An Interview with Fred Lerdahl
October 31, 2000
Fred Lerdahl is one of the most widely known and performed contemporary composers in America. Over the years he has received numerous honors, including the Koussevitzky Composition Prize, two composer awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship and others. He is also known for his scholarly studies of music theory and is the author, with Ray Jackendoff, of A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Currently, he is Fritz Reiner Professor of Music at Columbia University.
John Kochevar: What was your intent in the composition of Time after Time?
Lerdahl: Some years ago I wrote a piece called Fantasy Etudes (which Collage has played, incidentally), written for the familiar new-music ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion and piano. I wanted to return to this combination of instruments in a different way, one that was less a dialectic of opposites and more homogenous—not an easy task, since this instrumental combination has a naturally heterogeneous sound.
What I arrived at is a piece in two movements in which the material spirals around and comes back in ever larger formal patterns. The title "Time after Time" refers to the way the musical elements return again and again, progressively differentiated and rearranged, across as well as within the movements.
Kochevar: What inspired you?
Lerdahl: It's impossible to say precisely. I wanted a brilliant sound, and I had some vague, contradictory expressive urges. I was looking for a musical language where these impulses could coexist, grow, and flourish.
As in all my music, my compositional methods are related to my work in music theory. The theory reflects research that others and I have done on how people perceive and interpret music. From this theory I have developed compositional techniques that enable me to grow elementary materials by elaboration through expanding variations into formal complexity. The underlying materials are tonal (in an extended sense) and provide a basis for departure and return. I believe my methods will be accessible to the engaged listener, even when the results are quite complex.
Sometimes when you say "It's music theory," people think, "Oh, it's really dry." However, it doesn't have to be that way. A lot of 20th-century music has been based on artificial and arbitrary systems. My work in music cognition supports my desire to create music that is carefully organized but grounded in natural and expressive gestures. The richest constructions, I believe, disappear into the musical fabric.
Kochevar: You are still working on this piece. How is it going?
Lerdahl: It's going fine. I am working slowly and steadily. It will be finished in November. It will be performed first in New York and then by Collage in Boston.
Kochevar: What should listeners know before they hear this music? What should they listen for?
Lerdahl: The organic growth of the expanding variations, with its spiraling returns, is certainly audible, but I do not particularly wish the listener to concentrate on this. I am a lazy listener myself; I like to enter into music in a focused trance, so to speak, and let the sounds speak. Beyond matters of syntax and form, there is a good deal of color and instrumental virtuosity in Time after Time.
In the first movement, this brilliant surface alternates with quieter impulses that are lyrical and inward. This opposition becomes simultaneous in the second movement: here the piano (with support from the percussion) plays a serene and orderly expanding pattern of eighth notes, against which the other instruments overlay progressively more urgent gestures, until a resolution is finally achieved.
Kochevar: Let me ask you a few questions about the state of contemporary music. We are always trying to take the pulse of the audience for new music. In your opinion, are they alive or dead?
Lerdahl: Can I be somewhere in between? New music in the States has been somewhat in a rut. Our musical culture is dominated by mass media and mass taste. In contrast, Europeans still seem to go to new-music concerts in larger numbers, perhaps out of cultural habit. New music is comparatively well supported in Europe, although even there its financial underpinnings have become more fragile. Art music, especially contemporary art music, has always been a minority taste in this country, and it will continue to be so.
Kochevar: What about the state of composition of new music?
Lerdahl: At Columbia University, where I teach, there has been a lot of engagement recently with both computer music and recent European music. There is something about technology and multimedia that creates a wider interest in new music. Technology is going to be increasingly important for the future of music.
In the early days of electronic music, the goal was usually to generate sounds from scratch. Composers gradually realized, however, that interesting and beautiful sounds are extremely difficult to specify with sufficient richness, so they turned to transforming natural sounds.
With the array of sampling, digital, and real-time techniques now available and relatively easy to use, we are gradually witnessing the merging of traditional acoustic playing with computer music. It can be hard to tell in a commercial score what is natural and what is altered; the same thing is happening in film. I welcome these developments and am engaged with them in my own work (though not in Time after Time).
Kochevar: How do we keep abreast of developments in contemporary music?
Lerdahl: I myself spend time listening to recordings and going to concerts in New York and Europe. There is the Contemporary Music Review; you can subscribe or any library should have it. At Columbia we have a very international group of students who bring attention to contemporary music in their countries. Boston has a lively contemporary-music scene—something I know first hand, from when I lived there in the 1970's. We live in a time when music from all historical periods and all geographical locations is easy to find.