The composer Ken Ueno amplifies traditional instruments to uncover new worlds of sound, and his "Contemplation on Little Big Muff" gave Christophe Roy's amplified cello a strange and unsettling intensity, probing into sustained tones and building drama from the timbral textures that were revealed. There were few concessions to loveliness, but the piece had a fascinating, elemental power that resonated long after it ended.
Ueno was absolutely fearless, growling for long stretches while the orchestra played glissandi and repeating figures.
After intermission, the amazingly creative On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis by Ken Ueno was captivating. A natural blend of dissonance and glissandi, along with rough and sudden entrances of instruments, made a perfect parallel to Ueno s singing...Most impressive was a cadenza-like throat singing passage, including a brilliant range of dynamics and wide intervals. I ll listen for more Ueno in the future.
Ken Ueno's absorbing "On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis" is a concerto for himself, singing, screeching, growling, throat singing - manipulating the growl's acoustic overtones. The opening - a recording of Ueno at the age of 6, babbling - foreshadowed serious play, the complex resonances of Ueno's vocal excursions transformed into bright orchestral fanfares. The work's single-mindedness proved disarmingly generous. It was the evening's far-out highlight.
Intermission came and went and the second half started with the music Ken Ueno with yet another world premier. This one called "On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis."
DANG!
Ken is an overtone singer. and I was BLOWN away. He generated these powerful deep growls from within his throat that would occasionally be coupled with really high squeals. Behind his intense singing was some really wild string work which had the musicians sliding their hands up and down the strings creating a sensation of the music slowing and speeding. The other members of my group were not as thrilled with the vocals - they thought it seemed too painful or sounded too much like something you d hear out of a horror movie. For me? I couldn t be more awestruck. It was brilliant.
Ken Ueno also drew a loud reaction, and the greatest variety of reactions, with his first classical throat-singing work.
Composer and vocal soloist Ken Ueno offered the audience a rare treat of vocal technique and compositional innovation. On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis (2008) is Ueno's third work for BMOP, and what he calls one of his most personal works, reconciling his own identity as classical composer and experimental improvisator. The piece opened with a recording of Ueno singing as a child, over which Ueno began to hum in unison with solo viola. Out of this was born an exploration of Ueno's many vocal textures, including throat singing, overtone singing, multiphonics and extreme high register, matched to gorgeous orchestral color that grounded the unique vocal techniques in an atmospheric wash. At the risk of sounding simplistic, one could liken Ueno's many vocal sounds to a sound spectrum including swarming locusts, a sports car switching gears, fluctuating radio static, the extreme bass of monk chants, wind gusting through a small space, and the soft scream of fluorescent lights. At times, it felt as though live sound existed in his body's chamber but he was stifling it from release. The tones he produced filled Jordan Hall with unfamiliar vibrations and resonances so that his voice attained an other-worldliness that disassociated the sound from its human element, all the while contrasting it with the sweet sonorities of the orchestra. Met by the audience's enthusiasm, the performance was a rare treat indeed.
Rarely can someone so trained in the "right" way to do things take music down to its basic elements.
Ken Ueno's vocals are incredible. He goes from deep, booming growls to high pitched squeals, the kind that I would normally associate with a boiling kettle or Blixa Bargeld. Using circular breathing techniques Ueno keeps his vocals going continuously for large stretches of time (growling on the exhalation, squealing on the inhalation). As well as being physically impressive, it goes well with Whitney and Worster's rhythms and noise. Ueno is ever present but sometimes gets overwhelmed by the other two. It's not like he's just lost in the mix, he still colors the sound at these moments. On "Delillo" he is particularly remarkable, his rumbling snarls sound like something from Lovecraft calling from the abyss.
The concert opener, the world premiere of Ueno's ''Kaze-no-Oka (Hill of the Winds)" (2005), featured Japanese masters Kifu Mitsuhashi on shakuhachi (bamboo flute) and Yukio Tanaka on biwa (Japanese lute).
The piece began with the orchestra alone. Dense, slowly shifting microtonal sound-masses -- earthy rumblings against ethereal chord-clouds -- painted a vast, brooding aural landscape.
The shakuhachi and biwa kept quiet until the orchestra faded. Then, like a cinematic far-shot cutting to an intimate close-up, Mitsuhashi and Tanaka began a hushed, urgent colloquy, their nuanced brush strokes stark against silence.
In Kaze-No-Oka Ueno drew upon the Japanese aesthetic principle of "shawari" - important to Takemitsu, and now to Ueno himself. To put this many-sided concept into a nutshell, "shawari" can translate as "beautiful noise," "to touch," or "obstacle," and for the artist can mean the use of a deliberate "inconvenience," desired for its creative potential. A relevant example can be heard in the metallic sounds, above the pitches themselves, which emanate from the biwa. Ueno applied this principle to his orchestral writing by combining the instruments in close, sometimes buzzing, microtonal sonorities, and using other instrumental noises - even white noise from the mouths of the players - creating very sensual "artifacts of sound," as he calls them, with a structural rather than ornamental function. The biwa and shakuhachi duo itself was set against the Western orchestra in a dramatic manner. Unlike November Steps, in which the writing for the two instruments is temporally interspersed with the orchestral writing, in Kaze-No-Oka they appeared only after the orchestral section of the piece had fully concluded, in a cadenza which seemed to last as long as the first part of the piece. This was Ueno's response to BMOP's request that the shakuhachi and biwa part be usable as an independent composition, for another concert event. Many composers might shy away from separating these elements so completely, for fear of incongruity. But the tension at the moment of the duo's entry, the sustained intensity and relatedness of the music despite the sudden drop in density, the surprising length of the cadenza - these things resulted in a piece with its own strong sense of balance and "meaning."
The evening was redeemed by the last work, ". . . Blood Blossoms. . .," composed last year by Boston-based Ken Ueno, who was in the audience. Funky and asymmetrical, the score is thick with scary tremolos, punctuated by blasts of percussion or piano. It lopes along all crazylike. It was a nifty piece by a young composer worth following and showed the value of BF's mission: bringing to Atlanta vital contemporary music you can't find anywhere else.
Who ever said that practice makes perfect? UMass-Dartmouth professors Jorrit Dijkstra and Ken Ueno didn't even bother to rehearse for their debut as an improvised duo last Friday at the NAO Gallery in SoWa. With Andy Zimmerman's arresting "Light from Two Sides" art exhibit providing the visual backdrop, Dijkstra played an alto saxophone and a lyricon - an analog electronic wind synthesizer - and then processed, sampled, and looped himself using a myriad of electronic gadgets. Ueno manipulated the sound across four channels (through four speakers in each corner of the small room) by using a PowerBook and light-sensitive photocells that reacted to the movements of two mini flashlights. The effect was hypnotizing;
"Ueno knows his way around instrumentation.,.."
Date: May 27, 2005 Page: D15 Section: Living
CAMBRIDGE- "If it wasn't for Jimi Hendrix," says Ken Ueno, "I wouldn't be a composer." Ueno, a Cambridge resident whose piece "Kaze-no-Oka" ("Hill of the Winds") gets its world premiere tonight at Jordan Hall and whose music let it be stated at the outset sounds absolutely nothing like Hendrix's, nonetheless had his artistic Big Bang as a guitar-noodling 16-year-old, during a lonely afternoon in a California ski cabin, with a copy of "Are You Experienced?"
"It was like being hit by a bolt of lightning," Ueno, 35, recalls over coffee at Harvard Square's Cafe Algiers. "The complexity of the sound, and the rawness! I later found out that this is a very common phenomenon for guitar players when they first hear Hendrix, but at the time I thought I had some sort of special communion." Ueno (pronounced, he says, "like the Spanish word `bueno' but without the b") writes "new music," or modern classical: drones, forebodings, weird scribbles of strings, and sudden percussive jabs. His work has been called a fusion of Japanese underground electronic music with European modernism, and he's composed using pen, paper, and computer for everything from the baritone saxophone to the hand-cranked music box. His work has been performed in places from Lincoln Center to the Norfolk Music Festival, and he's written for ensembles from Philadelphia to Holland.
The composer himself cuts an engagingly paradoxical figure: He's a theoretician committed to "visceral energy," an avant-gardist with a taste for the basics. He will discourse with subdued intensity on the patterns made by cigarette butts on the paving stones of European cities, or on the concept in Japanese traditional music known as "sawari," whereby the rattle or buzz of an instrument is given the same value as the notes being played.
But he can also talk heavy metal. "I think the attempts to politicize the differences between types or classes of music are less relevant for my generation than they ever were," he says. "There's a level of commonality between Metallica and Bartok some grammatical differences, sure, but at the visceral level they're the same. I mean, when I play Xenakis [Iannis Xenakis, a legendarily "difficult" Greek modernist composer] to my friends in LA who are in heavy metal bands they get it. It's just gritty, fantastic music."
Ueno's "Kaze-no-Oka" is part of a tribute to the 20th-century Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, presented by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and featuring internationally acclaimed soloists Kifu Mitsuhashi on the bamboo flute and Yukio Tanaka on the short-necked lute. The two soloists will also be performing some of Takemitsu's more famous pieces. "When I thought of commissioning a piece for a tribute to Takemitsu," says BMOP's founder and artistic director Gil Rose, "I immediately thought of Ken. I thought he could take us into that sound-world, that meld of the ancient and the modern, of East and West"
Takemitsu, for Ueno, is the "Akira Kurosawa of Japanese classical music, the first and greatest example of an Asian composer who's been able to garner international respect, and he's such an inspiration to those composers who are not part of the dominant culture."
Ueno's own attempt, as a Japanese-American, to participate in the dominant culture ended when he was 18. Born in Bronxville, N.Y., he was guaranteed a peripatetic childhood by his father's job with Japan Airlines, and he lived in Japan and Switzerland before settling in California. Ueno's grand plan, as an adolescent, was to go into politics and become a senator, and at the age of 17 he entered the US Military Academy at West Point.
"I was a sensitive young man," he says, "and I suppose this was a dramatic way of proving that I was American." One year later, a neck injury ended his time as a cadet, and for 18 months he did nothing but play his guitar and endure physical therapy. "My life plan had been shattered," he says, "so I had to reinvent myself."
By the end of that period, Ken Ueno the musician had been born. At Berklee College of Music he was exposed to Stravinsky and Bartok; there was no going back. Now getting his doctorate in music composition at Harvard, he is an assistant professor and the director of the Electronic Music Studios at the University of Massachussetts at Dartmouth. Under the name DJ Moderne, he also hosts a show on Cambridgepublic-access television that has featured such prize-winning local composers as John Harbison and Bernard Rands.
A conversation with Ueno is a split-level affair. Above, hovering over the table as it were, is the cold and radiant world of theory, from which words like "hierarchicize," "intentionality," and "psychoacoustic" come blowing down. Below, darkening his brow and agitating his hands, is the more human restlessness of a young composer trying to get his work heard.
"I just want to offer people, for this 15 to 20 minutes of their time, which is not going to come again, an experience some sort of life-changing excitement," he says. "My favorite music has done that for me."
One of the tasks of a composer of new music, he says, is to "try to think up new mechanisms of interaction," ways in which what he calls "allergies" to unconventional sonic values can be overcome. In 1996 and 1997, Ueno was a volunteer music instructor at the Robert J. Watson House in Cambridge, a residential facility for young male offenders. During one weekly session, after tracks by Dr. Dre and Marvin Gaye, Ueno played his class the cello-and-piano movement from Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time," which was composed and premiered in a German internment camp in 1941.
"It was the only time I ever saw those kids quiet. And it couldn't have been further away from them culturally I mean, these were gangsta kids, and here I was playing them the music of this midcentury Frenchman, this colorblind ornithologist in a beret," he says. "But something about it just got their attention. You can feel when people are listening. Maybe the fact that it was written in a prison, in captivity. . . . But it just proved to me that if the music is good enough, and the context is set up well enough, you can get through."
By Keith Powers
What do a West Point cadet, an electric guitar player, a DJ with a TV show, a classical music composer and a Harvard doctoral candidate have in common?
They're all the same person. Ken Ueno, whose commission ``Apmonia'' will be given its world premiere tomorrow by the Pro Arte Cham-ber Orchestra at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, has been all of these things. And it all makes perfect sense to him.
``I evangelize for new music in as many ways as I can. I don't think composing is enough,'' the 34-year-old Ueno said over coffee in Harvard Square. ``I didn't have a classical background. I just picked up a guitar and started playing. I was 16, and I had a totally different life then. I went off to West Point - it was my way of searching for an identity. I was going to become a general, serve my country, then go home to California and become a senator.''
But life took a different turn. Ueno injured his neck and had to leave West Point; he returned home and spent a year recovering. ``All I did for a year was play the guitar and rehab,'' he said. ``Gradually, it dawned on me that music might be what I wanted to do. Then I heard the fourth Bartok string quartet, and it was immediately apparent to me.
``I had the same response to Bartok as I did to Hendrix or Black Sabbath or Coltrane. It might have been more complicated structurally and harmonically, but for me it achieved the same result. It was visceral. It goes beyond technical means or academic explanations.''
So Ueno studied first at Berklee College of Music, and later achieved degrees from Boston University and Yale before coming to Harvard. He will complete his dissertation, a large four-movement orchestral work, sometime next year.
Ueno's music often blends traditional instruments with amplified ones and ``found'' instruments such as soda cans. ``It's not that I listen to this genre or that genre and put them together,'' he said. ``And I don't always amplify things. But amplification allows me a way to make sounds that have been denied by classical tradition. I sometimes work acoustically with the benefits of the research I've done in electronics.
``Things thought of as noise in classical music are more in the foreground in other traditions. Like Hendrix with feedback. The guitar is amplified enough so that you hear his fingers sliding on the strings, and that's part of the musical expression.
``Tradition is difficult for me,'' Ueno said. ``I have to acknowledge it but find my own way. How does a Japanese-American make it in western classical music? I actually think real tradition is progress. When Beethoven used a trumpet for the first time, he altered the symphony form. Or when Stravinsky used non-linear, cinematic effects in `Rite of Spring.' Hendrix and Coltrane also redefined their media. In that respect, I'm traditional. You preserve the tradition by expanding it.''
His Pro Arte commission, ``Apmonia,'' does just that. In his program notes, Ueno likens his struggle as a Japanese-American seeking an artistic identity to German filmmaker Wim Wenders, who struggled to find his identity in an art form largely foreign to his native culture.
Wenders found similarities in Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, and framed his own film ``Tokyo-Ga'' with the actual beginning and ending credits from Ozu's ``Tokyo Story,'' placing his film in a sort of Ozu parenthesis. Similarly, Ueno begins and ends ``Apmonia'' with musical quotes from Harvard professor and composer Bernard Rands, to whom the work is dedicated.
Ueno cites Rands' insights into the works of Samuel Beckett, who coined the term ``Apmonia,'' meaning the irrational heart, in his first novel, ``Murphy.''
``The whole piece is kind of like one big breath: one inhalation, one exhalation. There's something meditative about it, something poetic. We are being taken hostage by events beyond our control, threatened every day. Maybe looking at the reality is a way of achieving understanding,'' Ueno said.
;``Classical music needs to be more inclusive, with other types of audience. Amplification and electronics are new ways of participating. I couldn't evercompete with Beethoven's Ninth. It was that time period, it had to happen, and he did it. Like Shakespeare, or Mozart's operas. But electronics is still developing, and I might be able to participate from the beginning with something new.''
( The Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra premieres Ken Ueno's ``Apmonia'' tomorrow at Sanders Theatre, Cambridge. For tickets and information, call 617-661-7067. )
By Robert Kirzinger
Boston-based composer Ken Ueno (b. 1970) was born in New York to Japanese parents. His father was an executive for a Japanese airline, and the family moved several times during Ueno’s childhood, to Japan, to Switzerland, and finally to California, where he attended high school. His first formal music training came in the form of clarinet and recorder lessons and at sixteen he took up the guitar, but he had little notion at that time of entering into a career in music. Instead, intent on coming to grips with his role as an American, Ueno participated in debate and speech activities in high school and ran track, and after graduation entered the officer training program at West Point, with an ultimate goal of entering into politics.
At the end of his first year at that school, Ueno suffered an accident during training that kept him in physical therapy for more than a year. While recuperating he took up the guitar again, playing every day for hours on end, and also began to rethink his chosen career path. He began playing guitar in bands and writing songs, eventually deciding to restart his higher education by attending Berklee College of Music. It was his first exposure to Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet that steered him toward new music composition, and following Berklee he attended Boston University, Yale, and Harvard. His teachers have included John Bavicchi, Bernard Rands, and Mario Davidovsky, among several others. An important aspect of his activity is that of “evangelist” for new music, and in that capacity he has taught at a halfway house for court-involved teens as well as produced and hosted a cable access television program, “The Modern Music Show w/DJ Moderne,” where his guests have included Davidovsky, John Harbison, Beth Wiemann, and many others. Ueno himself recently joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where he is an assistant professor and director of the school’s electronic music studios.
Ueno’s work has been performed by numerous ensembles around the world, including BMOP, the Hilliard Ensemble, Eighth Blackbird, the Prism Quartet, and the American Composers Orchestra, to name just a few. He has received numerous grants, awards, and recognitions, including recent commissions from the Fromm Foundation for the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra and the Radius Ensemble, and Harvard’s John Green Composition Prize, which included a summer residency at Fondazione William Walton in Italy last year.
Ken Ueno is an insatiable intellectual polymath whose deep interest in modern critical systems (including the work of Derrida and the post-structuralists), literature (particularly Samuel Beckett), and film has influenced his work on many levels from the abstract to the particular. His ongoing development of a compositional language has led him to a method of “phonetic” or “alphabetic” details juxtaposed with more complex musical “ideograms”—a metaphorical construct taken from observation of Western, alphabetic languages versus the pictorial Japanese, which coexist in Ueno’s own experience. This is one basis, as well, for the establishment of musical gestures operating on different, often seemingly independent, levels. In recent works, Ueno has concerned himself with the organic extension of apparently chaotic, or locally unpredictable, gestures into large-scale forms of satisfying, even seemingly inevitable cohesion. One way of achieving this kind of unity, for example, involves the employment of discrete pitch arrays that, through various transformations, remain the (mostly) audible foundation of a particular work (almost, but not quite, analogous to a “key”). This array may be based on an analysis of a key instrumental component of the ensemble. Microtonal inflection is often present as explication of a specific overtone.
But at first experience, the listener to Ueno’s works isn’t struck by their compositional rigor so much as by their tactile, physical nature, a quality that recalls the composer’s early experience with music as a disciple of Jimi Hendrix and a purveyor of virtuosic heavy metal. The impact of Ueno’s work is still positively palpable and sensuous, driven even when apparently static, with, at its core, that essentially human quality of played music, music that grows directly from the bodies and hands and hearts and minds of expressive musicians—music of real soul.
Ken Ueno’s new work, a BMOP commission, receives its world premiere this evening.
http://www.berklee.edu/careers/interviews/kenueno.html
What are the major achievements of your career?
As a composer, I have been actively involved in a wide range of activities in order to evangelize for modern music. As DJ Moderne, I host and produce a weekly live half-hour public access television show devoted to introducing new music and new music composers and performers to the public at large.
I have had the good fortune to have had performances by some great ensembles including: The Hilliard Ensemble, Albany Symphony's Dogs of Desire Ensemble, the American Composers Orchestra, the New York New Music Ensemble, the AUROS Group for New Music, ‘yesaroun, and Odd Appetite. Among those who have conducted my music are David Allan Miller, Paul Dunkel, Lawrence Leighton Smith and Harvey Sollberger.
Upcoming performances of my music include: Eighth Blackbird at Alice Tully Hall in New York's Lincoln Center (March 5th), International Electroacoustic Music in Cuba (March), the MATA festival (April 8th), Bang on a Can All-Stars at Harvard (May 25th), the Hilliard Ensemble at Engers, Germany (August 3rd), and a new work for the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College will be premiered in October. Recent residencies include travels to Alaska (November 2001) and Italy (Modena conservatory and Venice in January 2002).
In addition to composition, I have focused some of my academic energies toward research of Latin-American Electroacoustic music. I have contributed articles to a forthcoming book, Border Crossings: Latin American Music in New Contexts, to be published by University of California Press, and been invited to present a paper on Latin American composers at the Fifth International Congress of the Americas in October 2001.
What made you decide to pursue composing as a career?
It just gradually developed over time. There was no one definitive moment when I decided to become a composer.
What are the skills that you are called upon to use daily in your work?
There are compositional skills and administrative skills. The compositional skills are those that include the technical demands of creating the music - like having command over harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration, and using electronic music and notation software. The administrative skills are those involved in concert production - like preparing a budget for a concert series, calling performers and organizing rehearsals.
What is a normal day like in your line of work (assuming there is such a thing as a normal day)?
I usually spend a large portion of the day taking care of administrative details and I compose late into the night.
What is your favorite thing about your job and/or career?
Hearing a live performance of a composition. It takes a lot of time and an exaggerated amount of effort to get to it. It takes months of preparation on the part of the performers to play some of my music. It always amazes me, and I feel blessed to have in my life some people who devote so much time to learning my music. So when it all comes together, it's a collaboration between the composer, performer and the audience. It's a communal ritual, a celebration of human effort.
What is the most challenging aspect of your job and/or career?
Trying to remain faithful to the music and continuing to have the courage to be as radical as I feel I want to be. Trying to push myself so that I keep learning from and about music.
What are some of the rich rewards that have come with working in this field?
There isn't as much potential for financial rewards as in pop music. But, there is the potential satisfaction that one had lived an uncompromising life of art in having created the music that one wanted to make unencumbered artistically by the demands of consumerist tastes.
What do you think are the requisites for someone entering this field?
Traditionally, the requisites were/are: background in classical music; strong academic pedigree; a list of awards, performances and commissions. But I think more recently, and in the future, one needs only the will to be a composer. I came into music without a classical background. I started playing guitar at sixteen (16), and went off a year later to West Point to become an officer and serve my country. It took some time for music to become the most important thing in my life for me to want to pursue it seriously. But, I think my profile is increasingly sympathetic with the experience of many other American composers - especially the background in rock and jazz before going "classical."
How did your education at Berklee train you for what you are doing today?
It was at Berklee that John Bavicchi introduced me to Bartok's Fourth String Quartet and I heard Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. That was the impetus for everything that followed. Additionally, I think that the classes I took with Herb Pomeroy (Line Writing and the Duke Ellington classes) are still the best writing courses I have ever taken. Although I don't write much jazz anymore, his lessons still probably influence almost every compositional decision I make now - from a detailed consideration for the spacing of chords to a hyper-sensitivity for every interval and orchestrational color variable.
What are the current trends in the field of composing that will most likely shape your future and the future of this industry?
I think the two most important developments will be: 1) the further integration of live, real-time computer processing into compositional performance practice; and 2) the proliferation of non-traditional instrumental groups, including an increased participation of the composer as performer. I would like to see my main instrument, the electric guitar, come into its own as a concert instrument with new pieces that incorporate it in both chamber music and orchestral contexts. Additionally, I hope that in the future New Music will come out of the shadows of being a sub-category of Classical music and become an independent movement.
http://www.thephoenix.com/Article.aspx?id=14804&page=2
John Adams (b.
Ken Ueno: Latin American culture has made a resurgence of late. Not only are Latin American artists more visible and active in the United States, but also Latin American culture seems to be influencing our most important non-Latin American artists such as you. I would like to start our discussion by talking about your latest orchestral piece, the Nativity Oratorio El Niño that exemplifies this synergy between multiple cultures. You did your own translations. Do you speak Spanish? How well do you speak it?
John Adams: I'm not entirely fluent, but I have a comfortable reading knowledge and my spoken Spanish is improving by the day. It is easier to learn Spanish here in
Ueno: Were there intrinsic qualities of language that made working with Spanish appealing? How did you adapt the rhythms and qualities of the language to fit your musical style, or vice-versa?
Ueno: How did you go about transcribing the natural flow of the rhythms inherent in the Spanish language when you are not a native speaker?
Ueno: In composing a work in Spanish for an international audience, were you concerned that Americans in particular might associate the title El Niño with a meteorological phenomenon rather than the Nativity?
Ueno: The more violent aspects are certainly evident in the largest single section of the piece, which recounts the Slaughter of the Innocents. The text use you here is the Castellano in which she memorializes the slaughter of students during the 1968 revolt in
Ueno: How did you decide on the texts for El Niño
Ueno: When Peter Sellars suggested some of these Spanish texts to you, did he already have ideas about the piece?
Ueno: Composers from around the world are increasingly turning to ethnographic resources and popular music, not necessarily in their own culture. What are your thoughts on this so-called “globalization of culture”? To what degree do you feel you are dealing with aspects of culture, especially now having recently completed a major work which draws upon elements from Latin American culture?
Ueno: Do you think that Golijov’s use of Latin American rhythms and vernacular forms is culturally equivalent to your use of rock and roll references?
Ueno: You have conducted a lot of Ives, often programming pieces that showcase his interest in the vernacular. Another composer you have often conducted is Zappa, who in some ways is a more contemporary Ives.
Ueno: The composers who have a high profile in the
Ueno: Your method (or process) of composition depends upon computer technology in that you use sequencer software like Performer while composing. How dependent are you on that technology?
Ueno: Is it the empirical laboratory aspect that is helpful to you?
Ueno: Are there times when you are surprised when you hear the result with the live orchestra?
It would be interesting to study how working in a software environment has influenced the way one thinks creatively. Broadway composers would cut and paste, as did film composers (and I suppose Bruckner cut, if he didn’t paste), but that kind of procedure, which is so basic to this software world, was less commonplace when cut and paste meant an enormous physical effort. And here I can create structures by moving material around and I can also create kinds of harmonic relationships and contrapuntal relationships that one simply wouldn’t think of by walking in the woods or improvising at a piano.
Ueno: The pieces you were writing around 1992 and 1993 like the Violin Concerto and the Chamber Symphony represented a departure from your earlier work harmonically. This new progressive harmonic language seemed to point towards a completely new direction for your music, but in your compositions immediately following those pieces, like Gnarly Buttons, you reverted to the harmonic style of your earlier music. At that time, when I asked you about this return to a more familiar style, you said that you did not believe that a contemporary composer needed to be restrained by a linear, singular strand of artistic development, that there were many strands of styles and procedures from which one should be able to choose, as necessary, from composition to composition. More time has passed since Gnarly Buttons and you still have not investigated further the potential of the harmonic language in the Violin Concerto and the Chamber Symphony. Will you ever go back to that harmonic style?
Ueno: Did that level of dissonance did not feel natural to you?
Ueno: Your recent music, like Naive and Sentimental Music, has a dynamic orchestrational drama that is Mahlerian. In order to create a successful expanded time structure you depend more on extravagant contrasts in instrumental forces rather than on harmony. For example, juxtaposing the whole orchestra with passages for solo guitar.
Ueno: What do you mean by post-stylist?
Ueno: But there are composers working today with strong stylistic personalities. Your music has originality and a style that are definable.
Ueno: I wonder whether an underlying trend is that people are becoming less demagogic about their stylistic agenda or identity.
Ueno: Your music has always made references to vernacular styles, yet you have no qualms about being labeled a “classical” composer. Does that mean that you are addressing a more specialized audience for your music than the more general demographic that only listen to the vernacular styles?
Ueno: That is surprising to hear you say that, since you’re probably the highest profile American orchestral composer today.
Ueno: Does it bother you that classical music is not as much part of our life as pop culture?
Ueno: Why do successful and cultured people find complexity in music difficult to accept, whereas they are more likely to accept complexity when they experience other art forms?
Ueno: A lot of rap and heavy metal is more dissonant than most contemporary American classical music. Why is dissonance more problematic for classical music audiences than pop audiences?