Derek Bermel
A Shout, a Whisper, and a Trace
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“New York - brimming with the hopes, fears, and yearnings associated with exile,” is what we read in the program notes for A Shout, a Whisper, and a Trace (2009). Is it about the importance of being earnest or something else entirely for all to find their own place in NYC?
I’ve often been asked to compose a “New York piece”, or to write about the “New York experience” (and more recently the “Brooklyn experience…”). This is a tough request for me, because I was born in New York, so I can’t witness it through the essential prism of “otherness”. |
Photo by: Richard Bowditch |
New York is a destination; people usually arrive here for a reason — seeking a specific dream, fleeing from elsewhere — but for me New York is an origin, a point of departure.
In A shout, a whisper, and a trace I tried to view the city through the eyes of an immigrant. I had been rereading the letters that the composer Béla Bartók wrote to his friends and family in Budapest, a home he would never see again. His perspective gave me an outsider’s frame for an all-too-familiar place. Composing necessitates solitude, a kind of a self-imposed exile. This imperative – to be apart – may stem from a quasi-scientific desire to seek objectivity, to deal honestly with cruel truths. Of course, one can never truly be objective, but the perspective of an outsider may help creative artists to identify and organize our own version of the world.
At times I’ve sought out specific experiences – living in another country, learning to perform or analyze an unfamiliar musical tradition – in which I participated as an outsider. This is a different type of self-imposed exile that over the years has deepened my identity as a New Yorker and an American.
In A shout, a whisper, and a trace I tried to view the city through the eyes of an immigrant. I had been rereading the letters that the composer Béla Bartók wrote to his friends and family in Budapest, a home he would never see again. His perspective gave me an outsider’s frame for an all-too-familiar place. Composing necessitates solitude, a kind of a self-imposed exile. This imperative – to be apart – may stem from a quasi-scientific desire to seek objectivity, to deal honestly with cruel truths. Of course, one can never truly be objective, but the perspective of an outsider may help creative artists to identify and organize our own version of the world.
At times I’ve sought out specific experiences – living in another country, learning to perform or analyze an unfamiliar musical tradition – in which I participated as an outsider. This is a different type of self-imposed exile that over the years has deepened my identity as a New Yorker and an American.
The Migration Series, commissioned by Wynton Marsalis for the Jazz Lincoln Center Orchestra and the American Composers Orchestra – an amazing piece of music that deals with such a major issue as migration. Why and how all this concern from a New York City composer?
New York has always been kinetic, a place of hybridity, movement and the collision of styles and cultures. For centuries folks have been arriving from every part of the world, like the European colonists, like Lawrence, like Bartók, like my family (who are Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews).
Since childhood I have been drawn to Jacob Lawrence’s artwork. He was a Harlem Renaissance artist determined to tell a story ignored by the history books — the story of the Great Migration. African-American history has always been the dark mirror of America’s history; it’s the blues, the picture of Dorian Gray, the story behind our official History. Lawrence’s paintings dance, mourn, insinuate, improvise; they shout. His Migration Series is a mosaic, so much more than the sum of its sixty individual paintings. That mosaic quality is what I wanted to convey in music, so that the rhythms, melodies, and timbres – like the shapes, lines, and colors in Lawrence’s paintings – would take on personalities like characters in a play, colliding and meshing in various ways throughout the five movements.
Back in 2005, Wynton had requested from me a newly composed work for jazz band and symphony orchestra. I gave myself the challenge of writing a concerto for big band, in which the LCJO was nested inside the strings. It’s always tricky and magical when these two worlds meet and cooperate. I learned a great deal from the process, and I’m gratified that it continues to be performed, especially in recent years.
Listening to your Soul Garden for viola solo and string quintet, I wonder – did you have a visual representation that helped you jot down those notes or if not what was the creative process for it?
Not really. Contrary to my process with Migration Series, I tend not to think visually. I used to love transcribing the vocal gymnastics of my favorite singers, like Sarah Vaughan and Stevie Wonder, trying to write down all their virtuosic twists and turns. I used quarter-tones, glissandi, very detailed rhythms to get minute details down on the page. Slowly I developed a notational system to render as accurately as possible the bends and swoops of their vocal lines. Later I began transferring these rhythms to string instruments, in my first quartet, then later and more clearly in Coming Together and Soul Garden.
It may sound corny, but for me composing – and listening to – music is a journey. Because musical form can be so abstract, it yearns for clarity in expression. So I prefer to start a piece simply, a point of departure in which the gestures are unambiguous.
Everything in Soul Garden is derived from the opening melodic line; the form followed the development of the musical material. I started by humming a simple song; I wrote harmony and counterpoint at the piano, and then I wrote out the vocal ornamentations in my “new” notation, for strings. I used the melody first in a collaboration with the British choreographer Sheron Wray. Later, Paul Neubauer helped me to further refine the viola notation; I am really indebted to him. Composer/violist Kenji Bunch also helped. My models – for development and counterpoint respectively – were Beethoven and Bach.
New York has always been kinetic, a place of hybridity, movement and the collision of styles and cultures. For centuries folks have been arriving from every part of the world, like the European colonists, like Lawrence, like Bartók, like my family (who are Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews).
Since childhood I have been drawn to Jacob Lawrence’s artwork. He was a Harlem Renaissance artist determined to tell a story ignored by the history books — the story of the Great Migration. African-American history has always been the dark mirror of America’s history; it’s the blues, the picture of Dorian Gray, the story behind our official History. Lawrence’s paintings dance, mourn, insinuate, improvise; they shout. His Migration Series is a mosaic, so much more than the sum of its sixty individual paintings. That mosaic quality is what I wanted to convey in music, so that the rhythms, melodies, and timbres – like the shapes, lines, and colors in Lawrence’s paintings – would take on personalities like characters in a play, colliding and meshing in various ways throughout the five movements.
Back in 2005, Wynton had requested from me a newly composed work for jazz band and symphony orchestra. I gave myself the challenge of writing a concerto for big band, in which the LCJO was nested inside the strings. It’s always tricky and magical when these two worlds meet and cooperate. I learned a great deal from the process, and I’m gratified that it continues to be performed, especially in recent years.
Listening to your Soul Garden for viola solo and string quintet, I wonder – did you have a visual representation that helped you jot down those notes or if not what was the creative process for it?
Not really. Contrary to my process with Migration Series, I tend not to think visually. I used to love transcribing the vocal gymnastics of my favorite singers, like Sarah Vaughan and Stevie Wonder, trying to write down all their virtuosic twists and turns. I used quarter-tones, glissandi, very detailed rhythms to get minute details down on the page. Slowly I developed a notational system to render as accurately as possible the bends and swoops of their vocal lines. Later I began transferring these rhythms to string instruments, in my first quartet, then later and more clearly in Coming Together and Soul Garden.
It may sound corny, but for me composing – and listening to – music is a journey. Because musical form can be so abstract, it yearns for clarity in expression. So I prefer to start a piece simply, a point of departure in which the gestures are unambiguous.
Everything in Soul Garden is derived from the opening melodic line; the form followed the development of the musical material. I started by humming a simple song; I wrote harmony and counterpoint at the piano, and then I wrote out the vocal ornamentations in my “new” notation, for strings. I used the melody first in a collaboration with the British choreographer Sheron Wray. Later, Paul Neubauer helped me to further refine the viola notation; I am really indebted to him. Composer/violist Kenji Bunch also helped. My models – for development and counterpoint respectively – were Beethoven and Bach.
Artistic Director of the American Composers Orchestra, teaching master classes in the best schools around the country, traveling, exploring, playing music, most importantly writing music and words. What’s the secret to successfully juggling so many roles, being really good at everything and creating, writing, constantly, despite deadlines, daily mayhem or routine and so on? Is it a mastery in itself or a state of mind or …?
All those roles you mention – teaching, performing, curating, writing (words) – are just outgrowths of the creative impulse, other ways of stimulating the mind and reimagining the impossibly difficult and evanescent philosophical questions.
You ask about success, but I always feel like I’m failing! Failing to master a musical technique or a language, failing to say what I mean, even failing my family and friends, myself…. Maybe it’s the human condition to never feel fully satisfied. I love what Samuel Beckett wrote: ‘Fail again, fail better’. I’m a chronic reviser and tinkerer, and it probably makes my work better than it would be otherwise. Oh dear, I’m not being very inspiring, am I? Well, while I’m on a roll, here’s another quote, from Paul Verlaine: “A poem is never finished. It is only abandoned.” Depressing, but also exquisite!
Reality is much messier than our dreams. But I take heart from this concept: if completeness is not a point of arrival, but merely a hazy aim, then I’m allowed to strive for gorgeously impossible things. And when striving for a lofty, unachievable goal and fall short, I may nonetheless emerge in a place that’s new and unusual. And, exploring that interesting island on which I’ve landed, my failure can become a sort of success.
When I wrote my clarinet concerto Voices, I set out to make the orchestra sound like a human voice. Talk about a recipe for failure! It’s built right in to the proposition. But even realizing the impossibilities, something kept gnawing at me to pick up the pencil and continue writing.
Maybe it’s that kind of idealism, even in the face of predestined failure, from which all art springs.
In your blog entry, Bad Reviews and Mortality, you end it by saying, “So as the bad reviews roll in, I try to seek a modicum of Zen, grateful that — at least for the time being — when my tree falls in the forest, it doesn’t fall on deaf ears.” Never a heartbreak that called for some kind of different therapy, like breaking/smashing stuff up or does reason always prevail no matter what?
Oh no, reason never prevails! Note the phrases “try to seek” and “for the time being”.
I’m flesh and blood, a temporal, physical creature, and thus utterly emotional. My dad was British (stiff upper lip and all that), and we were a family of limited means, so breaking/smashing stuff was always out of the question. But you know, that particular blog post – like most of them – is about developing self-awareness. It’s a musing on my own insecurity and self-absorption, so I hope it was at least a little funny!
One needs a certain tendency toward navel-gazing to be an artist, for sure. But it can also be liberating to stop taking oneself so seriously and admit that the world is much more profound and interesting than our own egos.
So if we strive to be a bit better than what our ego yells, maybe we’ll fail a little better! And recognize that what we make is received via an ecosystem, in which the creative artists are but one vital element.
Meeting Penderecki you learned that “he would paint an abstract watercolor that helped to articulate the form of the piece and various events inside it.” Do you have any kind of ritual when composing? Is there a constant requirement to get and stay in the zone or not quite?
No rituals really, though I do tend to get good ideas when I’m moving – on a train or a plane. I like to have a strong cup of tea; that’s either my British upbringing or a caffeine addiction. I like strong light and a clean desk and an open mind, if possible. Sometimes the piano gives me inspiration, more often it’s a distraction.
I think of the “zone” – as you describe it – as a point of intersection. I wrote an essay about this for John Zorn’s journal Arcana. It’s that moment when two independent – even seemingly contradictory – ideas collide, a kind of perceptual jolt that usually portends a clearer path forward (or backward) in forming the piece. But I’m glad you read that essay. I treasure those long talks I had with Penderecki twenty years ago. And I still have that stunning facsimile manuscript that he gave me, with all his sketches; I really love it, and I take it out and look at it from time to time.
You mention Messiaen’s 1942 treatise Technique de mon langage musicale. Did you read that in French? You have this love for languages: Dutch, Portuguese, French and Italian - why them particularly? How has studying languages affected your own music playing and composing?
When I was writing Language Instruction, I was constantly listening to those language CDs, desperately trying to improve my Brazilian Portuguese for a lecture I was giving in São Paulo. Weeks and weeks of those repetitive recordings – “Bom dia, João!” “Obrigado, senhora!” – sentences, phrases, whole words, parts of words. When I sat down to compose I tried to block it all out and write music, but my brain was filled to capacity with monotonous reiterations. But once I gave myself over to the music of it all, the act of teaching and receiving language became the linchpin of the piece, both motivically and conceptually.
I come from a language family. My father was a translator of plays – mostly farce – from French and Italian. My brother is a Slavic linguist and translator from Czech. My mom was an editor. I love the process of learning a new language, those hilariously embarrassing mistakes, that awkward moment of trying to articulate an untranslatable concept; I love the window of cultural insight offered only via language. And because language is specific to culture, it’s specific also to music; what is our music but a modified expression of our native tongue?
When Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy play What Love, it’s clear that they’re speaking a uniquely African-American dialect. Language is not some neutral, antiseptic Esperanto. Like art, it has a particular character, a distinct flavor, and it is always evolving. It’s anti-capitalism; it’s messy barter, it’s a hybrid hydra.
Death with Interruptions is a piano trio with title from the novel by the Portuguese writer José Saramago. What’s the place literature has in your life? Other art forms you are really keen on keeping up with as much as possible?
Literature serves the same purpose for me that it probably does for many other people: it allows me to escape and dream in someone else’s mind. It reveals truths, it asks questions. One of the things I love in Saramago’s books is the characters’ optimism – even naïveté – despite, or perhaps because of, ridiculous odds. His writing walks a line between irony and earnestness, between gravity and absurdity, the same boundary that we human beings walk each day.
Your question about art forms is tough to answer. No particular medium appeals to me more than any other; what matters is what an individual artist does within it. Or maybe he or she has to create a new medium to express ideas. I feel the same way about style.
People know I worked with Mos Def, so they ask, “What do you like about hiphop?” But I don’t like “hiphop” as a genre any more than I like “classical” as a genre.
Duke Ellington was asked what styles of music he liked, and he said: “There are only two kinds of music: good music, and the other kind.” That sums it up pretty well.
Always in touch with orchestras, music groups, musicians, conductors – it feels like the classical music world with the new music scene is vibrant despite real concerns of this and that. What’s your opinion and how do you see it evolving?
Well, there’s no question that we live in challenging times, and I doubt that anybody expected what the digital revolution has wrought for artists, journalists, inventors. There’s great malaise about creative work being devalued and the middleman, who delivers the content, reaping the rewards. These are serious issues, compounded by our public educational system being horrifically weak in the arts. And simultaneously, we’re getting more of our information, communication, feedback, and entertainment via machines, digital machines. People are reluctant to leave their homes to attend movies, plays, festivals, even parties; for stimulation, they’re staying inside, interacting with the world in a controlled environment; entertainment and news is served up individually, via some “smart” device. What does that mean for music, or any performing art that is at its core a shared experience?
This brave new virtual world is intriguing but dark, and lonesome.
Bleak, eh? Well, I’m inclined to think that things are not quite as existential as they seem. I’ve been a freelance composer for 20 years, and I’m still here; maybe that fact itself can be an inspiration to some emerging artist.
Creative artists will continue to invent no matter what. How they will get paid is a much more complicated question. A musician whose specialty – like oboe d’amore or Wagner tuba – depends on a strong market for classical music, or a composer who only hankers to write for large orchestra, might have a trickier time monetizing their career. None of this is new; similar circumstances prevailed in Europe during the years following both World Wars, when artists adapted to more streamlined resources.
It’s often said that the only constant in life is change. Well ok, change is here; take it or leave it!
I think you’ll have to take it. I’m not sure if it’s a crisis, but if it is, we’d probably be wiser – or at least happier – to view it as an opportunity. A crisis can force new directions, and sometimes a cleaning of the slate is good for an artist. In the end, creators may be less affected than performers, since we’ve never been able to depend on mainstream “classical” music institutions in order to earn a living anyway.
And since you used that word “classical,” I thought about orchestras. For every orchestra that folds, a new one seems to pop up. Many young groups out there are passionately committed to contemporary music, and they’re not afraid to promote that scary fact to their audiences.
At ACO, we have a very particular mission, programming-wise, with an emphasis on commissioning composers and looking towards the future of music-making. There are other orchestras doing this – the L.A. Philharmonic, the Seattle Symphony, Albany Symphony, and BMOP in Boston. And I’ve been seeing it at the North Carolina, Alabama, Princeton Symphonies, and many others.
So maybe some of the problem is a crisis of imagination, reimagining the music we love in today’s rapidly changing – at times overwhelming – world, with all of the good and bad that that entails.
Who are some of the people with the biggest impact on the art scene and especially music? On the same note, you also wrote a piece about your travels in Brazil titling it “Movers and Shakers.” Are you always on the look out to find/discover movers and shakers and where is the most natural environment for them?
I can think of artists from many different environments who’ve had a big impact on their local scenes – those who discovered new audiences, those who imagined and launched new venues for their music, those who’ve been deeply involved in education. My clarinet teacher Ben Armato frequently observed that everyone has the chance to make a unique contribution.
Certain folks are quiet and solitary, yet they create a significant impact in their own way. Others make a lot of noise and get noticed, but you can rattle loudly and it doesn’t mean you’re really shaking…
I admire colleagues who have been generous to their peers and to the younger generation. I’m inspired by those folks, and I strive to be like that too, to be someone who creates opportunities and openings for others besides myself.
In “All Things We Are. Learning from Messiaen” you call him, “this quirky and musically irreverent soul.” What would you like to be known for when it comes to your music?
How my work is perceived is unpredictable, certainly beyond my control, and perhaps it’s better that way. Art truly flowers in the mind of the beholder, not the creator. But that doesn’t answer your question!
I’d be grateful if my work moved people and changed their lives in some small way. I suppose I’d also be thrilled if my music made its own lasting contribution to the art itself, which has given me so much throughout my life.
To know more about me and my music you can visit
my website:http://www.derekbermel.com/
or my blog: http://www.derekbermel.blogspot.com/
All those roles you mention – teaching, performing, curating, writing (words) – are just outgrowths of the creative impulse, other ways of stimulating the mind and reimagining the impossibly difficult and evanescent philosophical questions.
You ask about success, but I always feel like I’m failing! Failing to master a musical technique or a language, failing to say what I mean, even failing my family and friends, myself…. Maybe it’s the human condition to never feel fully satisfied. I love what Samuel Beckett wrote: ‘Fail again, fail better’. I’m a chronic reviser and tinkerer, and it probably makes my work better than it would be otherwise. Oh dear, I’m not being very inspiring, am I? Well, while I’m on a roll, here’s another quote, from Paul Verlaine: “A poem is never finished. It is only abandoned.” Depressing, but also exquisite!
Reality is much messier than our dreams. But I take heart from this concept: if completeness is not a point of arrival, but merely a hazy aim, then I’m allowed to strive for gorgeously impossible things. And when striving for a lofty, unachievable goal and fall short, I may nonetheless emerge in a place that’s new and unusual. And, exploring that interesting island on which I’ve landed, my failure can become a sort of success.
When I wrote my clarinet concerto Voices, I set out to make the orchestra sound like a human voice. Talk about a recipe for failure! It’s built right in to the proposition. But even realizing the impossibilities, something kept gnawing at me to pick up the pencil and continue writing.
Maybe it’s that kind of idealism, even in the face of predestined failure, from which all art springs.
In your blog entry, Bad Reviews and Mortality, you end it by saying, “So as the bad reviews roll in, I try to seek a modicum of Zen, grateful that — at least for the time being — when my tree falls in the forest, it doesn’t fall on deaf ears.” Never a heartbreak that called for some kind of different therapy, like breaking/smashing stuff up or does reason always prevail no matter what?
Oh no, reason never prevails! Note the phrases “try to seek” and “for the time being”.
I’m flesh and blood, a temporal, physical creature, and thus utterly emotional. My dad was British (stiff upper lip and all that), and we were a family of limited means, so breaking/smashing stuff was always out of the question. But you know, that particular blog post – like most of them – is about developing self-awareness. It’s a musing on my own insecurity and self-absorption, so I hope it was at least a little funny!
One needs a certain tendency toward navel-gazing to be an artist, for sure. But it can also be liberating to stop taking oneself so seriously and admit that the world is much more profound and interesting than our own egos.
So if we strive to be a bit better than what our ego yells, maybe we’ll fail a little better! And recognize that what we make is received via an ecosystem, in which the creative artists are but one vital element.
Meeting Penderecki you learned that “he would paint an abstract watercolor that helped to articulate the form of the piece and various events inside it.” Do you have any kind of ritual when composing? Is there a constant requirement to get and stay in the zone or not quite?
No rituals really, though I do tend to get good ideas when I’m moving – on a train or a plane. I like to have a strong cup of tea; that’s either my British upbringing or a caffeine addiction. I like strong light and a clean desk and an open mind, if possible. Sometimes the piano gives me inspiration, more often it’s a distraction.
I think of the “zone” – as you describe it – as a point of intersection. I wrote an essay about this for John Zorn’s journal Arcana. It’s that moment when two independent – even seemingly contradictory – ideas collide, a kind of perceptual jolt that usually portends a clearer path forward (or backward) in forming the piece. But I’m glad you read that essay. I treasure those long talks I had with Penderecki twenty years ago. And I still have that stunning facsimile manuscript that he gave me, with all his sketches; I really love it, and I take it out and look at it from time to time.
You mention Messiaen’s 1942 treatise Technique de mon langage musicale. Did you read that in French? You have this love for languages: Dutch, Portuguese, French and Italian - why them particularly? How has studying languages affected your own music playing and composing?
When I was writing Language Instruction, I was constantly listening to those language CDs, desperately trying to improve my Brazilian Portuguese for a lecture I was giving in São Paulo. Weeks and weeks of those repetitive recordings – “Bom dia, João!” “Obrigado, senhora!” – sentences, phrases, whole words, parts of words. When I sat down to compose I tried to block it all out and write music, but my brain was filled to capacity with monotonous reiterations. But once I gave myself over to the music of it all, the act of teaching and receiving language became the linchpin of the piece, both motivically and conceptually.
I come from a language family. My father was a translator of plays – mostly farce – from French and Italian. My brother is a Slavic linguist and translator from Czech. My mom was an editor. I love the process of learning a new language, those hilariously embarrassing mistakes, that awkward moment of trying to articulate an untranslatable concept; I love the window of cultural insight offered only via language. And because language is specific to culture, it’s specific also to music; what is our music but a modified expression of our native tongue?
When Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy play What Love, it’s clear that they’re speaking a uniquely African-American dialect. Language is not some neutral, antiseptic Esperanto. Like art, it has a particular character, a distinct flavor, and it is always evolving. It’s anti-capitalism; it’s messy barter, it’s a hybrid hydra.
Death with Interruptions is a piano trio with title from the novel by the Portuguese writer José Saramago. What’s the place literature has in your life? Other art forms you are really keen on keeping up with as much as possible?
Literature serves the same purpose for me that it probably does for many other people: it allows me to escape and dream in someone else’s mind. It reveals truths, it asks questions. One of the things I love in Saramago’s books is the characters’ optimism – even naïveté – despite, or perhaps because of, ridiculous odds. His writing walks a line between irony and earnestness, between gravity and absurdity, the same boundary that we human beings walk each day.
Your question about art forms is tough to answer. No particular medium appeals to me more than any other; what matters is what an individual artist does within it. Or maybe he or she has to create a new medium to express ideas. I feel the same way about style.
People know I worked with Mos Def, so they ask, “What do you like about hiphop?” But I don’t like “hiphop” as a genre any more than I like “classical” as a genre.
Duke Ellington was asked what styles of music he liked, and he said: “There are only two kinds of music: good music, and the other kind.” That sums it up pretty well.
Always in touch with orchestras, music groups, musicians, conductors – it feels like the classical music world with the new music scene is vibrant despite real concerns of this and that. What’s your opinion and how do you see it evolving?
Well, there’s no question that we live in challenging times, and I doubt that anybody expected what the digital revolution has wrought for artists, journalists, inventors. There’s great malaise about creative work being devalued and the middleman, who delivers the content, reaping the rewards. These are serious issues, compounded by our public educational system being horrifically weak in the arts. And simultaneously, we’re getting more of our information, communication, feedback, and entertainment via machines, digital machines. People are reluctant to leave their homes to attend movies, plays, festivals, even parties; for stimulation, they’re staying inside, interacting with the world in a controlled environment; entertainment and news is served up individually, via some “smart” device. What does that mean for music, or any performing art that is at its core a shared experience?
This brave new virtual world is intriguing but dark, and lonesome.
Bleak, eh? Well, I’m inclined to think that things are not quite as existential as they seem. I’ve been a freelance composer for 20 years, and I’m still here; maybe that fact itself can be an inspiration to some emerging artist.
Creative artists will continue to invent no matter what. How they will get paid is a much more complicated question. A musician whose specialty – like oboe d’amore or Wagner tuba – depends on a strong market for classical music, or a composer who only hankers to write for large orchestra, might have a trickier time monetizing their career. None of this is new; similar circumstances prevailed in Europe during the years following both World Wars, when artists adapted to more streamlined resources.
It’s often said that the only constant in life is change. Well ok, change is here; take it or leave it!
I think you’ll have to take it. I’m not sure if it’s a crisis, but if it is, we’d probably be wiser – or at least happier – to view it as an opportunity. A crisis can force new directions, and sometimes a cleaning of the slate is good for an artist. In the end, creators may be less affected than performers, since we’ve never been able to depend on mainstream “classical” music institutions in order to earn a living anyway.
And since you used that word “classical,” I thought about orchestras. For every orchestra that folds, a new one seems to pop up. Many young groups out there are passionately committed to contemporary music, and they’re not afraid to promote that scary fact to their audiences.
At ACO, we have a very particular mission, programming-wise, with an emphasis on commissioning composers and looking towards the future of music-making. There are other orchestras doing this – the L.A. Philharmonic, the Seattle Symphony, Albany Symphony, and BMOP in Boston. And I’ve been seeing it at the North Carolina, Alabama, Princeton Symphonies, and many others.
So maybe some of the problem is a crisis of imagination, reimagining the music we love in today’s rapidly changing – at times overwhelming – world, with all of the good and bad that that entails.
Who are some of the people with the biggest impact on the art scene and especially music? On the same note, you also wrote a piece about your travels in Brazil titling it “Movers and Shakers.” Are you always on the look out to find/discover movers and shakers and where is the most natural environment for them?
I can think of artists from many different environments who’ve had a big impact on their local scenes – those who discovered new audiences, those who imagined and launched new venues for their music, those who’ve been deeply involved in education. My clarinet teacher Ben Armato frequently observed that everyone has the chance to make a unique contribution.
Certain folks are quiet and solitary, yet they create a significant impact in their own way. Others make a lot of noise and get noticed, but you can rattle loudly and it doesn’t mean you’re really shaking…
I admire colleagues who have been generous to their peers and to the younger generation. I’m inspired by those folks, and I strive to be like that too, to be someone who creates opportunities and openings for others besides myself.
In “All Things We Are. Learning from Messiaen” you call him, “this quirky and musically irreverent soul.” What would you like to be known for when it comes to your music?
How my work is perceived is unpredictable, certainly beyond my control, and perhaps it’s better that way. Art truly flowers in the mind of the beholder, not the creator. But that doesn’t answer your question!
I’d be grateful if my work moved people and changed their lives in some small way. I suppose I’d also be thrilled if my music made its own lasting contribution to the art itself, which has given me so much throughout my life.
To know more about me and my music you can visit
my website:http://www.derekbermel.com/
or my blog: http://www.derekbermel.blogspot.com/
