. Performing is hard work too, but composing is long work. Day after day after day after day, and week after week when I can actually devote some time every day to it, and that’s not always. It’s also frustrating. Particularly when I’m composing a piece, I don’t sleep well at night because all of these things are going through my head. I’m hearing these melodies over and over, and my wife, who is an elementary music teacher, says the same thing happens to her with music that she’s teaching her children. But while I’m doing it, particularly if I discover something that I’m really excited about, yes, it’s a lot of fun. It’s very entertaining! [Both laugh]

BD:   In a performance of your music, how much is art and how much is entertainment?

Scott:   [Laughs] Another one of those tough questions! These are the kinds of things I ask my students, but I don’t expect to have to answer these myself! Entertainment is a big part of it, particularly because my music is repetitive, and it’s sometimes very slowly evolving. If we were, for example, to stand stock still at the piano, and make very little motion to make this music, there wouldn’t be much to look at. But there is a lot of movement required, and we have to choreograph our movements so that all twenty elbows and hands and forearms can work together around this small space. It is basically an area 6-feet by 4-feet that we’re dealing with inside the piano. So, there is quite a bit of visual entertainment as well as the sounds of the music. In fact, in some cases recently I’ve been using video cameras inside the piano, or trained on the piano from above, and presenting that view onto screens, or projection for the performers. So there’s certainly an entertainment value in that. It actually works very nicely. Technically it’s fairly elaborate to do, so it doesn’t happen too often, but we like to do that when we can.
scott

BD:   Have you given any thought to asking a piano maker about creating a piano specifically for you?

Scott:   Not a great deal, but the idea has come up again and again. People also ask me when I am going to get a contract to endorse certain pianos! For one thing, I like to travel with this music, and it’s much easier to travel with a suitcase full of tools and implements, and then to place those in a piano in some remote location and play the music. I do like to do that, but again, there’s the idea of transforming an instrument into something else temporarily, and then putting it back where it was. Then there’s the time element. I just haven’t ever taken the time, or been working on some project that has allowed me to take the time to actually invent that instrument. But somebody could do it, and maybe they will at some point.

BD:   Do you always get it back exactly right?

Scott:   We do. The piano sometimes needs to be tuned after we play it, but that’s true if you play Brahms or Beethoven as well. The piano goes out of tune. In fact, we in the ensemble say that we leave the pianos cleaner than we find them. That’s not always true, because sometimes you’ll have a brand-new pristine piano, but often they will be full of dust. In a damp climate you’ll find rusted strings sometimes, and even on fairly nice pianos. We don’t take the rust off the strings, but we do try to leave them at least in the condition that we found them. I toured once in Australia when we were doing a work in an alternative tuning, in the Just tuning, so I toured with a piano tuner. He was a friend of mine from Colorado, who went in advance of us along the way, and retuned the piano a few days ahead of time. Afterward, he then retuned again. [For more about this, see my interview with Franz Mohr, Chief Concert Technician for Steinway & Sons 1968-92.]

BD:   Each instrument had to get used to the new tuning?

Scott:   Exactly, to get the piano acclimated to this new tuning. He actually rebuilt a couple of pianos. He rebuilt part of the piano in the famous Melba Hall in Parkville in Melbourne, Victoria, because the action just wasn’t working right. He did lots of improvements to their piano, so this was an unexpected benefit of having us come to play. We don’t usually travel with our own technician, but we do make every attempt to keep the piano clean, and to make it look and act normal when we’re done.

BD:   I wonder if you leave your audiences’ ears cleaner than when they came in.

Scott:   [Laughs] I like to think so, especially when we’re using an alternate tuning. As you know, those alternative tunings have pure intervals, which our modern tuning does not, except for the octave. I’m convinced that the pure intervals do a scouring out of the musical brain, and they leave your body in a more harmonious state than it was. I don’t know if we do that with the music which is in normal tuning, but the sounds are so different, and I still find them very effecting. So, I’m hoping that audiences do, too.

BD:   Thank you for all of your ideas.

Scott:   Thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed sharing them with you.

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on March 19, 1998. Portions were broadcast on WNIB the following year; and on WNUR in 2006. 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 now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

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