Tracy Letts on Creative Work

I’ve been surprised by how some artists have reacted to this past year of institutional shutdowns and isolation. Like many of us, I first thought the forced isolation would bring productivity; I would finally read some books that had been collecting dust, learn more music, compose at break neck speed. Instead, I found it near impossible to work on anything remotely creative. In a way, many people in the arts have kept this sort of nihilism under wraps. But today in the New York Times, the playwright and actor Tracy Letts summed up my feelings about the past year (in creative terms) better than almost anyone else has…

NY TIMES: What’s one thing you made this year?

TRACY LETTS: “I’ve made nothing. On four separate occasions, I arranged my schedule with [my wife] Carrie so I could have six uninterrupted hours a day to write. All four times, I emerged from my office after two or three weeks, rattled, defeated, feeling lousy about myself. My wife finally said, “Here’s what you have to do: read books, watch movies, cook dinner and take care of our boy.” That is what I’ve done. And while my family is my focus and my joy, from a creative standpoint, this year for me has been a dust storm. I’m normally involved in a number of creative endeavors, in different forms, but the theater is my lifeblood and I don’t know who I am without it. The plug getting pulled on “The Minutes” was truly devastating for me. I feel like a heel even saying that since so many people in this country and around the world are suffering as a result of this pandemic in ways I can’t even fathom. But it’s the simple truth. I can’t do the computer theater, it’s too depressing for me, and I’ve turned down a couple of on-camera jobs because I am just as scared of this virus as I was a year ago. Creatively, I’m lost. It’s why I’m doing this interview. I’m guessing there are some other artists who identify.”

- New York Times: 7 Questions, 75 Artists, 1 Very Bad Year

Thomas Adès at 50

There always seems to be a single composer that casts a shadow of influence over a particular generation of younger composers. For my teacher’s teachers generation, that might have been a figure like Pierre Boulez or Elliott Carter. For my teachers, that might have been perhaps Luciano Berio or Steve Reich or Jacob Druckman (I certainly hear Druckman in the early works of David Dzubay as well as Augusta Read Thomas). But I would say almost undoubtedly that Thomas Adès has been that figure for some time now for my generation. Whether you are in your early 40s and looked at him as a slightly older wunderkind or in your 20s as an establishment figure of the new music community, his influence has been indisputable. Everyone from Chis Thile of the Punch Brothers to Andrew Norman (a new music “influencer” by his own right) have been under the Adès spell, with his trademark harmonic tricks and rhythmic mutations slipping into their own music. The opening chords of Norman’s Sustain sounds like an Adès harmonic game set into motion. I remember years ago a composer friend telling me about his crippling anxiety in turning 27, the age Adès wrote his “in-all-but-name” monumental first symphony Asyla, and not having written something of even comparable brilliance. As I inch closer to 27 this April, I have resigned that I too will be in that camp.

One reason for this obsession I believe comes from Adès’ use of harmony. However mythologized this may be, there was and is a perception within new music that there was the “bad old days” in the 1950s led by serialists in Uptown Manhattan like Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt as well as Pierre Boulez in France which led to the “good old days” in the late 1960s with Minimalism spearheaded by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley. The choices for young composers were, again probably mythologized but nonetheless felt, European avant-garde or American tonality. Adès, in the eyes of many young composers, found a sort of compromise by using clearly tonal sororities which drift in and out of focus within a complex rhythmic and orchestrational framework. I certainly as a young composer in high school found Adès to be a breath of fresh air; a composer who clearly didn’t reject triads but used them in new and ambiguous ways. I would subject my poor high school friends to his opera The Tempest whenever we drove anywhere; pointing out the astonishing percussion part in which once player performs both a small whip and thundersheet at the same time!

Adès is one of the few composers who truly forces me to be creative. George Benjamin would be another. By this I mean Adès writes exactly what is in his head with very little compromise. There is seemingly very little lost in translation between the creative inner ear and the notated page which is the number one Achilles heel of any composer. Most composers default in some sense to what we have seen before when writing, but Adès will write for screaming high piccolos and oboes in their thinnest register in irrational time signatures (an Adès staple) with small whips and bamboo sticks interrupting the irregular flow in Totentanz. Or writing a mind-numbingly complex series of rhythmic hiccups in the second movement of The Four Quarters while the string quartet plucks hefty chords, a sort of second movement of the Ravel Quartet on speed. This is never for the “new music sake of it” per say, this creativity almost always pays off in performance.

Adès turning 50 feels a bit odd. Even though he gained fame in his teens, he was no child prodigy. “Child prodigy” is a term I would reserve for the glassy haze over the eyes of Alma Deutscher as she performs a Mozartian pastiche. Adès had a mature and unique musical voice from the get-go, much like other Brits: Benjamin Britten, Oliver Knussen, and George Benjamin. This to me is just plain freakish and goes beyond “prodigy.” So for this enfant terrible to be turning 50 makes him more of an elder statesmen (there is of course two ages for a composer; young and elder).

Since the completion of his opera The Exterminating Angel a few years ago, Adès has taken up a sort of neo-classical style. His recent Piano Concerto is actually the third in the genre of solo piano plus ensemble works he has written (the other two being Concerto Conisco and In Seven Days). But as the title would suggest, this “proper” concerto makes a much more clear reference to tradition. The opening, though planned or not, is a jagged rendition of Gershwin’s “I’ve Got Rhythm,” the end concludes with declarative orchestral hits albeit through a hall of mirrors, and the work follows a standard three movement fast-slow-fast formal structure. His recent mammoth ballet Inferno is chock full of romantic references to Lisztian views of the underworld. The work is very much akin to Stravinsky’s Pulcinella with Adès paraphrasing on music by Liszt the way Stravinsky did to Pergolesi. The other two sections which make up the larger ballet Dante have yet to be premiered due to the pandemic, but the other two have little to do with Liszt according to Adès. If anything, Adès’ style is certainly ever changing with each piece, but they never fail to be innovative and exciting.

Heavy Lifting

Dave Jordano: Detroit Nocturne (2016)

As it turns out, ringing in 2021 hasn’t made composing any easier. I’m currently trudging through two big 20+ minute pieces (the longest piece(s) I’ve ever written for those of you counting). Creating a broad, large-scale formal structure that is clear and compressible takes a fair amount of elbow grease and is proving difficult. One of the pieces, a song cycle, is based around a series if texts by Mark Doty and James Wright which looks at what I think of as a kind of quintessential American melancholia. The type of American setting that lives at 2am in the Midwest and is musically occupied by Springsteen and Tom Waits. Late last year, I took the suddenly empty performance / commission calendar that came with the pandemic to focus on a piece that no one asked me to write. Commissioned myself, if you will. I wanted to write a large song cycle that investigated the sort of day to day American life that exists in rural America. Zooming in on a personal life which speaks for larger issues like a post 2008 finical crisis ‘Our Town.’ The final song in the set, Wright’s ‘Beautiful Ohio’, lends some much needed light to what might be a 15 minutes depression fest which precedes it. More to come…

But after a drought of live performances, there are some upcoming premieres and concerts in the news & events page! Students from the Northwestern Saxophone Studio release a filmed performance of my quartet Ain’t Gonna Study War No More on April 24th. Shortly thereafter, saxophonist Derek Granger and percussionist Dan Ingman premiere Deep State, a virtuoso diatribe they commissioned last year.