A Conversation with Conductor Julian Wachner

BY DAVID WOLMAN

Wachner: Complete Choral Music, Vol. 1 - Sometimes I Feel Alive; Rilke Songs; Missa Brevis
Audio CD
NAXOS AMERICAN
Buy now from Amazon

I had the opportunity to speak with Julian Wachner, the first installment of whose complete choral music has just been released by Naxos in its “American Classics” series. The composer/conductor is busy these days conducting new operas and old oratorios while simultaneously completing commissions for numerous choral works and a 50-minute organ concerto. His ambition and obvious ability make him a sought-after commodity for both the composing and the conducting worlds, though sometimes bridging the gap between the two is not so simple.

Q: Tell me about what you were doing with City Opera in New York City this week.

A: My opera, Evangeline Revisited, was being workshopped at the Vox Festival, having been chosen along with nine others from over 100 submissions. I was also conducting several of the other operas. This typifies the kind of existence I lead. I became familiar to the other composers as their conductor and they became familiar with me as one of their fellow composers.

Q: Given that your current CD includes pieces based on poetry, let me ask you how you see the relationship between the two, and how you begin to work on such a project, merging two different but often fused art forms?

A: Well, it started pretty simply when I was commissioned to write choral works based on the poetry of E.E. Cummings and Rainer Maria Rilke. The process of choosing the texts is incredibly laborious. I didn’t want to just choose random poems, especially with the Rilke piece; I wanted to choose poems that related to one another so there would be a line unifying the piece. With the Cummings set, I decided to focus on the themes of love, sex, lust in certain of his poems. The first poem inspired music indicative of youthful, frisky sexuality. The second poem seemed to portray a kind of refractory period, and the cycle culminates in music resolving into a more sophisticated, true, deep love. In that sense, I was trying to use his poetry to show the trajectory of a relationship. Once I picked the poems, the compositional process ran smoothly. After reading many Rilke poems, I settled on the poems related to animals and animals as metaphors of human behavior. Because the poems are in German, it took me a long time to taste every word and to negotiate my way through the differences in German syntax and grammar. In The Flamingos , I tried to create a kind of feathery, flighty feeling, and for The Black Cat , something mysterious. The Unicorn was more fairy-tale like, and The Panther evoked the heartbreak of captivity. With The Swan , I tried to use majestic chords. Having conducted much German music including the big Bach passions, my aim with the Rilke set was to avoid clichés.

Q: Given the kind of a cappella music you write, it would seem to demand very accomplished singers.

A: The Rilke definitely requires top-notch professional singers. Those pieces therefore are for university choruses at conservatories who have three months to rehearse. The Cummings pieces can be learned rather quickly, though in the end they sound more difficult than the Rilke pieces.

Q: In the Rilke, the harmonies seem very complex and close.

A: That’s the issue. If the singers are comfortable with the jazz milieu, the chords are more familiar, even though the music is not jazz. But there are 11th and 13th chords, for example.

Q: In your liner notes, you talk about the Apollonian versus the Dionysian elements that run through art. Are you referring to the fact that your CD includes the Cummings songs which, as you described, represent sexual love, and alongside this decidedly earthy text-based piece a Mass—specifically religious music?

A: Yes, on one level the CD contrasts secular music with sacred music. But keep in mind that this CD is only one of three in a series of my complete choral works. I think when the three CDs are completed the meaning of the Apollonian/Dionysian themes will be more apparent.

Q: For your age, you seem to have written a phenomenal amount of music. Are you extremely diligent, or does it come extremely easily for you?

A: It used to come fairly easily for me, and now I am very diligent. I haven’t written a piece without being commissioned since I was 25. I’ve been very lucky to have the attention, to be performed, to be published.

Q: I would think you are very fortunate to be writing almost exclusively on commission. Many composers of new music aren’t that fortunate. I can understand why someone wouldn’t want to sit down and write an organ concerto just for the fun of it.

A: Yes, my organ concerto is a big piece, over 40 minutes, and it’s had five performances and it will be recorded. That’s unusual. The new model for younger composers is to create an ensemble dedicated to playing their music. It’s almost like a rock group. It’s the Steve Reich method. On the other hand, for me, the disadvantage of being commissioned all of the time is that I am forced into a particular instrumentation. This summer, I would like to work on some music that isn’t commissioned, so that I can explore ensembles that I may not ordinarily be commissioned to write for.

Q: You’ve written that Leonard Bernstein is one of your idols. Is it his mixture of conducting and composing you identify with?

A: Absolutely. I also admired his desire to present as much music as possible to as many people as possible. But, if you look at his opus, it’s difficult to find music of quality after a certain point in his career. It kind of stops at Mass in 1970. I think he became so busy conducting that it was hard to find the downtime to compose. This is something I am very cognizant of. I need to make sure I guard my time so that I can keep up not only with the quantity, but with the quality of the music I am writing.

Q: Bernstein wrote a wide variety of music, such as Broadway, symphonic, and also some experimental music that was panned by critics. Do you feel that as a composer living today, there is more freedom to explore?

A: I do feel that, and my music is eclectic. This kind of eclecticism is still looked down upon by the academic world, but not by the public. I work at McGill University, where in the music department there are two divisions, the performance division and the research division. Composing comes under the purview of the research division, along the lines of the Princeton and Harvard model. There still is a split between the way music is viewed by academia versus the public and the industry.

Q: Another example would be Aaron Copland, who wrote, of course, very popular classical music, but also wrote 12-tone music. There was a lot of resistance to the latter. There was pressure put on him to continue writing the same popular music.

A: I would consider myself more of a Lukas Foss than a Leonard Bernstein. With Leonard Bernstein, you always know it is his music, even if he is trying to be experimental. Lukas Foss, on the other hand, was continually reinventing himself. That was one of the reasons people were confused by him. I think I am somewhere between those two.

Q: Do you receive guidelines from the people who commission you?

A: Yes. For a piece I wrote last year, they wanted something to go with the Brahms Requiem. So, I knew this was going to be a piece that had to be rehearsed along with the Brahms Requiem and performed by a good but amateur choir, and the orchestra would have only two rehearsals. There were certain things that were obvious to me about the practicality of it. And then in other situations, I’ve been commissioned to write orchestral pieces, where the conductor says “I’d like a little of this and a little of that.” It’s a little bit like ordering food in a restaurant. But you trust the chef to know that you don’t like chiles.

Q: Do you go ahead and write the entire piece, or do you send them a sketch first?

A: There is often a sense of a collaboration in the process. Of course, there is always the other way of doing things, the Stravinsky way: just write a piece and then find a commission for it.

Q: When you write sacred music as opposed to Cummings or Rilke, how does that affect your process and the expectations of the people commissioning you?

A: Any religious organization that would hire me to write music would know that my background would justify it. I’ve written a lot of Episcopalian/High Anglican music, and my reputation speaks for itself, which isn’t to say that I haven’t also written simple religious music, as well. I grew up with religious music, but at the same time, my stepfather was conducting the Buffalo Philharmonic and he was Michael Tilson Thomas’s associate conductor for a number of years, so I had all of that concert music, and my mom was a concert pianist as well. So, it’s no surprise that I have this eclectic combination of styles. Hopefully, my music will be judged not by its genre, but by its ability to supercede genre and be exceptional music that transcends other concerns.

WACHNER Sometimes I Feel Alive. Rilke Songs. Introit for the Season of Epiphany. Arise, My Love. Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing. Ave, dulcissima. Missa Brevis. Aaronic Benediction. Behold the Tabernacle of God • Noel Edison, cond; Michael Bloss (org); Elora Fes Singers • NAXOS 8.559607 (60:07)

It’s difficult to be a Renaissance man in American society. People who do more than one thing well are often suspected of vague alchemy. The tendency is to admire those of us who become our own logo, someone immediately identifiable and categorical. Sometimes this transformation is almost instantaneous. After all, you can be a so-called New Jersey housewife one day and a reality TV star the next, or brand yourself Lady GaGa merely by being, well, gaga. But Julian Wachner is no Johnny-come-lately and he refuses to become a brand. The only thing predictable about him is his versatility and prodigiousness as a conductor and composer. This CD, the first in a series of three CDs representing his complete choral works, demonstrates how difficult it might be to pigeonhole a man who is as comfortable writing a benediction as he is a sensual chorale.

By the latter I do not refer to something like Oh Calcutta! , but rather Wachner’s settings of three E.E. Cummings poems, There Is a Moon Sole, As Is the Sea Marvelous, and Somewhere I Have Never Traveled , a compilation Wachner calls Sometimes I Feel Alive . The work is an a cappella song cycle with male-female counterexchanges with a jazzy, syncopated, somewhat tongue-in-cheek twist. This is a musical encapsulation of young love leading (after all the fireworks of sexual abandon) to resolution, commitment, and serenity. The technique is hidden behind the ingenuity and liveliness, and there is more skill here than meets the eye, since Wachner has deliberately gone about composing a piece that can be sung by an amateur group. This is no easy feat when the result is as compelling as this.

The Rilke Songs , which Wachner derived by combining several of Rilke’s animal poems, is a more serious and complex piece of music reflecting the depth of Rilke while navigating the German text handily. Certainly, from a textual point of view, Cummings and Rilke are on opposite ends of the spectrum, and Wachner’s music reflects this. The syntax of the Rilke music is as multileveled as the text is musical. Wachner does a phenomenal job of conveying in his close harmonies the richness of Rilke’s poetry and the poignancy and humor as well.

As for the remaining selections, which constitute the bulk of the CD, I must admit, as I may have indicated in my recent review of Sir Philip Ledger, that I sometimes have difficulty evaluating religious music because of its adherence to liturgical imperatives, or to the traditions, express rules, and expectations of the church for which the music is composed. Though I particularly liked Wachner’s Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing, and though his sacred offerings here are well written, melodic and interesting, tonal and accessible, I’m not sure the compositions can exist in the secular world without the accoutrements of steeples, organs, oak pews, and the odor of incense. Accordingly, I should recuse myself by saying that I don’t attend church and I don’t tend to listen to much sacred music unless it is a few hundred years old (or maybe Britten and Fauré), and, even then, I am not particularly moved by the words of someone else’s scripture, nor am I ever impressed with how the music serves the text. Church choirs, however, I know for a fact, are constantly searching for new music to sing and Wachner’s music is popular among the aficionados because it is both singable and good. Perhaps the problem here, if there is one, is that the CD is weighted too heavily toward the sacred with just a tease of Wachner’s secular fare. However, judging by the Cummings and Rilke offerings, Wachner has nothing to fear from my predilection for the profane and experimental, nor do his sacred works have anything to fear from my agnosticism. And I am well aware of the fact that, though he did write secular music as well, the great Bach himself needed his church commissions, his choir conducting gigs, and his religious schoolteaching posts to foot the bill for his non-religious experiments. David Wolman