William Francis McBeth Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Composer / Conductor W. Francis McBeth

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

William Francis McBeth (March 9, 1933 – January 6, 2012) was an American composer, whose wind band works are highly respected. His primary musical influences included Clifton Williams, Bernard Rogers, and Howard Hanson. The popularity of his works in the United States during the last half of the twentieth century led to many invitations and appearances as a guest conductor, where he often led the premiere performances of some of his compositions, the majority of which were commissioned. His conducting activities took him to forty-eight states, three Canadian provinces, Japan, and Australia; and for a number of years he was principal conductor of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra in the capital of Little Rock. At one time, his "Double Pyramid Balance System" was a widely used pedagogical tool in the concert band world.

From 1957 until his retirement in 1996, McBeth taught at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

McBeth was born in Ropesville, Texas (near Lubbock). His parents were Joseph Phinis McBeth, a Baptist minister, and Lillie May Carpenter McBeth. William had a brother, Harold, and a sister, Laura Fay. He had an early start to his musical training, studying piano with his mother and taking up the trumpet in the second grade. He graduated from Irving High School in Irving, Texas where he served as President of the IHS Senior Class of 1951, as well as President of Future Farmers of America. He lettered in football and track and was a member of the Tiger Band and choir. (Mary Sue White McBeth, wife of Francis, was also in the Irving High Tiger Band class of 1951.) He attended Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. While an undergraduate at H-SU, McBeth played in the university band. From December 1952 to January 1953, the band traveled with U.S. Camp Shows to Europe. He also played string bass in a jazz combo, which was unusual for the time period due to widespread segregation throughout the South.

McBeth married Mary Sue White in 1953. They had a daughter, Laura and a son, Matthew. He served in the military from 1954 to 1956 with the 101st Airborne Band at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and the 98th Army Band at Fort Rucker, Alabama. He was initiated into the University of Texas Alpha Iota chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia in 1957. In 1962, McBeth conducted the Arkansas All-State Band, with future president Bill Clinton playing in the tenor saxophone section.

The most outstanding of his awards have been the Presley Award at Hardin-Simmons University in 1954; the Howard Hanson Prize at the Eastman School of Music for his Third Symphony in 1963;an ASCAP Special Award each consecutive year from 1965 to present; the American School Band Directors Association's Edwin Franko Goldman Award in 1983; election as Fellow of the American Wind and Percussion Artists by the National Band Association in 1984; a National Citation from Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia fraternity in 1985; Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia's Charles E. Lutton Man of Music Award in 1988 for his achievement and continued contribution to American music; Kappa Kappa Psi's Distinguished Service to Music Medal in 1989; Mid-West International Band and Orchestra Clinic's Medal of Honor in 1993; the John Philip Sousa Foundations Sudler Medal of Honor in 1999; and election as President of the American Bandmasters Association. In 1975 McBeth was appointed Composer Laureate of the State of Arkansas by the governor, becoming the first Composer Laureate named in the United States.

McBeth died on January 6, 2012 (age 78) in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

I met William Francis McBeth in December of 2002 at the annual Mid-West Band and Orchestra Clinic in downtown Chicago. The encounter was filled with insights and laughter. Portions were aired three times on WNUR, and now in 2026 I am pleased to present the entire chat.

Full disclosure, my mother’s name was Frances, so I understood the subtle difference in spelling all my life. I mention this because it becomes the source of comical situations which the composer relates toward the end of our conversation.

Bruce Duffie: Thank you very much for taking time from a busy schedule.

William Francis McBeth: Sure, it’s a wild schedule, I fear. [Both laugh]
mcbeth

BD:   Do you enjoy doing these kinds of clinics, as opposed to just playing concerts or giving lessons?

McBeth:   I enjoy doing the concerts more than anything else, but these clinics are very important for sales because everybody comes here to see what is new for the year. It’s like going to market! After thirty-five of these, I guess I’m just getting used to it.

BD:   Is it absolutely imperative upon you to have something new from your pen each season?

McBeth:   No, not imperative, but I always have something new every year. I may have skipped one a couple of years, but the pieces were so big that I didn’t get them finished in time. But I always try to have at least one brand new.

BD:   A big piece or a little piece?

McBeth:   It varies. Sometimes they are really big ones, and sometimes they are small ones. I do small ones for the little kids, and also for the high school kids. I try to do one that’ll hit them at least every two or three years, so that market is covered.

BD:   You write in all forms, but you seem to have a special affinity for the wind ensemble.

McBeth:   I started out as a string player, and all of my earliest music was for orchestra. When I got to the University of Texas, the godfather of wind music, James Clifton Williams (1923-76), talked me and another kid into writing for the winds. This other kid became quite a famous band composer, named John Barnes Chance (1932-72). [Both laugh] He’s played quite a bit. Have you heard of him?

BD:   Oh, of course! [Again, full disclosure, I had played bassoon and contrabassoon in bands and orchestras in high school and college.]

McBeth:   Oh, good for you! He and I were students together. Barney had written three orchestra symphonies when he got to school, and Williams said, “The orchestra is a Cadillac, but the band’s a darn good automobile. So, if you don’t have a door that’ll open for your Cadillac, what are you going to drive? You can write the very same music and get five hundred performances to one.” So it wasn’t so much that I chose it...

BD:   It chose you?

McBeth:   Yes. It was in an era in the twentieth century where only the winds and pianists really liked the newest music. The choirs were scared of it, and the orchestras would put up with it, but the winds would just eat it up. So you just kind of go with those who love you, and it just evolved that way.

BD:   Is it that they’re loving twentieth century music, or that they’re loving repertoire written for them, rather than the old transcriptions?

McBeth:   That’s a whole lot of it, because there was just so little literature for the winds. You have good insight there! [Both laugh] I wrote a tuba concerto for Dan Perantoni a few years ago. I’d never written a violin concerto, and I don’t plan to because there are zillions of them out there, but there are not any written for tubas.

Tuba and euphonium player Daniel Perantoni has been notable for the wide range of his activities, encompassing both classical and jazz performance as well as instrument design, consulting, and a pedagogical career that has landed students in major teaching and performing organizations. A 1963 graduate of the University of Rochester, Perantoni went on for a master’s from the Catholic University of America, finishing in 1968. He has long been associated with the University of Indiana’s Jacobs School of Music, where he succeeded the legendary Harvey Phillips (who, in the words of New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett, was the main figure in elevating the tuba “from the laughingstock of musical instruments to one of its kings”).

Following that feat, Perantoni chose to become active on a variety of fronts. His appearances as a soloist have occurred in such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall and the Spoleto Festival, and have taken him to the Montreux Brass Congress in Switzerland and to Japan. Perantoni co-founded Summit Brass, “the first and only truly American brass ensemble to represent the United States”; this American all-star brass group has made numerous recordings. He has also performed with the St. Louis Brass Quintet and the brass ensemble Symphonia. On the jazz side, Perantoni was recruited by Phillips into the Matteson-Phillips Tubajazz Consort, a group consisting of three tubas, three euphoniums (euphonia?), and a rhythm section. Perantoni and Robert Tucci have designed their own line of low brass instruments, named Perantucci, and he has served as a consultant and liaison to the educational world for the Custom Music firm. Perantoni is the holder of a lifetime achievement award from T.U.B.A., the Tubists International Brotherhood Association (now the International Tuba and Euphonium Association). To his students at Indiana he is known as Mr. P.

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

BD:   If a fiddle player comes to you and wants a concerto, you’ll turn him down?

McBeth:   No, I probably wouldn’t turn him down, but it’s a lot of fun writing for the areas that don’t have much literature, because you really get performed. A composer doesn’t really care about how much money he makes. He cares about getting performed. That’s the icing on the cake.

BD:   Is it just getting performed, or getting performed well?

McBeth:   [Bursts out laughing] Of course, that would be the best! You get some fabulous performances, and some terrible ones, particularly in the public schools. I used to take that personally when I’d get bad performances, but then I finally realized that everybody else was getting them too, so it’s not a personal problem.

BD:   Are the pieces that you write requested, or are they just things that you have to get out?

McBeth:   No, I haven’t written a piece that wasn’t commissioned in probably forty years. Every one of them has been commissioned by a group or an individual.

BD:   I assume that a lot of performers are after you for pieces. How do you decide yes or no?

McBeth:   You stack them up. I know how much I can do, and I stack them up for about ten years ahead. Then if somebody else calls me, I’ll tell them it will be ten years! Nobody wants to wait that long, so you keep it that far ahead. You don’t particularly pick and choose from the really good ones to a middle school somewhere, but they’re all by commission.

BD:   When a group asks you for a piece, are you tailoring it for that particular ensemble, or will it be for any ensemble of that instrumentation?

McBeth:   It will be for any ensemble of that level, but not so much the instrumentation. I don’t much worry about that because everybody’s got pretty much the same group, but it will be that level of performance. If they’re Grade 3, which hits the run-of-the-mill average high school band, I’ll tailor it for that. When most people tailor it for that, they worry about difficult rhythms and registers, and so forth. But I don’t really worry about that. The kids can learn the rhythms. That’s no problem. I don’t get them out of register, but for the younger ones I write very much by fingerings and trombone positions. I’ll alter something just to make the fingering more at ease, because the first time a group reads through a piece, they decide whether they’re going to play it or not. If they can read it well, they’ll almost always decide to play it, and they’ll read it well if you tailor it to those instruments fingering-wise. For instance, in a big selling piece of mine over the last thirty years, there’s a trumpet ostinato that goes [sings it]. It’s the fact that you can tongue it, and it’s all one finger. If you move the piece up one step, and they couldn’t play it. That would mean it was unplayable.

BD:   Because of the combination of valving?

McBeth:   That’s right, with those combinations. So, with the younger kids, I start worrying about fingerings and slide positions.

BD:   How do you make sure all of this stays true to what you want to write from your heart?

McBeth:   [Laughs] Sometimes you have to lead your heart to one side or the other just to get it. For instance, Ronald Lo Presti (1933-85) had a piece I really did like to use. It was an average high school piece I’d used in clinics, and the last three notes of it in the lower brass are [sings ‘chud-a-dum’] C/B-Flat/C. Well, in the trombones that means position 6, 1, 6! [Both laugh] They’ll knock their teeth out doing that, so I just made it three straight Cs. That’s what I mean by worrying about those things.

BD:   You expected the feeling rather than those exact notes?

McBeth:   Right. So I had to do something if I was going to use the piece, and I just had to change one of the notes.

BD:   Now you’ve changed a few little odds and ends in other people’s music. Do you object when people change your music?

McBeth:   If it makes it better, no. Every change I’ve ever made improved it, and if they did the same thing with mine, I’d be pleased... although you never think your own stuff can be improved. [More laughter]

* * * * *

BD:   You have this long list backed up for ten years. Do you know how long each piece is going to take to write?

McBeth:   Pretty much. I knew exactly how long until I retired from teaching four years ago, and now it’s a little different time frame. I can get to a little bit more, so I’m now getting used to how much I can do by thinking of it in advance.

BD:   When you sit down to the desk with paper and pencil... [pauses] I assume you still write with a pencil?

McBeth:   Sure!

BD:   Are the ideas always there?

McBeth:   No, no. I wish they were. The muse doesn’t always show up. You’ve got to call up the muse.

BD:   [With a wink] Is it a local call or a long distant call?

McBeth:   [Laughs] Sometimes it’s one of each, but I learned a little trick from starting each day from Ernest Hemingway. He said, “Never stop at night when you’re finished. Stop a little early and leave a little left. That way you know what you’re going to do, and the next day you don’t have to prime the pump so hard.” Once you get into it, it really hastens things along. That works really well.

BD:   You get a running start?

McBeth:   That’s right. But to quote Jack Douglas, who I think is the great comedy writer in America, “I spent my life staring at blank paper,” and that’s what you do. Most people call it inspiration, but I really don’t know what that is. But if you wait on that, you’d never get anything done. You’ve got to sit down and think you’re starting to work right now. If you don’t have any ideas, you just keep looking for them.

BD:   When you’re writing the piece and the ideas are coming, how do you know when you’re finished?

McBeth:   [Sighs] I don’t know how to say it, but I do know when it’s through! Each piece is a little bit different, but I just know when it’s time to stop. But I don’t start a piece now until I know how it’s going to end. I have to have the whole scenario of the entire piece in my head. I know what it’s going to do, and what I’m going to do with this and that. This doesn’t entail any notes. It’s just an idea of what you want this piece to accomplish.

BD:   You know what you want it to say?

McBeth:   That’s right. Then once you’ve got that idea in your head, it’s not too hard to get right into it. There are only twelve notes! Students don’t do it that way. They sit down at the piano and play a chord, and then they say no, no, and they try another one. Then they find one they like and they write it down, and then they go to the second chord. They just keep Scotch-taping these things together, and it comes out that it doesn’t make any sense. It just wonders around. But if you get the skeleton in your brain, that really helps. I can’t do it without that. Then you know what you’re looking for, and you don’t even know the notes yet.

BD:   Once you see the framework, then you can fill in all the bits and pieces?

McBeth:   Right. You sure can very easily.

BD:   When you get a commission, is there a performance time attached?

McBeth:   Not really.

BD:   They just want a piece?

McBeth:   That’s right. When I did one for the air force, they said they wanted a really big piece. That’s great, so it’s about a fifteen-minute work. But if it’s a middle school, they’re looking for six minutes. Every now and then a commissioning party will tell you what they want, but the composers never usually go along with that. They might ask for their Alma Mater or their fight song, but I’m not an arranger. I’ll write a piece but I never arrange. I started out arranging as a kid. That’s how I got into it.

BD:   That way you learn the nuts and bolts of where things go?

McBeth:   Yes, and that’s the easiest way to start because your harmonic choices and forms are more or less set. It’s kind of easy for a young kid to arrange. In high school I did a lot of arranging, and then I’d think that I’ve worked so hard on this thing, and it’s really come out well, but it still belongs to Duke Ellington! So why don’t I write the tune, and then it would be all mine!

BD:   Then did you start writing the tune and arranging that, or did you come up with the whole piece?

McBeth:   I started writing the tunes. This was for jazz bands in their early days. A lot of us started out arranging jazz, and then we moved on to other things as we aged.

* * * * *

BD:   You’ve been at this a long time. There is a perception that the technical ability of youngsters and professionals has gotten better over the years. Is this true?

McBeth:   The technique of the composers? I don’t think so.

BD:   I mean of the players.

McBeth:   Oh, the players, oh Lord, yes. Oh man! When I was at Eastman, Bernard Rogers (1893-1968) told me that the student orchestra, The Philharmonia, played better than the Cleveland Orchestra played fifty years ago. The public school education has seen to that.
mcbeth

BD:   Is that kind of progress still being made today?

McBeth:   Oh, it really is. It’s just grown in leaps and bounds.

BD:   Do the composers take advantage of this new found technical ability?

McBeth:   Yes.

BD:   So, what you’re writing today might have been something that would have been much too hard for them in the past?

McBeth:   Forty years ago, it really would be. Things I write today for schools would have been much too hard for them then. They wouldn’t even have owned the percussion equipment back then.

BD:   Then do you move a couple of your old pieces down a level or a grade, so that something which was Grade 5 would be moved to Grade 4?

McBeth:   Yes, probably so. Some of the things that were higher are now on a lower state contest list because they’re easier.

BD:   Does that please you?

McBeth:   I don’t mind where they are as long as they play it well.

BD:   Does it please you that you’re now able to write something more complicated?

McBeth:   Oh yes, but the more complicated things don’t sell much. There’s a so much less of a market. I did a commission for the Marine Band’s 200th birthday two years ago, and when you do something for the Marine Band, you’re sure not going to write a Grade 3! [Both laugh] It’s one of the best pieces I’ve ever done, but it’s not one of my bigger sellers because of the difficulty level. There are only so many colleges, and then you can multiply that number by five or six for high schools, and you can multiply that number by five or six for junior high schools. So the easier the music, the better it sells. But still, you don’t cease to write more complicated music because that’s where you’re more self-satisfied.

BD:   Have you basically been pleased with all of your output?

McBeth:   Yes. I throw a lot away before I’m finished, but Bernard Rogers used to say, “If you’re going to be a composer, the first thing you get is a large eraser, and the second thing is a large wastepaper basket, because everything you write is not engraved in stone.”

BD:   Do you actually throw it away, or do you save it and maybe modify it later?

McBeth:   Some stuff I do just throw away. You can’t come up with gems every time, but you can come up with something which is not terribly good, and sometimes evolve it into something that is good.

BD:   When you’re writing a piece, do you ever decide that an idea would work well in a different piece?

McBeth:   Maybe. I’m not sure. I may have done that, but I don’t really remember one right off hand. But I do keep a notebook where I jot down ideas that are not going to be used right away, and I have gone back and looked at those, and picked up some to use. It’s a kind of sketchbook.

BD:   When you’re walking around in a hotel like this, or going to performances, do you ever get an idea and decide that you’ve got to remember it?

McBeth:   Sometimes. That’s not as common as most people think it is, because the pop writers lie a lot about the way they come up with these things. They like to make themselves look really good. I’ve heard a lot of pop writers say that they woke up in the middle of the night and had a great idea, and jotted it down on the Kleenex! That’s not true! When you wake up at night you might still write music, but you also get ideas in concerts or from movie scores. Any kind of musical activity fertilizes the ear. It’s not that you heard something. It just gave you an idea of something.

BD:   Is it always music that gives you other musical ideas, or might it be the sight of a statue in a park?

McBeth:   It’s always music with me, it really is. But I’ve gotten general ideas that are not from music. A lot of famous composers have talked about walking through woods somewhere in Europe, and getting inspired just by watching the squirrels. When I walk, I’m not really thinking too much about music, but I do get ideas that are not from music, and where those ideas come from, nobody knows. I’m asked that question constantly. I get an e-mail a week from some student who’s doing a paper on one of my pieces, and the first question they always ask is about the inspiration of the piece, and there is no answer. If I answered it, it would hurt their feelings to say that it was a commission check from the University of so-and-so, because if it weren’t for that, the piece wouldn’t have been written. [Both laugh]

BD:   Might that piece perhaps have been written from another commission?

McBeth:   Yes, it could have been! I had one like that. One of the bigger sellers I have is a work called Of Sailors and Whales. [This is a five-movement concert band work inspired by Herman Melville's Moby Dick.] Allen Earl Beck (1937-2016), who was the conductor of the Navy Band, wanted me to write a piece for his retirement, and it was in six months’ time. I said I really just couldn’t do it, but he just kept begging me and begging me, so I said I’d try. When I started this piece, it got so big that I knew there was no way I’d make it. So told him, and I laid it back for a little while. I ended up doing it for the California All-State. If it’s good, you don’t want to get rid of it.

* * * * *

BD:   When you’re writing a tune, are you actually creating something, or are you discovering it?

McBeth:   Since there are only twelve notes, you may be discovering it, but I don’t know... although we are creating it out of that. If it’s something no one else has ever done, it’s a little bit of both.

BD:   We’re kind of dancing around it, so let me ask the real easy question. What’s the purpose of music?
mcbeth

McBeth:   [Big sigh] There is not a purpose for any of the arts. The general thinking of what is necessary for human life includes food, shelter, and clothing, and music is none of those. That may be why it’s so special. To me it just enhances life so much. I can’t imagine a person going through an entire lifetime without literature, without painting, and without music... although there are a lot of people that do. But for me, that would be just an awful life. I guess the real answer to your question of what it’s for is the enrichment for our lives. I can think of no other reason for art.

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

McBeth:   I am at times, and at times I’m not. When I go to symphony concerts now and I don’t see a soul in there younger than fifty-five, that’s frustrating. The younger generation may be getting away from us because never in the history of America have we had this much pop music. It’s coming from everywhere, and they know that but they don’t know the other. Then I think back and I feel that’s always been the case. When I grew up in west Texas, I thought something was wrong with me because I was the only person outside of my family who liked Brahms and Stan Kenton. Then I moved to Dallas, and into a high school full of kids who did know those two, and I thought nothing’s wrong with me, I was just in the wrong place! I had a little advantage because my parents were musical, and we had good music in the home. My mother had a music degree, and my dad was a Greek and Hebrew teacher, and he was an amateur horn player. So I grew up with good music and I had a little head start.

BD:   I trust you pass this along to your own family?

McBeth:   I try to.

BD:   Where’s home for you now?

McBeth:   In Arkadelphia in Arkansas. That’s just seventy miles from the Texas line. I taught at Ouachita Baptist University there. Arkadelphia is a small town with two universities. There’s Henderson State, and Ouachita, and only the highway divides them. I taught composition and theory there for forty years.

BD:   Is composition something that really can be taught?

McBeth:   No! To quote a dear friend of mine who teaches composition, “You can’t teach composition, but you can teach a person to be composer-like, and hope that it takes off.” No, to teach it for forty years and say it can’t be taught sounds ridiculous. People say I’ve been stealing a lot of money from the school! [Both laugh] It is because you can’t teach imagination. I can teach a kid to write a piece. I can give him the techniques and the devices so that he can construct a piece, but whether it’s really good or not is up to his imagination.

BD:   So you were preparing them?

McBeth:   Yes. What teaching does is save a kid years of searching if the kid’s got some talent. I had a student who is doing big commissions around the United States now. What I did for him was save him those years that I went through searching out all these techniques and devices, which my teachers didn’t tell me about. I don’t know why they didn’t, but you can just save them so much time. If they’ve got the talent, they just go right on and become composers.

BD:   What advice do you have for young people who want to be composers?

McBeth:   To try it. Just jump in! Sink or swim. You’re not going to write great things when you’re in your first two or three pieces. That’s an impossibility when you’re learning, so don’t get discouraged. I got an email from a kid in California about a month ago, and he was really wanting some advice. He said, “I write a lot, but none of it sounds any good!” [Both laugh] I told him to keep what does sound good, and use it again. Just start collecting what works for you over the years. If they want to write, I’m sure not going to discourage them.

BD:   Do you have advice for conductors, not necessarily just of band music?

McBeth:   Yes, follow what’s in the score particularly in volumes and dynamics and nuances. In the wind business, particularly public schools, if the conductors would just do what’s printed on the paper it would be great. But they’re so afraid they’re going to lose control of the sound that they’ll play a whole piece where the softest is a mezzo-piano, and the loudest is a mezzo-forte. That’s just so dull and boring, and it ruins a good piece.

BD:   Maybe what they’ve been hearing has been on the radio, because there’s so much compression and so much limiting that everything is squashed. [At WNIB, the station where I worked for just over 25 years, we played only classical music, and did not use any compression! The limiting I mention is standard on stations which play pop and rock, to say nothing of the recordings themselves, which utilize a great deal of compression. Listen to almost any current song while watching VU meters. They hardly move!]

McBeth:   Yes. On the radio everything is equalized. I bought a new home about twelve years ago, and one of the young kids who mixed the mud for the bricklayers found out I was a composer, and said he’d like to hear what I write. This was a kid who’d never heard anything outside of pop and maybe church music. I gave him a tape, and he came back the next day and said he’d never heard anything like it! He remarked that it would be going along and get real soft, and then it would be real loud. He’d never heard music that changed in volume.

BD:   Do you try to teach louds and softs in the Grade 1 and 2 pieces that you write?

McBeth:   You really can’t. You can write it in there for that to be done, and it’s up to the guy who does it, but you won’t even know who he is.

BD:   But you hope it’s there?

McBeth:   Yes, you hope it is.

BD:   What advice do you have for audiences?

McBeth:   To be open-eared about new music. It’s funny that nobody wants to see the same movie three times, and nobody wants to go back to church to hear the same sermon they heard last week, but in the music area, everybody wants to hear what they’ve heard many times. They’re not adventuresome. In music, audiences feel comfortable with things that they’ve heard, and very uncomfortable with things they haven’t heard. I don’t know why that’s the case.

BD:   [With great hope] Is it perhaps that there’s so much to get out of each piece that they don’t even scratch the surface the first time?

McBeth:   I don’t know. It could be. I have heard many people say they went to a concert and didn’t hear a thing they’d ever heard before.

BD:   That should be a good thing.

McBeth:   That should be a great thing! I always say that worked for me, but audiences should just keep an open mind, and try to realize what’s being done on stage, and not be scared by new things.

See my interviews with Malcolm Arnold, John Paynter, and Vaclav Nelhybel

BD:   Your music is mostly in a tonal style rather than an atonal style.

McBeth:   Yes, and I grew up in the atonal period. Now I like some of the atonal pieces, but there is very little twelve-tone that I like. Twelve-tone came out because the atonal form was primarily based on tonality, and once they didn’t have tonality, they couldn’t hold their music together formally. So they serialized it. It’s interesting that the serial period, or the twelve-tone period, went for as long as the Classical period [roughly 1750-1820], and what do we have for it? Maybe five or six works? [Pauses a moment] I did the keynote speech at NASM [National Association of Schools of Music] a few years ago in Orlando. They meet every year, and it’s all the deans of the accredited music schools in the United States. I told them I was just so pleased to have lived long enough to see communism and twelve-tone music just go away. I thought maybe they’d throw stuff at me, but they applauded and whistled! It was a novel adventure though, because that serial period, which was so dissonant and so abstract, broke ground for the other guys. Hindemith, for example, could come right in behind it, and without that they would have thought he was from another planet. It did help all of us, but nearly everything has gone back to tonality. Not to keys, but tonal centers.

BD:   So, you’re not just discarding all of the twelve-tone music onto the scrap heap of history?

McBeth:   Oh no. There are about six works that are really quite good, but the majority of it just didn’t do anything. Music goes. In all great pieces of music there’s direction. You know when you’re going somewhere, and you know when you get there. The first master of direction was Beethoven. Composers usually have direction by the use of dissonance. That’s the greatest tool for direction, so if all you have is dissonance, it’s impossible to have direction. It’s like having all consonance. It’s not enough. There’s got to be cross between the two. But the twelve-tone idea has stopped completely with composers a few years ago.
mcbeth

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BD:   You write all this wind music. Do you still write some choral music and other things?

McBeth:   Yes, I sure do. I write a lot of choral music.

BD:   Tell me the joys and sorrows of working with the human voice!

McBeth:   [Laughs] The sorrows are that the dissonance scares them, but once they learn it, they never forget it. They really do it well, and the joys are that you don’t have an oboe who fails to show up on that day! [Both laugh] If you don’t have individual people that have to be there, that’s the fun. There are always enough people to do it, and the great part about it is the copy work is so easy. You just have to do one and reproduce it. You don’t have to extract parts, as you do in instrumental works. [More laughter] I enjoy writing for choirs.

BD:   Are your band pieces or choir pieces littered with directions, or do you leave them pretty clean?

McBeth:   I put in quite a bit of direction. I even list the type of mallets to use on a xylophone, and sometimes I’ve given brand names! [Both laugh] But I don’t think you can give too much direction.... though I suppose you could and the page would get cluttered. But I think the more direction you give, the better. I originally started putting a long paragraph of performance hints for the piece in the front of my scores, and everybody does it now.

BD:   Is that for the conductor, or for all the players?

McBeth:   That’s for the conductor.

BD:   You obviously want the conductor and then the group to get as close to your vision as possible.

McBeth:   Right.

BD:   Do you want it to be exactly the way you want, or do you allow for a little interpretation?

McBeth:   Lots of composers say they allow for a little interpretation, but in my ear exactly the way I want it done is what makes it sound the best. Maybe a little bit is all right, but when you allow for interpretation, if you allow for it, it’s hard to go much past tempo and dynamics. Music is like water... it seeks its own level as a tempo, and tempos at your desk are very different from the podium. So when I write a piece, I perform it in public at least three times before I send it to the publisher. Then I check the tempos I really want, and change them when needed. But I personally don’t like a lot of leeway.

BD:   Do you conduct a lot?

McBeth:   Just about every week!

BD:   Is it better when you conduct your works, or when somebody else does them?

McBeth:   Well, that’s not fair! [Both roar laughing] Naturally I would think it’s better when I did them because I think I get them just like I want them.

BD:   Do you ever get it just right?

McBeth:   Rarely! But if you can get 85%, you’re happy.

BD:   Do you ever hit 100%?

McBeth:   If you get it in the 90s, you’re thrilled, and it’s just two or three times in your life that you get 100%. With the Marine Band concert we had 100% at the Kennedy Center. I had three days to work with them, and I didn’t even need three hours!

BD:   [Checking to see how he preferred to be known, and the answer was quite interesting] Let me hear you say your name.

McBeth:   William Francis McBeth!

BD:   [Surprised] Do you want to go by William, because it’s always shown as W. Francis? [Two of my other guests use their initial first, C. Curtis-Smith, and my colleague at Northwestern M. William Karlins.]

McBeth:   No, you go by what your parents call you. You don’t choose your first name. On my music for the last many years I put W. Francis McBeth. It’s a little pretentious to go with an initial and then a first name, but I had to do it because a big article came out in the Arkansas Gazette which listed Frances McBeth, daughter of Dr. J. P. McBeth! [Both laugh] When I went to Eastman, they couldn’t find my room reservation for half a day because they had me in the girls dormitory. [Much laughter] People don’t know that Francis is a very old man’s name in the English language.

BD:   I met a bass named Archie Drake, who was a relative of Sir Francis Drake (c. 1540-1596), the explorer who circumnavigated the globe.

McBeth:   Yes, and there was Sir Francis Vivian Dunn (1908-1995) the great conductor from Britain. One of the nights of the Round Table was a Vivian, and I’ve known several male Beverlys [male name without the last ‘e’]. One singer, George Beverly Shea (1909-2013[!]) was a well-known singer with Billy Graham. But I go by my middle name.

BD:   May I ask your birthdate?

McBeth:   Sure! March 9th, 1933.

BD:   Are you where you want to be at this point in your career?

McBeth:   I am much further along than I ever planned! [Laughs] I never expected all this to happen, but I’m just thrilled it did. I could never have imagined such a great life. It’s just wonderful, and I was very lucky. I got in on the very ground floor of the music for winds era when it started, and when you get on the ground floor, you’re a bit like Haydn. He got in on the ground floor of the orchestra. When you get in on that ground floor, everybody who comes later is going to do something that you came up with, that you more or less invented. Yes, I’m very pleased with where I am at this point.

BD:   Good. I hope for lots more from your pen!

McBeth:   [Laughs] I do too!

BD:   Who is the composer you mentioned as we were setting up to record?

McBeth:   His name is Steven Bryant. He’s getting big commissions now, and is a really good writer.

BD:   Is John Barnes Chance still alive? I’m sure I played one of his pieces when I was in high school.

McBeth:   It was probably Incantation and Dance. No, he was killed when he was forty-one. It was a real tragedy. Everything in his life went wrong for him...

BD:   ...except the music.

McBeth:   Except the music, that’s right. When he was writing most of that stuff, he was selling records at a store in Austin. He finally got a good job at the University of Kentucky, and his dog was digging out from under the back yard fence. He touched a single electric wire and electrocuted himself. It was a real tragedy. He didn’t write a whole lot because he spent so much time on each piece.

BD: Thank you so very much for this interview.

McBeth: I’m glad it worked out.

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on December 19, 2002. Portions were broadcast on WNUR the following year, and again in 2006 and 2018. This transcription was made in 2026, 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.