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Lowell Liebermann, page 3

BD: Why aren’t you there?

LL: [Matter-of-factly] Because I’m here!

BD: [Laughs] If you could, would you want to clone yourself so you could be at all your performances?

LL: Not necessarily. Special performances one always wants to be at. Premieres one would like to be at.

BD: If you could, would you want to clone yourself so that you could go to performances and also could continue to compose?

LL: I’m not that obsessive about what I do that I’m that concerned with it. One can only do so much in one’s lifetime, and you just have to accept the fact that you can’t do everything, after a certain point.

BD: Don’t you want to have a hundred and four symphonies to your credit?

LL: No, no, I don’t. First of all, I don’t think I have a hundred four symphonies in me. It’s funny because certain other composers accuse me of being wildly prolific, which I don’t feel I am.

BD: You feel you’re moving at your own pace?

LL: I feel I’m moving at my rather slow pace. I’m very impatient with myself. I feel as if I waste a lot of time as a composer. I feel, basically, like I’m a very lazy person. Then other people say, “My God, you’re so prolific! You’ve written sixty-one opus numbers at your age!”

BD: It is quite a lot for a little more than a decade.

LL: Well that would be stretching it because I wrote my Opus One when I was about fifteen. So it is a little more than two decades.

BD: Okay. But still, sixty one opus numbers is quite high!

LL: I recognize it’s a respectable amount of music to be written, and I could die today and feel at least I’ve accomplished something.

BD: Are you proud of all of them?

LL: Not equally proud of all of them, maybe, but there are no pieces that I’m ashamed of, because I would have withdrawn them a long time ago.

BD: That’s good that you still like your early works.

LL: Yeah, and that’s an example where I would not want to go back and revise them, even though I recognize that some of them are flawed. I’d rather have my Opus One stand as a piano sonata that I wrote when I was fifteen, than try and go back and rewrite it when I’m really a different person and a different composer, It would just be a hybrid, then, that was neither here nor there. I’d much rather spend my energies writing new pieces than going back and revising.

BD: Is each piece a little progress for you?

LL: I don’t know about this concept of progress in art. I think that’s a big cliché of the twentieth century. [Laughs] In fact, I was having lunch with a writer who was putting forth the idea that it was a Marxist cliché of the twentieth century!

BD: [Laughs] Then I’ve got to revise my thinking!

LL: I think music history has neatened up everything in retrospect to where it now seems that the musical continuum has been one smooth progression. I don’t think that is the case.

BD: I see it in fits and starts.

LL: It’s in fits and starts, and then there are composers who don’t quite fit in, or were considered conservative or even retrogressive in their day. Historians like things tied up in neat boxes, and like to see charts and graphs. I don’t think much of the concept of artistic progress, because I think it’s a sort of fluid evolution. What is the concept of progress — that what’s being done today is better than what was being done in Bach’s era or Beethoven’s era.

BD: Then let me revise the question slightly. Is each piece that you do a little growth for you as a composer?

LL: I would hope. I do recognize the couple of pieces that maybe I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to spend on. So maybe in that respect they’re not as growing, or as thoroughly investigating something as I would want to be.

* * * * *

BD: When you sit down to start a piece, do you know how long it will take you to accomplish the compositional task?

LL: Usually it takes as long as I have to write it. I really only get pieces finished because I have deadlines. If I have a month to write a piece, I’ll write it in a month. If I have a year to write a piece, I’ll think about it for eleven months and then write it in a month. I tend to be very dissatisfied with whatever I’m doing at the moment.

BD: You can’t self-impose an earlier deadline?

LL: Oh, that never works! I can’t fool myself. So if I have an unlimited amount of time, I just keep hacking at the material, not being satisfied, until, you know, forever. The joy of deadlines is that you just have to grip yourself and say, “I’ve got to get this piece finished!” So you sort of just grit your teeth and force yourself ahead.

BD: Are the ideas always there?

LL: It depends. The idea is usually there, but then how it gets worked out can sometimes be the tough part. When I start a new piece, it does take a long time to get the idea and to decide what I want to do with it. Each piece is different. Sometimes it can be three notes, sometimes it’s a theme, sometimes it’s a concept. And you never know; each piece is different. That’s one of the things. I have a great belief in variety in art, not only variety from one work to the next, but also variety within the piece itself. One looks at a lot of modern art, or a lot of artists, or composers, who just do one thing; they have their shtick. They might do solid color paintings, and there’s really no growth or difference between any of the works. So that variety is something I would like to think happens in my music.

BD: You have the variety on your palette to choose. Is your palette set, once you get out of school, or does your palette get bigger with time?

LL: I would hope it’s continuously expanding... or not necessarily expanding, but changing because one changes as a person. Hopefully there’s some relation between one’s growth as a person and the growth of one’s art, not that art should be autobiographical.

BD: We’re kind of dancing around it, so let me hit you with the big question. What is the purpose of music?

LL: [Laughs] Oh, dear! I hate those kinds of questions because it’s very difficult for me to give a sincere answer without sounding very maudlin and sort of sentimental and almost naïve. It also ties in with my belief why so many damaged people become artists, which is that one tries in one’s art to create almost a perfect world, this perfect artificial world. In my own music, I have a firm belief in beauty in the art. I don’t believe the purpose of art is to twist one’s face in the negative aspects of one’s culture or life. For me, art has almost a moral purpose, that it should point the direction to a better way.

BD: It sounds like it’s very optimistic and uplifting.

LL: Yes, it is. I don’t really know what the purpose would be otherwise. That’s not to say that one doesn’t have sad music or depressing operas, but somehow, if it’s a great work, you feel renewed and refreshed, and it somehow points in a better direction. And I would like to think that my music helps to lift one out of the mire that contemporary life is.

BD: Because I’m a very optimistic person, I look for this in music.

LL: I can tell! You look like an optimistic person!

BD: [Laughs] Thank you! I take that as a compliment!

* * * * *

BD: Are you at the point in your career that you want to be at this age?

LL: I don’t think one is ever at the point one wants to be. One always wants more. What I would really like is just to have the security — financial and otherwise — to really accept not only just the commissions I want to do, but the number I want to do each year, and really be in a position to be picky and choosy; to be able to write my music without having the day-to-day worries.

BD: I assume you’re getting toward that.

LL: Oh, yeah. I certainly am.

BD: You’ve written chamber music, you’ve written orchestral works, you’ve written an opera. When you’re working on one piece, do you ever get an idea that you think, “Oh, that would be good, but not in this string quartet, but in a song”?

LL: Yeah, sure. That does happen.

BD: Do you save that idea?

LL: Yeah. I’ve got quite a stack of sketches of just little fragments; sometimes it’s just a little figure of a couple of notes.

BD: Do you refer to those often?

LL: Usually when I’m beginning a new piece I look through those sketches to see if there’s anything I want to use. There usually isn’t, and I usually end up just writing new material. So I have this stack of sketches, and the bottom pages are getting progressively browner as there are always new ones being put on top.

BD: Eventually you’ll come back to them, though?

LL: Eventually, eventually.

BD: Or maybe not?

LL: Or maybe not. [Both laugh]