Q&A with Alan Pierson, conductor for Wall to Wall Steve Reich

Alan Pierson has been praised as “a dynamic conductor and musical visionary” by The New York Times, “a young conductor of monstrous skill” by Newsday, “gifted and electrifying” by The Boston Globe, and “one of the most exciting figures in new music today” by Fanfare. He is the Artistic Director and conductor of the acclaimed ensemble Alarm Will Sound and served as Artistic Director and conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic for three years. He is Principal Conductor of the Dublin-based Crash Ensemble, co-director of the Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensemble, and has appeared as guest conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the London Sinfonietta, the Steve Reich Ensemble, and The Silk Road Project, among many other ensembles.

On April 30, 2017, Alan will lead the American Composers Orchestra in Steve Reich's The Desert Music. The performance is part of Symphony Space’s free marathon event Wall to Wall Steve Reich, featuring Steve Reich himself in conversation, as well as a program spanning more than four decades of his work, culminating in ACO’s performance.

Alan was kind enough to speak with us about The Desert Music and his upcoming performance with ACO.

Conductor Alan Pierson. Photo by Michael Rubenstein

American Composers Orchestra: The first album by Alarm Will Sound – “the vital, omnivorous” (The New York Times) chamber group you co-founded and for which you are artistic director – is Steve Reich, featuring his Tehillim and The Desert Music. It's considered one of the best recordings of these pieces by many (and by Steve himself!). What drew you to tackle these works for your first AWS album?

Alan Pierson: Tehillim was the first piece of contemporary music that I fell in love with. I have a visceral memory of hearing it in in a class (led by Michael Pisaro) at a Northwestern University summer program when I was 18, and then dashing out to the nearest record store to buy the CD. (I've since gotten rid of nearly all of my CDs, but I've kept that one even though it's scratched well beyond any possibility of actually playing.) The following fall, I found the Tehillim score in the MIT music library and became obsessed with the idea of performing it. Tehillim was one of the first pieces I conducted. It was well beyond my abilities at the time, but I loved the music so much that I had to do it anyway. I had developed a vision for how Tehillim should go that I felt very strongly about and that was very different from either of the recordings that existed, so I really wanted to get it out there. Then in 1999, when I was grad student at Eastman, Steve came to hear me conduct Tehillim. He came away very enthusiastic about the performance, and that helped open doors to make the album happen. So Tehillim is a piece that's I'm very deeply connected to.

I came to The Desert Music in a very different way. I had listened to the Nonesuch recording (which is of the original full orchestra version) after falling in love with Tehillim, but never really got into the piece. I knew that it was building on the same sorts of musical ideas that I'd loved in other works of Steve's, but The Desert Music wasn't doing it for me. Then when I came down to New York City in 1999 to watch my teacher (Brad Lubman) conduct Reich's The Cave as part of a series of Reich concerts that Lincoln Center Festival was doing that summer, I happened also to catch a performance of the smaller chamber version of The Desert Music. And suddenly I glimpsed what the piece could be. I've always felt that Reich was more a composer of chamber music than orchestral music; and reimagined as a massive chamber piece, I saw all kinds of possibilities for The Desert Music that I hadn't envisioned before. With just one player on a part, the piece suddenly felt much closer to those earlier works of Steve's that I'd fallen in love with—pieces like Music for 18 Musicians and Tehillim. One of the orchestra members had given me a score for The Desert Music to follow along with during rehearsals, and I poured over that score all summer and began imagining what I wanted to do with the piece. I started envisioning a realization of the piece that would be very different from the Nonesuch recording, and that I really wanted the world to hear. So that was it. I knew that that had to be the album.

ACO: And what did it take, from you and the ensemble, to capture a great recording of The Desert Music?

AP: It was a huge process! We spent over 30 hours rehearsing The Desert Music, and while we had absolutely no skill at the time with recording or working in a studio, we had an obsession about making the recording absolutely what we wanted. And we didn't let up. Gavin Chuck (now Alarm Will Sound's managing director) and I hid out under the desk in the Eastman School's computer music lab after hours so that we could spend every possible hour editing and mixing that album. I was 26 at the time and most of the singers and players were probably even younger. It was the kind of process I could only imagine happening at that point in life.

ACO: You and the ACO will perform the 2001 version of Steve Reich's The Desert Music, for 10 amplified voices and reduced orchestra, with your brass arrangement. Can you talk about what it was like working with Steve on this version? Besides reducing the size of the ensemble, what goals did you have for the new arrangement?

AP: Well, I didn't work with him as much as persuade him. I was thrilled by the possibilities that the chamber version of The Desert Music offered, but I really missed one thing from the orchestral version: the brass. Reich had replaced all of the brass with synthesizers for his chamber version, and I felt that this robbed the piece of one of its crucial colors. I knew the original 12-piece orchestral brass section would overwhelm such a small ensemble, but I pitched Steve the idea of a reduced brass orchestration that would mix live players with synthesizers in order to cover all the thick brass harmonies and give the flavor of acoustic brass without having so many players. He was very skeptical! So I got a bunch of students together who volunteered to play through my imagined brass orchestration. We recorded the session and sent it to Steve. Once he heard it, he was sold, and that was it. That became the official way to do the piece.

The smaller instrumentation really transforms The Desert Music in a brilliant way. There's much greater rhythmic clarity, which is so crucial for Reich's music. Tempos can be faster. And those thick, juicy jazz harmonies that he wrote speak much more clearly. 

ACO: We hope you don't mind us quoting Twitter, but you recently said, if you're going to listen to just one track of The Desert Music, it has to be the middle movement. Is this your favorite movement? Or do you say this because, given that the piece is structured in an arc form A-B-C-B-A, the middle movement is best suited to stand alone?

AP: Yeah, I think that central movement is where it's at. Steve is a canon guy, and that middle movement has the only vocal canons in the whole piece, and they're fantastic. And in between the canon sections, he does this other thing (another technique he's developed over decades) where he takes a theme and stretches it out, making it longer and longer. And while he's doing this, he's got the harmonies restlessly beneath the tunes. It's some of my favorite of Reich's vocal writing. His typical vocal instrumentation is four voices, and there's no other piece where he writes vocal harmonies as thick as in The Desert Music. And in this section as he's stretching out those melodies, there are these fantastically crunchy tight jazz harmonies. Plus, the whole sections just barrels. It's got tremendous energy. I love it. I have other favorite spots—the luminescent first vocal entrance in movement V, the hockets in movements II and IV, the flute solos, etc...—but if you're gonna listen to one movement, the central one is where to go.

ACO: What new perspectives do you hope the marathon can offer on Steve Reich's incredible body of work? And what are you looking forward to about the marathon and your performance of The Desert Music with ACO? Why is it important that the marathon includes that piece? 

AP: I've gotten more joy from Steve's music than from anyone else's. Performing his music is pretty much always a joyful experience for me, and I hope to give some of that experience to the audience. And I've never before performed so many of his pieces on a single show, so it's really exciting to be a part of a performance that brings so broad an encounter with his music. The Desert Music is a marvelous piece of Reich's that's so seldom heard—I don't think it's been performed in New York since I conducted it here 16 years ago. For me personally, there's something special about revisiting a piece that was so important to the beginning of my life in music and that I haven't conducted since I was a student. So this is a particularly meaningful performance to me. And even after having Steve in my life for years, it continually amazes me that someone who's music has meant so much to so many of us is a an actual human being who's in the world and who you can relate to. So having Steve at this show and on stage talking with me is a very special thing.

Learn more about Wall to Wall Steve Reich, a free marathon event at Symphony Space on April 30, 2017.

Follow Alan on Twitter
www.alanpierson.com

Past Forward: Composer Spotlight - Steve Reich

Steve Reich has been called “America’s greatest living composer” (Village Voice), “the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker), and “among the great composers of the century” (The New York Times). His music, spanning a vibrant career that started in 1960s, is a staple of contemporary classical repertoire and has influenced composers and mainstream musicians all over the world. Music for 18 Musicians and Different Trains have earned him two Grammy Awards, and in 2009, his Double Sextet won the Pulitzer Prize. 

Tehillim, composed in 1981, is a work for four female singers and chamber orchestra that Reich says is quite different from his earlier works. He writes in his program note, “There is no fixed meter or metric pattern in Tehillim as there is in my earlier music. The rhythm of the music here comes directly from the rhythm of the Hebrew text.” The word “Tehillim” is the Hebrew name of the biblical Book of Psalms, from which the piece takes its text. Reich also writes that the work “may well suggest renewed interest in Classical or, more accurately, Baroque and earlier Western musical practice.”

The 2016–2017 season marks Steve Reich’s 80th birthday, with over 400 performances in more than 20 countries across the globe celebrating his music and legacy. American Composers Orchestra is proud to be a part of this celebration, and performs Tehillim with sopranos Elizabeth Bates, Martha Cluver, Mellissa Hughes and mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway at “Past Forward” on Friday, March 24, 2017 at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. 

Steve Reich was kind enough to speak with us about the piece and his relationship with ACO’s Music Director George Manahan, who conducted the premiere recording in 1981. This interview is transcribed from our phone conversation.

Composer Steve Reich. Photo by Jeffrey Herman

American Composers Orchestra: We wanted to start by talking about your relationship with ACO's Music Director George Manahan, who conducted the premiere recording for ECM Records in 1981. Can you talk about how you came to work with him and what it was like?

Steve Reich: My ensemble never had a conductor for anything until 1981 when I wrote Tehillim. We felt we might be able to do it without one but it sure would be better if we had one. James Preiss, one of the main percussionists in my ensemble, was teaching at Manhattan School of Music and knew George, who was at MSM also, and said to us, I think I have the ideal guy to be a conductor. George had the same kind of mind set so we decided to try it. George came down to my studio on Warren Street near City Hall and it was just like hand in glove. We said, this is the guy! George completely mastered the changing meters which are [laughs] well, I would never write anything with such large measures the way I did in Tehillim unless it wasn’t necessary – it accurately reflects the vocal line – but it’s a difficult piece to conduct. I think Michael Tilson Thomas said to me at some point afterwards, “Musicians like downbeats!” [laughs]

Anyway, George did a great job during rehearsals. We then took the piece to Europe and he conducted on tour with us. We all lived together, worked together, performed together. It was just a delight. Back in The States we did the American premiere at the Rothko Chapel out in Houston and the NY premiere at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, near the 20th century galleries. George did all of that and then finally we went back to Europe to do the recording in Stuttgart. It was very intense. There were a lot of people and we recorded live. There were lots of re-dos. Everybody’s in the room. I think it’s a remarkable recording. George is absolutely first rate and a pleasure to work with, and to top it off we both have the same birthday! [laughs]

George Manahan conducting the premiere recording of Tehillim with Steve Reich and Musicians in Stuttgart, 1981. Photos by Deborah Reingold courtesy of the Paul Sacher Foundation

ACO: Thinking about this first recording of Tehillim vs. the many subsequent recordings that have been made, can you identify anything about George Manahan's approach to performing Tehillim that is different to other conductors?

SR: I think George was at home with this kind of musical language – the subdivisions of twos and threes – and he was familiar with a lot of 20th Century music. I would say for me, that recording and the Alarm Will Sound recording are the two outstanding recordings that come to mind. The Steve Reich and Musicians recording had [laughs] I don’t know 50 or 60 cuts. And Alan [Pierson, Music Director of Alarm Will Sound] sent me a lot of the in progress mixes. So as cohesive as it is musically, this is a testament to how correct Glenn Gould was when he recorded and re-recorded so many multiple takes.

ACO: Tehillim has been performed numerous times around the world since its premiere in 1981. Its initial reception was not as severe as say Four Organs at Carnegie Hall in 1973.

SR: No no no [laughs] Tehillim was appreciated right away. It was pretty obvious that in general people were, and still are, attracted to Tehillim more than Four Organs. I enjoy it more. They are very different types of pieces.

ACO: Do you think audiences’ responses to these works have changed over the years?

SR: Of course! Four Organs created a riot in Carnegie Hall in 1973 – it’s been noted many times – but Michael Tilson Thomas did it in San Francisco in 1996 and … well, people recognized it and really liked it. There was a lot of resistance in the late 1960s and early 1970s to what I was doing and now that has changed enormously. I’m in Los Angeles right now – the LA Phil New Music Group just did Tehillim with conductor Jeffrey Milarsky. It was a great performance and received a wonderful standing ovation.

ACO: Do you think it is important for listeners to know the origins and meaning of the text in Tehillim?

SR: Yes, the text is the Psalms and, like any concert with vocal music, the text certainly should be printed in the program. They’re not that long since they’re really parts of the Psalms. The answer to your question is this: when you first heard Bob Dylan you said, “What … I can’t understand a word.” But there was something magnetic about the music. When you listen to Handel’s Messiah you don’t get all the words, but the music magnetizes you and you want to listen to it. You got some of it, got the gist of it, but later on you might say, “What exactly were they singing?”

Tehillim is of course set in the original Hebrew, which means that you’re not going to understand it by listening, so you’re either going to go to the libretto or you’re not. I think most people do end up going to the libretto and they understand it, they get it. Everybody especially understands “Hallelujah,” so the last movement is crystal clear and that may help gel a lot of the other parts. But for most people, if you’re just a casual listener, it has to work just as music. That’s a must for any composer. If you say, well, they’ve got to understand this and that and another thing, that’s just a crutch, that’s an excuse. I don’t accept it. If music is going to work it has to have legs and either it does or it doesn’t.

Now, if you’re attracted to the music and you’re interested in it, then you might listen to a recording before the performance or bring the text with you, and I think you will get more out of it, because Tehillim is definitely a setting of the text in the classical sense of that term. The meaning of the words counts and you want to capture that as best you can. So sure, the text matters, but the music comes first and then if you’re really interested you can go to the score and say, “How’d he do this?” [laughs]

ACO: You have said that you don't believe in movements, that when the music stops, it stops. Is Tehillim an exception? If so, why did you make an exception for Tehillim?

SR: It’s an interesting question because it was the first piece of mine to have a movement break, but certainly not the last. I have a lot of other pieces now with movement breaks. You Are Variations comes to mind immediately, which is very much related to Tehillim. You Are Variations is one of my best pieces, but because of four pianos and a chorus it’s performed less than I wish it was.

But to answer your question, writing Tehillim with movement breaks was basically a gut decision. I had finished the first half and I remember being in the car with Péter Eötvös, the Hungarian composer-performer-conductor, who at the time was the conductor of the Ensemble InterContemporain and the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart [Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra]. I had finished the first half and we were going to perform it as a work-in-progress. We were driving from Paris to Stuttgart. His English was not very good and my German was non-existent, so was my Hungarian, but he said to me at one point, “So you’ll go on like before? Same tempo?” [laughs] It hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought, wow, what a good question. And really, what his comment ignited was the realization that I needed a slow movement. I hadn’t yet written a consciously slow movement at a different tempo. So that introduced the idea of taking a pause. Also, a lot of concentration is needed in the first half of Tehillim – it’s a very long section. A little break to catch your breath is very much in order in a purely practical sense, and the slow movement serves that purpose very well.

Having movement breaks or no breaks is not according to some theory or principle. If Péter Eötvös hadn’t said that, I probably would have gone with the same solution, but I do remember that moment with him in the car and thinking about it. The slow movement is the most chromatic music I have written to date – after my student years anyway – and I think it’s very successful. It was really exciting for me because I had never written anything that moved that slowly. It opened up a whole world which I pursued quite a bit going forward.

ACO: As you may already know, ACO is dedicated to the creation, performance, preservation and promulgation of music by American composers, and is involved in many programs to commission and premiere works by young American composers. Can you talk about any similar organizations or programs that contributed to your success as a young composer? 

SR: To be perfectly candid, I really wasn’t interested in the orchestra. I’m working on a piece now called 20 Soloists and Orchestra, which is a concerto grosso using the first chair people and a few soloists, but basically this is a large chamber work, which I’m always doing anyway, with a sort of backup band with brass and the remainder of the strings. So I have been writing chamber music all my life. Tehillim is a large chamber piece in that it’s one to a part. Is isn’t chamber music in the sense in which that it’s conducted, but I think playing it requires having to listen to each other much like you need to with all chamber music.

When I was getting started, no, there was no organization of any sort that I relied on to establish myself. The most overwhelming important thing for getting started was founding my own ensemble back in 1966. It started with three musicians, which grew to five, including Philip Glass and James Tenney. With Drumming I think it grew to 12, and then in 1976 it grew to 18. And there it more or less stayed until 2006, when I just felt I really couldn’t have the energy to do what was necessary to keep it going. Even though I had people to help out – I had managers and so on – there was an irreducible minimum that I had to do which I felt I really couldn’t.

My ensemble was the vehicle for my music, including Tehillim and of course Drumming and Music for Eighteen Musicians and other pieces. At a certain point I began writing for other ensembles and whether or not my ensemble could do it was sort of gravy or not, depending on the piece.

On the other hand, there was and still is an organization I was a part of, which I hope benefited others, and which I felt reflected my interest in the idea of the composer performing and getting involved in the performance of his or her own work. That is Meet the Composer. Myself, Fran Richard, and John Duffy were really the very center, the core of Meet the Composer. It was an organization that I really felt was worthwhile and of course it grew and grew and grew and now has turned into New Music USA by merging with American Music Center. I think it’s a very worthwhile mission. Supporting young composers by giving them money [laughs] and commissioning works is a great thing to do. ACO came along much later in my professional life, but it’s a great addition and something I’ve been connected with from time to time.

I should say in passing that the loss of Steven Stucky was just a total shock that completely left a hole in the American musical world. I think that should be noted.

ACO: Can you talk about the vocal style needed from the four female singers in Tehillim? Should their voices sound as similar in timbre as possible? Or can different vocal timbres create a richer texture in performance?

SR: Well, first of all, singers are human beings. I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear that [laughs]. Their vocal cavities necessitate, as a rule of biology and physics, that their timbral quality will in fact vary. What is essential is not that the timbre of the voices be the same, but that the vocal style be uniform. So, if you’ve got one singer who thinks that they’re going to belt it out like Wagner’s Tannhäuser and the other three are singing early music style, which is what it should be, then that doesn’t work.

The vocal style of Tehillim is definitely related to Renaissance and Medieval music, but it can also be related to Ella Fitzgerald. Cheryl Bensman-Rowe, a great singer who is now in the Midwest, was putting together singers for the early versions of Tehillim. They would ask her, “What kind of vocal style do you want?” and she would say, “Similar to Joni Mitchell and he’ll love it.” Believe it or not, I hadn’t even heard anything by Joni Mitchell and only heard her about 10 years ago – I was completely floored, she’s absolutely amazing – but I think Cheryl had it right. Basically, singers are a good fit for Tehillim if they can sing with no vibrato, sing in a small voice, are at ease with a microphone, and are experienced with early music. They need to be agile and they need to have really good rhythmic qualities, which singers in the operatic world may not have as markedly as the people I’m talking about. So – early music, good with a microphone, at ease with different styles of non-operatic music – that is a necessity. Of course the timbre is going to vary from singer to singer, but if they’re all in the same stylistic world it’s going to work just fine.

ACO: Tehillim is especially intriguing in the way it doesn’t frequently display obvious tension then resolution, dissonance then consonance, whereas this is a basic tool used in a lot of music (especially Romantic and Classical) to create drama. How is it that Tehillim creates drama? 

SR: Tehillim obviously belongs in the tradition of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music – singers who regularly sing Bach cantatas will be right at home in Tehillim – and you could say a lot of music from those periods don’t use, to quote you, “frequent tension and release.” Bach seems to be doing pretty good [laughs] and does he have that kind of Romantic tension and release? Well, yes and no.

I would say that in Tehillim there are parts of the slow movement that have dissonances that resolve, albeit in a small and understated way. The Hallelujah at the end, to me, is ecstatic. I think it’s some of the best music I’ve ever written. If you can pull off a good Hallelujah in D Major then [laughs] that’s what it’s all about. So it does create strong emotional responses which surely vary throughout the piece. The mood of the slow movement is drastically different than the Hallelujah that follows it. The first two movements are similar, but in the first movement the voices are constantly doubled by the B-flat clarinet, then right on a dime at the beginning of the second movement, the voices are doubled by oboe and English horn. It almost feels like new singers – the timbre of the singers changes drastically.

Now, of course this is something Bach did too, changing the doubling of the woodwinds that are supporting the voices. These are all old tricks that go back to Bach and before, and this is part of the reason that I think the music is satisfying. For people who have listened to a lot of classical music from various periods – who relate to anything of Bach and before, and from Stravinsky onwards, and for that matter who like Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell or lots of people who are singing today – it seems to satisfy them and give emotional variety, which I think is really the essence of what you are asking.

You can learn more about Steve Reich and upcoming performances of his music at www.stevereich.com.

ACO performs Tehillim with sopranos Elizabeth Bates, Martha Cluver, Mellissa Hughes and mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway at “Past Forward” on Friday, March 24, 2017, 7:30pm at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. More information and tickets here.

ACO also performs The Desert Music at Symphony Space’s free marathon concert “Wall to Wall Steve Reich” on Sunday, April 30, 2017. More information here.