a Return to Beauty and Meaning

Rather than searching for the rare idea – the transformative idea that would create new kinds of beauty and meaning in their art – artists can find themselves trapped in a struggle between ideologies and schools of thought. Often they abandon beauty and meaning altogether, as their concept becomes more important than the result.

Born in the United States I grew up in a musical family, regularly performing, composing and producing a large variety of musical works for our community. I was exposed to many genres, including classical, popular and jazz at an early age. In grade school, when I came across and later studied the music of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ives, Bartok, or Cage, I was fascinated. It seemed so open-minded when compared with the strict conventions and genre-laden thinking of more commercial forms of music. By the time I finished high school, music had become my life. Discovering new sounds and exploring how those new sounds might be sculpted into beautiful and meaningful music had become my passion.

So I moved to Bloomington Indiana, where I earned a degree in composition from the Indiana University School of Music (now the Jacobs School of Music). While there I studied with John Eaton, and took masterclasses with Milton Babbitt, Lukas Foss and Leonard Bernstein. While I had many formative experiences in Bloomington, I was also shocked and appalled at the narrow-mindedness of the academy. The lists of things that you had to do – or weren’t allowed to do – were so long and so rigid. I regularly witnessed a fellow student mobbed for daring not to follow the orthodoxy. And for every one of those, many others dutifully wrote what was expected of them, rather than what they really wanted to explore. Frustrated by this pervasive dogmatic thinking, and convinced that the life of a performer would nurture my writing like nothing else, I embarked on a career as an operatic bass.

What people crave today, and what is most often missing from their lives, is beauty, depth of meaning, discussions of moral goodness – in short, the profound.

For more than two decades, I sang much of the great repertoire written for my voice. The Minnesota Orchestra, Bayreuth Festival, Dresden Music Festival, the State Theater in Karlsruhe and German National Theater in Weimar were among the venues at which I had the privilege to appear. I worked with conductors like Kazushi Ono and Daniel Barenboim as well as directors like Wolfgang Wagner and Michael Hampe. I stood on stage with singers like Ghena Dimitrova, Vivica Genaux and Roberto Frontali. Every rehearsal was an opportunity for me to listen to my colleagues; to watch them play and work.

So today, when I compose a new piece of music, I can picture what I am currently working on being played, or sung, or performed, or directed or conducted by any number of the thousands of colleagues I have worked with over the years. This extensive experience has given me both an instinct for drama, as well as an expressive sense of the lyric line that is grounded in practice. My singing career has also afforded me the time in which to develop a unique perspective on harmony, and to gain an intimate knowledge of the orchestra.

My career as a performer gave me more than a life in the academy ever might have done. When you are interpreting a piece of music or theater, you have to understand the curve of the work; to viscerally feel its long bow. For an interpreter, the piece must be internalized – perhaps memorized – but it will always be deeply personal. You inhabit the piece, and for a while at least, the piece inhabits you. I think that this keeps my work from becoming overly abstract. In this way, working as an interpreter is good for any composer. Perhaps this is why so many of our greatest composers also spent a substantial part of their lives as interpreters.