by Thomas Healy

Lisa Bielawa, composer and vocalist, was born in San Francisco.  She moved to New York after completing her B.A. in Literature at Yale University in New Haven.  In 1992, Ms. Bielawa began touring with the Philip Glass ensemble, and, in 1997, co-founded the MATA festival.

The following interview with Lisa Bielawa took place on 15 May 2009, 1 week before the première of her Concerto for Orchestra In medias res by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in the New England Conservatory of Music’s Jordan Hall on 22 May (See a review of this concert elsewhere in our pages).  That date also marked the end of her 3-year appointment as Composer-in-Residence with BMOP.  Ms. Bielawa was recently named the recipient of the 2009 Rome Prize in Musical Composition, a fellowship that will allow her to spend a year at the American Academy of Rome.

TH:  Could you explain the origins of your Concerto for Orchestra In medias res and its specific relationship to BMOP?

LB:  Well first off let me explain a bit of the background.  My 3-year residency as Composer-in-Residence with BMOP came about from an underwriting grant program funded by the League of Composers and the Meet the Composer series, the joint program of these two being Music Alive.  I worked with Gil Rose originally as a singer, and through this early collaboration we came to know each other’s work and learned to work closely together.  We applied for and received this grant, and after a 3-year dream collaboration, this work came about, a culmination of that partnership.  As Composer-in-Residence I got to know the players personally.  BMOP is an unusual organization because the performers are active new music advocates.  They are also accomplished soloists and leading chamber players who have their own groups outside of BMOP.  It is very rare to have such performers make up an orchestra.   And then there’s Gil who decides who he wants to work with.  He feels very close to new music and he often works with composers both with BMOP and outside it, independently.  Because I recognized right away that it was a rare opportunity to work with such a demographic, I decided to get to know the principal players one at a time by writing solo pieces for them.  This was on top of other compositional projects.  Every other month I would spit out these solo pieces which later came to be a part of a catalogue of Synopsis pieces, 15 in all.  These Synopsis pieces became studies for me that helped me develop material for the larger piece, In medias res.  It was a distinctive process in that this larger piece is made up of previous material that was already familiar to the players.  It was sort of a little gift for them, or like Christmas for them, to recognize their own music in this larger work.  The title itself refers to a process that originates in literature, in epic poetry to be specific.  It’s starting a work or a poem in the midst of the action, e.g., Achilles in the midst of a battle in Homer, and you gradually come to learn the meaning of the scene later.  You experience flashbacks later, and these solo pieces that begin the work are not really the beginning but the end of the story.  The work functions within this literary device.  These flashbacks are not just for the players, but for the audience, too, who are already familiar with these Synopsis pieces.  The more that the audience is with me on my 3-year journey with BMOP, the more it will understand and the more it will hear.  It is truly a unique opportunity that is so much more than just an orchestra piece, but a real friendship with the players.

TH:  How did you reconcile having the parent material derive from a set of solo pieces into a large symphonic work?

LB:  Well I cannot recall any specific process.  In some cases, when I would be searching for material, I would find it in these Synopsis pieces similar to Prokofiev taking material from sketches he made as a teenager for his 3rd Piano Sonata.  I treated these Synopsis pieces as sketches for generating material for the larger piece.  I had 2 years of writing the Synopsis pieces before I began working on In medias res, and Synopses numbers 10 to 15 were written on top of the Concerto for Orchestra.  They were written in a way to develop material for the larger work and the latter Synopsis pieces became more wholly integrated into the concerto, since they were being worked out at the same time as the concerto was.  For example, I would use a specific rhythm or some material from a bar and combine it with the orchestral context.  In one instance, Kate Vincent, a violist with the Firebird Ensemble, had a solo Synopsis piece, and in the concerto it became hugely amplified during a solo part.  In another instance, Bob Schultz’s cadenza towards the end is also from a Synopsis piece, but in this case it is expanded.

TH:  It has been said that much of your symphonic works reflect the qualities and characteristics of chamber music. Does this apply to In medias res, and if so, how?

LB:  I actually do not have much chamber music.  Most of my works do not include more than one player or fewer than fifteen players.  I do not know exactly why I am mentioning that, but I think this comment on my symphonic works stems from a different direction, and that is that my works have to do with people.  I am not a coloristic thinker when I am writing for the orchestra.  I’m writing for people, not instruments.  Thinking of the orchestra as a canvas is much too lonely an approach for me; I am too much a social person.  Traditionally, orchestral music means sitting alone and composing music, which is something I am not temperamentally suited for.  I am more suited to having friends and hanging out the entire time.  It is a quality in which I am constantly thinking about the individual player.  I love listening to Debussy as much as anybody but he is not a useful inspiration for me.  When making a composition, I am considering the gestures of the individual players performing on their instruments, and of the gestures of these players satisfying themselves and their own phrases.  They do not have to pass it on to other players.  If you’re practicing the music at home, you are not going to understand what your specific role is in the whole picture until you get there and start rehearsing.  I am a people person, and I consider the individuals.  Even if there are 75 of them, their part is very coherent on its own.  I am a very active performer and very performer-oriented.

TH: It seems that you are interested in some or most of your compositions to reflect and comment upon the environmental aspects of the acoustical space of the music.  Have you further explored this interest in In medias res?

LB:  In medias res will be performed in Jordan Hall.  It is a very traditional hall for orchestras and produces a terrific acoustical sound.  I am thrilled to hear my music in this hall.  Gil Rose does my music very well and he knows all of the pieces.  It is an amazing thing that all of the composers who work with him receive something unique.  That is that he is very intuitive about new music and very intuitive about each specific composer’s musical voice.  He really is more than a conductor, he is an impresario or even a Svengali.  With me specifically, we got very close to the work and he offered me a challenge.  He said that you always have pieces played outside in which the performers are walking out in the middle.  He said that I am always thinking outside the box and breaking the rules, and really what fun is there in that?  The challenge he issued was for me to write a strait-ahead piece without any tricks and to see what would happen.  Now remember I had the whole set of Synopsis pieces behind this work and I think that I needed a challenge like this.  I remember hearing a Mahler cycle.  Now I love Mahler and even he has some of these tricks in which the performers are playing offstage but when, for example, you see somebody pick up the crash cymbals, he is going to slam them together at the climax.  In other words they are going to do what is expected.  That is something amazing about Mahler: when you listen to it live, they are going to do exactly what you want them to do.  You do not think of an interesting or unexpected color when you listen to Mahler, such as when you hear all the horns playing.  You’re not thinking:  “Wow, man, that’s something unprecedented.”  Instead every instrument does what you expect.  It really was a very fun challenge that came from Gil.

TH:  I am interested in your experience with Philip Glass and his influence on your music; specifically regarding the concept of global harmonic arcs accompanied with more immediate local activity as 2 multi-dimensional entities.  Can you elaborate on this unique concept of harmony in your music, and more specifically in In medias res?

LB:  With orchestral music you have to take elephant steps.  I find that, when I’m writing pieces that have a grand scale, it’s really effective to allow things to unfold harmonically at a pace that matches this grand scale.  It unfolds at a pace that the listener can take in.  It is true of Philip Glass that he has these epic scales in which the harmonies are unfolding.  This is why he is so well suited to opera.  It is very effective and quite exhausting.  Opera composers work at a much quicker pace, and I am fascinated by having the pace of the harmonic activity match the pace of the gestural activity.  In this you have phrases working in tandem with one another but Philip radically separated the two things.  In the actual terms of executing something that doesn’t keep pace with how other events in the piece are happening Philip created two different levels. Of course, there are lots of examples of this; he didn’t actually invent this.  I said before that I liked the idea of a solo player practicing something meaningful, and in having large arcs with individual gestures.  This tension fascinated me the most.  The question of making this work, whether or not these tensions are going to fly, is something I’ve kept myself aware of the whole time; I’m always concerned in satisfying both things.  Say, for example, having the concertmaster play this or that thing for 4 measures while having other events taking minutes to unfold and making these 2 separate things satisfying to me.  Such a harmonic pace can give a lot of grandeur.  I find that starting with such an arc, whether it is rhythmic or melodic or based on the texture of the orchestra and having to fill in the information afterwards is an interesting challenge.  I am doing it every day. It works for me and it can it can also be helpful to other composers.  It doesn’t make me special or Philip special; it’s mostly about the degree of its influence.

TH:  A lot of your works have direct literary connections, and I’ve gathered that it plays a strong role in the aesthetics of your compositions. Does In medias res have a literary connection, and if it does, what does its relationship to the music entail?

LB:  Synopsis is a literary term that means a short rendering of a larger story.  And this is at the core of my concerto.  There are 2 true things: some orchestral composers are more visually oriented.  They are symphonic colorists who draw their inspiration from the visual arts.  It is a long-held practice for artists to have separate media inspire one another.  For myself, I feel very fortunate to be in a vibrant community of artists.  I find myself with many opportunities to work with other artists.  I was a literature major in college.  How I keep myself alive and sane while I am doing all this work is to read.  I need reading like I need breakfast.  The thing that makes my compositional approach work is narrative and narrative concepts.  It makes my brain go.   Several years ago I began writing an orchestra piece.  I was in Nova Scotia, where Philip Glass has a place.  I worked where I could gaze out onto the ocean.  I found myself delaying myself and this piece.  I couldn’t come up with anything, and I find that I never can if I don’t have text to keep me company.  It doesn’t matter where composers find their inspiration.  Some get it from mathematical properties and this doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going outside your piece.  There is sometimes a certain Puritanism in music that doesn’t allow one to draw from outside influences; if there’s a certain external inspiration, then there is something wrong with that.  If that is the case, then it is too bad for me.  I need to read emotionally and that is always going to be the case and it doesn’t seem to be changing.  It is just the way I think about things; it’s where I take my inspiration from.