A Conversation with Professor Cliff Eisen
Mike Ragogna: Professor Eisen, in the new Mozart 225 box set that celebrates his 225th anniversary, your narratives on the iconic composer sometimes contradict the romanticized version we’re often taught about as school children. I think the movie Amadeus was the first approach at presenting a competing image of Mozart, but your book portrays yet another variation of him. What do you feel are some of the more important and perhaps controversial facts everyone should know about the composer?
Prof. Cliff Eisen: I think the most striking thing is that, as far as I can tell, Mozart was not a neglected, underrated composer, more or less abandoned by the Viennese musical public, someone who, disengaged from the world around him, retreated into his own private musical world. On the contrary, his own letters and other contemporaneous writings about him show that he was fully engaged with everyday life, that he achieved remarkable success in his 10 years in Vienna – don’t forget, he was the second most-commissioned opera composer during that decade, and he obtained postings both at the court and at St. Stephen’s cathedral – and that there absolutely no reason to think his domestic life was all that much different from anyone else’s: he was happily married, had two children and a wide circle of friends and acquaintances from all classes of Viennese society. The important point, however, is that we understand he lived a full and rewarding life because that affects the way we hear his music. The traditional view of Mozart as disengaged reduces his music to something technically and expressively perfect, with little inner engagement on his part or on ours: like Mozart, we hear the music as disengaged from our selves, by and large. But if Mozart was in fact vitally committed to his music and to his life more generally, then we can listen to and experience his works as profoundly human. He wasn’t a kind of conduit for some higher musical divinity but an individual, like us, who was supremely capable of captivating and moving his audiences through his music.
MR: Considering the era and its culture, what do you think made his works resonate at the time and why, to this day, is his music so beloved?
PCE: I think it was, and is, the idea that the music really is divinely human, or humanly divine. It’s worth remembering that even during Mozart’s lifetime, most (not all, but most) writers considered his music “beautiful”. Just as important, perhaps even more important, writers beginning in the early 19th century described his music as “Romantic.” That’s to say, the Romantic ideal of self-expression was something the Romantics recognized and appreciated in his works. The late eighteenth-century had no idea of “Classical” as we do now: “classical” only meant exemplary, not a style and not an historical period. But the Romantics were self-consciously “Romantic” and they universally recognized Mozart as the first “Romantic” composer. So as I tried to say above, it was—and I believe is—the intensely human aspect of Mozart’s music that made, and make, his music resonate.
MR: Over the years, as you’ve researched his music and personal story, did anything especially surprise you or possibly shock you? Did you unearth material that has revised and now contributes to the Mozart biography?
PCE: I don’t think I was shocked by any one document or bit of evidence so much as I was pleasantly surprised by the accumulation of bits of information that add up to a completely different picture of Mozart. This included a careful reading of the family letters, with their frequent emphasis on both everyday life and with intellectual and cultural currents of the time, and a revised reading of the contemporaneous documents concerning him. At the same time, I began to think about the music in different ways. I thought, if the biography isn’t what we think it is, then is there another way we should listen to the music? That seemed to me to make sense: if you change the “author”, so to speak, then don’t you also change the works? I now hear Mozart as very much concerned not only with expression but also with sound for its own sake. When audiences heard the magnificently scored first chord of the overture to The Magic Flute, I’ll bet at least a few of them said to themselves that they’d never heard a sound like that before. I was gratified, too, to find an early obituary published in London within a few weeks of his death in December 1791. The obituary describes him as probably the greatest composer who ever lived. This pretty neatly sums up what I found unsatisfactory about the traditional biographical narrative and all its implications for how we think about and listen to Mozart.
MR: Musically, what mechanically and creatively was he doing differently from his contemporaries?
PCE: I think perhaps it is the range of Mozart’s musical imagination, his delicate ear for sounds, and his ability to juxtapose stability and instability to expressive ends, and in the most sophisticated ways, considerably more sophisticated than any of his contemporaries except Haydn. Here’s an example, a bit technical but hopefully revealing. In the last movement of the concerto K. 456 [number 18], the central section modulates to the key of B minor, which is about as far as you can get, tonally, from the movement’s main key, B-flat major. Mozart manages this distant modulation in only six chords, so smoothly that you’re barely aware of what’s happening until, all at once, you find yourself in an entirely different expressive universe, not just tonally distant from where the movement started, but affectively too. At that point, as if to underline what’s happening, Mozart splits the ensemble into its three components—winds, strings, piano—and each plays in a different meter. Eventually he makes his way back to where he started but the important thing is that unique combination of both moment and journey, the juxtaposition of stability with instability, and the range of expression. This is only one moment. Mozart’s music is full of such moments.
MR: This box set contains a lost song, here referred to as “K477a,” that is said to have been written as a friendly competition with Antonio Salieri. What are your thoughts about that song, the truth about and behind their “competition,” and the affect that might have had on Amadeus’ works?
PCE: It’s good to have some idea, finally, what this work is like, not least because it’s been freighted with some biographical implications about Mozart’s relationship with Salieri, suggesting it was more amicable than is generally supposed. The piece itself was probably produced quickly and it’s a slight, if nevertheless significant, work. But I’m not convinced it says anything about Mozart and Salieri. We simply don’t know how the work was put together, whether Mozart and Salieri ever met to discuss it, or whether the publisher merely contacted the composers with a text and asked them to write different sections, without any co-ordination between the two. It is important, though, because it’s a rare example of an aspect of Viennese musical culture that’s not much explored, a topical work published to capitalize on – for lack of a better word – fandom.
MR: It’s been said that if the classic composers knew their works were being performed as they literally appeared on staff paper or manuscripts, they would be horrified. Did Mozart have a sense of legacy and do you think he would want orchestras, etc., to interpret his music more or less liberally than his original notations?
PCE: The whole idea of legacy is a fascinating one. I think it’s important to remember that eighteenth-century musical culture was largely based on the idea that what’s old isn’t played any more. All music was modern music. Concerts in Vienna, for example, did not include works by Handel and Bach—even if those might have been played privately, but even then not very much, and not very many pieces. So Mozart’s “historical” expectations were limited. At best he might have expected a few really excellent earlier works to retain their currency. Of course that means a piece from the early 1770s might still be performable in the 1780s but not in the 1790s. So I found it remarkable to read in a letter his father Leopold wrote to him in 1778, when Mozart was in Paris, that Wolfgang ought to look to his spiritual and professional welfare: the choice, as Leopold saw it, was between a miserable, unsuccessful life and the production of a body of works that people still listen to in a hundred years. A hundred years! I don’t know what musician, at the time, might have had that view of posterity and the musical future. I suppose it’s a sign of Leopold’s estimation of the quality of his son’s work but under any circumstances it’s a remarkable—and prescient—statement. The question of textual fidelity is a thorny one. Suffice it to say for the moment that Mozart probably expected a certain fidelity to his texts, understandably since he was so careful and detailed in writing them down. But at the same time, given performance conventions of the time, such as improvised ornamentation, he also probably expected there to be differences among performances depending on how musicians read his texts and what they thought his notation meant. He was certainly aware of different performing conventions in north Germany, France, Italy and England. I’d like to think that for Mozart, expressiveness was more important than literalness.
MR: The box contains about 5 hours of newly recorded material including music recorded on Mozart’s actual instruments. How did the latter affect you once you heard it? Were there any new assumptions one could make after hearing Mozart’s compositions recorded with his instruments, perhaps their limitations or different kinds of resonances that might have affected his creativity?
PCE: I’m a big fan of period instrument performances because I like the sounds they make, more individualized than modern instruments that are often meant—unlike period instruments—to blend homogeneously. I can hear the marvelous inner voices much better on period instruments and that’s important because Mozart invests his inner parts with real expressive significance. At the same time, period instruments sound different in different registers or when, for example, a note on the horn has to be hand-stopped. Mozart was keenly aware of what his instruments were capable of and how they sounded, and he used their individualized characteristics to make his musical points: a note here or there rings out through the texture of the whole, a slur or dynamic gives a particular voice a heightened degree of presence and expression, and the combination of different instruments makes his ensembles almost infinitely variable in the kinds of textures they can produce. And all this in the service of expression.
MR: There are hundreds of conductors and performers of Mozart’s works. Which do you feel captured his original intentions or spirit best?
PCE: Several years ago, when I was more single-minded about performing Mozart on period instruments than I am now—what I just said above notwithstanding—I was asked to write the notes for a performance by Colin Davis of the “Jupiter” symphony, on traditional instruments. I wasn’t looking forward to it and at the rehearsal, I thought the first movement lacked something. But the slow movement! That was beautiful. So it was clear that it isn’t just a question of period instruments, but of performance per se. And if it was this particular Colin Davis performance that moved me, it seemed just as clear that it’s not really about Mozart’s “intentions” though it is absolutely about his “spirit”. Davis was always a great Mozart conductor and I’ve always been very fond of some of George Szell’s performances too. Among period instrument performers, there are quite a few I think are really worthwhile, including John Eliot Gardiner and Robert Levin. Bob Levin is really one of the very best: his playing is always both thoughtful and expressive and his attention to detail is, I think, unprecedented.
MR: What do you feel are his most “important” compositions?
PCE: Our views have changed about that. In his own day, one of the pieces that made his reputation across German-speaking Europe was The Abduction from the Seraglio. And in the years just after his death, when his wife gave Mozart concerts in various cities through Germany, one of the mainstays of her repertory was arias from La clemenza di Tito. These aren’t the pieces that we now think of as his most “important” so clearly that’s something that’s changed about us, not the music. If I had to isolate some pieces as particularly important, though, I might choose Idomeneo, because that’s a piece that represents a logical end-point to one period in Mozart’s development – but an end-point only in the sense that Mozart saw what he could do, felt he’d reached a certain kind of limit but could then use that point of “arrival” to move forward—and I’d also choose The Magic Flute, for pretty much the same reason but ten years later. The kinds of things that happen in The Magic Flute are also typical of his later chamber music, another repertory I’d single out. And there’s no question that the Viennese piano concertos and symphonies are high points that had a profound influence on later composers.
MR: Through your research of the music and the man, were there any hints at how his music would have evolved further had he lived longer?
PCE: I’m not sure we can say how his music would have evolved, but I think we can say with certainty that it would have been different in ways we can’t imagine. Thinking about Mozart’s musical development, it seems pretty clear that the early 1770s works, works like the Sinfonia Concertante K. 364 and Idomeneo, the great Viennese works of the mid-1780s and the later music, especially from 1790 and 1791, are all so radically different from each other that I can only think that here is an artist constantly re-evaluating his compositional and expressive goals, reflecting back on what he’s done and projecting forward to what he wants to say or express. If we didn’t already know that all of this music was by Mozart, would we confidently say it must all be by the same composer? I’m not sure we would. But that’s the beauty of Mozart, that almost everything he does is new and different, however subtle the differences between successive works might be. So I can’t say exactly what he might have done had he lived longer, but I am sure it would have been different from what he’d already done.
MR: How has Mozart’s music affected you and your life? Are you familiar with all of his works and which are your personal favorites?
PCE: It’s pretty fair to say that Mozart has been the main focus of my academic work for about thirty years now – and not out of any sort of obligation but simply because I find his music, as well as the biographical and historiographical aspects of Mozart, endlessly compelling. I have a special affection for the C minor Serenade for Winds, K. 388, because this was the first piece by Mozart that really grabbed me: I was 15 at the time and I thought it was the most moving work I’d ever heard. I can’t say I’ve heard every piece Mozart wrote, though I’ve at least looked at all of them. It’s hard to pick out favorites but I’d certainly mention the Requiem, Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, the late string quartets and quintets, several of the piano concertos—especially K. 491, number 24, and K. 488, number 23, which has a spectacularly beautiful and moving slow movement—and the big E-flat symphony K. 543. It’s not an easy question to answer! If I were really to name all my favorites, the list would be somewhere between 150 and 200 works long.
MR: I ask everyone this question for the benefit of students, etc. What advice do you have for new artists?
PCE: My chief advice would be, think for yourself. Often, in my teaching, I see students who feel they have to do exactly what their teachers suggest, without exercising their own critical imaginations. Yet making music, and listening to music as well, ought to be active and engaging, not passive. What’s important, I think, is that both performers and listeners forge their own personal relationships with a work, or a composer, and to try to communicate that, as performers, or to try to understand the depth and beauty of our personal visions as listeners.
MR: And I understand this is an odd approach but what do you think Mozart’s advice might have been or what direction or wisdom has his legacy suggested to new artists?
PCE: That’s a tough question. The historical evidence is contradictory: one the one hand Mozart sometimes complains in his letters that performers don’t play what’s in the score so I can imagine him being quite strict in this respect; on the other hand, it’s clear he thought that expressive performance trumped everything else. Considering that only a part of a “piece” is in the score, and that Mozart himself changed his interpretations from performance to performance, I’d like to think that what he’d like to hear in modern performances – what his legacy is with respect to performance generally – is that rare combination of individuality and expressivity. This doesn’t mean doing things the way he did, and I don’t think he would have expected that. A thoughtful musician like Mozart was perfectly aware that taste – and for that word we can also read “expression” – is always changing. “Taste” is the central idea behind much eighteenth-century music, even if it’s never clearly defined. But the fact that it isn’t clearly defined, at least in eighteenth-century terms, is probably less important than the idea of “taste”, whatever it may mean to us now, and however we define it. Perhaps that’s Mozart’s greatest legacy, the obligation musicians—and listeners—have to be “tasteful.”
MR: What new projects are you working on and what does you future hold?
PCE: I’m currently working on a new, five-volume critical edition of the Mozart family letters, which I hope to publish about 2020. It will be the first ever complete edition of the letters in English and includes extensive commentaries on the persons, places and topics mentioned as well contemporaneous documents and iconography.
A Conversation with Universal Classics Executive/Director of Mozart 225, Paul Moseley
Mike Ragogna: Paul, what is the history behind Mozart 225’s research, assembly and eventual manufacturing? How involved was the project’s partner, the Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation and its president, Dr. Johannes Honsig-Erlenburg?
Paul Moseley: Well, about two years ago in one of our regular label meetings, we realized it was Mozart’s 225th anniversary—and also 25 years since the Philips Mozart Edition—and we thought if we don't do something for 225 there may not be another big anniversary in our—and the CDs’—realistic lifespan! So that was the start. Then I started mapping it out at home as evening hobby on the sofa just to see where it might go. I felt immediately it had to be both completely different and more authoritative than anything on the market. For that, we needed independent authorities which is where Mozart scholar Professor Cliff Eisen and the Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation came in. They both could not have been more helpful. I went to Salzburg to explain the concept and everyone from Johannes Honsig-Erlenburg down embraced it. I must particularly thank Dr. Ulrich Leisinger, their Head of Research, who became intimately involved in many areas such as the fragments, questions of authenticity and chronology, iconography and general advice. And Professor Eisen greatly helped me clarify my thinking on the overall layout of the set. Ultimately, the choice of recordings and their juxtaposition, the eventual 200 CD size and the box and its design were entirely decided at the label—as that’s what we do every day.
MR: The box spans many of Universal’s classical labels as well as hundreds of conductors and composers. Assembling all these works from a production and sourcing perspective must have been demanding. What are a couple of stories of the tactile elements of the box’s assembly?
PM: One thing that kept coming up was performance practice. Do you go with period instruments first or traditional instruments? I really wanted to give period instruments prominence and this is possible in key areas such as Concertos. I realized that we had everything on Universal—Decca, Deutsche Grammophon—except one work—the Concertone for 2 violins K190. So we had to license that in. But then you can’t ignore the great Mozartians like Brendel, Uchida, Schiff and Pires. So this is where the idea of alternative performances of key works came in. One thing best to avoid is mixing these period and traditional performances on the same CD! The pitch shifts would be painful!
As far as the box itself is concerned, I wanted it to feel like an expensive box of chocolates that was always full! A box that reveals its contents layer by layer, makes you slow down and take your time. So much of what we do is hurried, instant and disposable—whereas I felt this should be the opposite—immersive, and digressive. The box lid is designed to close on its own though, slowly and silently! The scores and letters facsimiles were chosen to try and bring the listener closer to Mozart himself—his huge humanity, one minute pragmatic, the next coarse, the next sublime.
MR: Paul, what does Mozart and his works mean to you?
PM: I have been a Mozart enthusiast since my student days at Oxford. In 1986, I spent a happy summer in Vienna researching a paper on the Requiem. Having known Mozart scholars like Erik Smith and Alan Tyson back then, and later when I joined Decca working with many great Mozartians like Bartoli, Solti, Uchida, Schiff and Levin has been a huge joy. For me this was a true labour of love. While the Philips Mozart Edition was a pioneering landmark in its day, I felt there was so much more that could now be done to marry scholarship, comprehensiveness of content and new achievements in performance.
MR: The box contains lithos, bio and research books, and of course, 200 CDs, which feature new recordings that include Mozart compositions performed on his own instruments. Were the new works commissioned for the box and how did they come together?
PM: Yes, once we had worked out what we did not have, mainly fragments, we either licensed it in from other labels or commissioned new recordings from cooperative partners like Ottavio Dantone and Francesco Piemontesi. The Solistes des Musiciens du Louvre were already planning to make a recording on Mozart’s own instruments—including the newly returned ‘Costa’ violin—of the Piano Quartets, so I suggested they add some world premiere recordings of related fragments. The very last recording to be made was this April, of the recently discovered song co-written with Salieri ‘Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia’ K477a The Salzburg Foundation made that possible as they did with several other shorter pieces, all on Mozart’s instruments that they curate at the Mozart museums in Salzburg.
MR: How would you suggest the listener navigates this complete works box as to what to listen to first, etc.?
PM: I have tried to make the set as navigable as possible to various approaches of listening. So if you want to start with K1 you can! However, more likely you will explore the four main boxes in turn—Chamber, Orchestral, Theatre and Sacred. Each of these is subdivided chronologically, so for example you can trace Mozart’s approach to concertante music from the first concerto to be written which is actually the Violin Concerto No. 1 K207 through to the last great Bb Piano Concerto K595. It is interesting to see how Mozart had bursts of writing for violin in Salzburg, then wind instruments in Paris and finally settled on the fortepiano and finally basset clarinet when he reached Vienna. He was a very pragmatic composer and of course needed to keep food on the table! Another fun way is via the enclosed “K“ book. Take any random page of this and listen to works and fragments written in the same year and even spot favourite themes that Mozart was working and reworking at that time.
MR: What is contained in the box set’s “K” book?
PM: The “K“ book is something I am proud of: most people who like Mozart know that his works are not given Opus but “K” numbers. “K” stands for Köchel which is the name of Ludwig von Köchel who catalogued them first in 1862. There have been many attempts to update the catalogue since and the Salzburg Foundation were very helpful in providing me in advance with the numbering of the new Köchel catalogue which I believe will be published in 2017 and is the first major revision since 1964. So this little book is a navigational aid telling you the name, place, date and CD to find each work of Mozart as well guiding you to the Digital Mozart Edition, a free-to-access online score of the work.
MR: How does the Mozart 225 Libretto App work?
PM: The Libretto App is a neat tool which very simply gives you on iPad and iPhone the original text and next to it your translation of choice of all Mozart’s sung texts. You can search by the CD you want to listen to, or by K number, work or aria title. It's free if you purchase the Edition - you just enter the code when you have downloaded the App. Amazingly there has never been such a thing for classical and we hope to develop it much further in future. We also provide normal PDF versions of the texts for browser users.
MR: I don’t believe there is any Mozart project this ambitious in the marketplace. Were there any fears about producing such a massive product and how did the financials and projects work to make it happen?
PM: Yes there are always concerns doing something this big and the costs are substantial mainly in the editorial field. Once you write new words in English, French, German and Japanese your costs multiply by four! However we budgeted carefully and there weren’t too many surprises.
MR: Will Decca be releasing any more comparable box sets around other iconic composers?
PM: As long as enough people buy Mozart, we are certainly looking to do more! But it takes much planning and there’s nothing like having a good anniversary to hang it on. Then you can get the live music sector involved too in year-long festivals and so forth.
MR: What was most satisfying for you about the creation of the box and what did you learn in the process, either about the artist and his works or possibly even about the production process involving such an enormous amount of sourcing, etc.?
PM: For the layout, I wanted to arrange works chronologically within genre and that often led to a variety of performers within a single CD. Each performance had to be re-auditioned sonically and dynamically to ensure a reasonably smooth transition between a multitude of approaches to interpretation and recording. That was amazing as many performances were new to me and a great joy. I remember things like George Szell conducting Symphony no 34 or the Orlando Quartet’s Prussian Quartets. With period and modern instruments, you really have to have both, especially in the Piano Concertos! Finally I think I found a way, with supplementary performances of many key works offering a choice that hopefully will both provide surprises and satisfy all but the most dogmatic of listeners. The lesson I learned was mainly about your master database – keep it tidy and don’t lose it!
A Conversation with Michael A. Levine
Mike Ragogna: Michael, you’re known as a producer, overseeing projects like Lorde’s take on the Tears For Fears hit “Everybody Wants To Rule The World,” recordings by The Naked Bros. Band, scoring the TV series Cold Case, and much more. Lately, you’ve been working with The Landfill Harmonic. When did your association begin and what is your function?
Michael A. Levine: My agent, John Tempereau, thought the film Landfill Harmonic—about the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura—would be a good match for me because of my interest in poverty and social justice, and the fact that my wife spent decades working in international aid in Latin America, and my daughter grew up there.
The Recycled Orchestra is made up of kids from one of the poorest areas in Paraguay. They had no money to buy instruments, so their instruments were made from recycled materials found in the local landfill, hence the name of the documentary, Landfill Harmonic. I first heard about the orchestra when a video about them went viral a few years back. I was delighted to get a call about two years ago about scoring the film. This is such a great human interest story - I was very excited to be involved. Initially I was hired just to compose the score, but then I ended up writing the closing credits song, “Cateura - Vamos a Soñar (We Will Dream)” with my daughter, Mariana Barreto, whose first language is Spanish.
I wanted the score to reflect a certain degree of authenticity about the experience of these impoverished kids. I researched traditional Paraguayan music and based a number of the pieces on it. One of the fun things I got to do was to use one of the recycled violins on this score as I am a violinist. It was hard to play! It left me with even greater respect for the kids' dedication. I also had a slew of instruments made from things I found in our garbage: a drum made from an oatmeal cylinder, salt packet shakers, bubble wrap pops, empty bottle wind instruments, et cetera. My wife started laughing every time I went near the big blue recycle container.
MR: How has your role grown since your association?
ML: The story of these kids' triumph despite ridiculous odds was so irresistible that I found myself taking on a role as a cultural ambassador for the orchestra. When members of the orchestra came to Los Angeles, I introduced them to people at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control where they got a tour. I was also able to facilitate a joint performance between the Recycled Orchestra and the InterSchool Orchestras of New York last month at the historic Trinity Church. Together, we performed the closing credits song from the movie. The orchestra’s conductor, Favio Chavez, played guitar, Mariana sang, and I played on a recycled violin. It got a standing ovation from a packed house and was filmed by HBO-Latino.
MR: What are your impressions of how that community has had to survive and have you been following aspects such as the Paraguay town’s health concerns, poverty, et cetera? How does knowing these facts and the issues the town faces touch you personally?
ML: Like much of the third world—and some parts of the U.S.—people live hand to mouth, and the options are few. But their situation is even more dire than most; some aid organizations won’t work there because of fears for their own workers’ health. The orchestra’s remarkable conductor, Favio Chavez, realized right from the beginning that the orchestra was not just about music per se. Studying music gives these kids structure, discipline, and camaraderie. Most importantly, it gives them permission to dream. Some of the young people Favio began with ten years ago are graduating college now, and not only in music. That kind of opportunity and achievement was unthinkable for them before the founding of the orchestra.
My wife, who designs nutritional programs for entire countries, always says that the best people to help are those that have already gone 6 steps on a 10 step journey on their own. As Favio says, “Having nothing is no excuse for doing nothing.” He has changed the lives of dozens, maybe hundreds, of kids for the better. It’s hard not to be moved by that. I dare you to watch the movie and not get choked up!
MR: You’ve worked for James Brooks, Ron Howard, and others, supplying music for everything from commercials to films. How did you break into this field of music and what do you think were the important stepping stones that prepped you for your current success?
ML: I started out in a grade school music program. I would not have been successful were it not for the selfless dedication of my teachers. When I was sixteen, I got my first cover of a song I wrote on a record. "Here we go!” I thought. But it was followed by a lot of unglamorous jobs: as a street musician, accompanying dance classes, and playing in country western and Irish bands. Nonetheless, all of those things laid the groundwork for later successes. As a street musician I learned to figure out what my audience wanted hear, connect with them, and get paid in about 30 seconds. Later when I wrote music for commercials, I realized it was the same job. I learned a lot about composing for picture by accompanying dance classes—film composing legend Elmer Bernstein [To Kill A Mockingbird] started out the same way. I played in a country western band with Shawn Colvin—who later won two Grammys—and sang on a version of my Kit Kat "Gimme A Break" jingle. And playing fiddle in an Irish band got me a job playing on Harry Gregson Williams score for Veronica Guerin. He later asked me to score the climactic murder scene for the movie, and introduced me to Hans Zimmer, which was a game-changer.
MR: Who were your musical inspirations? Favorite recordings? Why did you choose the paths of producer, songwriter, and arranger/scorer?
ML: Way too many to count. As a kid I loved Bach and the Beatles. Later ’Trane and Miles. My mom had enormously eclectic tastes, as did my older sister who often controlled the playlist, so I grew up listening to show tunes, The Clancy Brothers, Bob Dylan, Balinese gamelan, Harry Partch, and Tom Lehrer. Of course, I love the visceral side of music, how it touches us on an emotional level. But I also love the puzzle of music, how to put a composition or a track together so that it grabs you and keeps you engaged all the way to the end, which is what songwriters, and producers are all trying to accomplish.
MR: What’s your favorite project that you’ve worked on?
ML: Whatever I’m doing right now. Today I was writing some pieces for an album I’m recording with percussionist great Evelyn Glennie. I’m playing violin on the album. In fact, it features a lot of duets between us, which is both exciting, and humbling, because she’s so damn good.
MR: What were some of your most significant or challenging milestones as you followed your musical passions and career?
ML: Almost all were accidental. I ended up playing on a Grandmaster Flash album because somebody told the producer I was the go-to guy for sampling. I had an Emulator II, serial #40. I loved that thing! Writing the music to the Kit Kat "Gimme A Break" jingle was also a fluke. The agency wanted to sell the client a different campaign and needed something as a throw-away alternative. That single cue I wrote for Veronica Guerin turned out to be exactly what Jonathan Littman, head of Bruckheimer television, wanted to hear for a crucial murder scene in "Cold Case," which I ended up scoring for seven years. The Lorde track got used in "The Hunger Games" because she had a contractual obligation and no other unreleased music left. Then it became a hit!
MR: What are some of the biggest challenges facing producers and film/TV scorers in 2016? Has the environment changed over the years?
ML: On the challenging side, the field is more crowded with more talented people than ever, especially as other areas to make money have dried up. On the up side, there are more opportunities than ever, especially in television, and a great way to make your story stand out is to have great, distinctive music.
One of the classic challenges to a composer is the “temp” track—music temporarily put in a film or television show that the director and producer have heard over and over to the point that they believe it is the only way to tell the story they are telling. But this is done on a scene-by-scene basis with rarely any sense of how it works in the whole of the project. So often, a composer has the dual task of not only coming up with music that binds everything together as one coherent story but also convincing those in a position of power to part with their preconceptions.
MR: Michael, what’s your advice for new artists?
ML: Being an artist is one of the most human things you can do. In some traditional cultures all musicians, dancers, and painter/sculptors are amateurs and almost everybody does all of them. But in our culture, for better and for worse, it is a professional calling. The most difficult thing about being a professional artist is that you are constantly being told “no.” No matter how incandescent your vision, and how sure you are that you have something to offer, you are going to face rejection most of the time. It is enormously hard not to slip into “I must suck” mode. That’s when you get to remember how privileged you are to make music every day.
Martha Graham and Agnes DeMille were both legendary choreographers. Once, when DeMille was going through a rough patch, Graham told her this:
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open."
MR: How does your association with the Landfill Harmonic evolve from here?
ML: We have an album coming out in a few months that will include music from the Trinity concert and some material from the score, plus a few surprises. After that, I hope we can do more performances together.
MR: What projects beyond Landfill are you working on?
ML: Besides the aforementioned Evelyn Glennie album, I am working on an album of songs with Mariana, and scoring a Lego DC Supergirls movie. Another documentary I scored, City 40, was just released on Netflix. It’s the harrowing story of a courageous/insane Iranian-American director who snuck into a closed Russian nuclear weapons building city and what she found there. I recently wrote the theme song for the first VR version of a classic video game, but I can’t say anything about it…yet. I am also developing a television show—as a producer—that is also hush hush for now, but I can say it is built around the most mysterious puzzle on the internet.
PETER WHITE’S “DO I DO” EXCLUSIVE
A Conversation with Peter White
Mike Ragogna: Peter, you again are revisiting some of your favorite songs of the ’60s and ’70s on your new album Groovin’. From your perspective, how does this particular selection of songs fit together to form a statement of that period?
PW: I’m really not trying to make a social statement. If anything, I’m just attempting to show that the songs from that era were so good that they not only stand the test of time but can be re-arranged and re-interpreted and still remain completely valid as musical statements today!
MR: What is it about the songwriting or original recordings that make them resonate with you? Why do you think they’ve remained popular through the decades?
PW: These songs all predate the digital era and they were all written at a time when melody took precedence over the production values, because there were very little production values back then! Everything had to be achieved through superior songwriting and musicianship. Nowadays, it’s possible to take a mediocre song and make it sound great with all the digital tools which they simply didn’t have in the ’60s and ’70s. The songs had to be top notch and very often the writer of the song had to convince the artist or the publisher of the merit of the song based on singing it with a just a piano accompaniment or it wouldn’t have been recorded. I was a teenager in the ’60s and ’70s and the songs back then affected me more so than the music of today, but I don’t think it’s just because I’m older—I really do think the songs were better back then. All the songs I’ve recorded on this CD are still being played on the radio every day. That has to be the best measure of the quality of a song, that it stands the test of time.
MR: Back in the that same period, jazz artists such played jazz versions of popular songs but they were mostly relegated to easy listening stations and what would become Muzak. When you approach these recordings, do you consciously try to shy away from that stereotype or does it even matter at this point?
PW: When I record a song, I’m thinking about how to present it in a unique way. From what I’ve heard of Muzak, it seems to be an attempt to wring the emotion and dynamic out of a song so it truly become background music. I am trying to do the opposite—retaining the emotion in the song, which is a little more challenging as I don’t use a lot of the lyrics! Some songs, however, like “Here, There and Everywhere” have such beautiful melodies that as an instrumentalist you can just simply play the melody and the song immediately comes to life. Thanks, Paul [McCartney]!
MR: What are some of your memories of these songs and how they became part of your life when you were young?
PW: “Sleep Walk” is the earliest song I recorded here, written in 1959 and I first heard it by an English guitar instrumental group, The Shadows in the early ’60s. I loved the melody and it’s around this time that I became interested in the guitar. It didn’t matter to me that there were no words, in fact since then I have been a firm believer in the power of instrumental music to entrance the listener. It wasn’t until some ten years later that I started to listen to song lyrics, courtesy of Joni Mitchell. Another song I recorded—“I Heard it Through the Grapevine” was the first hit in the UK for Marvin Gaye—we never heard the Gladys Knight version over there, so it was Marvin’s version that became a huge hit. I loved the haunting, mysterious sound of the song even though I had no idea what he was singing about. I was 13 years old when I first heard it. With most of the cover songs I record, I try to get far away from the original arrangement to the point that if you took my melody guitar away, you might not recognize the song. In the case of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” however, the electric piano intro was something I couldn’t get away from - along with Marvin’s voice, it makes the song!
MR: For your next release, do you have yet another volume of this era’s music in you or will you be moving on to another concept?
PW: My albums of cover songs only appear once a decade so I’ll think about it again around 2026 ha ha!
MR: What is jazz to you in 2016?
PW: I have never considered myself a jazz artist—just a guy who plays music on the guitar! I heard Pat Metheny say once “jazz is music for improvisation.” I think he is on point here. Even though my music contains improvisation, it is a small part of the song, and usually comes at the end. In straight ahead jazz, the improvisation usually forms the bulk of the song, with the melody played once at the beginning at once at the end. Enough of the music lesson! All of us who are under the “Smooth Jazz” or “Contemporary Jazz” umbrella are still touring and making CDs, even though the FM stations that played our music have largely changed to other formats. Nowadays we rely much more heavily on the internet for our fans to find us. I’m just glad that in the 90s through the turn of the century, a window opened to let musicians like myself be heard and have a career as solo artists!
MR: Do you have some favorite contemporaries?
PW: Pat Metheny, Euge Groove, Rick Braun, Marc Antoine, Earl Klugh, George Benson, AC/DC—yes really, AC/DC! When guitarist Malcolm Young recently left the group, I thought, here’s my chance—I know all the songs, I can just step in! Well, they hired his cousin to replace him, so that was the end of my rock and roll dream! It’s a question I’m most often asked—how did a guy from England who grew up listening to rock and roll end up in California, playing jazz. Well, to me it’s all music and I don’t take much notice of labels. I still play the guitar as I did in the 60s, just a little more reflective now and a lot less frantic!
MR: What advice do you have for new artists?
PW: Play music because you love it. Learn different styles and try to be accomplished on various instruments. I got my first touring gig with Al [Year of the Cat] Stewart because I could play the piano as well as guitar. If you can sing, then sing! A person who can play two instruments and can also sing will be hired over someone who can only play one instrument, unless you are Segovia or Eddie Van Halen! You also have to find the places where musicians hang out and jam and you may meet someone that can open a door to you. I recently hired a young sax player, Curtis Brooks to play in my band because I met him at a jam session in of all places, Cancun, Mexico!
MR: Where is the followup to “Time Passages”? When are you and Al Stewart going to jump on that?
PW: Al and I actually wrote many songs after “Time Passages” but none of them became hits. “Midnight Rocks,” from the 24 Carrots album actually crept into the top 40 in 1980 but that was the last time we saw chart success on the scale of the late ’70s. It was like a window that opened briefly and I’m glad, because the success that Al had then kept us touring all the way through the ’80s and led to my solo career starting in the 90s. I still do shows with Al occasionally but my appearance is usually unannounced. I will usually mention it on Facebook however, which is something we didn’t have in the ’70s or ’80s, or even the ’90s!