An Interview with Jennifer Walshe

Jennifer Walshe talks to Jonathan Grimes about her early musical experiences, her philosophy of composition, her work as an improviser and how this has shaped her music.

Jonathan Grimes: Perhaps you could start off by telling me what your current situation is. Where are you living? What are you working on at the moment?

Jennifer Walshe: My current situation is that I'm living out of a suitcase for the next three weeks. I had a grant for the last year in Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany, which is an artists' colony. I was living there for the last nine months and it was fantastic. I had a studio with a grand piano and you were responsible to nobody. You were just expected to be there two thirds of the time and do whatever you wanted. It was really fantastic to be away from an academic institution. It's called 'Akademie Schloss Solitude' but it's not an academy; it has studios and there were filmmakers, architects, philosophers, visual artists and musicians [staying there]. It was a really great environment to be in and I learnt a lot. I have another grant that I'm just about to begin in Berlin. It's part of the DAAD artist-in-residence programme. I'll start that in September and that runs for twelve months. I'm in the little pocket of time between one [residency] stopping and another one beginning!

JG: Are you getting much work done at the moment or is this just holiday time for you?

JW: [laughs] Not really! That's the unfortunate thing about being a composer: there's always a deadline and there's always something that needs to be done. I have a project that I'm notating at the moment, which is always a long and arduous process.

JG: So you move to Berlin in September?

JW: Yes.

JG: And is it a similar type of residency from what's gone before?

JW: Yes, it is. You get an apartment in Berlin and don't have to worry about money. The only thing they expect is that you're working. Prior to last year I spent six years in America where I thought at the university [Northwestern University, Chicago] and was doing my masters and then my doctorate, so the day was divided into three: I had my lecturing, my dissertation and requirements for my doctorate, and then trying to compose. All of a sudden, that went to just having one requirement every day which was composing. That was amazing to have, overwhelming at times.

JG: It must have been a big change.

JW: Oh, it was huge. We used to joke in Schloss Solitude that it was like The Shining [movie staring Jack Nicholson] because it's isolated. There's a great scene at the start of the film where they're interviewing Jack Nicholson and they say to him, "Do you think you'll be able to take being away on your own?" And he says, "I've got a writing project outline; I can't wait for the peace and quiet." I think everybody feels like that when they get there, and then they go through a little adjustment phase. But luckily nobody became a raving axe-murderer! Certainly I, and quite a lot of the other people at Solitude, really had the sense that it was now or never. You had this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work, and if you messed this up you would regret it for the rest of your life. So at times that made it quite an intense experience.

JG: Because opportunities like that don't present themselves everyday.

JW: Yes.

JG: Just taking you back, I'm interested to know what made you go in the direction of composition. Did you grow up in a musical family to start with?

JW: It's difficult for me to define what a "musical family" is. Is a musical family one where you all play traditional music or is it that your mother ran the Dublin Youth Orchestra?

JG: Let's put it in a different way: where music is present.

JW: Music was definitely present when I was a kid. My dad used to play rock guitar in a band in the sixties that largely played in orphanages and the Central Psychiatric Hospital -- bizarre locations. I was certainly lucky in that my father's taste in music was a little outside the mainstream. We owned two copies of The Rite of Spring on LP but didn't own very much Haydn. When we got a piano, my father bought everything he could find by Chopin and Satie, and didn't buy any Beethoven and Mozart. Plus I came from a family of artists, in that my father is now in NCAD [National College of Art and Design] -- he retired and went back to art school -- and my mother is a writer. So any artistic behavior was always supported.

JG: So, not only was it a house where music was present, it was also a creative environment in the broadest artistic sense.

JW: Yes.

JG: Was composition always something you leaned towards?

JW: Yes. I wrote a lot when I was a kid and wrote a lot of pieces for the piano. Then I was a trumpet player and played in the National Youth Orchestra and the Irish Youth Wind Ensemble. I enjoyed that a lot but I always really liked writing. I know it sounds cheesy but I got a bigger buzz when I made something; I enjoyed it and missed it when I didn't do it. I think I was lucky because if I played the violin I would not have had the encouragement I had when I was a student composer because [as a brass player] there's not a huge amount of repertoire out there, so brass players are always incredibly supportive of composers because they want new repertoire. So, when I was eighteen, I wrote my first official piece, a trumpet quartet, and it was performed several times. And I wrote brass quintets and even a piece for brass choir. The Irish Youth Wind Ensemble also did a piece [small small big] by myself. So a lot of wind and brass players support young composers a lot more readily than string players, and wind ensembles will support them more readily than orchestras will. I'm really glad that I was a trumpet player because if I had been a string player and said [to a string quartet] "I wrote a string quartet," they'd say "We've to learn all of the Beethoven, all of the Mozart and all of the Haydn, so yours can wait." Whereas brass players are like "Great! New music -- let's give it a shot."

JG: So you went to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama?

JW: I was very lucky in that I went to the RSAMD as a trumpet player. The [brass] department had quite a lot of people that had started as brass players and had ended up switching to composition. There seems to be a pattern -- we used to call it the 'failed brass player pattern' -- because I know a lot of composers that were brass players at some point in their life. So when I went [to the RSAMD] I realised it was quite normal and there were already mechanisms set up for how that would occur. Once I arrived I thought, "Yes, that's what I want to do." I had composition lessons with James MacMillan once a term. He introduced me to Morton Feldman's music and pointed me in [the direction of] experimental music very early on. He was a very kind person and helped me get my first professional performance. I [also] studied with Rita McAllister, and ended up with John Maxwell Geddes, who was a great teacher.

JG: And then you went to Northwestern University in the US where you studied with Amnon Wolman. What made you choose the US over Europe?

JW: Well, by the time I finished in Scotland, I knew that I didn't want to come back to Ireland, and that I wanted to get the hell out of the UK. I didn't want to go to the continent because my [foreign] language skills weren't quite there. I attended the Ennis Composition Summer School and Michael Alcorn was teaching and he said to me, "You should really think about the States. I think you'd have a ball there." And at that stage, the composers I was really interested in were all American. I was into Cage, Feldman, Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, La Monte Young, so it seemed natural to go across the water [to the USA].

JG: How important was this six-year period in the US for you?

JW: I can't imagine being where I am today without it. I was blessed in that I ended up in Northwestern University, which had a six full-time composition faculty, and they all wrote extremely different music. That was what really attracted me to the place: there wasn't a house aesthetic. Amnon [Wolman] was a huge influence. He was an amazing teacher, became a friend and was a great mentor figure. So I was very, very lucky. Being away in the States was great; and then being in Chicago, which is a really great city for improvisation, was also hugely important to me.

JG: And I have a question about your work as an improviser for later on. But for now, in 2000 you won the Kranichsteiner music prize at the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music. What effect did winning this have on your career? It must have been a huge endorsement.

JW: Endorsement is probably the most apt word that you can use in that Darmstadt [the course] is this bizarre place. The piece that won the prize was As mo cheann and before the prize was even announced, Armin Koehler, the producer who runs the Donaueschingen Festival, came up to me and gave me his card. After the prize was announced I did start to get all these emails and it was terrifying. Because you think, "What if I don't write a piece that sounds like As mo cheann? What if I write a piece and they think it's not as good?" So it was a really terrifying period actually.

JG: Yes, because looking at the list of works that you were commissioned to write as a result of winning this prize, it seemed as if the floodgates had opened.

JW: They really did. I was lucky in that they opened, and I did them and they worked out. And that gave me stepping-stones to other projects that I'm now working on. One of the things that I don't like about Darmstadt is that a lot of the composers who do go there are these young composers who've latched on usually to complexity as a stylistic aesthetic and they've decided, "This is who I am." Of course, you're twenty-one and you don't know who you are as a person. And the way that you talk about the aesthetic and analyse it is very distanced from your personality. Because if you're giving a lecture about a piece that's written in a complex style, you're going to put up these grids and matrices of numbers and schematics. You're not exposing yourself in any way.

JG: So, you're hiding behind this technique?

JW: Yes, and I think it's a very safe thing to do. It's terrifying when you're a young composer because you're always being told to justify your work in very specific terms. What winning the prize really forced me to do was decide who I was, or at least who I was then at that point. Because you think "If I wrote the piece in this style and it won the prize, does that mean I have to [always] compose in this style?" It was an interesting experience because all of a sudden I was in the limelight and I was getting these big commissions and you're quaking in your boots thinking, "Is it going to be OK?" The end of that cycle was when I lectured in Darmstadt two years later and then the knives were out because I'd won the prize and I had to stand up for what I believed in. That was a really difficult but great experience to go through.

JG: So you had to come back and defend yourself?

JW: Some of the guys in the audience couldn't take the fact that I was lecturing. I wish you could hear the tapes [of the lectures] because it is unbelievable. A lot of the time at Darmstadt, they're not asking questions because they're interested; they're asking questions to try to punch a hole in somebody's theory. It's funny because the first few questions are going to be like that -- it's somebody trying to show that they know more than you do.

JG: But this was the exception really -- experiencing these sort of questions?

JW: Oh yes. I had people at my performances that were cheering and booing; it was a polarised response. And I thought: would I rather have it that people were just sitting clapping politely, or that people are screaming and booing? And I thought I would go with the latter, where at least I felt there was a response that was being dragged out of people.

JG: It sounds like real character-building.

JW: Oh it was! [laughs]

JG: You've alluded to your composition aesthetic and I'd like to focus in a little more on this. Perhaps the best way to describe it is to take your quote, "The sounds I am interested in include those that we hear all the time but are normally considered flawed or redundant." What is it about this way of working that interests you so much?

JW: I think that partly it's because I've no interest in making a sound that I've heard a million times before. So, when somebody says, "Will you write a piece for piano?" I'm like, "Oh damn. Piano -- what am I going to do with it?" [laughs] And I think about how I can make it not sound like a piano. Or, if I want it to sound like a piano, I want to make it sound like a very specific type of piano, like the piano chord at the end of A Day in the Life by the Beatles, or something like that. It makes me cry that a lot of the time, someone learns how to play the violin and they're told that the only sound that they should be making is this one very specific sound, and there are hundreds of other sounds that can be made. And yes, that sound is incredibly beautiful, but there are also these other great sounds you can get from the instrument. It's like saying that you're going to compose a piece but the only colour you're using is blue, whereas I just want to use all these other colours. It's very Cageian in that it's a philosophy of life, which is this idea of trying to see beauty in everyday things.

JG: You've also mentioned that a very important element in this whole philosophy, if I can call it that, is the non-traditional way in which you write for instruments. Do you feel that because of this, your works often require a particular type of performer?

JW: Yes, but in saying that I think every work requires a particular type of performer. The problematic thing with the music education system is that people think that if they play a few pieces after 1950, that means that they're contemporary music specialists, and I don't think that's true. I've learnt now that it's ridiculous for a contemporary composer to think that every person who plays contemporary music should be into what I do or they should be good at what I do. I'm lucky now in that the people who commission me know what they're getting themselves into, otherwise they wouldn't commission me. The people I write for [know] there are [certain] things I can ask them to do. Those relationships are far more interesting to me than trying to get some ensemble to play or commission a piece of mine, just because I think they're good. I'd rather work with people I know where we have a really fruitful and beneficial working relationship.

JG: And because of this fact that you're asking performers to go beyond conventional ways of playing. Do you have to be more involved when it comes to the rehearsal and performance of your works?

JW: I think that my notation gets it a lot of the way there. But a lot of the people, I know their mindset because I work with them a lot. So the Skate-boarding piece, there's been two performances of that so far: Anton Lukoszevieze did a cello version and Ensemble Chronophonie in Freiberg did a version too. And when they emailed me with questions, they were the type of questions you'd ask of any composer. Also, I'm often performing in the pieces so I'm there anyway. I think my philosophy of how music should be now is changing in that for me, it's almost like theatre. It's not just that you sit on stage and play the notes -- there's a mindset that goes with it. My approach is encompassing more elements of performance. Even if it's just a piece for string quartet and two boom-boxes [saw it in a movie] there's a specific staging. To me, the gestures they make have sounds; even if you're not hearing a sound, there's a rhythm to the gestures people make.

JG: Yes, because even going back to the point about notation, I've read the introductions in your scores and they're incredibly detailed. So, you can, if necessary, stand back and let the performers get on with it.

JW: The notation is very important and I think I went to an extreme for a while where I was seeing exactly how anal I could be in pieces like They Could Laugh Smile. The score is a whole page of streams of information that are all relating to the trombonist and it's very difficult to decode. So that piece was really important to see how far I could push that, and to develop a language that could be consistent across my scores, so that I always use the same symbols for specific things.

JG: I'd like to ask you a question about your work as an improviser, which you mentioned earlier. To what extent has your work in this area influenced your composition work?

JW: Oh hugely. I started improvising when I was in Chicago because the college where I was studying encouraged it and we performed a lot of experimental music. I started using my voice in my performances and I started working with this guy, Jonathan Chen, and we formed a duo called nolimetangere. We started doing these experiments, where we would book a room and just play for a couple of hours, tape what we did and just listen and talk about it. We’d do these experiments where we would make each other really angry and then tape the sound. It was all very bizarre but I think you have to go through that phase in that if you just decide, “I want to be an improviser and I’m going to gig,” you’re not going to do it well. So, we gelled into this combination of live electronics and voice and As mo cheann was written for him to play with me because he’s a violinist. So I never would have written that piece and never would’ve performed at Darmstadt if it weren’t for our improvising, and I never would have explored the vocabulary of my voice. That gave me the confidence to start playing [different instruments]. I now have a piece [dirty white fields] I wrote for voice and violin which I perform a lot and I’m not a violinist, but I can play the violin in this way so that I get these sounds I really love. I don’t think I would have developed in this way as a composer if I hadn’t been an improviser too.

JG: You said before -- and I hope I’m right in quoting this -- that you see your music as a reflection of the culture you experience as opposed to belonging to a tradition. What exactly did you mean by that?

JW: I don’t know if you quoted me but I’ll try to explain my reaction to that comment. One thing that was very curious to me was that people would comment on my music and say, “Your music is very personal.” What I realized was that for me, my music is, like it or lump it, a reflection of my personality, which is a reflection of the culture my personality functions in. And so, there are a lot of pop-culture references in there. You have a lot of composers and you read interviews with them and they say that they totally adore Mozart and at the end they tag in, “And I like the Beastie Boys.”

JG: And I played in a band!

JW: Yes. I use pop music because I’ve listened to it all my life and I love it. It makes sense because if I'm thinking about a certain colour, often it will be a reference to a certain sound in a pop song. For me, it is a reflection of the culture in that way. It’s not a sort of intellectual tourism where you think, “Here’s this element which I can analyse and apply in such a way that you don’t really hear anything of the original.” For me, it’s much more [a case of] growing up listening to your granny singing this traditional Irish song; and the way she sings it, the way her voice sounds, the notes of it have this particular colour, which is incredibly emotionally resonant. So, it’s about putting that into the music, rather than trying to put in Molly Malone because you think you should display your musical heritage.

JG: So it’s very sincere, it’s part of what you are.

JW: Yes.

JG: I’d like to ask you about one of your current projects and that’s your commission to create a work for the National Sculpture Factory, which came about through the NSF contacting CMC. Can you tell me about this project?

JW: I’m very excited about this project because I’ve been commissioned by a visual arts organization and that is such a different experience than being commissioned by a music ensemble. I was commissioned to work with the space in any way I saw fit, and it’s been an ongoing relationship -- I’ve gone down to Cork and given talks and done a lot of workshops with both student and professional artists. Some of them made pieces as a result [of the workshops] and it was great to see people [compose] their first-ever sound work. And also, to see this very different view of working with sound -- a lot of the people [attending the workshops] came from a visual arts background. Now the workshops have finished and I’m concentrating on writing the piece. We’re going to use the space of the factory as a stage and play on the unique architectural properties that it has. I’ll be in a cupboard for the entire piece, so I don’t have to get dressed up! [laughs]

JG: And that’s going to happen in?

JW: In November.

JG: This project leads into my next question. There’s a very strong visual element to your works, and this project, I suppose, builds on this side to your work. How do you feel about the relationship between the visual and the aural experience of music? Is it possible to separate the two?

JW: For me, I can’t separate the two any more. There’s a beautiful quote in Silence [by John Cage] where he says, “What next? Theatre; because we have eyes as well as ears.” I cannot remember the last piece I wrote that didn’t have some visual element to it, even just in terms of disseminating the performers through space. Last year I wrote this opera for Barbie dolls [XXX_Live_Nude_Girls!!!], which was hugely visual, and I’ve just finished writing another opera, which again has so many visual components. I’m starting to do work with slides and projections that can be manipulated live. So [my work] is hugely visual in a wide variety of different ways.

JG: You mentioned your opera, XXX_Live_Nude_Girls!!!, involving Barbie dolls. How did come to write a work based on Barbie dolls?

JW: Partly it was because I was reading about marionette operas and I really liked this idea of the Esterhazys taking Haydn or Mozart out to their summer palace and putting on marionette operas because they were cheap and portable. Also, I really do not like a lot of modern opera and I do not want to set text, so I thought about using the Barbies as marionettes and videoing the action live and projecting it, so that people could see it very clearly. I started thinking about it and told Anton Lukoszevieze [cellist] about the idea. He loved it and looked for commission funding for it. It was a very unique project to do because every person I talked to while I was writing it either told a Barbie story or pointed out something about Barbie; so you suddenly realize how ubiquitous Barbie is as a brand. The stories that people came out with [about Barbies] were stunning -- very weird and bizarre things. The opera is not a condemnation of Barbie; it’s not saying whether Barbie is good or bad.

JG: Did you get commission funding from Mattel?

JW: No, we avoided Mattel! We had a legal precedent where somebody had used dolls and Mattel had tried to sue and it was thrown out of court. The bizarre thing was that I got so much publicity for this. It was insane -- all over the world, I had articles in newspapers because it was Barbie! It was very funny because now I see what makes news!

JG: That piece was your longest work to date: do you plan to write any more large-scale pieces?

JW: Some of the works I’m working on now are longer. This science-fiction opera which I just finished is 30 minutes long; I’m writing a music theatre piece for the ISCM World Music Days in Stuttgart in 2006, so that will be around 40 minutes. I like working with longer durations because for a lot of the sounds I use I think you need to listen to them for a least 2 minutes to hear them properly.

JG: You’ve just turned thirty earlier in the summer...

JW: Thanks a lot! [laughs]

JG: ...which still counts as being young for a composer. Where do you see yourself going from here? Are there new directions that you plan to go in?

JW: I can definitely see that I’ve made shifts in what I’m doing, especially in the last twelve months. I’ve started working a lot with text. I’ve been doing these pieces, which are recipes where you cook with sound. I’ve also started working a lot more with graphics, so I’m doing pieces now where there won’t be a score but an architectural plan that the performers move through, and there’s a complex symbolic language that I can notate live [while the performance is taking place]. If I look back at my notation and all the language I developed to notate my sounds over the last years, it’s very clear that it was leading up to this sort of thing. The musicians that I respect the most are the ones that were able to continue growing, like Stravinsky who could make these massive style shifts or Beck, whose every album sounds completely different. I really respect that because it’s trying something new and not settling into a specific way of writing that you stick with for the rest of your life. Now I’m starting to see myself more as an artist, in the sense that I work with visuals as well as sound, instead of saying that I’m a composer and only being allowed in this little box.

JG: We look forward to seeing and hearing these in the future. In the short-term are there any projects happening later this year or in 2005 that you can tell us about?

JW: There's an opera production company in the Berlin called Novoflot and they want to breath new life into opera because they think it's very exciting. They have started a project called Kommander Kobayashi and this year they commissioned three composers to each write a thirty-minute opera based on the same character-set. My one is called Set phasers on kill because it's all about immortality and death. I read a lot of science-fiction novels when I was writing it and this theme cropped up again and again. The opera has a lot of pop-culture references, and I die at the end of it!

JG: You're one of the characters?

JW: Yes, the characters come to visit my spaceship and they want to steal something from me. At the end of it there's a massive kung fu fight in slow motion. I'm doing a lot of tai chi to get in shape for it. It's pretty exciting! [laughs]

JG: And when is that going to be performed?

JW: It will be done in Hamburg and Berlin in January 2005.

JG: You'll have to send us the DVD of it! That's all I want to ask, Jenny, so thanks very much.

Jennifer Walshe was interviewed on video by Jonathan Grimes in the Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin, on 9 August 2004.

The views expressed in this interview are those of the persons concerned and are not necessarily those of the Contemporary Music Centre.