On August 8th, 2019, Judson Scott and Peter Nelson-King (myself) will be mounting East Coast Meets West, a recital of late 20th-century/early 21st-century works for trumpet and piano, trumpet and voice, and piano solo. The recital features three world premieres by myself, as well as a fourth premiere, A Song for Ab and Pooh by Carson Cooman. Cooman is an extremely productive musician, the composer of more than 1000 pieces and a very active church organist, with a YouTube channel featuring first recordings of many dozens of modern organ compositions. I came across A Song for Ab and Pooh, one of his compositions for trumpet and piano, on his website, offered up for free owing to its short length. An aleatoric composition (meaning that it has major elements left to be determined by the performer(s)), the trumpet is given a solo a piacere, with optional piano accompaniment that has "cells" of material to be treated at the pianist's whim. It's musical content intrigued me, as well as its strange title, and to find out more I reached out to Cooman. He was kind enough to do a correspondence interview, and here is the result of those questions.
Aleatoric music is an occasional practice of yours rather than a constant - what draws you to the format?
"I'm always interested in exploring a wide variety of possible elements in the writing of music. I've written a lot of music, but I always strive to make there be at least something about each piece that is different from things I've written before. I have no interest in writing the same piece over and over again. And here in the early 21st century, we are at a time in history with an amazing panoply of techniques and elements that can be brought to bear and combined in one's own ways in compositions. For the realization of certain musical ideas and concepts, aleatoric elements are one tool to draw upon. I love some of the unexpected rhythmic coordination aspects that can only be achieved with such kinds of notation. And I have written pieces (like Lutosławski made brilliantly "mainstream") that integrate aleatoric and strictly notated elements.
Music that has aleatoric, open form, or improvisational elements has always felt like a normal possibility to me perhaps because my instrument as a performer is the organ, which is the only Western classical instrument that has a completely mainstream, and entirely unbroken, tradition of improvisation. For all other instruments, it's become a specialized or abnormal thing. One can get a typical conservatory training in many instruments without ever improvising anything."
Who are Ab and Pooh, and is that who the piece was written for in terms of performance?
"The "Ab and Pooh" of the title are small stuffed animals (an eagle and bear) that have been with me for a long time; in Pooh's case, literally since the day of my birth. They've figured in "family lore" and our imaginations since childhood, and my brother (to whom the piece is dedicated) still to this day draws calendars that feature illustrations of these two characters doing improbable things; we give these to family members at Christmas."
The disconnection between the trumpet and piano parts is intriguing. Was the trumpet part written by itself first, or did you conceive of them at the same time?
"I wrote them together, though the trumpet line is notated in detail and the piano part is just a set of elements for the pianist to use. I wrote them out originally under each other on the paper, and as I was going along it seemed that the piano ideas wanted to remain "elements," rather than being made into a fixed, strict, rhythmic accompaniment."
How do you feel about trumpet and piano as a medium?
"My brother was a trumpet player, and I was accompanying him on the piano since the first week he took lessons. I wrote a lot of pieces for him, beginning with something for his first few months of study that used less than an octave of range. As he grew to be an advanced player and attend conservatory for college, so did the difficulty of the pieces I wrote for him. We gave many public performances together during the years that he was actively playing and spent countless hours playing privately. So the medium seems completely normal to me, and I know well its standard repertoire (as well as plenty of obscure things). We also did a lot of trumpet/organ music, which is of course also an effective genre."
You're an extremely prolific composer, with a personally-catalogued oeuvre totalling more than a thousand pieces, and you aren't even 40. Was this a wise move?
"I think the only way it would be unwise is if I had an expectation that a performer or listener needed to engage with my entire output (or even a large portion of it.) I'm happy for people to engage with it in whatever way they want and to whatever extent they want. If they find one or two pieces that suit them, that's great. If they want to (as some have) delve into an extremely large number of them, that's fine too.
The notion that there is anything strange about writing a large number of pieces is, in my opinion, a very unfortunate "post-Romantic" inheritance that we are still stuck with today. In the pre-Romantic era, there was nothing at all unusual about somebody composing a large number of pieces.
I think each composer has a sort of musical metabolism and a speed of working that forms very early and is extremely unlikely to change. Some people write a lot of pieces, some people write very few. Some people write those pieces very quickly, other slowly. Some work quickly and then revise, others agonize over each measure along the way, etc.
The most cursory examination of music history shows there's no correlation between quality and either the number of pieces somebody writes or the time that they take to write any given piece. There are prolific composers who have written tons of excellent pieces, and there are composers who have written few works and none of them are very good. And vice versa. I remember the late Harold Shapero telling me that as a student he decided to go study with Paul Hindemith because "Hindemith was a fast, prolific composer, and I wanted to be really fast too." But in the course of that study Shapero realized that he'd always be a very slow composer. Their relative speeds were baked into both him and Hindemith from the start, and it wasn't something he was going to learn to change in lessons. And both Shapero and Hindemith wrote very high quality music.
Tangentially: there's also not necessarily a correlation between being a prolific composer (having a large catalog of compositions) and writing those pieces quickly. While this is certainly true in some cases, it's not necessarily the case. Vincent Persichetti said that people always commented on his being prolific and assumed that he must write quickly, but he always insisted that he wasn't actually that fast of a composer at all. He just wrote constantly. He taught at Juilliard for decades but lived his whole life in his native Philadelphia. For driving himself back and forth to New York from Philadelphia, he devised a kind of desk that he could put over the steering wheel of the car so that he could keep composing while driving. (It's amazing he died of lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking rather than a car accident.)"
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East Coast Meets West is presented as part of the Wayward Music Series. Another interview is coming, and I'll see you then...
~PNK
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