Music I Am #43 – Douglas Boyce, composer
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The moment when you knew you wanted to be a musician:
It is an interesting question because the start of my interest in music-per-se was quite epiphanous: watching a videotape of Stop Making Sense in my junior year of high school and feeling ‘what the hell was all that!’ at the end. But the shift of my primary interests (physics, mathematics, classics, and history) had a much slower unfolding, happening over several years, with numerous, analogous eureka moments: first hearing Coltrane (suggested by my first piano teacher, a Franciscan nun with three music degrees from Eastman), first hearing Crumb (at a concert in an art museum where I walked in late and saw a percussionist drumming on bass strings ), first hearing Ars Subtilor (at a concert featuring the astounding Enemble P.A.N.), the last two in my freshman year at Williams College. But the story of how the idea of music as a career/life-project is less about inspiration and more about necessity: the conversations around whether my undergrad honors project would be in Physics or Music, with my teachers, family, friends, and myself were quite… fraught.
An important skill for a career in music that does not have anything to do with an instrument or making music:
I’ll give two. Skill at long-term planning, as in organizing one’s life but also practical stuff of Gannt diagrams and how to REALLY use a spreadsheet. That stuff matters to a surprising degree. A deep knowledge and earnest interest in at least one other domain of human life and thought. In a moment wherein the support for the arts and indeed the foundations of the noösphere are collapsing, as musicians, we must effectively translate our praxis and our intentions, and be able to do so without oversimplifying them or relying on existing ideologies about music in the world of non-musicians. As thinkers like Gadamer and (Richard) Bernstein taught us, the conversation across domains of thought is essential but requires a great deal of work to engage in a truly engaged pluralism. And if we can’t pull that off, we’re in even bigger trouble than it looks like we are.
Two ways you stay motivated:
Coffee & Deadlines. They are, in actuality, serious points, but let me explain. I arrange things, whenever I can, such that my morning coffee is consumed as I am consuming. Yes, I need to get up early and hit the ground running, but I have found over time that when I do that not only do I stay productive, but the rest of the day feels good because whatever annoying administrative grind I need to deal with, I can think back out the day being productive, and encourage to start the next day the same way Deadlines matter not just because they are obligations (contractual or reputational) but because I am lucky (and have worked hard (as echoed below) to work with wonderful players and (more importantly) wonderful friends and partners in the strange voyages of modern music. And so, the deadline is an obligation in the way that finding the right birthday present for a friend is. You put in the time because it is the right thing to do and to be doing, even when pressed.
Latest Project:
The Bird is an Alphabet is an album of new settings of American poets (Jorie Graham, BJ Ward, Wallace Stevens, Melissa Range, and Marlanda Dekine). All the poems are interrogations of language, of the word, and its role in life, and in the creative life; the music draws upon art-song, medieval music, modernist chamber music, and the energy and freedom of hip-hop.
What inspired it:
The album connects to many themes of my work; A Book of Songs (recorded by tenor Robert Baker (tenor) and Molly Orlando (piano)) links the European 19th-century art-song tradition inaugurated with the modernist aesthetic which replaced its rhetoric. Scriptorium written for Byrne:Kozar:Duo by Melissa Range (Lawrence University) puts forward an evocation of the medieval ars veterum practices, but more severe in its outcome the work sets for poems. Ars Poetica was written for counter)induction and the poet, Marlanda Dekine, and provides musical spaces for the spoken performance of her poetry of personal history, and cultural form. As mentioned above, all of these works are written _for_ the performers, and so they are inspired by the texts, but also by the beautiful musicianship of those who would be joining the fun after the pieces were ‘done.’
Who’s on it:
A Book of Songs: Robert Baker, tenor, Molly Orlando, piano Scriptorium: Byrne:Kozar:Duo Ars Poetica: counter)induction, Marlanda Dekine (poet)
How do you discover new music?
If you are very careful and devout in what you engage with on social media, the algorithm will reward you; also, even if you find and listen to regional radio shows online you will often find a coherent, cogent sense of what is going on in the community.
One living and one dead musician that deserves more attention:
- Guillaume de Machaut: yes, not unknown, but not truly given the detailed study by more people. As I say to my students, you will come away from engaging with his music thinking that we’ve been in decline since 1350.
- Elena Mendoza: Look up Nebelsplitter, and fasten your seatbelts.
Where can we find you online?
Upcoming Event you’d like to share?
Ars Poetica performed by counter)induction and Marlanda Dekine at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Saturday, January 13, 8:00 pm https://www.music.pitt.edu/events/season
pic 2: Marlanda Dekine, Caleb van der Swaag, and Dan Lippel
