Conversations with Composers
Composer Andy Vores speaks with Executive Director Lisa Stiller. Andy is the Chair of Composition, Theory, and Music History at Boston Conservatory, and composer of Natural Selection, Cantata Singers’ latest commission, to be premiered on May 8, 2009 at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall.
Lisa: Andy, thank you so much for agreeing to share some thoughts with me and our online viewers. We are eagerly awaiting the world premiere of Natural Selection and are deeply appreciative of all the great work you’ve done with our Classroom Cantatas students around this project, as well as their own Cantata.
Andy: It has been my pleasure.
Lisa: To begin, what do you find inspiring about writing choral/orchestral music?
Andy: I find writing interesting choral music to be rather a challenge—and I do like compositional challenges! I don’t enjoy or admire vocal or choral music where the text is obscured, so one of the necessities for me when writing for chorus is to do it in a way that keeps the words clear but doesn’t rely overmuch on simple rhythms and syllabic setting. Writing for chorus and orchestra provides the added challenge of making sure that everything has a presence and that instruments and voices work together not separately – at least if that’s the work’s intention.
Lisa: I know how much David Hoose enjoys working with you and performing your music. This time you have an entirely new group of collaborators: school children. After all, they have composed two melodies that you will include Natural Selection. Has this been a process you’d enjoy repeating?
Andy: Oh yes—the first part of this process has been very gratifying. Let’s see how the children respond to my setting of their melodies. Hopefully they’ll find it intriguing—and still recognize them as their own. We had to work very quickly together, so it was quite breathless at times, but great fun. I also love to work with children as performers and am eager to hear their finished Classroom Cantata.
Lisa: What are your thoughts about the new work Natural Selection?
Andy: I grew up closely connected to the English countryside, and the texts I’ve chosen—by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, and Charles Darwin—reverberate strongly with me. Their descriptions of life in the hedgerow, meadow, and undergrowth fired remembered sights and sounds and smells, which I think have influenced what I’ve done in Natural Selection. All of the settings are surrounded by (sometimes permeated by) “thicket” music – a welter of overlapping notes, which reminds me of the tangled, thorny, bushes, which separate English pastures and fields. I know this probably won’t be conveyed to the listener – but a sense of nostalgia may come across.
Lisa: You’ve worked with Cantata Singers before, most recently during Cantata Singers’ performance of our last commissioning project from you, World Wheel, in 2000. What brings you back to work with us again?
Andy: I love working with David Hoose, and I love the commitment and enthusiasm of Cantata Singers. Here is a group of people who truly love what they do, do it beautifully, and who place contemporary music in a central position in their programming and performance. Who could resist all that?!
Lisa: Your new composition is placed in a season devoted to Benjamin Britten. Where are your musical and or philosophical intersections?
Andy: Britten has always been enormously important to me. There are many purely musical reasons for this - to do with his harmonic language, the genres he wrote in, his sensitivity to text. The breadth of his inspiration, his craftsmanship, and the humanness of his music all made a deep, and early, impression on me. But I think the thing that I most respond to, at least now that I’m in my 50s, is a worldview which, while never bleak, encompasses great amounts of darkness as well as illumination. There is an almost Jungian wholeness to Britten’s conceptions which makes his work so rich and deep and complex, even when the musical language is as plain as day. The transparency of his music, which then reveals the constant, universal tussle between chaos and order, speaks to me strongly. Indeed, that’s the heart of Natural Selection too – so for my piece to be premiered alongside Britten’s music feels exactly right.