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Easley Blackwood, page 2

BD: Well, then let me ask the big philosophical question - what's the purpose of music?

EB: I think the overall purpose of music is to entertain and please.

BD: Nothing more, nothing less?

EB: Nothing more, nothing less. It provides high class entertainment to a relatively small audience of people who are tuned into it.

BD: What about the rest of the people who don't fall into the relatively small class of people who are tuned in?

EB: Well, they don't get it.

BD: Should they not be helped to get it?

EB: I don't think that there is much that you can do in that regard. I know very, very few converts. Most of the music lovers I know liked it immediately. They may have heard absolutely nothing until they were in their middle teens. I've run into a number of undergraduates at the University of Chicago over the years who became music lovers all of a sudden in one fell swoop at age 16 or 17. They heard a Mahler symphony or a Verdi opera. Usually it's big orchestral pieces that catch the folks in their teens.

BD: Perhaps a Tchaikovsky ‘1812 Overture' at the end of a 4th of July concert?

EB: More likely the 5th Symphony, or the march in the 6th Symphony, or a piece like Respighi's Feste Romani, or a Beethoven 7th. Usually, it's a big splashy exciting piece, and they go on from there and work into the subtleties and get into the less bombastic things. They get into Brahms and Beethoven and Mozart. And then they find their way into chamber music.

BD: Well, then, what about the rest of the people? Should we try to get to them, or just to hell with them?

EB: Well, I can't say to hell with them. There's always the possibility that someone will have a sudden change in taste and suddenly hear some meaning in a work that hadn't been heard before. I know full well at this point, my ears and my taste are not like they were when I was a kid.

BD: Not better or worse, just different?

EB: It's different. In some ways I can trace it. I started piano when I was 4 years old and had perfect pitch immediately. I remember thinking all through my early teens that since I was able to recognize every note as it went by, that I must be hearing everything. I remember one day in Boulanger's class, this must have been about 1955 or 1956, she stopped a student at one point and said, "What key are you in?" The student was perplexed and couldn't be sure. And she said, "What kind of a chord are you playing right here? Just what is that succession of chords that you just played?" The student replied, "Well, I just played a German VI followed by a I, VI, IV." She said, "You see, you do know what key you're in." Then I thought, hey, that's interesting. That fellow identified what key he was in not by knowing all the notes he heard, but by a chord progression. I suddenly realized, wait a minute, I'm hearing all the notes, but I'm not hearing the chord progressions.

BD: So a real musician must come from to it from both angles at once?

EB: It certainly is helpful. But after teaching harmony for 35 years, I can hear the chord progressions. The other night, just for fun, I switched on the radio and heard the slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony of Mozart. I hadn't thought about the piece for awhile, but I found that as I listened to it, I could identify every chord as it went by. I could hear the piece go I, V of ii, V of v, V, V of iv, perfectly clear knowing what it was. At an earlier time I would've been able to figure it out. But as it was, it went by and I heard it. Now perhaps, having this ability at this point has kind of changed my perspective on atonal music.

BD: Well, this of course then allows you to look at the structure of music.

EB: You can see the structure. You can see the way the form is interrelated with the modulations and the key changes, and where the modulations are immediately conclusive, whether they're ambiguous and then corroborated, whether they're ambiguous, not corroborated and then departed from right away, whether the new tonic is actually played in a strong beat or not, or how long it's delayed. And it seems to me that there are just many, many more subtleties here than you find in the kind of prosaic gestures that are essentially associated with non-tonal music which I was always trying to get around in my own atonal music.

BD: You were always trying to impose a good structure on something?

EB: I was trying to impose a good structure and a sense of harmonic motion plus changing modality or, in some cases, changing rhythmic modality.

BD: But you don't disown any of those pieces that you wrote?

EB: Oh no. Well, some of them are no good, I'll frankly admit that. Some of them are miscalculations too, as far as sonorities are concerned. What sounds like a grand dissonant agrigate in the piano is a shrieking discord if it's played with a brass section over a clattering of percussion instruments.

BD: But you obviously thought it was right when you were writing it.

EB: Well, in some cases there was a true miscalculation about the sonority involved. I was perhaps infatuated with how much fun it was simply to sit and put the piece together from component parts without being sufficiently aware of what the overall sound was. That, too, is advanced with the years. I can, at long last, look at an orchestra score, an unfamiliar piece, and hear it in my mind's ear – not simply as an abstraction.

BD: You hear the colors and everything?

EB: I actually hear the colors. I hear how it's spread out across the stage. I hear the echo in the hall. Right now, if I want to, I can hear the sound of Yankee Doodle being played by an oboe accompanied by a harp on the stage at Orchestra Hall with the hall empty or filled... or any hall that I'm really familiar with.

BD: Do you take this into account, then, if you're writing a piece for the Chicago Symphony at Orchestra Hall?

EB: Yes. Definitely.

BD: Does that then preclude a performance by the Cleveland Orchestra in Severance Hall?

EB: No, it doesn't preclude it. But if I were going to write a piece for the Cleveland Orchestra, I would want to hear a number of Cleveland Orchestra concerts in Severance Hall. Better yet, rehearsals. You learn even more from rehearsals.

BD: Because the works are torn apart and you can hear bits and pieces of them?

EB: Yeah. And you can hear how it goes together.

BD: So, in other words, you would really not want to write just an orchestral piece.

EB: Well, I could. But if I wrote an orchestral piece at this point, I'd hear Orchestra Hall.

BD: So it makes a significant difference, then, the orchestra and the hall?

EB: Oh yes it does. No question about it.

BD: And then that comes out as different notes and different textures in your piece?

EB: It comes out in different textures and different balances. It will also influence the conductor and what tempo to take. You can't fine tune the conductor!

BD: Would you like to?

EB: No. It does not pay. You give the score to the conductor and he then has to frame an interpretation and project his interpretation to the orchestra which then executes his interpretation of your work.

BD: How much leeway do you build into the score?

EB: Lots.

BD: So there are many right ways of playing a certain piece?

EB: Yes, there are. Composers sometimes say, "Play only what I have written. Exactly that. No more. No less." I think that they are wrong. The composer can't control the interpretation of his work.

BD: Are they wrong or just short-sighted?

EB: Both. And I am aware that Stravinsky said that, and he changed his mind in later years, too.

BD: Well, aside from what we've been talking about, how much changing of mind has there been in Easley Blackwood as you approach your 60th birthday?

EB: Lots and lots and lots. My taste has changed over the years and my interests have changed. I've particularly become fascinated in the evolution of modernism from say, 1910 to about 1930, and I've recently gotten acquainted with a large number of obscure works in that period. It's partly because of this newfound ability to read a score, and I have found some absolutely stunning pieces.

BD: Such as the Casella you've recorded?

EB: Those are some of them. The Casella ‘5 pieces for String Quartet' are better than the Stravinsky 3 Pieces for String Quartet – more intricate, more obscure of course. I've never heard them. Prokofiev's ballet, "Le Pas d'acier" is an absolutely complete knockout. It's one of these industrial ballets. At one point, the dancers are actually prancing around on the half completed building with cranes lifting girders in place. The factory scene is interesting too. There's another one where the dancers are prancing around the white hot ingots on the floor of the steel mill with a blast furnace in the background. The action is very clear there. Now, if you look at that piece and then look at his Second Symphony, a lot comes to life with the Second Symphony which looks like extracted bits from the ballet. There is a fantastic mechanistic ballet by Carlos Chavez called "El Caballos de Vapor." It's a completely obscure piece. It uses very very interesting polyrhythmic technics for orchestra too. It would take a very expert orchestra to play it.

BD: Now coming back to your music, if someone decided to use this Fifth Symphony as the basis of a ballet...

EB: Fine. I go along with it.

BD: Even if they were making some kind of political statement upon it?

EB: Perfectly good. No problem. An old friend of mine with whom I've kept contact with for a long time - a nuclear scientist and a good amateur musician - just happened, by coincidence, to be in town during one of the performances the CSO gave of #5. At a little dinner party afterwards, he said, "You've been listening to a lot of ballets, haven't you?"

BD: Was he right?

EB: He certainly was. He can pick up a subtlety like that. Now, another old friend some years ago listened to one of my very early atonal polyrhythmic pieces – a piece for flute and harpsichord. He was not a knowledgeable musician, but he had a large record collection and he really enjoyed it. He listened to the piece and after it was over, he said, "You know, I can't escape the impression that you choose every note in that piece in such a way to produce the maximum possible surprise." And I thought to myself for a moment, "Uh-oh... He's right! That is exactly the process I use." I never wrote another piece like that again. If someone can spot that just listening to it, then it's too obvious.

BD: You don't want to be obvious?

EB: I don't want to be obvious. I want subtleties to be there.

BD: Do you want to give obvious pleasure?

EB: Yes, I do, but I want there to be subtleties above and beyond that. If it gives obvious pleasure and there are no subtleties, you've got a piece like Orff's "Carmina Burana."

BD: That one just hits you in the gut.

EB: It hits you in the gut and you listen to it 5 times and that's the end.

BD: And yet, some people listen to it 500 times.

EB: I remember when I first heard it. I was absolutely swept off my feet. This must have been about 1958. I listened to it immediately again and then listened to it every day for four days and then that was the end of it. Never heard it again. Never wanted to hear it again.

BD: That was 35 years ago. Would you want to hear it again now?

EB: Oh sure. But it lost my attention at that time. There are no subtleties in it.

BD: I wish you had heard it last night so that you could say if there were some things that you missed, or any change in your own idea that has made you look at it differently.

EB: That's entirely possible. That could happen. But take a piece like the Beethoven Opus 59 #1 Quartet. That one, I find, sounds wonderful when you first hear it. Actually I admire #3 more. That one sounds grand when you first hear it, but it's even better the second or third time, and when you get to know it really well, you find out that there are some really extraordinary subtleties in it.