Antilogy Magazine

MATTHEW WELCH Interviewed by JASON CADY

Matthew Welch, photo by Jason Cady

Matthew Welch is a composer and multi-instrumentalist known for his innovative and eclectic compositions and his virtuosic bagpiping. His music has been performed by the Flux Quartet, Gamelan Dharma Swara, Dither Electric Guitar Quartet, Transit, the Avian Music Ensemble, Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, and many other ensembles, including his own group: Blarvuster. He performed with the Simon Fraser University Pipe Band for their first prize victories in the World Pipe Band Championship in 1999 and 2001.  I talked with Matt in his Brooklyn apartment on June 22, 2011. This was only a couple weeks before he moved to New Haven, Connecticut, after having lived in New York City for ten years, including several years as my housemate.

JC: Where did the title for your most recent work—The Favrile Opalescence —come from?

MW: The Favrile Opalescence is a Tiffany glass procedure for making stained glass, It allows a certain level of floating luminescent particles within a color so that depending on your orientation and how light is reflecting it can reveal other shades of color with clear borders. I chose that name because my piece had a bunch of different strains of thought going through it.

JC: Was this piece a departure from your other work?

MW: Almost every piece I do has some kind of prototype along the way. Either the material will realize itself in a couple different form, or a form will utilize very similar material and I had written a piece called the Mosaic of Iridescence for my band [Blarvuster] and the basic idea was maximizing rapid harmonic change on a sixteenth note level and then dealing with stretching those types of phrases out.

JC: So the harmonies change every sixteenth note?

MW: I started off with a bagpipe melody and then just created note-to-note counterpoints above it with the idea that there is triadic movement on every sixteenth note. And then further splitting that up into interlocking rhythms with timbral color shift as well. So there is this shifting color in a linear way. It’s not much different from harmony in general, but it’s just a way of making a synaesthetic  reference. So The Favrile Opalescence is another piece that uses this particular type of interlocking counterpoint that I’ve been working on lately, but it moves it into a very chromatic realm. Mosaic of Iridescence is strictly modal, and the Opalescence is an almost Gesualdo chromatic language on every sixteenth note. Or you could just call that a unit of time because those motifs will come back at double time or stretched out twice or up to four times the length.

The commission project [by Redshift] was that this was to be in response to a soundscape created by Kathy Turco of wildlife in Alaska. Of course I picked the bird one because I have a lifelong history with birds and birdwatching and a lot of knowledge about birds…

JC: Now when you say you picked the bird option, could you…?

MW: Oh, yes. Sorry. Kathy Turco had all of these different soundscapes of different wildlife in Alaska. I chose the collage that featured birds. I had to respond to this soundscape, but my melodic language is rather birdlike anyway.

JC: And that audio will be heard with your piece?

MW: Yeah, though there will be an option to perform it without the track. But the soundscape did influence a lot of my decisions like dynamic terracing in the piece. There are a lot of sections that are subito-fortissimo and then the next module is pianissimo. So the backing track will creep through at times or be completely obliterated. I was thinking that the piece would be as if you were performing in the wild - the concert is happening in someone’s backyard. So that the performance would be part of the soundscape, not necessarily an extension of it or a mimetic response to it. To me it sounded like a condensed environment anyway where bird activity was happening in a much more accelerated way.

JC: You mentioned interlocking rhythms, you’re referring to Balinese rhythms...

MW: Yeah, the point of departure for those rhythmic techniques is the Balinese kotekan, but I extend what is normally considered physically possible as a Balinese gamelan musician, where rhythmic units would be in one, two, or three, sometimes four strokes before you have a rest. And sometimes I extended that within this piece, letting them incorporate larger amounts of varied rhythmic groupings. Instead of 1-2, 1-2-2-1, that type of thing, that it would be 5 with rest, then 1, or then 3 and then rest or 4. Anyway, I was trying to extend the fabric, which allows me more time to create something more akin to a melodic shape and with that a more possible change in color and pattern. But yes, the idea is kotekan extended.

JC: Could you tell me about the opera on your Tzadik CD [Blarvuster, 2010]?

MW: The piece is called “Canntaireachd Masolah.” It may be an opaque title, but “Canntaireachd ” is the solfege that pipers use. So, it’s an opera without words but with this way of conveying an instrumental melody that’s highly ornamented, and with possible timbral shifting all with the voice. This gives the opera–because it’s me singing it—a bit of that bagpipe sound in the timbre of the singing. And, also having studied and sung Indonesian music, in a Javanese gamelan context, it has some of that timbral edge in the sense of intonation as well. So, sometimes I am working with shading of intonation, that is just-intonation, like the bagpipes against an equal-tempered ensemble. It gets a color in there that is not purely western. The syllables are for the most part improvised, not what the actual syllables are, but what syllable I choose to use that either has a traditional reference or not.

JC: Can any particular note have more than one correct syllable for it?

MW: Yeah, in the bagpipe notation, any particular pitch has a vowel sound that would identify what the pitch is, and then each vowel sound, is preceded by a prefix that either uses the trill of the tongue, which is, of course, from the Scots’ dialect, so, “o” could be the pitch and “tro” would be the ornament on that pitch. In the traditional repertoire, the note “o” could be ornamented with a “tro”, or “derrido.” There are all sorts of ornaments on particular notes, but the idiomatic aspect of the bagpipe, how the fingering works on the pipes, a lot of the ornamentation arose out of ergonomic fingering. So it’s not from an abstract or conceptual framework where you prefer certain intervals in an ornament. The weird thing about that is that certain ornaments become attached to particular pitches that you can’t do on other pitches, but there are a number of ornaments that you can do on any pitch. So, I’ll often re-map how to ornament a pitch. Any pitch can be ornamented with any prefix and, for me, any vowel sound now. It gives more of a cohesive line of expression to the vocal gesture, rather than trying to convey exactly detailed information to be replicated. So that way it’s a lot freer and spontaneous. But the idea also behind that is that it sounds like a language, and there a number of forms of mouth-music in the British Isles and all over the world.

JC: “Mouth-music”?

MW: Yeah, it’s a category of Irish and Scottish music, where there’s a lot of nonsense syllables used, and it’s also a broad umbrella term. Even in Gamelan they have “mouth Gamelan” a name that translates to that. It has a pedagogical purpose. You sing through in one voice the entire texture of a multi-part gamelan.

Usually, this is used for teaching dance when the gamelan’s not there. A good dance instructor will also be a great gamelan player, and also able to replicate all of the important information that the dancer should be listening for in the gamelan texture: pointing out where gongs, or structural units are, or cues from the drums. And gamelan music is onomatopoeic anyway. A lot of the names of the instruments come from the sound, actually.

So I’m responding to this private vocal music practice. No one really uses Canntaireachd in the piping style performatively, so I am trying to move that out of the realm of tutelage into a unique performance practice. I always enjoyed listening to world music traditions where I couldn’t understand a single word, and I always had the problem listening to pop music, especially when the words were so banal, like it didn’t even really matter what they were to me...

JC: It’s often better if you can’t understand what they’re saying in pop music. It can even ruin the song sometimes.

MW: Especially, when there’s a juxtaposition of a happy song - or a happy kind of tonality or jovial rhythm...

JC: ...and lyrics about heartbreak. That can be funny.

MW: I would prefer that words be in books. I’m coming to this idea of opera and still want to put a spin on the tradition, yet build on the tradition. I am thinking of Einstein on the Beach where numbers and solfege are used. Or thinking more about the vocal not being the foreground of the music, just another part of the texture.

JC: Like Einstein on the Beach [Philip Glass, 1976], where the voice is probably secondary to the violin and the overall instrumental texture.

MW: Right, but maybe even more importantly, it doesn’t continue to give direction to a narrative development. Of course, the writer that has inspired me the most is [Jorge Luis] Borges, so this is an opera that is trying to work parallel to some of the work of Borges, and possibly incorporate his words, or adaptations, or just a story about Borges.

JC: This opera or a potential future opera?

MW: The Canntaireachd Masolah is a prototype for an opera about Borges. I toyed with using Borges’ words, but I am still in the construction process. But as I wrote the vocal melodies, I literally sang them. I sang, and thought of an image or a gesture, in a Feldman kind of way. There was a sense of an air or a contour and a rhythmic approach, but something that is altered on multiple iterations. And as I came up with these lines, I didn’t compose them on pencil and paper; I improvised them. I wanted to put it in my voice and respond to the rhythm of the words.

JC: And then you wrote it down later?

MW: I wrote it as I was improvising.

JC: And, even though it’s all sung by you, aren’t there two characters being expressed by you?

MW: Right, yes. One idea was that, as I’m working on this Borges’ version of it, is that it’s two Borges in a dream-space conversing. So it’s this singular character being expressed, by two performers, or one performer and two different mentalities. I also was thinking about the tradition of shadow puppetry in Southeast Asia, where there’s normally one orator and singer/narrator that is able to take on many different voices to characterize. This element of one person delivering the story can also be further developed by modal procedures in the music. So, in this opera, to distinguish each character, instead of a leitmotif, or any particular combination of notes, a pitch set, or a pentatonic mode, that distinguishes one character from the next.

JC: Did you have one character in pelog and the other one in slendro?

MW: One’s pelog and one is slendro, and as each tableau moves on that starts to become more complicated and more ambiguous to deal with the unity of the character, and the multiplicity of the character. Thinking of moment-to-moment drama, there was a desire to move more into a feeling of harmonic progression or harmonic separation, thinking of modularity and its relationship to mode and how the root word works there which is the whole development of structure in Western music as related to mode and modulation and modularity. There’s a steady progression there. I wanted to use that as a way to enhance this perception, or expression or ambiguity in characterization, without being too definitive.

JC: I want to ask you another question about Borges, because you have other pieces that drew inspiration from Borges, and I was trying to understand exactly how that affected your music. For example, Earle Brown always cited Alexander Calder as being an influence on him and his music directly articulates Calder’s ideas about space into music. Whereas the influence of Philip Guston on Morton Feldman seems to be a more general, metaphoric inspiration, not really literal. So, when it comes to Borges, how has the influence related to your instrumental music?

MW: Okay, for me, it’s right in between those two, in between ineffable atmosphere of creating artwork in another medium and the actual one-to-one mapping. The Borges influence was in some cases more specific than others. For example, trying to write an opera about Borges, trying use his idea of two Borges talking in a dream-space I want to capture the atmosphere of that dialogue, of the imagination that came off with that scenario.

But also I literally want to use a Borges work and stage that. I primarily read non-fiction, just, music, philosophy, etc. It had been many years since I read fiction. So Borges was a dive into fiction for me. I tend to be rather obsessive about certain artists. I want to get to know their entire output so that I can see what could be considered the nebula of their creative personality. And, of course, that changes as people grow.

There’s something about Borges’ imagination that resonated with mine. These short stories that have singular premises I found how the metaphors worked and could be translated to my music. In Funes the Memorious, the guy has an infinite memory, where all memory is a one-to-one relationship. So the Borges extraction from that is you have to generalize. Abstraction is a survival method. That’s inspirational for me because sometimes I am obsessed with detail, not seeing the larger picture in a lot of things.

But, specific works that I’ve written in response to Borges, The Self and the Other, was the first Borges-inspired piece that I had written. It was his sense of fiction bordering on the level of non-fiction. It’s really hard to tell what is esoteric information that is true, because Borges is so erudite that he can reference the very obscure to the point where you’re not really sure if he made it up or not. And he often juxtaposes that with known information. And that, as a metaphor for procedure of combining what I know, which is a rather mixed bag of music, and trying to place that on the same table with a scientific, inquisitive, experimental approach to creating something that doesn’t exist...

JC: So do you mean there might be a quote of a traditional bagpipe melody and there might be also be a snippet of a bagpipe melody that you had written in a previous piece, and the listener has no way of distinguishing?

MW: Precisely, but a little bit further. The fact that the person that is experiencing the Borges’ work is not in the know of what information is correct or not, I feel that I am able to create a situation where an ambiguity arises, where one is overwhelmed by the level of detail and its referencing potential. I think of minimalism or post-minimalism, the kind of abstraction and larger simplified gestures of work, I use that as a way to create ambiguity between bagpipe and gamelan traditions, so that what I’m looking for is something that has reference potential, but actually can’t be backed up. I am looking for cohesive gestures from one point to the next, it has to be convincing musically, but there’s this subtext of either a tradition that is imagined, or is misinterpreted, or is a false document, in the way of Borges writing a book review of a book that doesn’t exist as a way to take all imaginative intangibles that you experience in a novel and condensing it into a short story. Borges didn’t write novels because he just thought that...

JC: He’d rather sum up the idea of the novel in a fictional book review?

MW: Yeah. I think the unfurling of the plot wasn’t the important thing.

JC: It was the concept.

MW: Yeah, exactly. And I’m trying to convey that sensibility as an educated listener. It’s a loose relationship. Sometimes it’s specific. Sometimes it’s just metaphorical. But I just appreciated the general disposition of his work. His work is about literature in a certain way. He spent so much time reading literature and multiple translations of a work, or even a lot of different literature on particular subjects. So, here’s someone who is so inspired by reading that he wants to write.

JC: And you’re saying that your music is music about music?

MW: Not necessarily music about music, but that’s kind of an interesting thing to think about. I want it to be about music, but also about art, about the concept of combining musics.

JC: When you write pieces for other ensembles that involve elements of improvisation or indeterminacy have you had any problems with not being satisfied with the results when you were not one of the performers?

MW: Yeah, even where I am one of the performers. But I prefer to be involved as a performer in those works. So, in an interesting way, I view some of those works as perhaps more important for satisfying performing desires of mine, and community desires, the ability to work with people that work best as improvisers, that are able to execute notated music but can bring that level of intensity you can get through improvisation. I also am very conscientious to have work that doesn’t require that.

If I want that in my work, I also want to be personally involved, so that it’s not just a freedom of improvisation but moving into the oral process. In other music that I’ve played, like Balinese gamelan, there’s no notation whatsoever. There are levels of freedom, but it’s how the music,or how the rehearsal is conducted, and how people arrive at the performance—that’s very different. It’s much more the use of the voice in conveying, either through directions or discussions, or singing something as an example. Or being able to be an improviser myself and improvise an example of how to realize something that is flexible, is very important.

I’m not necessarily happy choosing one over the other, but I imagine getting specific notationally also helps me think about refining improvisation and vice versa. Things that I come up with in improvisations I’m able to map into a way of notating.

JC: I feel like it’s very hard to understand the music of one’s own time. What music do you think will be important in the history books of the future?

MW: What is important to me is probably not very important to most people. My music and the music of my friends is important to me.

It’s important to see that people are able to grow as performers, improvisers, composers. The US doesn’t present the best financial apparatus to help cultivate marginal culture. So it’s hard for me to say what is important because I feel like I am a part of the margin, and always will be. Is the margin important in relief to mass culture? Or is the mass culture the zeitgesit?

Who owns the zeitgeist? Is there a genre of music that’s going to win out? Or is there a movement that’s going to win out? Or one that’s going to have a profound effect on people a hundred years from now?

It’s strange because you think of [Arnold] Schoenberg as having such profound effect on the twentieth century. And now I’m coming to experience his work as a theoretician. Is it important because it turned everything upside down? Or is it important because it was actually good? What is the objective of originality?

JC: If we compare [Josef] Hauer to Schoenberg, he had similar ideas, as Schoenberg, at around the same time, but had no impact.

MW: Right. I wonder how much rhetoric was involved, or how much community was involved. Schoenberg moving to L.A., basically being a founding father of American academic, serial music, and that becoming such an important thing in America and not just in Europe, and how Schoenberg was responsible for that as a pedagogue, or just from being present in the community.

JC: And also having immediate, disciples. Berg and Webern, carried forth his music. I don’t think Hauer had that kind of influence.

MW: Yeah, I think history will represent those who are lionized in their own time. And it’s interesting that you point out the Schoenberg disciples that are almost bordering on collaborators. They weren’t that much younger than Schoenberg and their music went in very different directions, even before Schoenberg really came up with the twelve-tone method.

I think about [John] Cage and the New York School. They’re important because of conceptual rhetoric, but also they seem to hit a particular zeitgeist with the negative view of Europe after World War II. New York became the art scene in general, as Europe was still reconstructing itself.

It’s hard to say, because there’s so many genres. I do have a feeling that in our day and age, improvised music has become more important. But is the “improviser-composer-performer-thing” really a new idea? Bach had his own tunings and was quite the harpsichordist. But, it does seem like that tends to be more and more important, and what I am realizing is that composers are only important in retrospect, and in their time, performers have the power.

So this phenomenon of the improviser/performer that could very well become, in my own time, the contemporary classical music. Maybe this is just where I live. [Being a composer] seems to be viewed as outmoded because it requires notation and the hierarchy of composer to performer. And also composers, trying to explore the furthest extensions of an idea can become impractical. Is it important to write symphonic music? Or is it important to abandon it?

It’s a very interesting question, the idea of importance and longevity or legacy. The word importance always contains a question mark at the end. I can only hope that what I do doesn’t die out.

- Transcribed by Sarah-Jane Ripa

Matthew Welch:  http://blarvuster.com/matthew/

Jason Cady:  http://numbermadeaudible.com/