Martin Bresnick Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Composer Martin Bresnick

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

Bresnick (born November 13, 1946) grew up in the Bronx, and is a graduate of New York City's specialized High School of Music and Art. He was educated at the University of Hartford (B.A. '67), Stanford University (M.A. '68, D.M.A. '72), and the Akademie für Musik, Vienna ('69–'70), and studied composition with John Chowning, György Ligeti and Gottfried von Einem. He went on to teach at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Stanford University and the Yale School of Music.

Bresnick’s work has received many prizes, among them: Fulbright Fellowship (1969–70), three NEA Composer Grants (1974, 1979, 1990), Rome Prize Fellowship (1975–76), MacDowell Fellowship (1977), First Prize, Premio Ancona (1980), First Prize, International Sinfonia Musicale Competition (1982), Connecticut Commission on the Arts Grant, with Chamber Music America (1983), The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Elise L. Stoeger Prize for Chamber Music (1996), "Charles Ives Living" award, American Academy of Arts & Letters (1998), Composer-in Residence, American Academy In Rome (1999), Berlin Prize Fellow, American Academy in Berlin (2001) a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003), and was elected to membership, American Academy of Arts and Letters (2006).

Bresnick is currently a professor at the Yale School of Music, where he has been a widely influential teacher of contemporary composition. His teaching has been recognized by a Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching at Stanford University, a Morse Fellowship from Yale University (1980–81), the ASCAP Foundation's Aaron Copland Prize for teaching, and the Yale School of Music’s highest honor, the Sanford Medal for Service to Music.

Bresnick has been recognized as having composed a large catalog of respected works while teaching and as an influential voice at the Yale School of Music. Notable recent performances including a 60th birthday retrospective at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, the premiere of his oratorio “Passions of Bloom” on the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, the premiere of his fourth string quartet “The Planet on the Table” by the Brentano String Quartet, and a performance of his piano concerto “Caprichos Enfaticos” at the Nasher Sculpture Center.

As a composer for films, he has contributed many scores for documentary films, including Arthur and Lillie (1975) and The Day After Trinity (1980), both of which were nominated for Academy Awards. He also composed the score for the PBS documentary Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet.

In the fall of 2003, Martin Bresnick was visiting Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. At that time, I was teaching the Introduction to Music course there, and I arranged to meet with Bresnick in my basement office for an interview. He is a deep thinker, so his responses were always solid and grounded in the ever-changing history of compositions for the concert hall.

Coincidentally, I was continuing my radio series, originally on WNIB, Classical 97 for over 20 years, then on WNUR, the station of NU. I presented parts of the interview, as well as some of his pieces, on the air. Now, as he is about to enter his 80th year, I am pleased to place this transcript of the entire conversation on my website.
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Bruce Duffie:   You’re a professor at Yale, and you compose your own music, and you conduct. How do you divide your time amongst those very taxing activities?

Martin Bresnick:   A lot of my activities at Yale have to do with teaching — teaching composition, teaching in seminars, and teaching individual students — and I try to reserve as much time as I can to compose. My conducting has of late been a lot less, because we just haven’t had as much call for it. So many other conductors do this in a full-time way.

BD:   Do you get enough time to compose?

Bresnick: I’m a person who is now no longer allowed to complain ever again about this, because in 1998 I was granted an unusual award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was the first Charles Ives Living Award, as it was called, and it gave me three years off from my job just to write music. [Notice that a CD shown below-left has a Trio of Bresnick and also a Trio of Ives.] In fact, in order to accept the award, I had to agree that during that time I would not take any employment in a full-time way as a teacher, and that I would devote my time solely to writing music. So that’s what I did.

BD:   Was that something you really looked forward to and relished, or did you miss the teaching?

Bresnick: At first I looked forward to it, and relished it, and then I began to miss the teaching. It gave me an opportunity to examine myself in an honest way, and I discovered that as much as I like the free time to compose, which was an invaluable experience to be sure, the teaching that I’ve done for so many years has actually fed me as a composer, and made my life a very lively place. I missed my students, and I missed my colleagues at that wonderful environment that I worked in at Yale.

BD:   Now you’re back there?

Bresnick: I’ve been back for two and a half years. This year I won a Guggenheim Fellowship, so I’m going to be off again in the spring. But when you asked the question, I must say that I’m never allowed to complain about having time in that way, because I’ve been very fortunate.

BD:   Regarding teaching, is composition something that really can be taught, or must it be innate within each young composer?

Bresnick: You’ll probably find as many answers to those questions as the individuals that you asked. But probably the consensus among them generally is that composition cannot be taught. There’s a truth in that, which shouldn’t be overlooked, and that is the goal, which probably should be written as a slogan on every composition teacher’s door, is first do no harm. This is what we tell doctors when we send them out to practice. A lot of the teaching experience for gifted students can be an experience which is inhibiting, or deleterious to their activities as a composer. So, first you want to make sure that you don’t get in the way of some emerging gifted person. You want to facilitate those gifts in some way. You want to make them flower. You want to make them reach their fullest possible potential.

BD:   [With a wink] You don’t want a lot of clones of you?

Bresnick: [Smiles] I personally am not into cloning in this area. The two most significant teachers in my life — John Chowning and György Ligeti, who were advisers for my doctorate at Stanford — explicitly rejected the idea that anything that a student should do would resemble anything that they did. Ligeti was particularly grouchy if you brought in something that looked like Ligeti. He was not happy about that.

BD:   He was actually pushing you away?

Bresnick: Yes, he pushed you away from imitation. He wanted to see if you were interested in ideas that were like his ideas, but he never had any interest in having your works sound anything like his music.

BD:   Do you do this with your students?

Bresnick: Indeed! I’ve been teaching at Yale in the school of music since 1981, and of all the schools in America that have contributed in some important way to our imaginative life in concert music, I don’t think you can generalize and say there’s a Yale sound.

BD:   There are the Yale Cellos, but not the Yale Sound. [The Yale Cellos are featured in one of the works on the CD shown above-right.]

Bresnick: That’s right. There are the Yale Cellos, and they are wonderful collection of young musicians. In the composition program, in all the years I worked as a colleague of Jacob Druckman we never asked that there be a Yale Sound.

BD:   Then let me broaden it a little bit. Is there an American Sound that the American composers are putting out?

Bresnick: That may be true, and it tends to wax and wane. Different eras tend to produce more Americano-like sonorities, and other eras produce more international sonorities. We are presently in a strong identity position, that is to say American music seems to resemble itself more distinctly now than it has in a long time. That’s possibly because some developments in Europe have gone their own way, in directions that are not particularly congenial to the American musical sensibility at the moment. I don’t think this is a self-conscious thing, and is certainly not on the part of the people I know back in New Haven... although it may actually be more self-conscious for others. One of our very gifted and prolific students has gone onto a very successful career at the University of Michigan and elsewhere. Michael Daugherty is a composer for whom his self-identification with American popular culture is very, very powerful, and in that position he joined with his colleagues, William Bolcom and the late William Albright in making Michigan a place where that particular stance was really the most forward position that they occupied. I don’t think you can say that about Michigan so much anymore, and it’s never been like that at Yale. If I may take that point further, I would say that over the years we’ve had quite a few students from abroad. We’ve always had a pretty international mix, which does tend to stir the waters.

BD:   Do they bring the strains of their own homelands with them?

Bresnick: They do very often, and their own sensibilities.

BD:   Then are they taking some ‘Americano’ with them when they go away?

Bresnick: In some cases they have, and in some cases they’ve left some very interesting things behind for us to reflect on. We’ve had some funny cases recently. We’ve had some students from China or from Taiwan who became interested in American rock music as a possible source for some of their material, and in Taiwan today, that’s not a very popular style. Most of Taiwanese composers have been taught by teachers who actually worked in Germany, and have a high modernist patina. So their students go back to Taipei sounding a little bit like Michael Nyman or Michael Gordon.
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BD: [With mock horror] They’ve been corrupted???

Bresnick: [Smiles] Yes, they’ve fallen a bit from some points of view, people would say.

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BD:   There are a number of composers who are trying to smudge the line between popular music and art music. Are you trying to do this, or are you trying to keep them apart?

Bresnick: I don’t have a position about this personally. I should say that for better or worse, I am the grandfather of Bang on a Can, which includes Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolf, and Evan Ziporyn, who is a wonderful clarinet player. In fact, all these people were my students at Yale, and I must say I bless them all. I don’t do what they do, but I don’t mind what they do. In some cases, I think it’s great what they do. In my own compositional output, I’ve really been a much more of an omnivorous kind of creature, which is to say I will eat anything that is edible in the environment, being very bear-like in a way. I’m not solely a vegetarian or vegan or carnivore. If I see something that has a potential for stimulating my imagination, I’ll go there, whether it be popular music or abstract high modernist music. My music is like that, in that it travels a wide range.

BD:   Are you often surprised when an idea you had that comes from one area, and then winds up being something completely different, and gets worked into some other kind of composition? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interview with Judith Shatin.]

Bresnick: I used to be more surprised, but knowing myself now, I see that that is a constant phenomenon for me. A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece for Paul Dresher (1951 - ), a very well-known west coast composer, who has an ensemble that involves electric guitar, drum set, and electric violin, a completely electrified ensemble. In order to write for them, you had to in some ways renounce a certain kind of complexity that would require a conductor and an acoustic environment. You needed a different kind of a sound. They were also just in that time by Lisa Moore, who is my wife, and is the pianist in Bang on a Can. I wrote a piece to have her play with them, a sort of semi-concerto called Fantasia on Theme of Willie Dixon [this work in on the CD shown below-right]. He is the guy who wrote the original tune that the rock’n’roll group Cream made into a song called ‘Spoonful’. As it turned out, the way I used it, it sounds like a very odd cross between the Cream version of ‘Spoonful’ and the Brahms D Minor Piano Concerto. So these things do influence each other in very odd ways.

BD:   Are you then looking for the Brahms audience, or the Cream audience, or both, or an amalgam, or neither?

Bresnick: These are very good questions! This one came up just the other day when I was doing a masterclass at DePaul. When we came to the end of a piece that had a certain cadential thing which I felt was tacked on, I asked the composer why he did that. He said he thought the audience expected a cadence at that point. I said it would be better if he wrote what the piece expected, rather than what the audience expected. Let the piece tell you what it wants to do at the end, and listen carefully to that. Engage in a dialogue with your own creation to find out what its potential and its possibilities are, rather than deciding what an audience wants to have happen at this point, and then do that or not do that. In my piece, it’s not that I want the Willie Dixon audience, or the Brahms audience. I want each piece to achieve its perfection of its parts, and to become as good as it can be.

BD:   Is the music that you write, for everyone?

Bresnick: I would be the first to say I hope so!

BD:   All six billion of us???

Bresnick: [Smiles] Well... Having taught for a while, you see some students who are extremely ambitious for themselves. They want to go out and make a career and do really well, and I see nothing wrong with that. What I would like to remind my students is that they should be equally ambitious for the music as they are for their own success. I’m extremely ambitious for my music. I would like it to do everything. I would like it to reach the most abstract thoughtful people who are specialists in their field, the sort that Mozart would have called ‘Die Kenner’ [experts and the connoisseurs] and also ‘Die Liebhaber’, the ordinary amateurs who will just listen because they love it, and don’t really understand. I’m even not afraid to entertain the groundlings, the folks who stand on the bottom rung, and enjoy good pratfalls, or even a sex act on stage. I have a sense of my music as a global space, and if it reaches everybody, let it do so.

BD:   Do you try to do this in each piece, or in your pieces as a collection?

Bresnick: I try to do this in almost every work. I try to let my works have as many doors open to an attentive listener as I possibly can. When you ask me if I would like it to be for everyone, not perhaps all six billion, but any number of those six billion people who are prepared to listen attentively. I want to have something there for them. If they don’t want to listen, I’m not going to grab them by the lapels and make them sit down. They’re free to go! But if they want to listen, I don’t want to serve them a stone. I’d give them some bread.

BD:   If you won’t grab them by the lapels, might you try to lure them gently?

Bresnick: I am a very luring kind of guy. [Both laugh] That’s a good description of what I do. I think of my music almost in an ecological sense. It’s like that burr you encounter when you walk out into the fields among the high grass. When you come home, there are these little things still sticking to your pants, and you wonder how they got there! They didn’t bother you or irritate you. You had a wonderful day, but they’ve made themselves apparent to you now, and have moved themselves on you by your interaction.

BD:   These are aural and intellectual burrs?
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Bresnick: Yes, that’s what they are. They’re little pieces of sand that get into the grit of your oyster to make a pearl.

BD:   Is it you that makes the pearl, or their imagination that makes the pearl?

Bresnick: I make the place where the pearl can be. Without an extensive philosophical introduction to what I’m about to say, I am increasingly convinced that music is an art of high cognition, but is really not an art of semantic explicability. So no amount of words that I use to tell you about my music will actually persuade you that the music is about what I say it’s about. On the other hand, music is a very thoughtful art, and to grasp a concept of a thoughtful thing that is not made of words is sometimes hard for people to get their arms around. What I want to do is make a thoughtful thing that is not made out of words. But that means you, the listener, are invited to come in and assemble some explanation for what happened in a way that you can understand. For most people, that means making up words, actually!

BD:   Words rather than pictures?

Bresnick: Pictures would be like words, in the sense that they are external descriptive things. These are things that are signifiers that point outside the work of art. Whereas a mathematician looking at a blackboard full of figures will experience that in its own realm as a thing of great beauty, a musician while listening to a great work can experience the music quite in that way without any verbal or pictorial support of any kind. I’m happy to make that possible.

BD:   Is this in your music, or in any music?

Bresnick: Any music. I’m speaking of myself as a listener, but I don’t demand that of all listeners, because I’m a specialized character. I have spent a lifetime having to do that, or relating in that way, and many listeners are not like that, so I don’t expect them to be like that.

* * * * *

BD:   Have you done some works that incorporate text?

Bresnick: I’ve done quite a few, and my works are often very stimulated by literary subjects. In the past year or two, for example, among the works I wrote was one called Songs of the Mouse People, which are not actually songs but the titles of potential songs that are suggested to me by Franz Kafka’s story Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk. It was Kafka’s final short story, and is a story of a mouse diva who sings for the other mice. Kafka is not thought of as being a funny guy, but he was actually quite funny. He says of this diva that she actually squeaks, which is all that mice actually do, so he wonders in the story why they think of it as singing at all. Then he says on second thought that her squeaking is actually no better than any other mouse’s squeaking, so he wonders why they think of her as a diva... but then he speculates on all things! So I wrote a piece which is a series of Songs from The Mouse Treasury of Great Lieder. I have five songs which are actually songs without words. They’re pieces for cello and vibraphone. They were written for Maya Beiser, who is a cellist, and the percussionist, Steven Shick. They will be recording it in the next week, and another piece called Grace. [This CD is shown at right]

BD:   What about works that actually have sung text?

Bresnick: I was commissioned by the Da Capo Chamber Players to produce a piece in honor of the past Millenium. These are kind of overwhelming and daunting projects, but I had a friend who is a poet with whom I worked on this, and he wrote a poem called, My Twentieth Century. It is a beautiful poem where I have the players in the ensemble speak the lines. They abandon their instruments and walk to the front of the stage and speak the lines of this poem. They do so in pairs while the music is going on. They interact with each other, so that at any given moment, two of them are standing and speaking the words of this poem to each other, while the others are playing. Since each is rotating, you never get the same quartet twice as the piece goes along.

BD:   It seems like you’re using the vocalists as another color in your palette, rather than as vocalism.

Bresnick: Yes. It’s not a very extreme piece from that standpoint. I do want the audience to understand the words, which is why they are spoken. I thought of it in some ways like a Bach cantata. He would have written a very simple Chorale where the tune might have been known to his congregation in Leipzig. They could sing it at a Sunday service without too much difficulty, while all around them swirls this magnificent counterpoint and architectonic structure. My work is done in that spirit.

BD:   You’re working with young composers and you’re also working on your own music. Are you optimistic about the future of the type of music you write?

Bresnick: I’m both optimistic and pessimistic. Let’s talk about the pessimism first, because it’s always better to come back with the optimism.

BD:   First the bad news, then the good news!

Bresnick: The bad news is that surely the audiences for ‘concert music’ have declined pretty dramatically. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. There are, of course, some bright spots. There are certain places where there has been contact made with the younger audience, but on the whole, surveys show that the audience for the kind of music that I write is now well into its middle-age if not older. If you attend concerts, particularly of chamber music or the symphony, you see a lot of gray heads in the audience. I respect those folks and their continued interest in this music, and that’s great, but obviously the future of our music depends on whether or not younger people will come and listen to it, and find something there. That being said, the answers are still very much in doubt whether or not the art form as it’s been constructed — concerts on a stage with people playing what are really ancient instruments by now (violins, flutes, oboes, and so on) — in that environment will persist. I think there is some question about that. On the other hand, the good news is that great music is still being made and written by young people. However, I’m not sure that it’s being done in the concert music space. It may be being done in the popular idioms, such as music for movies and films, in basements and computer studios around the country, where people do their own D.J.-ing, and scratching their own things. We don’t yet have a coherent vision of what that is yet, but one can say that it doesn’t necessarily resemble the concert-going audiences that we used to know.

BD:   Do you think it’s going to shift glacially, or is it just going to come to a stop and break off?

Bresnick: You’ve described a good picture of what Stephen Jay Gould would call ‘punctuated equilibrium’! When he discussed the evolutionary process, he pointed out that the Darwinian concept, which makes a certain amount of sense, that things evolve. We tend to think of this as a gradual and continuous process, when in fact it occurs in jerks, and poles, and explosions in which for many, many, many, many expanses of time nothing seems to be happening at all, and then suddenly something happens, and everything changes rather rapidly in a certain direction.

BD:   A bit like the change of instruments around 1600?

Bresnick: Exactly, the change from the prima pratica to the seconda pratica, which is what you’re describing, or the creation of a symphony orchestra, which didn’t exist before 1750 in any real sense, which becomes the standard form for large amounts of public to attend. There are punctuated points, and we may have passed over one in the last fifteen or twenty years.

BD:   We won’t know until we look back at it from a farther vantage point?

Bresnick: Yes. Hegel says something about the wisdom being like the owl of Minerva. It only takes flight at dusk, meaning we only become wise about the world after it’s already happened. [Both laugh]

BD:   But you keep muddling on?

Bresnick: I do, because I’ve never found anything more challenging, more difficult, and finally more rewarding than writing music in which a layered complexity of experience can be embodied in a world of sound, and successions of sounds. That combination of the purely physical pleasure of hearing beautiful sounds, and the abstractions that this combination of sounds can produce in my mind, is so exciting and so stimulating that I’m sure I’ll write music till they wheel me out!

BD:   Is the music that you write, great? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interview with Lawrence Leighton Smith.]

Bresnick: Let me answer that question with a story. When I was a very young composer I was studying in Vienna. I’d actually gone to study with Ligeti, but I ended up studying with a man named Gottfried von Einem. He’s not so well known in America anymore, but he’s very well known in Austria even to this day, and is very much a venerated composer.

BD:   Didn’t he write Dantons Tod (Danton’s death)?

Bresnick: He did, and also Der Besuch der Alten Dame (The Visit of the Old Lady), and Der Prozess (The Trial). He did a number of very fine operas. He was a very interesting man, and he was very kind to me. At the end of the year I studied with him, he invited his publisher, a guy from Germany named Dr. Harald Kunz, who was working for Bote & Bock, which was, at that time, a very famous publisher. They were later acquired by Boosey & Hawkes. Von Einem invited Kunz to meet me because von Einem wanted this guy to publish my music. So we had a lot of Schnapps, which was von Einem’s way of socializing. It was much too much for me, I must say, but they were both having a good time. Finally, Kunz turned to me and he said, “Mr. Bresnick, Gottfried von Einem would like us to publish your music, but we don’t just publish anyone at Bote & Bock. We have to have a certain level and standard, and I would like to know if you are a genius. This is because if we’re going to publish your music, we need a certain sort of statement of that kind to make this investment in you and your career.” I was a twenty-three-year-old American guy, and was completely nonplused by this question. I suddenly found myself speaking like Gary Cooper, shuffling my feet and saying, “Oh, Shucks, gee, gosh...” I didn’t answer the question at all, and von Einem looked at me with a glaring expression on his face. When the meeting ended and Kunz left, von Einem turned to me and said, “Martin, you are an idiot!” I was terribly afraid I’d done something wrong. Then, he said, “If someone is foolish enough to ask you if you are a genius, then you tell them you’re a genius! You don’t hesitate.” Of course I got the point right away. I was supposed to impress this guy, and if he wanted to know that question, I should have answer. [Laughs] As it turns out, whether I’m a genius or not, Bote & Bock did accept my music for a while. So is my music great? I don’t know. I don’t write it in the light of that sun, but I certainly try to make it as great as it possibly can be. I’m fairly merciless with my own interior criticism. Whether I can do a mixture of criticism and the creative forces that are given to me, and achieve something that is great will be left for you and other people to decide, not me.

BD:   Does your music please you?

Bresnick: Mostly it does, I have to say. I’m not one of these people who wanders around burning my old manuscripts. In fact, since I have also written articles and research papers on musical matters, when I read my written words about music, I always feel that they’re imperfect and have to be revised. I have never written anything with words that I’ve felt has been a truly adequate explanation of my thinking about things. I’ve looked back at pieces that were written fifteen or twenty years ago and wondered how I could have said that. That seems impossible! But I’ve not really felt that way about the music I’ve written. I’ve never felt that I should go back and revise or change it.

BD:   Is it that music is less specific?

Bresnick: I think it is more specific. It is so precise in what it’s trying to do, that when I feel there is no adjustment possible, it’s really done. It has its own dependence on a temporal plain, and requires only the passing of time at that moment for understanding that precision. So, thirty years down the road, it still sounds as precisely made, and as accurate to me as it did when I wrote it.

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BD: You’re pleased with your music. Are you pleased with the performances that you hear of your music?

Bresnick: Mostly, but I feel mixed. I’m sure some are good and some are not good. I remember having a very interesting conversation with Kenneth Gaburo, who was an artist and a very interesting guy who did a lot of things with text. He wrote fascinating music, but he was haunted constantly by the idea that as soon as his musical ideas took form in the world as an embodied performance, they had fallen away. They were not as good. He had a platonic or almost a kind of Catholic vision of the sinfulness of this world, so that when the music entered into the world, it was filled with sin. Its embodiment implied that it was less than it should have been.

BD: It was perfect in his mind, and went downhill from there?
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Bresnick: It was an awful downhill journey, and he was always tormented by this. I smile thinking about it now, but in conversation with him, I had a very intense experience with just how painful it was for him. I felt for him in this way, but this is not something I personally feel, because my sense of music is that it is a social art of social meaning. When other people play my music, not always, but very often I’m delighted by the contribution that they make. If they’ve given it serious thought, and worked very hard, they reveal things in it that sometimes were unanticipated by me, and mostly that’s good.

BD:   These are pleasant surprises?

Bresnick: Yes, mostly that’s very good. I just had two performances here in Chicago by the Jupiter Trio. They are new to this community, but you’re going to be hearing more about them. They’re in residence at DePaul, and are stupendous players. Robert Waters (violin), Julian Hersh (cello), and Aglika Angelova (piano). They learned a trio of mine which is about fifteen years old, and they played it with a freshness, a vitality, ease, and precision. Their particular personalities came out in a very lovely way, so I’m very grateful when musicians of that caliber take the time to do it. I don’t know if they make it better than it is, but they sure make it good.

BD:   They found everything they could in it?

Bresnick: Yes, and they bring out things that weren’t even there. There’s a little room for that, and a great performer can sometimes bring to life a very meager piece of music.

BD:   Let us go one step further. What about recordings? They have a certain universality, as opposed to performances which is done and gone. Have you been pleased with those? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at right, see my interviews with Mel Powell, Ralph Shapey, and Samuel Baron.]

Bresnick: Yes, although recordings are a snapshot of a real thing, and I have a hard time reconciling myself to them in this sense. When you hear a recording, no matter how good it is, you know that it is a bottomless pit, because a recording implies that you could have gone over each section fifty or more times to get it that many times better. Something about it could be enhanced in some way, and at some point you have to abandon it, because you’ll just spend the rest of your life tweaking this or tweaking that.

BD:   [With mock horror[ You mean you don’t get it perfect???

Bresnick: [Laughs] No, and not only do you not get it perfect, but there’s nothing about it that is perfect, despite the illusions of the audio engineers. They know it’s not perfect, but everybody likes to tell each other it’s never perfect when you’re in a performance, so it doesn’t matter that it’s not perfect because it’s been created for you on the spot. A perfect recording is like a perfect version of a great spaghetti alle vongole [spaghetti with clams] that has somehow been frozen in time. It’s not as satisfying as a real spaghetti alle vongole that you eat at a great restaurant.

BD:   Is there such a thing as a perfect performance?

Bresnick: I don’t think so, but I don’t know if that’s the right thing we want from performance. We want it to be more than adequate in its rendition of the demands that are placed upon it, but we also ask that it be spontaneous, lively, and communicative, and that the people around us be committed to listening to it. It’s a whole event. A good performance is a 360-degree experience.

BD:   But you keep striving for that perfection?

Bresnick: You always do, but it’s the journey more than arrival that really matters. You’re never going to get there, and that’s fine too. Has there been a perfect performance of Hamlet, or a perfect reading of The Inferno of Dante? I doubt it! I could go to see Hamlet many, many, many times, and I’m not really searching for perfection. I’m searching for re-engagement with the ideas that are in it vividly and dramatically represented for me.

BD:   Do you want your music to engage the audience?

Bresnick: Yes, in that same way, and in a sense, that’s the hubris I was expressing before in terms of ambition. That’s the ambition I do experience in my heart when I write. I want my music to try to be as good as that play is good.

* * * * *

BD:   When you’re sitting at your desk, do you still write with pen or pencil?

Bresnick: I still do, actually. I still write with a pencil. A lot of my students write into the computer, and that has advantages and disadvantages.

BD:   When you are there, are you thinking of the performers, or are you thinking of just the music, or of the audience, or about dinner later that evening?

Bresnick: [Laughs] Can my answer be all of the above?

BD:   Sure!

Bresnick: The first thing always is whether the music is becoming itself. Is it adequately on the way to representing its potential qualities? Then the question becomes whether this adequacy has anything to do with this world that we’re living in, namely can it be played by people who have five fingers on each hand. [Laughs, because at first he said five hands!] I try to keep this within the bounds of the possible.

BD:   Your next piece is going to be for piano five hands!

Bresnick: Piano, five hands, and just one player! [Both laugh]

BD:   Up until a few years ago, that wouldn’t be possible, but now you can have over-dubbing.

Bresnick: Yes, you can have over-dubbing, or you could have cloning. We could produce a person with five hands... [Both continue to laugh at this prospect]

BD:   Coming back to reality, when you’re working on your compositions, are you discovering the music or are you creating the music?

Bresnick: That’s also a very interesting question. There are some wonderful quotations by composers who have spoken about this. I think Stravinsky said at one point, in one of the discussions with Robert Craft, “I am simply the vessel through which The Right of Spring passes into the world.” He, in a sense, gives up authorship in favor of having been a communicative vessel for some idea that existed outside of himself that he didn’t invent.

BD:   But I assume you want to be more than just an editor.

Bresnick: In that case, I think he was trying not even to edit. Those kinds of descriptions are actually most similar to what you hear when you look at what the Prophets say. They are speaking the words of God, and they do not wish either to truncate or mollify, so as not to make them smaller or larger. They don’t want to do any editing. They want to let the word of God speak through them directly.

BD:   They’re merely transcribing?

Bresnick: They’re transcribers in a sense, yes. This is not me, but I’m just saying that people do feel that way. I can understand why, because there is a point that occurs somewhere while I’m writing a piece, where I no longer feel as though I am having to control everything about what is happening. It’s beginning to take its life seriously on its own, and move in its own way. I almost have to get out of the way and let it proceed the way it wishes to go, because if I fuss with it or poke at it too much, I will muddy it and destroy it. That’s not usually the case at the beginning of a work, when I’m still elaborating its premises, but at a certain point that occurs. By that admission, you see the distance between me and somebody like a Bach or a Mozart, who seem to have it all right from the beginning. They have gotten the point about what the premises are, and have simply written the piece as if they were taking dictation. These are unique figures in the history of music. [Wistfully] Would that we all could do that...
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BD: But eventually you come to a point where these controls must stop?

Bresnick: Yes. Usually the piece tells you that, too. If you’re listening carefully, it says, “I’m done!” There’s nothing else that needs to be said about this, and that’s an important moment. If your ego is sufficiently detached from your efforts, so that your ego doesn’t interfere with your creativity, when the piece says it’s through, you should be through, and stop. You and I both know composers who don’t seem to have gotten the message, and have gone on much longer than they should have.

BD: So a bit of advice to composers, then, is to love the piece and not yourself? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interview with Jeffrey Mumford.]

Bresnick: I wouldn’t say it that way, but I would say the first part of that is true. You’ve got to love the piece, and you’ve got to love it with a love that’s a mortal love, in the sense that you would be ready to stand or fall on this. This is a kind of Martin Luther thing. “Here I stand! I can do no other!” You’ve tacked your Ninety-five Theses to the wall, and that’s what you believe. You must not give us something in which you can be tentative and pushed around about. When you hand us that work when that’s done, stand behind it and love that piece. If you do that, then the self will take care of itself. I’m not worried about your ego at that point, because you really are focusing on the task in front of you.

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BD:   I’ve asked you about composers. What advice do you have for performers who want to do your music, or other new music?

Bresnick: [Laughs] I like these questions a lot, Bruce! Again, Stravinsky is very thoughtful in this. At one point he railed very violently against anybody who tried to interpret his music. He thought that interpreting his music was completely the wrong way of going about it. He said, “Simply play it! Play the right notes, in the right time, with the right dynamics. Do not interpret my music! It requires no interpretation. I have already supplied that!” Of course, I am on that field very close to that. There’s an awful lot of intervention by performers in your work, which has no real place in it. This is not to say that the performer has to be the slave of this, but if a performer would really like to compose music, I would urge them to go and compose it, and not do it in my piece! My pieces are my pieces! So, if they want to play them, fine! [Both laugh] That’s a little extreme, but let me give you a concrete example so this doesn’t sound like just abstract blather. The rhythmic complexity of my music is often such that there are written-out accelerandos and de-accelerandos. The music is written to get faster or slower depending on the way I have notated it. It doesn’t often say ‘get faster’ or ‘get slower’, but it’s written in such a way that it will get faster or slower if you play it accurately. But if a player tries to invade that and start doing things with it, they upset the balance by which I made those terminations, and the result is dreadful. I’m often called upon to say, “Don’t do anything here! It will go! Have confidence that this will make it.”

BD:   I wonder if Stravinsky ever heard a performance that was note-perfect, because we hadn’t achieved that kind of technical perfection in the orchestra yet?

Bresnick: Everybody’s sense of what note-perfect is, is relative.

BD:   Surely the recordings got better and better, at least in terms of what’s in the score.

Bresnick: Sure.

BD:   I wonder if now he would be pleased to have it go beyond what is written there.

Bresnick: He may. I’ve often had that thought myself. I heard a performance recently of the Dvořák Piano Trio No. 4 in E minor (Dumky) played by the Jupiter Trio. It’s been played many thousands of times since Dvořák wrote it. The performances now of that piece, which has some considerable difficulty, are stupendous, and I wonder what Dvořák would think if he could only have heard the piece played that way. I think he would melt like butter in the sun... at least that’s how I feel! When a piece of mine is played so brilliantly, I’m speechless with joy and pleasure.

BD:   This is something we get all the time. There are concertos which were written for a player that he can just barely get through, ten years later they’re contest pieces that every entrant must play.

Bresnick: That is absolutely true. Some works remain difficult because the virtuosity that is implanted in them is not digital. It has to do with some other abilities and weights and measures, and those pieces remain difficult to do, even when the technical problems are solved. Some of our best music actually is like that. I’ve written some pieces that I consider virtuosic, which do not require flying fingers. They require some other kind of poise and agility.

BD:   Flying emotion?

Bresnick: Flying emotion or poise. I would say they need more balance, and the ability to turn gently and quickly towards something else which does not reveal itself as a technical problem, but some other issue. It might have to do with emotion, or with intelligence. It might be what we think of as the ability to adjust to a new environment in an elegant and an appropriate way.

BD:   Is this simply ‘musicality’?

Bresnick: That is another definition, but I’ll accept that. Virtuosity of musicality. Our great musicians have that. The ones who can build, who have that ability on top of their technical facility, are the greatest of all masters that we have, and they’re very rare.

BD:   You are about to turn 57. Are you pleased with where you are at this point in your career?

Bresnick: Let’s take it from what I have written, and look at it from the most high-minded point of view at first. Then we can look at it from the more banal and egoistic points of view. From the high-minded point of view, I am proud of some of the works I have produced. I like everything I’ve done more or less. I don’t know if I’ve accomplished as much as I should have accomplished in the breadth or length of the things I have done. I’ve been a busy guy, and I haven’t always been able to make the bigger statement that perhaps I wanted to make. Still, I hope to continue to try and move in that direction, even though I’m fifty-seven. By the time he was fifty-seven, Beethoven was dead for several months, so he was already done, as were Debussy, and Schumann, and Bizet, and Mendelssohn, and so on.

BD:   To say nothing of Mozart!

Bresnick: Yes, and many others! I’ve been given this gift of a more extended life span, so I hope to make some good use of that. From the professional standpoint, I’m doing fine. Of course, like anybody else, I’d like more, but when I look back at my colleagues, and the people I grew up with, and where I began as a young man in New York City, professionally the idea that I’ve actually been able to make a living as a composer and teacher of music, that I’ve traveled around the world, and had these opportunities to study with magnificent teachers, and seen amazing places — including the basement of Northwestern University! [Both laugh] I owe this entirely to having been able to develop my talents to such a point that somebody felt it would be worthwhile to have me continue doing it, and amplify it. So, it would be of bad manners to complain about that.

BD:   I hope it continues for a long time.

Bresnick: Thank you, Bruce.

BD:   Thank you for coming in, and for the conversation.

Bresnick: My pleasure.

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This conversation was recorded in my office in the School of Music at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, on November 19, 2003. Portions were broadcast on WNUR two months later, and again in 2017. 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.