.  He mentioned to me that he would like to know when the interview would run on so that he could alert his friends in Chicago.  This led to my first question . . . . .


BD:    This idea of knowing about the interview brings up one of my favorite questions.  Are you not aware of the performances of your music that take place all over the world?

AI:    I know about some of them.  Of course, if there are some that I don’t know about, then I don’t know them.  [Laughs]

BD:    Are there many more than you know about?

AI:    I doubt it.  I do receive communications from B.M.I., the royalty-collecting agency.  So when there’s a radio performance, for example, or a concert performance, in some other country or even in this country, I usually hear about it that way, if I don’t hear about it in other ways.  They have a monitoring service.

BD:    Are you pleased with the various performances that you have heard of your music?

AI:    Very much so, on the whole.  I’ve had some very good experiences.  I remember one time hearing a recording of a work of mine, which I had never had recorded and didn’t know it was going to take place.  It turned out very well.  It was a recording of a piece called Dandelion Wine, and it came out on a Turnabout disk several years back.  I was delighted with it, although I had never met any of the musicians involved.  It’s always nice to be present at the rehearsal just before the final rehearsal, so that you can make a few suggestions, but it isn’t always possible.

BD:    Are you a big suggestion maker?

AI:    Not a big one.  I usually listen very carefully and take notes, and then I make a few comments.  But in case of a first performance, I am usually a little more comprehensive in my suggestions because sometimes it’s my fault if I haven’t quite got the balance correct.  I may ask somebody to do something, play a little louder or a little softer than I had indicated, and things of that sort.  But if it’s a piece that has been performed a number of times in which these problems have been ironed out, I usually don’t have to make too many suggestions.

BD:    Talking about first performances, are you ever surprised with the way things sound?

AI:    Well, less than I used to be!  [Both laugh]  After a certain amount of experience, you begin to have a pretty good idea how things are going to turn out.  I must say that the surprises have often been pleasant ones, too.  There’s a recent work of mine called Pilgrimage which was first performed in Cambridge by a group called Collage Ensemble.  When I first heard them rehearse the work I was very pleased; it sounded much more brilliant than I had even expected it to.  They were excellent players, of course, and so that was a very pleasant experience for me.  As a matter of fact, I’m now writing another piece for a similar combination.

BD:    Are you pleased with the direction that music is going today?

AI:    [Laughs] I don’t really know what that direction is.  There are many different directions, and what I am pleased with is the fact that there are always talented students coming along who are doing interesting things.  They may not all be going in the same direction, but there’s something underneath it all which is reassuring.  One kind of experience that I find reassuring is that of serving on a jury, often made up of different composers with very different persuasions.  The jury will look at forty or fifty manuscripts, or tapes, and try to award a scholarship or a prize to the best one.  Over and over again I have been impressed by the fact that talent is recognized very readily by such a jury, even though the composers on the jury may be of very different aesthetic persuasions.  They all recognize what constitutes a talented young composer.

BD:    What exactly are you looking for?  Are you looking for the best piece, or the most potential?

AI:    Depending on what level you’re talking about, you can give awards to students or you can give awards to composers who have been professional composers for a number of years.  So in the former case you’re looking for promise, and in the latter case you’re looking for the best piece or what seems to be the most individual expression and the most convincing expression from many points of view.  I think that a really talented, original piece is recognizable by a group of experienced composers of many different persuasions, and that tends to suggest to my mind the fact that there is a common denominator of some sort which we ourselves may not be able to explain, but that we all have a feeling for what it means to be a good composer.

BD:    Do you feel that you and your music are part of a musical lineage?  Do you fit into the musical world which is going on?

AI:    Yes.  You’re asking a question which really urges me to pretend that I’m a historian, rather than a composer.

BD:    Right, right.  Take yourself out of the picture and look at it.

AI:    This is a very tricky area because everybody has an axe to grind.  Everybody thinks that the music he or she is writing is the best.  Otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it; we’d be doing something else.  So to get out of that and try to decide whether my music is in the mainstream or a tributary would be impossible for me to say.  I do think that the music I write does have its antecedents.  I find that when I write music, I am constantly doing turns of phrase and composing things which certainly resemble other music that I have heard.  I’ve become less and less worried about that because I begin to realize that what constitutes originality is not just the physical fact of not sounding anything like anything that’s been written before.  Being original means somehow conveying a fresh vision of things, and the language you use to express that must, in some ways, resemble the languages that have been used before — just as if you are writing poetry, you still have to use the English language or the French language or whatever language you choose, but there has to be a language in which your ideas are communicated.  To that extent, you’re using the same words, the same constructions, that other people have used, but you’re using them somewhat differently.

BD:    The biography of you in the Grove Dictionary says, “Your style is characterized by sharply profiled, often lyrical melodic lines, and by clarity of phrasing, brilliant orchestration, rhythmic animation, and a commitment to classical motivic development, balance, and overall shape.”  [See my Interview with Stanley Sadie, editor of The New Grove Dictionary.]

AI:    Wow!

BD:    Do you feel that’s an accurate description?

AI:    Well, I think that all of those things I would like to have said about my music.  I don’t see anything there that I would want to disagree with on principle.  I hope my music is as good as that makes it sound.  [Laughs]  When they say classical motivic development, I suppose it means that I recognize the fact that a certain group of intervals, played in a certain way with certain rhythms, can be recognized, and the fact that it can be recognized can be used by the composer as a way of creating continuity and coherence.  In other words, I’m not afraid of the idea of a motive, if that’s what they mean by that.  I’m not afraid of taking something and repeating it, or varying it in such as way as to continue the musical discourse in an effective manner.  I’m not one of those composers who try to avoid repetition of all kinds and try to make very moment absolutely brand new.  I don’t think that’s possible, actually.

BD:    Not possible, and not even desirable?

AI:    I don’t think it’s even possible to do that.

BD:    What do you as a composer expect of the public that comes to hear your music?

AI:    I would like them to meet me halfway! [Laughs] I think that’s what I would expect.  I would like them to listen, and not to start thinking about other things.  I would like them to be alert and to pay attention, and I would hope that if they are alert and if they do pay attention, that their attention will be rewarded.  And in order to do this they should have some experience with other music.  It isn’t possible to communicate with someone who has absolutely no background in music at all, but I would say the average concert-going audience certainly ought to be able to enter into what I’m trying to say, musically.  I’ve had the experience of having audiences respond positively, so I assume that it’s possible.  There are always some who don’t respond, and this is the way it always is, too.

BD:    Let me turn the question around.  What is the obligation of the composer?

AI:    Well, I think the obligation of the composer is to project his ideas.  Lots of people can walk along the street and say they have a wonderful idea, but they can’t put it on paper.  Or when they put it on paper, it doesn’t make any sense to anyone else.  What you have to do is to capture the essence of your own idea and try to project it as clearly as possible.  That’s where technique comes in.  You wear a critical hat as well as a creative hat when you compose, and you have to keep changing those hats back and forth, just the way a painter will step back from his canvas and squint at it, and then come back and paint some more.  I think the purpose of the squinting at it is to put himself in the place of the viewer, in this case.  Likewise, the composer is obligated to put himself in the place of the listener and imagine that this was a piece written by someone else.  Would it make any sense?  You don’t even have to go through that exercise; you know darn well, sometimes, that it doesn’t make sense.  You’re trying to say something and it isn’t coming through.  That means that you as listener are not in tune with you as composer; you haven’t quite figured out what it is that needs to be clarified in order to make that idea project across the footlights.  It’s like being an actor.  You have to have a sense of timing; you have to know how to project your lines, your words, your gestures, perhaps even a little larger than life, in order to make them as clear as possible.  I think this applies to the music of Bach as much as it does to the music of Tchaikovsky.  It’s not a question of hamming it up in a vulgar sense; it’s a question of your gestures being unmistakable.  That’s what I think the composer’s obligation is, in a nutshell.  Of course, this is all a great oversimplification.

BD:    Oh sure, sure.  You’ve spent a lifetime delving into all of this and you could probably write volumes and volumes about it.  A brief interview on the radio is just an overview.

AI:    I’d rather spend the time writing the music.

BD:    Ah!  Well, for whom do you write?  Do you write for a specific public, or do you write for yourself? 

AI:    In one sense, I write for myself.  I think everybody has to do that first, but I should qualify that by saying that I regard myself as a member of the human race, a member of the society in which I live.  So when I write for myself, I’m writing for myself as listener, assuming that if I like it, somebody else may.  If I don’t like it, I don’t think anybody else will.  I think you’ll find most composers will say this, no matter what their persuasion.  I’ve heard this same statement made by many composers on interviews and panel discussions.  It seems it’s sort of like the stock answer that every composer comes up with when asked that question, so I don’t claim any originality for this, but I think it’s true nevertheless.

BD:    Are there not pieces that you don’t like, which are either acknowledged masterpieces, or at least are quite popular among other people?

AI:    Oh, yes!  There are plenty of pieces that are very popular that I don’t like, and there are some that aren’t popular that I do like.  But when I write, I don’t write for a particular segment of the population.  I don’t say, “This is for you, and this is not for you.”  I’m too busy trying to make the darn thing work; too busy trying to make the piece really get off the ground and really stand there!  My main job when I’m composing is to put something together that won’t fall apart the minute I walk out of the room!  And if it stands on its own feet, as it were, then I feel that I’ve succeeded.  Now what does it mean by standing on its own feet?  It means that I don’t have to be there in order to have this piece do its job.  In other words, a group of performers can get together and perform that piece, and an audience can listen to it, and something, some kind of communication, will take place.  I would hope that the audience would be as large as possible; I never have any feeling of being in a little ghetto of composers who only write for each other.  This is a common myth that people invent about composers today; they think that composers spend their time writing for each other.  But I couldn’t think of anything less interesting than writing a piece just to be listened to by other composers.  I would find that a very futile occupation.

BD:    You say that it’s really a myth, that it’s not going on, though it seems to be.

AI:    I don’t think it’s going on at all!  I don’t think any composer would admit that it was going on.  I don’t know one single composer who would come right out and say, “I’m writing this piece for other composers.”  I’ve never heard anyone say that, or imply that.

BD:    Then why has the myth grown up?

AI:    I think it’s because a lot of the contemporary music is difficult.  It tends to demand a kind of listening which some people are not willing to give, so they assume that somehow the composer is pulling a fast one, or the composer is simply writing for someone else.  I suppose that’s what it really is.  A lot of people seem to think that if they don’t like the music, well, “It’s not for me.  It’s for somebody else.”  So that’s where this myth gets started, but I don’t think the composer looks at it that way.

BD:    How do we get the public to appreciate, or at least enjoy, more contemporary music?

AI:    Well, that’s the question.  I think a lot of them do.  I think that the audience for contemporary music is a fairly substantial one, actually.  If you compare it to the audience for, let’s say, Mozart’s music in Mozart’s time, that was a very limited audience, limited to a certain class of people and a certain geographic locality.

BD:    But don’t we really have to compare the audience of today with other audiences today, rather than something that happened three hundred years ago?

AI:    Well, yes, that’s true.  But I don’t think that you’re going to get the same size audience for a new work that you’re going to get for Beethoven, or Tchaikovsky because these things are very familiar; they’re classics and people feel comfortable and safe with them.  Of course, they are marvelous pieces, and they keep revealing themselves anew each time you hear them.  They’re miracles.  I’m as much of a Beethoven fan as anyone else, and I wouldn’t want my music to supplant Beethoven’s.

BD:    But you would like it to stand alongside, yes?

AI:    I would like it to stand alongside Beethoven, and everybody else’s music.  If it doesn’t, if contemporary music doesn’t take its place beside the others, then the concert hall will become a museum instead of a living experience for people.

BD:    Let’s talk about some of your music specifically now.  First of all, the Violin Concerto.  Tell me a bit about this work.

AI:    It was written a long time ago.  Actually, it was completed in 1954, but it was begun even quite a bit before that.  I interrupted it to write some other pieces.  It was originally written just because I wanted to write a violin concerto.  There was no firm commission from anybody.  I was in my early thirties at the time, and it was a piece that I put a lot of work into.  Then after I finished two movements of it, I did get some commissions for some chamber music, so I dropped it, and then somewhat later I came back and finished the last movement.  It sat on the shelf for four years because there was no one who particularly wanted to perform it.   Then when we opened our new music building at the University of California in Berkeley in 1958, there was some money from the university which was given out in order to have performances in the new auditorium.  The San Francisco Symphony was going to be invited to give one of the opening concerts, and I asked to have this work included in the program.  That’s how it got its premiere.  It went very well, and since then it has had a number of performances and it’s been recorded.

BD:    Do you advise young composers, or even old composers, to write what they want rather than waiting for commissions?

AI:    They should always write!  If there are no commissions coming up, you write anyway.  Over the last several years I’ve had enough commissions to keep me busy, but occasionally there’s been a hiatus.  About four or five years ago there was a soprano student at the conservatory who asked me to write a song cycle for her.  I had nothing else to do, so I did it and that piece has been performed by a number of different singers.  It’s now being published, but normally, if there’s no commission, just write for whoever wants to sing or play your music.  If there is a commission, then that, of course, takes precedence.

BD:    Do you accept every commission that comes your way?  [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my Interviews with Leslie Bassett, Robert Erickson, Robert Hall Lewis, Ralph Shapey, William O. Smith, and Harvey Sollberger.]

AI:    I sometimes have to postpone them.  If someone commissions something, I say, “Well, I’ve got three or four commissions that I have to complete first.”  I will get around to it as soon as I can, and sometimes the opportunity just slips away because I haven’t been able to get around to it and something else takes its place.  I think I’ve accepted most of the commissions that have come along.

BD:    I just wondered if there was ever a case where they asked you to do something you really didn’t feel like writing.

AI:    If that were the case, I would say no, but usually I find it an interesting challenge.  Sometimes I’m not sure that I want to do it, but then when I get into it, I enjoy it.  I once wrote a piece for four solo voices with piano accompaniment, and that group disbanded before I could finish it.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to write it in the first place, but I got into it and got quite interested.  Then another group finally took it up and performed it.  It’s a little like being an architect in which somebody says, “I have a lot.  It’s this size and it’s on a hill and it faces this direction and I need so many bathrooms.”  As soon as the parameters of the problem are described, it becomes kind of an incentive to see what you would do to solve the problem.  Sometimes your musical ideas begin to take shape as a result of the limitations that are imposed by the person who wants to commission the work.  I’ve always found it to be a great stimulus, actually.

BD:    Do you feel you’re a musical architect?

AI:    Well, in a way.  I like to try something I haven’t tried before.  The piece that I mentioned a moment ago, Pilgrimage, was something that I wrote for this ensemble which had a percussion player in it.  I had never written a chamber work involving percussion before.  I had used percussion in orchestral works, but I knew that a lot of people nowadays were using percussion in chamber music, and I thought it was about time that I did it, too.  Here was the opportunity, so somewhat hesitantly I started doing this and I got fascinated with the possibilities.  I felt that I was doing it in a way that was different from the other pieces I’d heard.  I’d always had certain reservations about the use of percussion in chamber ensembles, and I think that I was able to get around the things that bothered me about it.  I ended up writing a piece that pleased me very much.

BD:    Have you ever written a piece that you feel has just turned out completely the wrong way, or do you abandon it before it gets to that point?

AI:    I try to fix it.  There are some; obviously I don’t like all the pieces I’ve written as well as all the others.  There are some that I like better.  I think there are a few pieces I wrote in the past which I don’t have any great desire to hear performed again, and there are some that if they were to be performed again, I would want to go back and fix them up a little bit.  I remember I had one interesting experience:  I wrote a symphony for an orchestra in England, the Halle Orchestra of Manchester, and when it was performed, I realized that there was one part toward the end which I had miscalculated orchestrally.  It just wasn’t coming off properly.  When that piece was going to be performed again by the Oakland Symphony here in California, I had a chance to fix the orchestration and make it work better.  I was much more pleased with the results and it was later recorded by the London Symphony.  So I had an opportunity to actually improve the piece because I had miscalculated it on the first run around.  That happens occasionally.

BD:    Then what do you say to the musicologist a hundred years from now who goes back and says, “Let’s dig up the first versions, and the original versions.”

AI:    I wouldn’t want that.  This happens, you know.  The symphonies of Bruckner are a good example.  Apparently he revised his symphonies so there are several versions of them.  I know that Mahler, in the middle of his career, was changing the orchestration of his fourth and fifth symphonies, I believe.  In the light of his experience as a conductor, and having performed them, he went back and revised them.  I’m not enough of a scholar to have an opinion on which version is the best, in the case of Bruckner.  But I would imagine in the case of Mahler I would pick the latest revision because he was a pretty canny orchestrator.  I think that the reason he revised so many times was that he was an innovator in the whole field of orchestration.  He was doing things that were really quite unusual and unprecedented, and he had to try them out.  I don’t suppose any of us have the genius that Mahler had in handling the orchestra, but I know that we all have our own idea of how something should sound, and trying to realize that ideal in actual orchestral technique, or instrumental technique, is not always easy.  You have to develop your own language as you go along, so there are times when you may want to revise.

Impressario on the first performance, but could also be done with another contemporary opera.  It’s a piece that calls for about five soloists and an orchestra of about thirty-five musicians and a chorus.  It’s a magical tale and something of a satire as well.  It’s hard to describe.  The main characters are three men, sort of Dickens-like caricature characters, who are the commissioners of this town, who decree that Christmas will be abolished!  As a result, the sun refuses to rise the next morning.  And of course, through the intermediary attentions of the heroine, who is a young girl who prays for all the people involved, she finally persuades the sun to rise.  The three commissioners mend their ways and decide to have Christmas every day of the year — July, August, it doesn’t make any difference.  So there’s a little bit of satire involved.  It doesn’t make any sense when I just give you the barebones outline, but it was an interesting experience.  What it did for me was to give me enough experience with opera so that when I had the opportunity to write a full-length opera, I didn’t feel as if I were going into it with no experience at all.  

BD:    Then let’s talk about the big work, Angle of Repose.  This was a commission from the San Francisco Opera?

AI:    Yes, this was a bicentennial commission.  Kurt Adler, who at that time was the director of the San Francisco Opera, decided that he wanted an American work for the bicentennial, rather than a European work.  I understand the Chicago Lyric Opera commissioned the Polish composer Krzystof Penderecki.

BD:    Yes, and we got Paradise Lost, which surprised everybody and baffled a few.

AI:    I think it baffled Adler, and it may be partly because of that that he decided he would not commission a foreign composer to celebrate the American bicentennial, but he would commission an American composer.  And he wanted to commission one who lived in the San Francisco area, so I was very fortunate in being the one that he chose.  The novel is by Wallace Stegner, a first-rate American novelist who has written many novels having to do with the West.  But he doesn’t write Westerns; he writes psychological novels and novels about Americans.  He didn’t want to do the libretto himself, for reasons which would be easy to understand.  I don’t think he wanted to tear his masterpiece apart and revise it in order to make an opera out of it.  We were able to get a librettist named Oakley Hall, who is also a novelist.  He worked up the libretto for it, and we worked together very intensively for a year and a quarter.  He first mapped out the scenario and wrote a libretto, and I would set it to music.  Then he’d call me on the phone and say he wanted to change something, and I’d say, “Well, I’m sorry.  I’ve already set that to music,” and we’d go to the mat over that.  Sometimes I could persuade him to leave it the way it was; sometimes I was able to accommodate the music to the new version.  But in any case, we worked it out very amicably, and it was a very interesting.

BD:    Did you have any input into the libretto?

AI:    Yes, I was able to make suggestions.  To give an example, I felt very strongly that the mezzo-soprano soloist, one of the important characters, should have a big aria at the end of the second act.  I knew what the content of the aria should be, essentially, but he didn’t see how you could end an act on what, to him, was just a soliloquy.  He’s not a musician, although he likes opera, but the thought of having an act close with one person just telling you exactly how she felt about everything didn’t seem very dramatic to him.  I had to persuade him that nothing is more effective than to end on a brilliant aria

This interview was recorded on the telephone on April 26, 1986.  Portions (along with recordings) were broadcast on WNIB later that year and again in 1991 and 1996.  The transcription was made in 2008 and posted on this website in January of 2009. 

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.