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I can think of a couple people who are sort of part of my world, but not exactly.  That’s an interesting question because a couple of those people I already did talk to.  I think I’d like to interview this rock star, Bono.  I’m interested that he still functions as a musician, but has this idea of turning his global access into some kind of an influential thing.  It fascinates me that he wants to do that.  I guess for a very different reason, I’d like to interview my favorite soccer player, Alfredo Barraza.  He’s been retired for about 10 years.  

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Well you know, it’s gonna be remembered in a rather paradoxical way. Very often when there’s been a bad distribution of wealth, and a few people with great privilege and a lot of people suffering and so forth, paradoxically many, many, things in the arts and architecture and the building of beautiful things have occurred. And I think that this period will be, in terms of the making of things, the making of beautiful things, that I think it will be remembered with great distinction. The Renaissance popes, some of the worst patronize some of the greatest artistic events. Pope Julius . . . we have the Sistine Chapel from a pope who spent most of his time fighting. So we who are artists have to accept that good times for us are often bad times for society.

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Well, just one is that it’s not going to be as dominate a force over the next quite soon years. Particularly China, and India, and other regions of the world have the latent resource and power which we barely imagined, and the United States will not too long from now begin to adjust to not having the kinds of controls that it has. Already it’s adjusted to being essentially a third world economy; but a much more fundamental, psychological adjustment will have to take place, something like that which England experienced around the Second World War. And we’ll see whether we have the innate civility to do as well as England did with it.

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Well if you ask that question, you know, at the end of the 19th Century, I think everyone would have said yes. Of course we’re doing better. We don’t have slavery. We seem to be behaving more tolerantly and so forth. But then there was the Holocaust. And I think the real legacy of the Holocaust is that we can no longer think of a trajectory . . . you know, toward an enlightenment trajectory. Because of course the way I have to read the Holocaust is that the country from which I have, perhaps, the most artistic respect . . . because Bach essentially raised me as a musician . . . this extraordinarily developed country was at the heart of this utter calamity, and probably the most culturally sophisticated development that we’ve ever achieved. And also the country which had achieved the most sophisticated integration of various racial and national types. There was no country in Europe, for instance, in which Jewish people were more accepted in high stations and important professions. And then you had the camps. So I would say finding the overarching purpose, or if we were to take that to mean as it so often does, some development in the positive way about human nature, I think it’s very, very, tenuous and hard to believe. I think one has to believe much more in individual kindness, and daily decency, and much less grand ideas.

Recorded On: 6/12/07

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Yeah. I think the biggest challenge is going to be trying to . . . well, the redistribution of resource. There’ve been encouraging sign, which is that some of the richest people have decided that the flint beyond the herd of scale might be able to change some of the most horrible situations, particularly African and medical situations and so forth. That’s encouraging. I think that probably a much more radical idea of redistribution of resources is necessary. And locally right now on a graph we are going the other direction. We are certainly quite content with people at the upper scale getting much richer, and people on the bottom disappearing. There, of course, one could argue that the lack of a primary truly genuine, spiritual, religious impulse may be one of the reasons it’s so hard to settle the idea of distribution of resources.

Recorded On: 6/12/07

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It’s probably the hardest thing for me to articulate because most of my life as a performer deals with forms of religious music. And I certainly feel that when I conduct a Bach cantata that I am absolutely engaged by – not in an abstract way at all – the issues, and the stories, and the experience. But I can’t find a formal structure for that. And when I write a religious text, I would have to say that I am as gripped by the ancientness and the sound of the words, and this feeling that they are carrying significance, almost that has been sort of gradually attached to them over centuries. I would like to feel that all of the assertions were things I can insert. And that’s not really how I feel. So when I said a religious text, I would say first of all it’s the text I’m in love with, the way the words sounds, and the King James Bible I could read over and over.

Recorded On: 6/12/07

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The hardest thing is to have compassion and forgiveness. Tolerance is also a really hard one, because some of the major issues in this country . . . you know, race, and I’d have to even say a kind of intellectual tolerance. I’m very bothered that many groups in this country are dismissive of other groups because they feel they are not as cultured and not as educated. I think we have a very tremendous attraction to intolerance almost bred into the early life of this country. So yeah. I would consider those my major virtues. And also it’s, you know, so hard to apologize for things. And I’m always impressed by people who, when they’ve done something really wrong, don’t do the standard thing which is just to make it worse and ostracize, but actually go the whole way and try to reengage the situation. And in our profession, our music profession, there are constant tests of those issues.

Recorded On: 6/12/07

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Often . . . this sounds more composed than it is, but often by waiting it out. That’s never a decision. It’s only a submission to realizing something can’t be there when you want it to be there

I have to catechize myself. I have to talk myself into it. I think we’re all instilled with various levels of confidence. I’ve always been interested in reading Benjamin Britten’s statements. Almost his whole career is described in terms of level of confidence. I wrote that piece I was on a high level of confidence. Some people have that in great abundance, but others have to cultivate it like a garden.

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I don’t envy my own Tanglewood students now coming from a very different world where almost anything, any note they put down is right. Because having had to go through a time where the criteria were clear I think does train one’s ear in a way that can be useful. So I think what I recognize, people have asked me why there are a lot of composers born in 1938 who have done good music. And I think the answer would be that we all went through hell. We were in kind of a boot camp together; and in feeling like we needed to survive that and reorganize it, we became quite strong.

Recorded On: 6/12/07

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Sometimes the joy is just an absorption. It doesn’t always happen that way, and sometimes I have to work on things in quite a different manner, quite deductively and dispassionately. But when there’s absorption, and when there’s a sense that I’m not having to work very much at something, I feel both a little bit guilty because often I’m being paid, and you know, I haven’t quite reconciled the problem of being paid for something that I enjoy that much. But that’s the situation in which I feel tremendous happiness that I am discovering things almost for free. Like I haven’t had to pay anything like the price I might expect for that kind of enjoyment.

Well, the challenge is how difficult it sometimes is to apprehend an image, to pull it in. It sometimes takes a very long time between the sense of possibility and the realization. That can become irritating, and in fact very anxious-making, and can make my profession seem very unfriendly.

Often . . . this sounds more composed than it is, but often by waiting it out. That’s never a decision. It’s only a submission to realizing something can’t be there when you want it to be there.

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Well, it would have two possible consequences impact. The impact, of course, that I want primarily is the very conventional one of the listeners who retain something. That’s the primary issue that, at some afterimage, not necessarily in detail, in some portion of the audience, it could be quite small, it’s prevalent. That’s probably, when I get evidence of that, the most significant part of what I do. It doesn’t matter who that is. And I think it’s always a mistake to think only in terms of professionals in our field when we’re evaluating that. It’s much broader than that.

Obviously I like it when other people who are composing are interested in what I’m doing. And I like it when I’m in a situation where the reaction is strong enough where it can even be contrary. As long as it’s a reaction, and as long as there’s something that’s retained. To me the biggest issue in music that’s being written today is memorability or the lack of it. It’s not even a specific tune, or rhythm, or cord is remembered, but that something unique about the profile is retained. And I guess the big . . . my happiest index is when some group of performers decides to perform something again. Then I know that the afterimage has had some tenacity.

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I think composers are people who have not heard exactly a music that they would like to hear. That is to say, I think if all the music you wanted was in the world, you’d probably be a performer if you wanted to be a musician. But if there is something slightly different or radically different even, I think that’s what composers do. They look for something that they feel is missing.

I wanted to hear . . . I wanted to hear something that carried the qualities, that joined the qualities of the music that first gripped me, which was really in equal parts the dramatic improvisation, the live kind of improvisational quality of jazz, and the intricate structures of Bach. And that’s really, I think, always been what has attracted me, that there was a region there that I thought could be fertile and could be broad enough to keep doing it a long time.

I’m working on a piece which . . . part of it is a large poem, one of the last poems by Newash, who I’ve said before . . . this was again, just what I referred to. The overrun of not quite having found my way of where I want to be with him. He’s a difficult companion and sometimes digressive, and sometimes in a very pleasing way, self-centered and unapologetic of how much in the face of every event he still seeks pleasure rather than plume. So I think I need that, but I’m trying to settle a score with him. And it’s a very large poem, and it has tremendous segments which are not easily solved musically, which is interesting and sometimes discouraging. And then I thought that was the piece, but then at a certain point as I started something about his attitudes in the poem disturbed me. I needed an answer to his attitude to consequences of loss. And so the first thing that happened was a response in the form of a poem by ___________ for another singer. So I then informed my commissioner there was another singer and more music. And then that required a response because it felt formally upsetting to have a singer sing, and another singer sing, and not account for some other voice which might sum up two very, very, distinct viewpoints. So I then used a translation of a real good poem in which they could sing together in different characters than previously in the piece. So the text of the piece has been additive, and the approach to the piece also. And it’s a larger piece than I started out with.

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Mostly the musicians that I learned from and whose music I was studying and playing, some of whom I knew if they were alive. These came from very many fields of music. Probably Stravinsky who was still alive, and who I did witness as a young kid conducting, and whose music I knew at a very early age. For some of that period Bartok was still around. Jazz musicians that I knew really well from the recordings who I occasionally heard live, Thelonious Monk was probably most important or Oscar Peterson – I just felt they were almost like my friends. I adopted them. Bach, who was probably from the very beginning the first music I knew, and the first music that my father taught me to play, and certainly the music that I continue to be the most interested in over time.

Recorded On: 6/12/07

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Well I think the general idea of whether living citizens today are capable of imaging the world when they are not there anymore. That seems to be kind of the hardest leap for the general citizenry to take. The idea that there are many things that they could do which would be very helpful to people who are not yet here. And I’m not sure whether civilization’s ever been able to do that, but there are certainly a lot of impetus for that now. And so many issues come back to that. What do you wish to give up, perhaps, or change in very small increments that would make a tremendous difference? But it is true that the counterforce is an extraordinary urge deep within human beings, apparently, to just look after themselves, and fight their way through. And that’s that sort of “from the jungle” quality. So I think this sets a course where my profession seems to me to have potentially some meaning, which is that the person who has allowed the imagination to at least take over some of their life might be less likely to just think only of their own existence. It’s not guaranteed of course, because we don’t know whether people can change.

I think the biggest challenge is going to be trying to . . . well, the redistribution of resource. There’ve been encouraging sign, which is that some of the richest people have decided that the flint beyond the herd of scale might be able to change some of the most horrible situations, particularly African and medical situations and so forth. That’s encouraging. I think that probably a much more radical idea of redistribution of resources is necessary. And locally right now on a graph we are going the other direction. We are certainly quite content with people at the upper scale getting much richer, and people on the bottom disappearing. There, of course, one could argue that the lack of a primary truly genuine, spiritual, religious impulse may be one of the reasons it’s so hard to settle the idea of distribution of resources.

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Well I think the biggest American problem, the thing that would probably improve civilization or people’s experience of it the most, is if we were able to somehow encourage a belief structure that did not equate money and volume with value. Because really almost every decision about what’s worthwhile in this country has to do with its economic power. And it would be very amazing if perhaps over some . . . it would have to be belief structures that would be changing. We would begin to think that we’re making our own decision about what’s valuable. And if it’s not earning a lot of money, it may not be useless or worthless. Obviously that’s the perspective of the artist. I mean, the artist is saying, “I can’t compete at the level of economic heft; but what I’m offering is something that will make your life richer.” And maybe that’s always a minority view. I guess what I would consider to be an ideal universe would be a universe in which everyone has spent part of the day reading a poem or, you know, building something on their house they think is beautiful; a society in which everyone’s contribution to it was to make their corner more of an aesthetic experience. And I think the only society that’s actually achieved that informally, partly because it’s kind of an innate hedonism, and partly because of talent, is probably the many, many, centuries from __________, Italy where every house seems to be . . . in a little town, seems to have been made part of a composite work.

Recorded On: 6/12/07

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I guess my personal philosophy almost always has to do with . . . in the most important way with the need that I feel everyone has before an artistic element in their lives. And it doesn’t matter what their profession is . . . I heard once that everyone in the world has written a poem. I don’t know whether that’s true, but it should be true. Something like it must be true because I don’t think anyone lacks what we would call an artistic impulse. And what I feel more than sort of political causes that I might be interested in, I think that the cause that I would embrace is the idea that people might be encouraged to experience, even for a few moments in a day, the idea that the imagination is ruling their life for a moment. And that would be my prime cause in spite of the fact that, you know, I have occasionally written pieces with very frankly political subjects. And I’ve spent moments in my life, you know, 1964 when I went with all of the freedom summer folks to Mississippi with a group from here. And we definitely experienced an amazing moment in the politics of this country. But when I’ve addressed things like that in my music, it’s been much more because it’s a part of a whole emotional complex for myself, than that I want to convert or influence opinion. Because unfortunately the audience for such a piece usually agrees. And I think, you know, if one were really to be serious about moving people through the arts, politically you’d have to almost find . . . select your way into an audience that doesn’t like what you’re saying. And very seldom of course do we ever do that.

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Did you manage during the day to do one thing you really wanted to do?

Recorded On: 6/12/07

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Well where we are at this moment is yet another confluence of . . . I would have to say on all sides fanatical, religious conflict. And I don’t think that it’s possible for the United States to, as a country, detach itself from a fanatical, religious tradition which is engaged in this situation. And in terms of grand historical forces, it’s a replay of things that have gone back many, many, years. And interestingly enough to me, because I wrote a piece for the 50th anniversary of Israel, where I went to Israel and I actually tried to learn as much as I could about what was happening there . . . but it’s centering on the same part of the world again that’s so often it has. Palestine, Jerusalem, and the crusades and the various occupations by all three of three forces are almost like a short history of the world.

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Well I think almost anyone would change between those viewpoints depending on almost the daily report; but I’m optimistic that there are so many good intentions; but I’m pessimistic because if you’re as interested as I am in history, you see so many patterns recycling themselves. And there seems to be very little ability to see them coming and try to do it differently. So my pessimism comes from having the feeling that we’re in cycles that are . . . their potential for destructiveness has not yet played out.

Recorded On: 6/12/07