Outside Perspective

Lacrimosa dies illa - Cynthia Closkey

It seems to have become customary at funerals for family members to create photo displays, slide shows, and other memorabilia to depict and celebrate the life of the deceased.

The PSO's performance of Mozart's Requiem had some of that multimedia effect -- a projected text introduction, letters and poetry read between the movements, the interweaving of Gregorian chants -- but it seemed to me to celebrate not Mozart's life but his death.

"Celebrate" is perhaps not quite the right word. It's hard to find a word that properly reflects the power and grandeur of this setting of the Requiem and of Friday's performance.

From the somber opening bells, to the Gregorian singers, singing unseen backstage, to the blended voices of the choir and the striking solos, to John Lithgow's evocative readings, to the orchestra's performance, all the way to the final Amen, the cumulative effect was of an unstoppable swell of sorrow edged with hope for greater glory beyond this world.

The elements were disparate but they blended to a whole. More than that, they engaged the audience, perhaps more than a more traditional performance of the Requiem alone could have done. I left feeling that I had heard the definitive version of the work.

Yet, I find myself still wondering about the use of poetry from and about the Holocaust in this piece. To be clear: The poetry was beautiful and raw and painful, and absolutely effective.

At the same time, there's a lot of excellent poetry and prose in the world, many writings about specific events, about death and Death, and about sorrow. It's hard to avoid the thought that Manfred Honeck's choice of three poems about the Holocaust has a particular meaning.

One thought: The selected poems call forth images of hell, perhaps more vividly to a modern mind than texts like the excerpts from the Book of Revelations can.

The program notes suggest that people in Mozart's time had a more intimate relationship with death than we do today. As David noted in his post, echoing Andrew Druckenbrod's preview article, this seems to overstate reality. But I would be more inclined to agree that people in Mozart's time thought more often about Hell than we do -- certainly more than I do. The poems by Nelly Sachs and Matt May evokes a vision of hell on earth entirely appropriate to a requiem Mass.

(Photo credit: Mourning, originally uploaded by swimparallel.)

A year in 39 minutes - Cynthia Closkey

Photo credit: "Four Seasons-Day 14/365" by Andreanna

I looked for a list of soundtracks that include Vivaldi's most famous work and could not find one. One partial list mentions "Tin Cup, Spy Game, A View to Kill, What Lies Beneath, White Chicks, Saved!, Pacific Heights, The Other Sister...." I discovered that those Brits who watched much tellie in the 70s or 80s will always associate Vivaldi with Kingsmill Bread. But no comprehensive lists were to be found. (May I suggest that as a thesis topic for some aspiring film major?)

I needed the comprehensive list because I wanted to validate my guess that the first section, Spring, would be the most referenced. I find it the most recognizable part. To my surprise, my (highly unscientific) searching has revealed that movie trailers favor instead the opening of the "Winter" segment, for its sense of doom and foreboding. (See for example, Wall Street and The Empire Strikes Back.)

Given how often we all have heard Vivaldi's The Four Seasons in movies and commercials, at weddings and receptions, you might wonder that we would care to hear it performed again at all.

Yet we most certainly do want to hear it, and especially to hear it performed not as the background to action, but as a work unto itself.

It's a lovely showcase for a violin soloist, and at Heinz Hall Friday night Andrés Cárdenes was outstanding, particularly in his interplay with the lead cello. I was also struck to hear how the harpsichord complimented the strings, and how clearly the small orchestra's playing rang in Heinz Hall. Much of the Summer section's quieter and more delicate moments, in particular, seemed to be created specifically to be enjoyed here.

Perhaps The Four Seasons is called upon to act as soundtrack so often because it reflects a full range of emotions, settings, changes -- a year's worth, you might say.

Popular - Cynthia Closkey

Photo credit: "Popped" by AMagill

"Theme from Rocky" is an inspiring piece of music. It's all the more stirring performed by a skilled symphony orchestra like the Pittsburgh Symphony Pops, as it was last week during their preview concert. I wanted to jump up and start running up and down the steps of Heinz Hall, and raise my arms in triumph.

The joy of a pops concert is hearing music you know well, performed live by expert performers. One might think of "pops" as short not for "popular music" but "populist music," a counter to any presumed elitism inherent in classical music.

The Pittsburgh Symphony Pops aren't political though. They are fun. As I tweeted during Tuesday's preview, "Marvin Hamlisch is a card," joking with the audience and the orchestra, chatting with a six-year-old sitting in the front row and eating cereal, and improvising a short tune to inspire us to subscribe to the season. The audience loved him and loved the music. I heard the older gentleman seated to my left humming along with a Gershwin tune, and everyone in the nearly-full house clapped along with "Seventy-Six Trombones."

Granted, not everyone may love the Pops. If the thought of humming or clapping along with the orchestra appalls you, you might have an uncomfortable time. But the rest of us will be clapping, laughing, humming, and just plain enjoying ourselves, perhaps a little lowbrow but in decidedly high spirits.

Music, stories, and the world around us - Cynthia Closkey

Photo: "Big Sur color explosion" by maveric2003

To a person raised on television and film, as I was, music can seem to exist mainly for the purpose of supplementing storytelling.

Think of the score of Jaws, the theme song of Cheers, or the musical beds of This American Life: none of those stories would carry the same emotional impact without the music.

So strong is this impulse that, at many of the concerts I've attended this season, I've found myself envisioning the chase scene, the soft emotional two-shot, the montage for which a particular movement or piece might provide the perfect background. Sad, but true.

This weekend's musical selections demonstrated that music can be equally powerful in portraying a still scene -- a landscape, with its particular topography, skyscapes, and life within.

Interview with John Adams, part 6 - Cynthia Closkey

This is the final segment of my interview with John Adams, the PSO's Conductor of the Year. With these posts we're building up to two special concerts that he will be conducting with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on January 16 and 17.

In this segment, John talks about Pittsburgh, Heinz Hall, and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

Q: I'm sure you've come to Pittsburgh a few times to work this season. Do you get to see any of the area when you're here?

JA: I've been driven to a few college campuses, so I've seen them. I'm very fond of the bridges. I think they're lovely. And [the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra] is a spectacularly wonderful orchestra.

This [Heinz Hall] is also one of the great halls in the country. I think the average person doesn't understand how essential it is to be in a good acoustical environment. It's the difference playing a five hundred dollar violin and a million dollar Stradivarius. The sound is so important.

Q: Can you describe what the difference is?

JA: It's a combination of clarity of sound and resonance, and also balance. We hear music along a bandwidth of frequencies. You have your bass waves, which are slower frequencies, and they're larger and longer acoustical waves. And then you go up through the scale of the audible spectrum. A great concert hall presents all of that spectrum in a beautifully balanced way. You don't get too boomy a bass or too shrill a top.

And then you need a sort of ideal reverberation time, so that when the music stops it doesn't stop dead. There's kind of an echo. But you don't want something that sounds like a train terminal or a bathroom.

Interestingly enough, two of the great concert halls in this country -- Powell Hall in St. Louis and Heinz Hall -- were originally movie theaters. And although the stages have been acoustically shaped, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. You have to have a great hall to begin with.

And usually what you find it that when you've got a great hall, the orchestra will become great, because the orchestra knows … it hears itself and will rise to the challenge of the beautiful space. It's like somebody playing a Strad. They're motivated to play well.

Q: Do you notice differences in the audiences as well?

JA: Well, I've only been here once before. I came and conducted a program of twentieth century music, Stravinsky and my own music and Zappa, about fifteen years ago. And I … that experience was an expression of what's wrong about presenting contemporary music. Because the orchestra and the staff at the time didn't understand who I was, they didn't do anything to prepare the audience. So, much of the audience didn't come, and those that came were either fanatics or they were just people who were unprepared.

This time, the orchestra has a totally different philosophy about introducing a composer to a community. They're saturating the community for a year.

Q: We're having this interview, and you're doing podcasts --

JA: And I'm doing talks all over campuses, and I'll be doing two full concerts of my music … in effect three whole concerts, plus guest conductors are doing it.

So the audience will at least know who John Adams is. They may not like him, but they'll know who he is.

Interview with John Adams, part 5 - Cynthia Closkey

The fifth part of my interview with John Adams, the PSO's Conductor of the Year. With these posts we're building up to two special concerts that he will be conducting with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on January 16 and 17.

In this segment, John talks about the creation and premiere of The Dharma at Big Sur, how he revises and improves certain works, and why not every piece is worth revising.

Q: I had seen a video on YouTube, a clip in which you talked about The Dharma at Big Sur first being rehearsed.

Q (continued): In the clip you said that until you explained to the orchestra what you were doing, it was just a series of notes and they couldn't figure it out. And I guess [your book] plays into that as well. I mean, even today you can't be everywhere.

JA: That's an interesting story. That premiere, which happened in 2003, was a very high profile premiere. It was the opening night of Disney Hall, which is a big Frank Gehry piece of architecture, and it was televised nationally. It's the sort of thing that anyone who aspires to be an important composer would have to deal with: a command performance, write a piece for this public event.

And instead of writing something safe that would not ruffle any feathers or cause any difficulties, I decided that if I was going to spend nine months writing a piece, I was going to write the piece I wanted to write. And at that time I was interested in two very tricky and dangerous things. One was alternate tuning, and the other was writing for this amplified, electric violin. And these are dangerous things to put into a setting of a classical concert.

And it was not a success, the premiere. There were many things that needed to be worked out. And I wanted to tell that story, to inspire younger composers, to say, "Don't ever let down your highest principles, even if you have to risk a disastrous performance." I didn't feel great the morning after that, but I went back and I fixed it, and the orchestra brought the piece back a year later, and we got it right.

Q: It seems that that is a recurring thing. In your book you describe a piece you worked on for Kronos Quartet --

JA: Yes. (laughs)

Q: -- and you didn't get to hear it in rehearsal.

JA: But that was a bad piece.

Q: But then you fixed it later.

JA: I totally changed it. I realized what was wrong with the piece, I threw away what was really bad, and I kept what was good. I realized that the piece needed more strings, and I turned it into a string septet, and it became one of my most successful pieces, Shaker Loops.

Q: There must be a temptation to go back and change things later. This is a question that I'm sure everybody faces. At what point is it done?

JA: That's a really good question. I have some pieces that I think are dogs -- no offense to dogs. But I have a few pieces that I never conduct myself, for example. And I look at them, and I see that there're some really good moments in them, but the thought of going back and just ripping a piece apart and trying to put it all back together….

I feel that it takes so long to write a piece now -- six months if it's a chamber piece, a year if it's a big orchestra piece, two years if it's an opera -- it's better to just soldier on and learn from your mistakes. This is what Shostakovich felt. Shostakovich never revised his earlier pieces. I mean, he figured, "Maybe they're not perfect, but I am who I am now, not the man I was when I was thirty."

Now, some composers, like Pierre Boulez for example, he views his compositions as like these living organisms that will evolve and change all during the course of his lifetime. It must be a nightmare for his publisher. But he's just constantly changing pieces after each performance. And I'm tremendously impressed by that, but it's just not something that interests me.

This interview continues tomorrow.

Interview with John Adams, part 4 - Cynthia Closkey

Continuing with part four of my interview with John Adams, the PSO's Conductor of the Year. See also the first part, second part, and third part. I'm posting this interview over several days, in anticipation of two special concerts that he will be conducting with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on January 16 and 17.

In this segment, John describes the feeling of releasing a book in the current market, how he came to write the book Hallelujah Junction, and why he wrote a book like this.

John Adams (continuing his answer from part three): But it's very hard to be a serious composer, as it is hard to be a serious novelist. There's so much noise out there. I walked into Barnes & Noble, the big one at Broadway and Sixty-fifth, a few days after my book came out. And, you know, every author wants to do this, to see his or her book in the bookstore.

And I eventually found it, but it's kind of daunting and a little depressing to just see how every rock singer has got a memoir out, and every former cabinet official has got a memoir out, and there are books on sex and cooking and politics and terrorism, and it's this absolute tsunami of material that you're trying to fight.

And as you mentioned, now that anybody can sit with a laptop, almost anyone is an author.

Q: This is National Novel Writing Month [November 2008]. I don't know if you know about this, but that's that many more novels being produced in the thirty days of November.

JA: Yeah. And I had to stop going to my optometrist, because every time I'd go to get an eye test, the guy would make me sit and listen to his compositions.

Q: Oh no!

JA: He'd learned how to operate the software, and he'd composed these pieces. And I'd have to sit there for a half hour after I'd had my eyes examined, listening to these dreadful pieces that he'd written with his computer. (laughs)

Q: How did you come to write your book?

JA: I had been introduced to Jonathan Galassi about eight or nine years ago by a mutual friend, and my friend knew that I could write. So we talked, and Jonathan was very interested in my writing a book. At that time, I think the assumption was that I'd write some kind of book about general American music or essays or something like that. And I just basically forgot about it.

And then sometime around 2003 or 2004 a professor in California, who had previously collaborated with the Grateful Dead to write several books, told me he wanted to write a biographical study. So I spent a lot of time doing research with him in interviews. And then it turned out he couldn't write the book. And by that point I had spent so much time thinking about my past, and also being very inspired by the Gabriel Garcia Marquez autobiography, which is such a beautiful and humble and funny and revealing book, I thought, well, I'll give it a crack myself.

So I sat down and wrote a couple of chapters, drafted them and sent them to Jonathan Galassi, and he said, "I like it. Go for it." And over the next year and a half I finished the book.

Q: I lived in Cambridge for college and then I lived in San Francisco, so reading your book, at least at far as I've read, has been a time trip for me. What was it like for you, thinking back to those times? Do you feel nostalgic? Are you glad to be through them?

JA: I don't know if other people who write their autobiographies have the same experience that I did. But I found that the farther back I went, the more I enjoyed writing it. And the closer I got to the present, the more I found myself writing about a person that I liked less and less. (laughs) Because it was that person that, you know, I hear in my inner ear all the time now.

I basically wrote this book for young musicians. I wrote it for a wider audience of course, and there are other reasons for writing a book. But the thing that I care most about, and the thing that gives me the greatest pleasure, is when somebody tells me, "My son or my daughter wants to be a composer, she's eighteen, and I bought this book for her." That really hits it for me, because I never could find a book like this when I was a kid.

I mean, the books that had the most influence on me were John Cage's books. But those books are sort of radical treatises and they weren't personal in the way that this is. What I wanted to do was to sort of describe the kind of twists and turns that a creative life takes, and how you go through terrible periods of blockage, how you really are affected by criticism. I mean, everybody wants to say, "Oh, I don't read the reviews. Criticism bounces off my back." But of course that's not true.

And the other thing of course is for my major works I wanted to have some kind of personal statement, so that when I'm no longer around, if somebody's staging Nixon in China or Doctor Atomic or The Death of Klinghoffer, they can at least read a little bit, thirty or forty pages of what the author said. And there are very few composers who've left that kind of record.

This interview continues tomorrow.

Interview with John Adams, part 3 - Cynthia Closkey

This is the third part of my interview with John Adams, the PSO's Conductor of the Year. See also the first part and the second part. I'm posting this interview over several days, in anticipation of two special concerts that he will be conducting with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on January 16 and 17.

In this segment, John talks about how technological tools have changed composing and how the Web has affected the business of making music.

Q: When you were first making music, there was no computer-aided composition or anything along those lines. In writing, from when we wrote with typewriters to when we started writing with computers, the way that people wrote changed. The books themselves changed because the tools changed.

JA: How about the change from when they were writing with a pen to writing to a typewriter? Imagine what that was.

Q: Exactly. What about music? Do you think that changes in tools changed the music?

JA: Yeah. I don't know if the average reader of your blog is aware of the kinds of software that are available now, and that most young composers use. But they're basically called sequencers, and you have a bank of samples. You have a B flat played by a trumpet, and a C played by a trumpet, and a B flat played by an oboe and a C played by an oboe, and you can literally create an artificial orchestra. It's labor intensive.

I would say 95 percent of the music you hear now on commercial television, and much of what you hear on the radio, is created this way. Maybe not bands, but music behind commercials or films.

And so a lot of serious composers are using these computer programs, and they compose from the start on them. And I use them too. But I always use these technological software aids with enormous suspicion, because they can do certain things very well. They can allow you to hear your piece in a mock-up. But they're also very limited. They're very stiff, they don't have flexibility -- creating a ritard, slowing down, speeding up, doing all the kind of things that make Mahler or Debussy or Mozart so intensely human. They're not impossible to achieve, but they're fantastically complicated.

And so what I'm seeing, when young composers bring me scores now, I'm seeing this really disturbing new trend towards a very motorized, mechanical kind of composing, because I know what they're doing. They're writing to the dictates of the software rather than vice versa.  And so, you know, I see a lot of pieces that are in 4/4 time, and they've now gone back to very tonal writing.

I had a young girl, sixteen or seventeen years old, in Berkeley where I live, ask if she could come by and show me her music, her pieces. I would say she's moderately talented. She's very ambitious, very sweet, and really I'm very impressed with the fact that she wants to be a composer. And she arrived with an enormous stack of scores, all printed out perfectly as if they'd been engraved. And I could see that she was smart enough to learn how to do all this on her laptop. And she was writing an orchestra piece in a week. But the pieces all were superficial, and they were too much a product of the technology.

Q: I wonder whether … again drawing a parallel to writing, in writing you have to write something like fifty or a hundred pieces or stories before you write one good one. You have to work through a lot of crap. Maybe this will help them work through their crap faster?

JA: No, I actually don't think so. First of all, we have to admit that it's always been the case that there've only been a handful of really great composers alive at one time. It's probably the same for literature as well. So I think the natural winnowing process is always going to be there.

But I do think … you know, my son is a composer, and he has been astonishingly aware of the dangers of this kind of technology. He went to Stanford, and he can do all these complicated ... he can write program code and things that I can't begin to do. But when he composes he uses a pencil and manuscript paper. He has total control over what he wants to do. He doesn't have to worry about ''oh god, the machine doesn't do that, how do I make it work?"

Q: In addition to technology changing the way you write, it's also definitely changing the business and the economics of the music world. I'm thinking of small record stores. You're very lucky in Berkeley and San Francisco to have Amoeba Records and --

JA: And that's it. My record sales have plummeted, along with almost everyone else I know. It used to be, twenty years ago, even fifteen years ago, when I released a new album it was a big event. In a sense it was the big event of the year for me. And now, my company still is one of the very few companies that takes care and produces these beautiful objects of desire. The Nonesuch CDs, they have beautiful packaging and essays on the music, and pictures. But the major outlets where people could buy these are gone. Tower Records for example.

And so, it's very hard to know when I have a new album out. It's almost impossible to get the word out. So even some of my best friends will be shocked to know that such-and-such a piece of mine has been recorded. Because they just didn't know about it.

Q: That's terrible. So, have you thought about what you could do about that?

JA: Well, I have a homepage. But that's … at best over a year, a few thousand people might pass by there and notice that my recordings are out. I don't know. I think if I were a younger person and more committed to promoting myself, I'd probably find more inventive ways of getting the word out. Now, at my age, I'm just concerned with writing the next piece. I know over time that people will discover these pieces. 

This interview continues tomorrow.
Go back to part 2 of the interview.

Interview with John Adams, part 2 - Cynthia Closkey

This is the second part of my interview with John Adams, the PSO's Conductor of the Year. The first part is here. I'll be posting this interview over several days, in anticipation of two special concerts that he will be conducting with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on January 16 and 17.

In this segment, John talks about blogging and history, not being recognized, and what it's like to sit in the audience when his works are performed. 

Q: In your book [Hallalujah Junction: Composing an American Life], you used a phrase from a book that you had read, "the lexicon of musical invective"?

JA:  (laughs) That's right.

Q: In the blog world, I worry a lot about that -- the personal attack when you would rather have some greater discussion.

JA: No editorial wisdom exerted. It's a unique thing. But if you read the history of this country, in the 19th century for example, what was said in pamphlets -- in addition to newspapers but there was this whole tradition of pamphleteering, both in England and here -- just vicious, vicious things were said.

I was just reading about the elections in the Abolitionist period. This morning there was a review in the New York Times about a new biography of Andrew Jackson, and they make Sarah Palin and "palling around with terrorists" sound pretty … almost friendly. So, you know, the blogosphere has its ancestors in a tradition of unbridled American expression.

Q: But despite the larger context of it, personally … like you said [in your book] you have a rule against looking at blogs about --

JA: I have a rule, which I frequently break, much to my chagrin. Yeah, I mean, one can just simply elect not to pay any attention.

And I have to say, I was curious to know with Doctor Atomic, because it played in a very large hall -- the Metropolitan Opera -- and there were nine performances, three thousand seat hall, so that's a lot of people. And I was curious to know what other people, besides my friends or besides the New York Times or the Washington Post, thought of the opera. And … you know, you get all kinds of responses. Some people are clearly not very educated musically and they're just speaking from the gut -- which is interesting to me.

Of course then, just having to sit in the audience while your music is being performed can be a really challenging experience, if you get seated next to somebody who doesn't know who you are and they're not having a good time. And that frequently happens to me.

Q: I would think that, over time, that would happen less for you.

JA: (laughs)

Q: I mean, not that people will like it more or less, because people are always feeling what they're feeling, but certainly you're recognizable, aren't you?

JA: Well, you know, yes and no. People who are following the world of contemporary music would know who I am and recognize my face, but there are people who go to the Metropolitan Opera who may not be even musically literate at all. They might be in town for an anniversary or something and they bought tickets to the Met, and they don't even know what they're going to see.

I had a couple, a middle-aged couple sitting in front of me Thursday night -- the ninth and final performance of Doctor Atomic. And it was a fabulous performance. Everybody was just really on. And this couple so clearly were not having a good time. The man was sort of looking around and scratching his head and coughing, and his wife kept whispering to him. I was just hoping that they wouldn't come back after intermission. And they didn't.

(laughs)

I remember for the world premiere of On the Transmigration of Souls I had to sit at a mixing board with my engineer Mark Grey, who will be here for my January concert. We had the mixing board actually out in the middle of the audience -- they'd taken five or six seats and designated them for the mixing board. And my engineer Mark looks like a rock and roll engineer. He's got hair down to his behind. And of course there's this big … looks like the cockpit of a 747 with lights and wires and everything.

So I'm sitting next to this woman who comes down and sits in what's obviously her subscription seat, and she was just so put off. And here I am, trying to concentrate on the world premiere of my piece, which is a very, you know, moving and complicated piece for me. And this woman that's been sitting next to me all the thirty minutes of the piece just glaring at me and the sound man.

Q: Like why couldn't you have fixed this before.

JA: Yeah, I mean, she didn't know who I was. And she probably didn't realize what this was for, but it was clearly a major imposition on her evening.

Q: You were destroying her cultural evening. Although, in a rock show, that [the mixing board] is kind of part of the expectation.

JA: Of course. But some of these people in their 60s or 70s are coming to the New York Philharmonic or the Met to get away from that kind of music. And of course I do use technology. I use very subtle sounds around them, and a little bit of amplification for all my operas, and that's very controversial. Some purists get up in arms over it.

SEE ALSO: "A listener's thoughts on John Adams' 'On the Transmigration of Souls'" by Matt Campbell at the PSO Blogs Inside Perspective.

Continue to Part 3 of the Interview.
Go Back to Part 1 of the Interview.

Interview with John Adams, part 1 - Cynthia Closkey

In November, I had the chance to interview John Adams, the PSO's Conductor of the Year. John shared his thoughts on contemporary and classical music, audiences, writing his autobiography, Pittsburgh, the PSO and Heinz Hall, and more.

I'll be posting this interview over several days, in anticipation of two special concerts that John Adams will be conducting with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on January 16 and 17. This is the first part of the interview.

Q: I'm a writer, rather than a musical person, and it seems like you're a musical person who also happens to like literature and writing.

JA: I do, yeah.

Q: In the world of writing, we sometimes talk about having an ideal reader, the person that you're kind of writing for. Maybe not a real person, although sometimes it is a real person. Do you find, for different pieces that you're writing, that you have an ideal listener?

JA: Do you mean different listeners for different pieces?

Q: Or maybe just in general.

JA: I don't think about it too much. But if somebody asked me, "For whom are you writing?" I'd say my friends. And that doesn't mean other musicians necessarily, but the kind of people I would want to go have dinner with, or share a book with or go see a movie with. Probably people who share my political outlook and have similar cultural concerns.

But I've written Hallelujah Junction, and not all my pieces but some of my pieces, for that kind of educated but not necessarily musically specialized people. And I think if you are going to have an impact on culture at large, you need to have somehow that ability to appeal to an audience beyond your specialty. That's why writers like Dickens and Tolstoy, or a filmmaker like Ingmar Bergman are so immensely important -- because, while they had a great, great artistic vision, that vision could be appreciated by a large segment of the community.

I mean, obviously I'm not composing for the proverbial man on the street or the truck driver. I'm assuming that you know Stravinsky and Sibelius and Mahler and Bartok when you hear my music.

Q: You use lots of different kinds of music in your music. And sometimes classical music comes back into popular music, but it doesn't seem as often. So here's what I'm trying to say: Other than "A Fifth of Beethoven," the disco hit from the seventies, or "I'll Never Fall in Love Again," which takes a theme from a symphony, popular music doesn't seem to pull back from classical music.

JA: "Pull back" meaning…?

Q: Borrow back from.

JA: Oh, I see.

Q: Whereas if you think back to Carl Stalling doing Bugs Bunny cartoons, he really was pulling from and making references to…

JA: But you don't hear that any more.

Q: I don't. Do you have thoughts on that?

JA: You know, it would be just pure speculation. One thing is that the really powerful and commanding, original popular music now comes from what we would call minorities, and people who are almost defiantly identified with their culture, whether it's hip hop music or Latino music or rap music. And for a lot of these cultural groups, whether they're urban blacks in America, or immigrant populations, Hispanics, or whatever, they're music is a very, very emphatic expression of their cultural identity. And so, first of all, quite possibly they're absolutely unfamiliar with classical music. And secondly, even if they were, they probably would not want to corrupt their style or their utterance with references.

And you know, I find … I know that Frank Zappa is kind of a cultural god but when I hear little wink-wink references in Zappa's music to Stravinsky or … well, mostly it's Stravinsky that he likes to quote, sort of to show off how clever he is, I find it kind of silly.

But I would say, having said that, that I can hear influences for example of both Steve Reich and Philip Glass in some contemporary pop music, and that shows a certain sophistication.

Q: What are you listening to now?

JA: You know, I'm often asked that question -- "what's on my iPod?" And, you know, when I'm deep into a piece, I usually don't … I'm not an active listener to other music, because when I'm lucky enough to be home working, I spend six to eight hours a day working on my piece. So I tend not to be listening to music at night. I'll read or watch a movie or something.

And then I do a fair amount of conducting, so I'm often learning a new piece. In the past year, I learned by heart the Beethoven Seventh, and the Sibelius Seventh, Strauss Don Juan, Debussy, Stravinsky…. Right now I'm learning for performances next year in London, works by Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky…. So that absorbs… I wish I could give you a more hip answer.

Q: Do you miss it?

JA: Listening to pop music? No, not at all. Occasionally I'll ask my son what he's listening to, although he doesn't listen to much of it anymore either. But occasionally he'll send me some really interesting music. It seems that if you're a musically sophisticated person, you're drawn probably more to the more esoteric indie rock groups that are not famous. He recommended a group called The Books, which I've never heard of. I don't know if you've heard of them. I think they're an English group; they might be American. They're very creative.

But I also really do feel that popular music is absolutely tied to generational consciousness. I mean, it's a way that a generation identifies itself. So it's kind of appropriate in a way that people who are in their twenties identified each other through their popular music, and it's not surprising that somebody my age, 61, would not be tuned into that.

Continue to Part 2 of the Interview.