Excerpts from an interview with Michael Hicks by Peter McMurray

Transcription

1 Excerpts from an interview with Michael Hicks by Peter McMurray June 29, 2005 PM: I looked over your CV and bio, but if you could maybe talk about how you got into composing, first of all, when you started? MH: Well, I played classical guitar in high school. Actually started in junior high. And the first pieces I wrote were for guitar, and initially were collaborations with another guitar player. I really got into writing in a sort of--well actually, the guitar pieces were classical in orientation, sort of neo-baroque things. And then, I hung out with a lot of music people in high school. I didn t take any music clases, but I was friends with the music teacher there and he had a pile of manuscript paper on his shelf. It just intrigued me, and I said, Youlet me have that paper. I l fil it up with something, some piece of music. So actualy, when I was fifteen I wrote a choral-orchestral piece that is a real hodge-podge of styles, about a 6 minute piece, a setting of Psalm 133. And it was performed by the combined choirs and orchestras of the district. So I had a lot of encouragement from then on. I never actually had music lessons before that, on guitar or anything. I had a few months of accordion lessons when I was a kid, and that was it. So I was self-taught in most regards. When I was in high school--and maybe this is giving you more than you need to know--in my freshman year of high school, I was playing a lot of blues especially, and rock tunes with friends of mine. And I actually cut school for about three weeks, and then of and on, other periods during my first year of high school. I don t know how I pased my clases. (Some of them I didn t.) But I propped a record player up on top of the piano and just kind of figured out how these things work. So I really learned from those songs and from the hymns that my mom played all the time. (I just lived with my mom.) I learned basically the theory, the concept of theory. And then later, I read books from the public library, because our high school was right next door to the public library, and studied scores--you know, getting Wagner scores out, and Beethoven. Those are the ones I remember. And stuff that I liked to hear. I would go to the St. Vincent De Paul store, which is like the Catholic Salvation Army, and buy records there for a nickel apiece and listen to them. I learned a lot of classical pieces that way. So, very much self-taught. And then when I went to college, having had this experience, some of which was composing, and then a lot of figuring out of theory, and so on. I actually, you know, did the entrance exams to get into the music program at Foothill Junior College, in Los Altos Hills, California. And I knew all the stuff. I was in pretty good shape. And so at Foothill, I was in the choir all the time, and we had a very agreeable choir director--actually more than one choir, with madrigals--and I mean, I would just write stuff and they would do it. So it was great for me learning that way. Some of it was really too difficult for a choir, but they would do it. They would work on

2 it. It was so great. It was just such a great environment. That whole area that s in the Bay Area in California, on the peninsula, just south of Henry Cowell country, you know. And there s always been just a lot of openness to trying new things. So I think it was just the encouragement and the fact that I could get immediate performance, really, of these choral pieces. That got me into it, and got me sort of hooked on it. PM: So choral pieces were kind of your beginning point with more classical? MH: Yeah, other than the earlier guitar things, yeah, it was choral pieces for a long time. And then before I left Foothill College--I was there for a couple years--i did write some instrumental pieces, including a string quartet piece in 1975 that was a big hit there. And that s when all the professors there said, Oh, you ve got to study. You ve got to go to a really big school and study. It s funny because at the time, they wanted me to go to San Jose State to study with Lou Harrison. That s what everyone said to do. And I had never heard of Lou Harrison. And of course nowadays, it s like, Oh, Lou Harrison, really? That would have been a really interesting thing. Although I don t think I would have gotten along much with Lou Harrison from an aesthetic point of view. I would now, but back then I was definitely in a very neo-baroque, neo-romantic kind of thing. And so I would have been trying to write like Bernstein, Copland, and Barber in those days. And early Lukas Foss, like his Song of Songs. So yeah, I just always had encouragement to do it. And you know, I was pretty smart at other subjects, and so I suppose I could have gone into something else. But it was just more rewarding for me. And I grew up in an artistic household. My mother was a visual artist all her life. PM: So then, was that a two-year program and then you came to BYU? MH: That s pretty much what happened, yeah. I came to BYU because I had joined the LDS Church and was interested in--well, I had a mission in there too, among all that. But after that, actually, I had gotten out of composition and I was working in construction, building a new stake center in that area. And one of my old teachers at Foothill was really disturbed at this turn of events. So she gave me a commission--i think it was like $100 or $150--to write a two-piano piece for her and a colleague that played piano duos. And so I did write a three-movement piece for them to play. And that kind of pulled me back into it. And then after that I did come out to BYU. I was interested in and really committed to the notion of creating a Mormon music, in sort of a nationalistic sense. And so I had gotten a hold of recordings of Merrill Bradshaw and Robert Manookin, in particular. I really liked the things that Bradshaw was doing then--they really fit with what I was interested in at the time--and so applied here, and he was very encouraging. So that s how I made it down here. And you know, I was very conservative musically at the time, and came here, and this was actually a big avant-garde and experimental kind of place for me, particularly

3 because of David Sargent, at the time. So that really got me into writing--well, I sort of became the wild, young experimental composer here as a student; I was doing the furthest out kind of stuff at the time. PM: So like, how far out was that? Or how far not-out was the stuff that other people were writing at the time? MH: Well, when I say far out, I mean, just involving new notation. So you know, a lot of more collaborative and improvisatory kind of stuff. And experimenting with extended techniques and different sound sources. And a lot of this came out of Sargent s class, because Sargent s second-semester orchestration class was all about new notation, you know--reading Penderecki s scores and us doing improvisatory things in class. I remember bringing this pan in that I had used for years to make popcorn in, because I was a fairly big popcorn addict. You know, putting water in it and turning it [MH sings a few pitches] doing that kind of thing. And you know, we were reading, we were creating our own graphic scores and that sort of stuff in that class. So that s what really got me into that domain. To me, and I think to a lot of people in my generation, our entrée into this sort of West Coast experimental thinking and writing was through rock, because in the late sixties--i mean, I was born in 1956, so in 1966 I was ten years old. But I was really into all the psychedelic scene and that music. And for us, you know, the weirder the better. That was sort of the way it was. And so, you know, I d take something like Led Zeppelin s first album, or their second album especially, Led Zeppelin II, and there were just moments and passages in there that were so strange. And there were lots of other things earlier that had been done, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, a track here and there on their albums that were sort of musique concrete--we didn t call it that, but it was just weird, it was great. So I always was really interested in that kind of thing. But for me, classical music was a different thing. And actually it was being here at BYU that bridged those two cultural backgrounds. I think the weird was appealing and there was actually a sense of Mormon-ness about that, because in those days, in the 1970s, there was here a lot of interest in Mormon art of all kinds, with the premise being that Mormon-ness had to involve really reaching out and stretching and going in new directions. It was a sort of Joseph Smith Mormonism, I think, that just would look at something and turn it on its head and say, Well what about this? And I don t think that s the case anymore around here per se. But it was. You know, they had the Mormon Arts Festival then. And prizes given for works in theater, and visual arts, and in composition, and so people were writing things that were Mormon-themed in some way or another. But there was this notion that as one searches out ones own divine heritage, ones own divine inner self, that one will find newness. And to express it, one has to use alternative kinds of languages. There was a very strong sense of that. PM: And you think that was kind of the underpinning for your idea of a Mormon music, as well, that type of philosophy?

4 MH: Yes, absolutely. PM: To what degree do you feel like a Mormon music developed during that time? Is that a vocabulary, a genre, that happened? MH: Well, I don t think there was any vocabulary or style with it, but there was an attitude, an attitude which is--of course, Utah and Mormonism have a longstanding communal and community-oriented approach to things. It s a we culture. And so we were creating our own we subculture, for sure. I mean, we actually started a group called NASC, the National Association of Student Composers. That was our group, where we just created it. We d have meetings every week, and we d be presenting ideas and work to each other and so on. The name of it even, had the pretenses and pretension that are very Mormon as well. You know, like here, they have what used to be the BYU Piano Quartet, and they changed to the American Piano Quartet. You know, this sense of, We re defining our group as the National Association of Student Composers. There s a real strong sense of that at least around BYU, but also I think in Utah and certainly in LDS circles, that we re defining, that we re going to set a standard and identify ourselves with a national standard of some kind, you know. We re players too, in the big leagues. So even though it s so remote from the real centers of high culture, there was a lot of pretension and ambition at that time. And I think there still is. But now it s not so remote because of the way you can communicate and disseminate your materials. PM: Here at BYU, I mean, do you feel like most of the composers share that feeling? I guess, like, pushing for new ways? If you had to characterize the department, the composers on faculty? MH: Absolutely unified in this, although very different stylistically. And maybe very different in degrees of orthodoxy in religion, and degrees, you know. All different political outlooks, I would say. But Dave Sargent still teaches here. He s the senior-most faculty in composition. I was one of his students, as was Murray Boren, another colleague. And the two junior members were students of ours, so we re all kind of we ve indoctrinated one another, I guess, in some regards. But the thing I noticed around the department, and particularly among performers--because there used to be this sense that the composers were over here, and the performers were upholding more conservative standards. Now the performers we have tend to be LDS people who are not trained strictly at BYU, as were many of those before, but who have been trained at Juilliard, at Eastman, I don t know, Curtis Institute, and so on. And for them, they come here, and of course, they played everything where they were. You know, I mean, even John Cage was pretty much orthodox. So they don t balk at anything. And they re actually really good at it. And that s a real difference, the openness in the performing community here--because they ve been elsewhere--to do whatever. And they do, and it;s refreshing. PM: Are there any new music ensembles or groups that are, I guess, more likely to play new works?

5 MH: Well, I started Group for New Music here in And that?s a semesterly thing that does all new work. The choirs here have always been open to doing new things, given, you know, the latent conservatism of choral pieces in general. They still do lots of Murray Schafer kinds of things, and so on. They?re always doing something that?s not what their audiences would choose, and I?m impressed with that. Of course, bands tend to do more New Music than orchestras. The orchestra here will do faculty and student works. And the Philharmonic here does a reading each semester of student composition, reading sessions and stuff. So they?re very supportive. When I was a student here, none of that happened. I mean, to get a group here?when I was a student here, to get a group, to get a string quartet together that would play a new piece, was just impossible. Because they were taught that you had to focus on the?repertoire,? which meant no new repertoire. And nowadays, I mean, every student in our program can go rustle up a string quartet that will play well their new piece, just, you know, like that you can summon a group. So there?s a great deal more openness and collaboration. MH: I would say, to answer the style question, with composers, there is probably a bias against any style that would be too conservative. I can think of prominent composers who get a lot of play around the country and certainly on the East Coast in a sort of new Romanticism thing, or whatever, that probably would not be considered here, because we have such a strong bias towards the historic avant-garde and definitely a lot towards Downtown music you might say, and that we just tend to mistrust something that seems too pat and too formulaic and conservative.... I don t know if you know my CD Ritual Grounds. PM: No, I saw it on the website but I haven?t listened to it. MH: It spretty representative of stuff of mine from the last decade-and-half. And I?m not? Let me just say as a sidebar--and I say this to lots of people--i don t think that I consider myself a composer. I do compose. I consider, I think, all of my colleagues in the composition division here to be composers in the way Schoenberg defines composer, which is someone whose native language is tone, and who expresses him or herself in that language more naturally and prodigiously than in even his or her own speechlanguage, native tongue--that, you know, music is it for them. And I don t think that way about myself. But I do compose, and I think I compose well. But I don t just write and write like all of my colleagues do. PM: Do you mean atonal, or just writing as music? MH: I m just saying writing music generally. It s not the thing that I instinctively go to. I instinctively go to verbal language, you know, either written or oral.

6 PM: Maybe looking more broadly at, I guess, how New Music fits into the musical landscape of Northern Utah, especially the predominantly Mormon parts-- Zion, I guess--where do you feel like New Music does fit in, if it does? MH: Well, by new music do you mean the historical category of ars nova, you know, as a break with some mainstream music, as opposed to some of the music that is simply newly generated? Because Utah actually has a lot of new music in the sense of newlymade. But it s not, as you know, in the category of New Music. You know, New Music is a historical category. PM: New Music with a capital N. MH: Well, like I say, it has real strong Mormon underpinnings here. You have at the University of Utah, you have really a secular approach to it. I don t see any Mormon connection there particularly at all. You have Morris Rosenzweig as the head of the composition area at University of Utah. And he s very much in the Columbia-Princeton mold--in fact, I saw that the next issue of Perspectives of New Music has an article about him or an interview with him or something. So there is a sort of typical, professional stratum of New Music surrounding University of Utah, and ensembles and offshoots from that. PM: Is there an audience, do you feel, around here in Utah County for New Music concerts and such? MH: There s a huge sort of Bohemian crowd at BYU and elsewhere in Provo and Utah County. There are clubs in town, where Group for Experimental Music, which is an offshoot of Group for New Music here, have played Christian Wolff pieces and others. They just go play in the clubs and there are people coming in off the streets and hearing them and have a real appetite. It s a small following but it s kind of a ferocious appetite for really distinctive, you know, I guess you could sayrealy out there music, the weird stuff, for whatever reason. I think there s just such a monolithic culture around here otherwise, and there is such a hegemony of highly commercial and formulaic sort of Hollywood-based music that is sanctioned by the Church and by the Mormon market more than the Church. Even if you go to the temple, you know, you get sort of John Williams music in there now, which is jarring in a way. And I think that a lot of young people just want to escape from the deepening shadow of this stuff that is so monolithic culturally. PM: Do you feel like New Music in some way challenges the Church? Or just the culture attendant with Deseret Book and those things? MH: I don t think that it s a Church challenging thing, although there are people who drift away from the Church for a variety of reasons that have to do with socialization issues within the Church. They don t fit in, for a lot of reasons. I mean, if you grow up in

7 Utah County and you re a teenage male, or I ll say a young teenage male, and you have no interest in Scouting whatsoever, I mean, you re de facto disenfranchised. And yet, there s nothing religious or Mormon specifically, from any intrinsic religious perspective, to Scouting. So I m saying that someone like that may feel like, Where do I fit in? And you know, they might fit into some Goth group at school, or they might... whatever. But they re looking for a sense of community that the dominant community is not giving them. And New Music definitely is a way for many of those people. I will say that there s a lot of people who get into New Music too who are sort of techno geeks of one kind or another. I ve noticed that whenever we have a concert here involving any kind of electro-acoustic presentation, there s a lot of people there who come and head up to stage afterwards, How does this work exactly? They re fascinated by that. But I m always amazed when I go to New Music concerts here, and my colleagues are too we re looking around and it s people we ve never seen before, you know, of all ages, and they come. They seem to love it. They stay through the whole thing. They come up and talk to the composers afterwards and we re saying, Who are these people? Where are they from? What connects them? So there s an appetite and an interest there on all levels that just gets people s interest. We love it, we think it s great. PM: As one final question, where do you see things going in the future, with yourself, with a Mormon music, with BYU s composers? MH: Well, it s hard to say. Since any group of artists is a group of individuals first, a lot depends on what just arises and what befalls them, if they get a particular commission, or get noticed in some other way. For example, I have a piece that ended up on LSU s music history listening list. On their last day, right at the end of their curriculum, they come to my piece Rain Tiger. You know, things like that can happen that affect BYU s reputation and the dissemination of music from here. And it has nothing to do with the intrinsic quality of that music.... But collectively, I do see this as a tradition that s developing, in spite of contrary evidence. I think this is deeply embedded in Mormon belief. Mormonism includes this idea about all truth being circumscribed in a great whole. You know, Mormonism, i.e., the whole universe. That s part of our job, our quest on earth is to discover that, rather than to just obey some tradition.... There s no allegiance at BYU to some particular musical tradition, but to a Mormon cultural tradition that s meaningful, contrary evidence aside.