An Interview with Jon Pescevich
by Erika Swedberg
Your compositions have a distinctive style, and yet they defy all of the familiar categories such as Modern or Post-Modern, Neo-Classical, Neo-Romantic or Minimalist. How would you describe your music?
I like the term Radical Beauty.
My work places beauty at the center of what art is all about. Being attractive or well-designed is not enough; beauty is more than this. And while many things down through the ages have been beautiful in one way or another, most of what might be considered beautiful in the future has not been tried yet.
The set of all ideas that are yet to be considered – or what I call the design space – is so vast, that it is tempting to try and cut it down to size. But a grand narrative is a false filter, and so is an ironic pose and a post truth roll of the eyes. There are no short cuts in the creative process, and if there were, that would spoil the fun!
In my work, I am looking for something unconventional, but also beautiful in a new and unexpected way.
What do you believe today’s audiences long to hear?
Today’s audiences are over-saturated with entertainment. The modern world has produced arguably the best and certainly the most various opportunities for relaxation and pleasure that the world has ever known.
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.
Your first opera was based on Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’. What did you see in that play that appealed to you?
An important theme, that fascinates me, is thinking. What it feels like to think deeply about something, what a person experiences when they wrestle with a difficult problem.
My opera Hamlet’s Obsession is about the main character’s inner thoughts, which are expressed by the chorus. The story itself is about a young man who makes bad choices. We are living in very superficial times, and people crave an opportunity to look beneath the surface of other people’s lives, and see how and why they make the choices that they do.
Your first two major works were both operas. What excites you about writing operas?
It is always true when writing music that the extra-musical plays a role. The only question is, what kind of a role. Sometimes the role is completely hidden, or sometimes there is a literary reference to it in the score. Sometimes, when words are involved, it hangs, quite literally, from the notes.
In opera, the interplay between musical and extra-musical ideas is at its richest. The music must engage not only with words and story, but with theater and all of its various elements.
You have said that your creative process begins with creating tonalities. What do you look for in the tonalities that you create for the characters in your operas?
People very often use metaphors like “James is playing checkers, while the June is playing three-dimensional chess.” One may also ask “If my best friend is a piece of fruit, what kind of fruit is she?” Metaphor lies at the very heart of how people think.
My ascribing a certain harmonic world to a character or a literary theme is only a metaphor. But as long as I use this metaphor consistently, thoughtfully and evocatively (with beauty and meaning) I have gone a long way to fundamentally addressing the story at hand.
How can you have multiple characters, all with their own, individual tonalities, singing together?
That is a question of design.
I know in advance that a specific character is associated with a specific theme, or that these two other characters will be engaged in a dialogue. Knowing this, I can design the various harmonic worlds to fit together. Perhaps they are embedded in each other as modal variants, or perhaps they are startling contrasts. Either way, these harmonic worlds must fit together into a universe that anticipates the story. Almost always, this will demand planning and design.
How do you choose the tonalities when there are no words?
When extra-musical references are oblique or completely hidden, I am free to choose the harmonic material for strictly musical reasons. In this case, any metaphorical associations with the world at large can be picked up and put down later, as the piece evolves.
Much as scaffolding will be erected by builders and ultimately removed from view, so can the metaphors associated with the harmonic world become a practical and fluid part of the work process, and yet never appear in the finished composition.
Once tonalities are chosen for a composition, what are the next steps in your creative process?
First and most importantly, I make a sketch of the work from beginning to end that is satisfying. Not perfect, but aesthetically satisfying. In the sketch, many important musical elements are left out so that I can cover a lot of ground quickly, from beginning to end. At this stage, the orchestration and counterpoint are still rough-cut. Dynamics, phrasing, articulation and accompaniment patterns are often non-existent.
Once I have a good sketch, I know context. Then I can concentrate on all the elements that I neglected at first. I am no longer concerned with covering ground quickly, but I go as deeply into the material as I can, finding the most perfect expression for each idea.
What about form? What role does form play as a sketch develops?
Musical form is partly a delivery device. Think of glassware; a red wine glass versus a snifter: each glass is designed to present its particular beverage to best advantage. Similarly, I design formal structures to present the musical material at hand to best advantage.
Form is also architecture, or a large rhythm, and can have an intrinsic beauty all its own. The meaning of the form has to complement the meaning of the rest of the piece. Any art work has to speak with one voice, because it is a virtual reality. I will often continue experimenting with the musical form of the piece or of a passage long after the sketch is completed. But form is also a fundamental and crucial element of sketching.
What role does dissonance play in the harmonic worlds that you create?
Consonance and dissonance is a very old subject in music. Perhaps since Pythagoras, basing harmony on the overtone series has been a favorite explanation. An octave, then a fifth, then an octave, then a third – this certainly presents a symmetry which has great purchase on our ears. Traveling parallel to this symmetry or defying it is something every musician considers again and again throughout their lives.
But there is another kind of consonance and dissonance which has always played an important role. Mental dissonance is either generated by or a by-product of harmony and musical architecture. Fulfilling harmonic expectations or denying them happens both at the detailed level of chord progressions and counterpoint, but also at the global level of musical architecture and form.
How do you develop the accompaniment patterns for a new work?
Accompaniment patterns have a subtle, often subliminal effect on a piece, and yet their influence is also wide-ranging and dramatic. If one takes a passage of music which has already been sketched and one applies a half dozen wildly different accompaniment patterns to it while keeping all else the same, that piece of music will go through radical and unexpected transformations.
Which transformation is congruent with everything else the piece wants to say? Which one allows the orchestration to speak with clarity and dramatic force as well? Which one brings the form into focus, while allowing the various details inherent in a given melody to emerge? The role of a well chosen accompaniment pattern on the impact and sense of completeness made by a great piece of music is vastly underestimated.
How important are the remaining musical elements in your creative process, and how do you address them?
At the heart of every phrase is a catharsis; a moment of intense meaning. Eventually all these moments string together into ever larger climaxes. All along the way they point inevitably toward the end, and the ultimate meaning of the piece.
Each phrase and each catharsis is described by dynamics, articulation, and phrase markings. It is the composer’s job to place these markings for the performer, who will interpret them. Phrasing and interpretation grow out of structure, and complete it.
For over two decades, you made your living as a performer. Does that experience as an opera singer continue to influence your writing?
There are two ways in which my singing career still has impact on my composing. Every rehearsal was an opportunity for me to listen to my colleagues; to watch them play and work. So today, 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.
Secondly, 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.
When you were studying composition as an undergraduate, you were very deeply involved with academic and avant-garde music. What made you decide to change direction?
In grade school, when I came across and later studied the music of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ives, Bartok, or Cage, I was fascinated, I was bedazzled. I thought of it as open-minded! Especially when compared with the strict conventions and genre-laden thinking of more commercial forms of music.
When I arrived at university I was shocked and appalled at the narrow-mindedness. 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. Without freedom, creativity is unthinkable.
You feel that classical music lost its way in the 20th century. How did this happen, in your opinion?
Good ideas are rare.
Artists entered the beginning of the last century armed with a tool box filled with rules of thumb and laden with tradition. Neither served them well in their search for something truly new, and reflective of the rapidly changing world they found themselves in. Often they compensated with inflexible dogma which provided a world view and a theory of the case, but often hindered the creative process through its rigidity.
Rather than searching for truth (beauty and meaning in art) they became trapped in a struggle between ideologies and schools of thought, in which the concept was more important than the result.
How can classical music take a better direction in the 21st century?
We need to re-invest in the creative process, which is always the same. One takes a radical leap into the design space. Nibbling one’s way forward, one bite at a time, is no substitute for a leap of imagination. Equally important is a flexible critical framework. Before the leap, after the leap, or when comparing one new idea to another, the critical sense needs to constantly evolve.
Coordinating these two capacities (the radical leap and the critical framework) is the essence of all human creativity.