(Published in "Le Journal de la Société de Guitare de Montréal"1998.)
Patrick Kearney: Tell us a little about the inspiration and / or catalyst behind "Drylands".
Robert Jones: Well, Patrick, I've known you since you were seventeen and have followed your development as an artist with great pleasure.
PK: Thank you, Robert.
RJ: For years you've been bugging me to compose a solo guitar piece for you. Last year, when you asked again, some ideas clicked in my head and the result was "Drylands".
PK: Why the title, "Drylands: Four Scenes of Desert Life"?
RJ: The work consists of four movements each exploiting a different feature of guitar technique and relating somehow to aspects of life (and death) in desert country. I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, in what was then a relatively small city surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of miles of desert wilderness. My family and I would spend most of our vacations exploring in the deserts. Although I haven't lived there since 1972 (when I moved to Canada), the desert sights, sounds, smells, and feelings -- the parching wind striking your face, for example -- are indelibly etched in my memories. Re-reading Joseph Wood Krutch's book, The Desert Year, and coming into possession of a marvellous collection of photographs by Philip Hyde of the North American deserts brought some of these memories vividly to the fore again, just in time to inspire "Drylands" -- "Drylands", incidentally, is the title of the book of photographs I mentioned. PK: Do you often have extra-musical stimuli to your compositions? Why the title, "Drylands: Four Scenes of Desert Life"?
RJ: Yes. I'd never really thought about it before but, now that you ask, I think that that's my usual method. I've been inspired by landscapes, architecture, traffic patterns, literature (often by literature), also by particularly intense moments in my personal life. Generally I don't compose under the immediate impression but rather as "emotion recollected in tranquillity."
It may be of interest that the last time I wrote for guitar was the piece, "The Aviary of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum" (for flute and guitar). This piece reflects an afternoon I spent inside an aviary outside Tucson, Arizona, watching and listening to the desert birds (and reptiles, and insects, and plants). Another piece bringing together the guitar and desert life.
PK: What are the four movements of "Drylands" about?
RJ: There are a few trade secrets I won't reveal, but, here goes.
The first movement (Preludio) is a kind of twilight meditation as the light deepens into darkness and the temperature cools.
The second movement (Tango: The Bordello at the Edge of the Wilderness) represents, well, social life of a rather rowdy kind.
Amaranthus Albus, the title of the third movement, is the Latin name for the plant popularly known as tumbleweed. When I was a child, we had a large vacant lot behind our house full of these plants. They're really interesting to watch. When they die they dry up and drift around slowly, propelled by the breezes.
The fourth movement (Allegro) is a lively multi-ethnic piece bringing together elements of African, Country-Western, and Flamenco idioms. The general swirling movement alludes to the motion of the flying saucers sighted so often in the Southwestern US deserts.
PK: How difficult was it for you to write for guitar?
RJ: Really, I've always found it terribly challenging to write for the guitar. Most of the guitar repertoire was composed by guitarists and we outsiders always find it shocking when something we conceive of as quite easy turns out to be impossible and other things that we think will be very difficult turn out to be easy. The most frustrating experience, though, is with passages that are just barely playable. No matter how well the performer masters them, there is a sense of stress and strain that gets transferred to the audience and makes them uncomfortable. I was very fortunate in working so closely with you, Patrick, as you weren't afraid to make suggestions about rewriting the awkward passages. Sometimes, I approved your suggestions wholeheartedly; other times they forced me to take another look at the passage and come up with a different version that was mutually acceptable.
PK: Do you find the guitar a successful instrument through which to express your work?
RJ: Writing for guitar places special limitations on me. Being a professional pianist enables me to write for the piano with great ease. With the guitar, there's always the nagging suspicion that "this isn't going to work."
I find that many twentieth-century composers who write for the guitar deliberately turn their back on traditional guitar idioms. I did this in some of my earlier works for guitar but - in a very real sense - this makes the non-guitarist composer's job even more difficult. The traditional idioms, if used correctly, are almost guaranteed to sound good. My Prelude definitely makes use of some Villa-Lobos devices (in a new way, I hope), and the tango is -- well -- a tango. The last movement uses some traditional as well as non-traditional idioms. I think that only in the third movement, the tumbleweed one, I set out to do something really new. It's based primarily on unusual sounds: buzzes, glissando shrieks, drum effects, and microtones.
PK: Have you written anything else for guitar?
RJ: Yes. A Fantasy for Two Guitars (1976); Night Pieces (1978) for the unusual combination of flute, clarinet, guitar, percussion, and piano; Two Impromptus for flute and guitar (1981); and The Aviary of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, also for flute and guitar (1986).
PK: How do you determine when one of your compositions is finished?
RJ: Generally, when it's had a performance that I considered successful.
PK: When composing do you find yourself writing for others (the public) or for yourself?
RJ: That is an interesting question. When composing, yes, I try to please the audience, but by writing a piece I feel compelled to write. I imagine myself listening to the piece and trust that my tastes are not so totally different from those of other people. If it pleases me it should please some other people too. So far, this faith has been justified.
PK: If you had to describe your compositional aesthetic in a phrase or less how would you do so?
RJ: I think it's clear enough from what I've said about the individual movements of "Drylands" that my style is eclectic. Much music of the last twenty years or so has been characterised by the word "Postmodern" -- my work sharesthe characteristics of this style, freedom to combine traditional and novel features in the same piece, freedom to vary the stylistic mixture from piece to piece and movement to movement, freedom to combine the rigidly predetermined with the freely intuitive, and a desire to involve the listener's whole self, not just the ears or the intellect.
Interview with Robert F. Jones: May 10, 1985
Musical BackgroundI began piano lessons when I was six and shortly after that I began writing pieces in the style of the elementary piano books that I was using. By the time I was about halfway through high school I realized that composition was going to be my career.
I had a lot of training as a pianist, a fair amount as a clarinettist, and a little as a cellist and percussionist. I know that this background has beenof great importance to me as a composer, simply because I can imagine what my pieces must be like to perform while I'm writing them. It's an automatic thing for me.
In high school I got a lot of experience writing for instrumental ensembles. The student orchestra was directed by an exceptionally talented and imaginative musician, William Bagwell, and he gave me a lot of work to do arranging and rearranging music for the somewhat peculiar ad hoc ensembles that Wafter high school I went to the New England Conservatory as a composition major. My first composition teacher was Daniel Pinkham; I studied two years with him. It was a very valuable experience. He placed a lot of emphasis on clear notation, in realizing your ideas in the most practical way. He was full of advice about practical things and hardly ever tried to influence me on style.
I then studied two years with Robert Cogan, who was very good at expanding your horizons, at challenging assumptions and forcing you to look deeply into the implications of what you were doing. I later studied with Seymour Shifrin at Brandeis University. He was helpful in trying to develop a very disciplined approach to composition. It's something I may have rebelled against at the time, but from which I have derived many benefits. All in all, I am very happy with the compositional instruction I had.
Of course, in addition to composition lessons I took courses in traditional writing skills. I had an exceptionally good course in 16th-century counterpoint with Judd Cooke. He took a very practical, as opposed to abstract, approach to teaching it. We sang a lot of motets. We even had to distribute our own motets and sing them in class. The aim was to get us to work as composers, approaching the style from within, rather than as pasticheurs, mechanically following a lot of technical rules. I think the most valuable aspect of learning the traditional writing skills is the develop coordination between the inner ear and the notating hand. One of my teachers called composition "pushing notes around" and I think that the traditional writing skills are valuable calisthenics.
I was extremely fortunate, both at New England Conservatory and at Brandeis, in the quality of the performances my music received (for the most part). At the Conservatory some extremely gifted performance majors gave me beautiful performances and at Brandeis my String Trio and String Quartet were given extremely well-rehearsed performances by the faculty members, really great musicians.
Composition
"Is composition communication or research?" I would definitely say that for me the communication aspect is foremost and the technical side of things acts as a medium of communication. A better way of looking at it, though, is that I am involved in the making of expressive musical objects with a life of their own.
When I start a piece I usually begin with concrete musical ideas -- not necessarily ideas for the opening of a piece. I then take these bits as starting points for continuations. I usually do a lot of rapid sketching at this point, trying to work out the lines of development. The large-scale form arises from the nature of the materials. Usually fairly early in the compositional process something clicks, and the shape of the whole becomes clear in my mind. My criteria for what works come from my instincts; I have faith that if I find a piece musically convincing it must necessarily be structurally sound. Once I have arrived at the overall shape of a piece, it's mostly a matter of working out the details.
Right from the start I'm very involved with imagining the performance situation in all its aspects; a specific hall, specific performers, even the lighting and the temperature of the hall.
Once a piece is in rehearsal I'll sometimes try to clarify the notation --dynamics, phrasing. Occasionally I'll rewrite certain aspects of the instrumental figuration in the interests of reliability.
I would agree with Garant's statement about composers losing contact with instrumentalists. Certainly through my experience as a performer I find that what composers especially dislike are composers who don't have a clear idea of what they want. There was certainly many pieces I've played that could have been written in such a way as to make the performer's job much easier without diluting the composer's intentions.
Aesthetics
My choice of media has been to some extent conditioned by practicalities. I've written a lot of vocal music because I've worked a lot with singers as an accompanist. I teach at Vanier College where we have a wonderful choir director, Jean Sult, who has performed a lot of my choral pieces. Lack of a readily available electronic music studio has prevented me from using electronics where I might have liked to, which is a matter of circumstance, but there's an internal preference as well, in that if I had a stronger compulsion to express myself in the electronic media I would have found a way of doing it.
I have recently been called a "Neo-Romantic" (somewhat to my surprise) and have just begun to formulate some thoughts on the matter. I think we should distinguish between "Neo-Romanticism" as a matter of compositional technique ("Neo-Tonality"?) and "Neo-Romanticism" as an aesthetic. On the technical side, I have always used a certain amount of tonal allusion -- things like triadic structures, tonal centres, and so forth--in my purely atonal music. In 1977, though, in writing a piece for the Vanier Choir, I found myself writing in a purely tonal style--tonal, not even neo-tonal. Although the piece, The Purple Cow and Other Mad Wriggles, is quite whimsical, it is a sort of watershed in my development; after writing it I felt freer about the range of stylistic possibilities that I could include in a piece.
Two events that affected my stylistic progress were the deaths of Shostakovich and Britten. Both of them were composers I didn't give much thought to while they were alive, but after their deaths I began to realize what music had lost.
Considered as an aesthetic matter, today's "Neo-Romanticism" is, I think, just the latest orientation of the perennial Classic-Romantic pendulum. My aesthetic has always had strong affinities with the Romantic. My early atonal music is distinctly "Expressionist," and it seems to me that Expressionism is a part of Romanticism. Another aspect of the Romantic outlook that has always appealed to me in the tendency to a kind of inclusiveness -- trying to pack the maximum into a piece. So I would say that tonal elements, tonal progressions, serialism, non-European influences -- jazz, oriental music, etc. -- can all be put into a single piece. Among my heros are Mahler, Ives, and Tippett.
I sometimes use quotations from other composers but usually they are very much buried. There are little phrases that are stuck in from works by friends of mine, Tam O'Shanter contains some distorted folk music and a prominent chord from Gittermmerung, and Tombeau, the last of the Five Uneasy Pieces, written at the time of the Beethoven bicentennial celebrations, uses the "serial" passage from Opus 135 in an atonal context, a kind of in-joke. There are also some explicit tonal quotations in that piece.
As a composer, I see myself as an individual, not as a representative of a current. I think that most composers after their basic formation get involved in their own compositional world. My work as a composer is to some extent compartmentalized away from my work as a performer or listener. As a composer, I'm mostly interested in listening to other pieces for what I can steal from them, but as a performer, I try to give the best possible realization of somebody else's ideas.
The quotation from Serge Garant that the young composers of today are basically sterile and writing "retro-banal music" I think says more about his preoccupations as a composer (and possibly as a listener) than about the state of composition today. He certainly has a right to the kind of music he likes, as does everybody else.
Profession
Essentially I have supported myself and my family by being a teacher and performer; it is only in the last few years that commissions have come in that gave me more than minor remuneration. When writing a commissioned work I try to please the commissioner by writing the piece I want to write. Istart with myself as the first audience and trust that my tastes are notso totally different from those of other people. If it pleases me it should please some other people too. So far, this faith has been justified.
Culture
My principal
interests among the other arts are architecture and literature. Both
stimulate my musical imagination directly and indirectly. I know that I
have been very much influenced musically by the Iliad and by Joyce's
Ulysses, though not in any way that I could exactly put my finger on. I
have been very attracted to the writings of artists who are also
writers. I've set texts by William Blake, David Jones, and Emily Carr.
I think it has something to do with the literary expression of the
visual imagination, something that music can add to fruitfully.The other art that I've been very involved with recently is dance. My wife, Pamela, has been working in the filed of historical dance and I've done a lot of work with her in the fields of Renaissance and Baroque dance. Through her I have come into contact with a number of modern dancers, whose art I find very stimulating as well. I have recently become a computer amateur; I'm not sure if or how this interest may influence my composing. I don't think it is possible to avoid manifesting your cultural identity, at least in any kind of genuine art. Cultural characteristics are not always clearly seen by contemporaries; both Berlioz and Debussy, who today seem so quintessentially French, were accused in their lifetimes of being unFrench. Even in the somewhat impersonal language of international post-Webern serialism, I think that we hear Stockhausen as "German," Boulez "French," and Babbitt "American." Does anyone sound "Canadian"? I think that we may be too close to seen distinctive Canadian attributes in new music, unable to see the forest for the trees. Do I sound Canadian? Or have my early years in Arizona and training in Massachusetts prevented me from taking on any colouring from my thirteen-year residence in Canada? I don't know. Immigrant composers are especially common in the twentieth century (Did Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Rachmaninoff take on "American" characteristics after their immigration? I believe so.) but there are plenty of examples from earlier centuries: think of Josquin, Lassus, Handel, Chopin, all of whom reflect characteristics of their culture of origin as well as of the cultures they adopted.
I don't see that consciously restricting oneself in the interests of cultural identity is going to manifest anything other than conscious restrictiveness. I'm fundamentally opposed to all kinds of artistic restrictions and think that attempting to limit one's style on a nationalist or cultural basis is petty. I want an expanded vision, an opening out not a closing in, except as the inward vision can be more expansive than the outward.