Caroline Pittman in discussion

with composer Howard Sandroff

C: Howard, we are delighted that your piece is on our program and thank you for giving me this interview.

H: You’re welcome.

C: Tell me about your music.

H: I’ve been composing for a long time and this piece that is being performed this evening, the Adagio for Piano, I wrote in 1984. In the Adagio I happened on a compositional methodology, which I have been using to this day. So this work is important to me because it dictated the rest of my compositional life. Although I suppose I shouldn’t speak for the future.

C: You have a specific method that you use to teach your students composition.

H: Adagio is almost a primer for the way I teach. So that many of my students have experienced the progress of my method from this composition. However, It’s probably more interesting to talk about notions of the method rather than talk about the specifics of how I teach it.

The Adagio opens with a fairly austere sound object. It’s made up of five clusters, actually two clusters back to back. The sound object progresses from a very high-pitched cluster to a very low-pitched cluster, which collapses to become a chord of five pitches. Shortly after the chord introduces itself, counterpoint begins to grow from the middle. The image in my mind at the time was of a visual image that can exist vertically and horizontally at the same time.

I was plagued by this imagery for a long time and how to translate it into sound. One day I started composing this piece and finished it six weeks later, which for me, was unheard of. The composition came out like a great explosion. We hear a reiteration of this sound object as it takes itself apart and puts itself back together again both vertically and horizontally. That continues for the whole first section. The object reveals itself in many forms.

The one thing that became an obsession of mine compositionally was that I was not interested in musical ideas that developed. I think that is an old-fashioned idea, one that is purely European and I was looking for a different way of expressing myself musically. I think when we look at the 21^st century, what we mostly see are people writing using a newer kind of language, a non-diatonic sort of language, which nonetheless still develops from simple to more complex. I was interested in finding a different way of doing things. In general my compositions are not made up of material which depends upon hearing it in a certain order. In fact I’ve proven on a number of occasions that a piece works just as well when I rearrange the musical elements into a different order. In fact there is a version of the Adagio which is in a drastically different order and twice as long. Tonight’s performance is the original one I endeavored to keep.

The reason the compositions lend themselves to rearrangement is that no single part of a piece is dependent upon another for meaning. Each object can be confronted on its own terms in its own time without reference to something that happened earlier. The opening object exists fully developed right from the first moment. I manipulate it in ways that present it in other forms and they are neither simpler nor more complex, they are just different. The process can be likened to a Calder mobile, where the fixed elements, which never change, are only ever appreciated in their relationship to other fixed elements. What I decided in Adagio was to build all of the individual sound objects out of the same five pitches.

You have played Chant des Femmes and in fact it is also based on five pitches. You can hear them and feel them in your fingers because they are there all the time. They manifest themselves in different ways: Sometimes texturally, sometimes melodically and sometimes timbrally.

C: One of the qualities I love about Chant des Femmes, for flutes and electronics, is its lyricism. Do you think that might have come from you originally playing violin as a child?

H: No, I think it is probably comes more from the charge. Mary Stolper asked me to write her a piece and it was just time to write a lyrical piece, maybe the flute is a lyrical instrument. Maybe all flutists are lyrical people, maybe I had arrived at a point in my own life where I was Lyrical, I can’t quite see that but you know anything’s possible. Perhaps this method is more lyrical in Chant des Femmes than it is in the Adagio, which is somewhat austere. But that is partly because Chant was composed fifteen years later and I had greater mastery over the technique. The one thing that everyone needs to understand is that ultimately composers teach themselves to compose. You may have teachers and they may show you how to push notes around, but before it’s really meaningful, at least for myself, you need to teach yourself the way in which these things serve you. It’s a lifetime’s quest and less about finding the answer than it is about making the journey. So I would never say that I had really mastered the technique because if I had then there would be no further reason to compose. So, the Adagio is important to me because of what it forced me to discover.

Part of the fascination of composing is that so much of it is magic. Magic in a sense that it defies explanation. There are things that I know I do because they are part of my technique. I push the notes around to accomplish a certain musical goal, but that doesn’t explain everything because in the end there are lots of things in a musical composition that defy description or analysis. That’s what I call the magic. The most important question is can I do it again? That is the horrifying question for all artists, can I do it anytime I want. The great fear is that after you finish a piece… can you make another one? If you can’t is it because you couldn’t call up the magic, but I don’t know. Lots of pieces that I start never got finished, because I recognized at some point in the process that the magic wasn’t there so rather than belabor either myself of the world, I just stopped composing that piece. My output is very small, not because I don‘t compose, but because I don’t finish the pieces that I don’t think have the magic. Unfortunately, there are more pieces that don’t have magic than there are that do. So at least from one point of view I can say with confidence that I feel good about the works of mine that are out there. The ones I had doubts about never made it to the light of day. They exist only in the file cabinet, usually for good reason.

C: As a performer, I feel that composers often don’t use enough editing.

H: Every note must have a reason for being; every note must be justified. The craft is about only producing that, which is necessary. It is a minimalistic approach. Although as I said, there is a magic component that lives within the composition, everything that the composer puts in is an act of cognition, an act of intelligence. In my view that art of composition is motivated by reason therefore, every note must have justification.

C: For whom did you write the Adagio?

H: I wrote Adagio for Salvatore Spina, who performed the premiere on WFMT radio shortly after it was completed. Abe Stokman recorded the work in the early 1990’s and it was released on a Centaur CD. I think it takes a special pianist to appreciate what’s happening in the piece. Sebastian Huydts was my composition student a few years back and I know that he has taken the method and applied it to his own composition teaching. I think that gives him an added appreciation of the piece and I am really looking forward to hearing his interpretation.