BD: Your full-time job is teaching and administering at DePaul. Do you get enough time to compose your own works?
GF: If I’m careful and make sure that I guard my time jealously, yes I do. I have the summer available and the periods between quarters. In
addition to that, I make sure that my administrative work and teaching is taken care of, so that I can have long stretches. For example,
I will try to have whole days during the week when I can devote myself to my compositional efforts.
BD: If you know that you’re going to be off next Thursday, do you start to get the ideas moving in your head on Monday and Tuesday?
GF: During the summer I try to do the hard stuff that’s really going to require sustained effort, so that I can do more mechanical things during the
quarter — things that I can come back to more easily when my efforts are interrupted frequently.
BD: Instrumentation and copying?
GF: Yes, things like that, and it seems to work reasonably well. I will plan on getting this much done by a certain time, so that I can devote
myself to the next thing when I have a sustained period.
BD: Do you know before you start — or at the beginning of the process — about how long it will take to get the composition finished?
GF: I guess I have to say yes, I have a pretty good idea about that, and that has come about, often times, in surprising ways. For example, if I
have to have a piece done by a certain time, I keep saying, “Well, I’ve got to get on with this piece. I’ve got to do it,” but I really
don’t because back in my mind I know that I’m going to have time if I really push at the end. So far I have not really disappointed my
people. I might disappoint somebody next year, but so far it’s been all right! [Both laugh]
BD: When you start a piece, do you know how long the performance will take?
GF: No, but generally what comes out requires a longer amount of time than I anticipated or thought of at the very beginning. The piece is
longer; it gets longer than my original ideas might have suggested it could be.
BD: Do you then go back and tighten it up after you’ve heard it the first time?
GF: No. I’ve realized that my initial impulses did not include a lot of exploration that I got into in the process of doing the piece. If
I am required to do a piece that lasts no longer than X number of minutes, I can do that.
BD: Then if you get an idea that you know is going to take too long, do you put it aside for another piece?
GF: Yes, I can do that, too. Frequently that happens.
BD: Are all of your pieces on commission, or are there things that just have to come out of you?
GF: It’s both. It’s both. If there is no particular commission at any given time and I’m full of ideas, I’ll start working on
something. That’s not a problem. I have pieces mentally stacked up for a long time ahead. Sometimes I can’t wait to get
done with commissioned pieces to get on with other ideas that I find are exciting and interesting that occurred to me, but nobody’s asked me
to write that particular piece and I want to do it anyway.
BD: When you’re working on a piece and you go over it to get it right, how do you know when it’s done?
GF: I generally will have a pretty good idea long before I’ve actually made my first complete sketch — or draft — what’s going to
happen in that piece. That is, I know the overall shape of it. Frequently the piece will come as a single, large shape.
BD: It comes into your mind as a bang?
GF: Yes. It can happen that way. Sometimes it develops, but the shape occurs well before I’ve done a lot of details. I
might have some details of things that I think are going to be at the beginning, that may or may not end up being there at the
beginning. I can do that sort of thing, but I have an idea not necessarily how long, but what the shape of that piece is, what the
profile or the biography of that piece is, well before I’ve finished my first complete draft of any kind. I’m not saying that I know how
long it’s going to be, necessarily, but I have a general idea that it’s going to be long-ish or short-ish, whatever it is. So when I work
it out, I have a pretty good idea of how it’s supposed to go in terms of an ending and everything else. Sometimes if I hear a
performance of it, there are some things that didn’t work quite right, so I’m happy to go back and correct that or fix it up, make it a little
more elegant or whatever. But those are little patchings here and there. They are not major issues. Sometimes some major
thing happens. Certainly one of the most interesting experiences that I had was with a piece called American
Rest. Its first version was something like twenty-two to twenty-four minutes, and I didn’t like it. It didn’t do what I
wanted it to do, for some reason, so I revised it and developed it in various ways, and it turned out to be sixty-five minutes.
BD: My goodness, three times as long!
GF: Right. That’s the most drastic thing that’s ever happened. That doesn’t happen often, but that was an interesting
case. The piece was rewritten, in effect. I scrapped the old one, took things out of it that I liked, and wrote another piece.
BD: So what happens when someone finds the old copy in your wastebasket and says, “Oh, I want to play this! It’s a great piece!”?
GF: Well, they’re certainly welcome to do that! [Both laugh] I do have one pencil copy of that, I think, someplace.
* * * * *
BD: Are your scores fairly clean, or are they littered with lots of directions for the performers?
GF: I would say they’re about in the middle. Not lots of instructions. I imagine that a piece with lots of instructions would be some work by
Ligeti, for example. I am nowhere near that. Mine are somewhere in the middle.
BD: Do you expect some degree of interpretation on the part of the performer?
GF: Yes, especially the piano pieces. Sure. Ideally what I would like to have any performer who tackles them do is really learn the
pieces very well, and then work with all of that in a rubato-like manner. I want the right notes, but to make the rhythm and the
flow of it, that’s how that person wishes to interpret it.
BD: Then, of course, the obvious question — how far is too far?
GF: That’s hard to tell! That’s really hard to tell. There probably is no standard. We have gotten used to feeling that it’s
possible to play established pieces too fast, but we’ve heard them a million times and people generally come to a certain range and fall within that
range. If you’re outside of that range, it’s too much. Easley Blackwood, for example, has said that anything that is ten
percent more or less of whatever he asks for is going to be a distortion that is undesirable. I can’t pin it down like that. It might be
the case, but I can’t really pin that down.
BD: Well, have you basically been pleased with the performances you’ve heard of your works over the years?
GF: [Thinks for a moment] I guess I would have to say that maybe about half of the time I’m pleased. It’s difficult to say.
I haven’t heard a lot of performances of my piano music. A pianist in town, Stuart Leitch, is doing a lot, and his performances are very good
— some of the best I’ve heard of my stuff.
BD: Do you play your own pieces?
GF: I have my own performance, I guess, which I use as some kind of standard — however inadequate that standard is.
BD: You are not the ideal performer of your own works?
GF: Not necessarily. I have a poetic grasp of how those works are supposed to go, but I don’t take as much time to practice them as
I really ought to. Under ideal conditions, I would spend many hours a day for some extended period of time to get those pieces down to
perfection. A professional pianist, somebody who does that sort of thing and who specializes in contemporary music, would be, perhaps,
somebody who would do a much better job on my own pieces than I would. I would probably have to do some coaching as to the poetics of it.
BD: Is there such a thing as a perfect performance?
GF: It is perhaps possible that there are performances that you can’t imagine how they could be better.
BD: Are there times when you sit down to play one of your pieces that you, the performer, has a big fight with you, the composer?
GF: In the case of the piano pieces, I would say no. If there is something that I have done wrong as a composer and I realize that as a performer,
I’ll just change it. So there’s no conflict! [Both laugh]