JAMES MULCRO DREW
      

Writings / Interviews / Conversations        
                                                       

INTERVIEWS (excerpts 1989—2005) with S. Michael Brannon. 

(SMB) I know you were involved with music at an early age, but did you have regular piano lessons—that sort of thing?

Yes, I had piano lessons at about age 5—I loved Bach and nothing else at that time. I kept having lessons until I began changing, you know, making variations of Bach. Soon my attention went to jazz music because the musicians were playing music that they just thought up right on the spot. I just couldn’t believe what they were doing—it was amazing to me.

(SMB) How did you learn to play jazz music?

I would look at the signs in front of clubs and then sneak in during the day when various musicians were just hanging out and I would always bug the pianists to show me something—anything. But, how I really learned was by really “Listening” to recordings, and later when I appeared to be old enough (which I wasn’t) I’d frequent the clubs—especially the sessions. I’d get to sit in until somebody that could really play came in—then they’d kick me off the stand. I ended up some twenty years later being given the “New Star” award by the Downbeat International Critics poll.

(SMB) When was this—like what years?

It began in the early 1950s.

(SMB) Were you active in the New York new music scene during the 1950s?

I was active in jazz music during much of the 1950s. I worked steadily with various groups—with players like Johnny Coles, Elvin Jones and even Lester Young. I had an interest in what was called new classical music, but I didn’t get into it until the late fifties.

(SMB) How did you enter into the new music scene?

I guess by just hanging around the places where artists and dancers would be. I met Morty Feldman at a party at a psychiatrist’s apartment. My girlfriend’s brother-in-law knew the psychiatrist so I went to the party with her. After talking with Morty for awhile about what I wanted to learn he suggested I study with Wallingford Riegger. I did for the next year or so.  I met John Cage shortly after that.  He was at the New School.  I asked him about studying new music and he told me to trace all the tone-rows in Webern’s op.21. I said I didn’t really want to do that and I wanted to know about what he was doing. He said OK and we walked over to a little restaurant with outside tables and he drew a lot of rhythm schemes on napkins while he talked. I never really studied with him, but we did stay in contact—we also did some concerts together a few years, later. He and David Tudor stayed at our house in New Orleans briefly—it was a madhouse with two very young children making all kinds of noise. I think they went to a motel right after that to rest up for the concert that we did do later that week.  

(SMB) During the 1960s and 70s your music was becoming quite visible on the New York scene.

It was OK, I guess. I did have some premieres that got various kinds of reviews.

(SMB)WHEN DID YOU FORM YOUR FIRST ENSEMBLES THAT WERE DEDICATED TO YOUR OWN MUSIC?

Let’s see—it was around 1968, in New Haven. I was in-residence at Yale at that time, and I was fortunate enough to have composers Humphrey Evans III and Lucky Mosca in the group. They were both students at Yale at the time.  We had an ensemble called the Crossfire Mission Orchestra which had maybe seven or eight other performers. We got quite a lot of publicity by doing concerts in unusual spaces—and many performances behind barbed wire.

(SMB  Barbed wire?)

Yes, the audiences we were performing for, remember this was the roaring sixties, were really rowdy—I mean like students screaming and throwing bottles and so forth. I think our final concert was off campus in a bar called McTriff’s where I was also the featured performer doing an amplified balalika version of Penderecki’s Victims and Humphrey did another electronic version, too. There were police involved, but it was wonderful public Theatre.  Lucky and Humphrey also had an ensemble called Not Morton, Baby, which was a reference to Morton Feldman. It was anything but quiet, of course.

(SMB When did you begin to create Theatre works by choice?)

In New Orleans in the mid-1970s. I staged the first performance of my Cruxifixus, including a ten foot wooden cross, a masked chamber ensemble also on stage and an electronic tape. The audience didn’t know what the piece was at all, but they weren’t hostile.

(SMB I know that there were some less than successful performances of Cruxifixus.)

Yes, that’s true. I was in-residence at Cal State-Fullerton, in 1977-78, and the piece was produced on campus. The final scene is Jesu actually attached to the cross with lights dimming, as the curtain falls. Well, the curtain did not fall and the dancer who plays Jesu is left hanging—I mean for maybe two or three minutes—she’s standing on a four inch cross block which is really difficult, anyway and finally she has to simply get down from the cross and bow. I couldn’t believe it that they’d forgotten to lower the curtain. There was an announcement in the program that requested No applause  at the end of the piece, but the audience who by then was totally confused applauded wildly when the dancer took her bow. Unbelievable.
And then there was the unauthorized “nude” version that was done in the UK in the mid-1980s. I don’t like to think about that one.

I’ve written before about your music, but Donald Martino has observed something unique in your musical language. He said it “has a purity with dirt in it.” What do you think that means?

I’m not sure how to answer that. Don and I have been friends for a long time so I know he is being somehow complimentary. That’s a mysteriously hilarious statement. I don’t know. I follow a sort of stream of consciousness when I begin a piece and then I tinker. I think in terms of large sounding shapes and of combinations of tones that produce other tones that you hear but are not notated on the written page. I have no system or anything like that. I follow my intuition. I like the idea of large “slowed down” shapes that are heard as suspended and floating melodies. Things like that fascinate me.

I know you have a strong belief in the holy in Art. How? Explain.

There are two metaphysical illuminations that’s shaped my life.  God is one. Art is the other. Art is the highest gesture we can make for our fellow human beings.  As for me, personally, I see God and Art as being One. That is the holy in Art.  That guarantees my intention—and yes, that’s abstract thinking, but there’s a big difference between thinking, which is Abtract and invisible and what we experience in our present reality in concrete form—even if that’s invisible, too, like music. My music is not abstract because it always expresses a human feeling.  In my opinion Art tells a story. In order to communicate anything it must tell a story. In painting even lines and fields with no figures can reflect a sacredness if the artist actually has a profound belief.

Picasso left the abstract style because he said “there was no drama in it.” When listening to music, looking at the visual arts or reading literature, the most important question we can ask is “what was the intention in this work.” In other words, what’s the story? If you’re conscious there’s a story—if you’re not conscious there’s a dream story. On the other hand, there are abstract stories. This kind of story reflects something you, and the viewer or listener. has to find totally on their own. You know, like you have to make it up.

How do you project this spiritual quality in your music?

I aspire to incorporate spiritual immensities in my music through masses of sound which intensifies by the process of refraction or blurring, while allowing submerged melodic lines to appear and disappear. It’s like painting with a very large brush. Like those old fresco guys—or like Asian calligraphy on a massive scale—even with one tone. You know, like a big swipe with a very loaded brush.
 
I notice you use painting metaphors more than musical descriptions. Why is that?

I’ve learned much more about form from painters than I have from composers. There’s that invisible thing as opposed to the concrete thing.  Solid shapes, floating shapes or almost invisible shapes are still concrete. They remain so even when you take them into your invisible world of sound.  Visual comparison is a much more direct way of talking about music too—if you have to talk about it at all.

What are your thoughts on new art?

There is no new art. There’s simply discovered expressions that work at a particular
time. We simply discover things that have always been there.

 You’ve mentioned New York today as being historically disconnected. What do you mean exactly?

It’s my expression of how I see the frenzy, beginning in the 1980s, that accompanies chasing careers instead of creating personal expression—New York used to be the epicenter of the arts. It’s quite curious that now all the people supposedly working in the arts, profess that they are doing there own thing, but in reality they have unknowingly joined a club in which there is no personal identity. The only serious modern music that resonates now was composed some thirty or forty years, ago. So, as for those of us that continue from that period we are living the best of two worlds—we are both current and historical.  

Do you mean the newer composers and painters aren’t looking forward?

It’s not a question of looking forward. It doesn’t matter which way you’re looking. The main thing is to find the expression that comes directly from you—right now! 

Today the young composers still talk about concepts created 50 years ago when the New had an energy. It’s still new. There’s not much energy today, no belief in high art with the new kids on the block.  My old friend George Rochberg referred the types I’m speaking of as the authentic bourgeoisie looking for money and unearned celebrity. Serious intention in Art, according to what I see and hear lately, seems to have disappeared.  PR will sell it to dumb and dumber customers. That’s exactly what’s happened in both music and the visual arts—beginning in the 1970-80s and downhill ever since. It reminds me of some rock guy in the 60s, singing “the Holy Ghost has left for the coast.” Prophetic. Serious intention left, too. This is a fun art period. Fun is good, but serious fun is funnier. The gesture should be joyful rather than das camp. Cage said that “he preferred  laughter to tears,” but he was also serious about Art no matter what most people might like to think.

When people create music with the intent on making systems that destroy the perception of organization, the consequence is often music that can only be appreciated for the technical aspects, and for me, have very little of what I enjoy hearing in music that is created out of the stillness to which Cage often referred.

You left New York in the 1980s?

 Actually, the New York I grew up in came to a close for me in the 1970s. I wasn’t a joiner in what constituted the “group” mentality of the 1950-60s, and without much planning, I began a kind of “on the road” life. En route—with some exotic instruments and music paper and pencils. 

Are the innovations and energies of the 1950-60s understood in the 21st century?

Listen, the personal expressions that began to emerge in the 1950s-60s, are completely alien to the composers and painters of today.  I think some of them want to be connected to deeper expressions, maybe, but it doesn’t seem to work for them. I think a lot of them have only academic backgrounds and that certainly doesn’t help in finding a personal voice.

Remember I’m speaking in general terms here because there are always exceptions in even non-animated periods.  

But what about the past as being a source of appropriation?

It sure worked for many of the great composers in history, medieval, renaissance—it worked for Stravinsky and Picasso. An artist has to totally understand the material that is to be borrowed to be successful. Ives and Rochberg really knew.

What’s curious is that most of the composers and painters, today, can’t understand that  “borrowing” puts a huge responsibility on them. If they can’t match the quality of what they’ve borrowed it won’t work for them. They put a veil over their emotional emptiness with a slick surface.

Being inventive in making Art in one’s own time is even more of a responsibility—like you’re out there all by yourself. Solo.  But, it’s probably easier to live in a period of great energy with artists creating some pretty wild stuff all over the place. But that’s not happening today.

They’ll never understand the profound concept of mud.

CONVERSATION IN NORTH CAROLINA (1979)

Robert Ward commenting on my Orangethorpe Aria: “You sure put all of your chips on
                                                                                              melody, James.” 
                                                                                             “I have no chips, Robert. Just               
                                                                                             “bare bones.”
 

   
(NOTES on a Radio Theatre piece produced in Germany)

WHISPERING AT THE EDGES OF HEAVEN (Radio Theatre Version) 2006

This work should be approached by the actors with the following information.

I've worked with the most simple language in order to reveal the complexities embodied within it. The few words that I used are simply re-ordered so as to reveal how language obscures and defines its meaning at the same time. 

I've followed a Derridian concept that states that words have multiple meanings as well as no meaning. The possibilities in word projection and their binary--reception is used in my work as a means to show that meaning was already always there and that the re-ordering of the same words offer a common inner-wellspring that is available to all that LISTEN. Everything will always be there.

Beyond words is Harmony--in music, rivers, birds, rain, muted snow, and quiet thought in silence. All already simpler than words.

--James M. Drew, 2006  

MUSIC IS ABSTRACT (from Book of Thoughts)

Music is abstract because you can’t really touch it. You can feel it through vibrations and emotional interchange. A score page of music is not music--it’s a map…a way to activate the music. The sound is there and then it disappears into the air on which it arrived. Secret stuff. Senses. Feeling without “feeling.” It’s in the residue of the story.   

WHAT’S POSTMODERNISM? (Maxwell Bennett, Conversation, Indianapolis,2005)

What is Postmodernism? That’s a funny term. It also doesn’t even achieve its own identity since it still drags along “modernism.” 

The big difference between what is called Postmodernism and Neoclassicism is that the Neo-classicists looked back on the work of earlier guys with honor when they built upon them. These early guys believed in what they were doing and so must someone who comes along much later—they have to have the same basic strengths and integrity regarding art—it’s a responsibility. 

I don’t think that Johns and Rauschenberg should be called Postmodernists. They both project a “modernist” spirit—with Rauschenberg the collagist, and Johns a kind of a hard edged classy neo-Dada. He evidently tried to take his personal expression out of his paintings and still produced a very identifiable identity. Excellent.  

As for the new composers coming along under this category—there appears to be a bunch of them that are what they call nowadays “audience friendly.” They seem to make non-threatening copies of music from recent decades.

Ives had a word for that kind of music even during his period. Some things don’t change—so you just have to see the humor in it. Pretty hilarious stuff.

Of course, we all know that the “friendly” audience is also at fault for not demanding Art of real substance. I mean Art that requires engagement rather than just entertainment. The masses are comforted by symphony boards and tricked by gallery dealers. They all should be ashamed. There’s important instructions and revelations in Art that should be taught in every school because it teaches what is valuable and what isn’t just found in Art but in Life.
 

CONVERSATION WITH NICOLAS SLONIMSKY (Los Angeles, 1977)

NS “Now about your music. What is the technique you use that this Hispanic writer, Cordo (?) writes to me about?
            

JD “I have no idea, Nicky. I don’t use a technique. I have “expression” not style. 
        I use sounding shapes only--not technique. I use what I’ve got—I say
        what musical thoughts come to me in a private way, personal—if you’re going
        to be honest in your art, you’ve got to have a personal language not a made up
        one.”

NS  “But, this color theory or concept that she mentions…

JD  “All sound has a color—it’s emotional, like what makes us laugh or cry. That’s
         not a theory, it’s for real. Blue is blue, right?”

NS  “No theory.”

JD  “Right. I just make things as best as I can. Yeah, and I also want my works to
         sound kind of snazzy, too.”

NS  “In several of your works that I’ve seen, there are many experimental notations
         that begin in the early 1960s. I looked at a page of your The Lute in the Attic, for
         example, in Cage’s Notations book, which shows a kind of “variable” control of
         musical time in how the music is performed—but all of the pitches are notated
         exactly. This seems me to be very different from Cage’s indeterminate approach
         and closer to what Earle Brown was doing around that same time.

JD  “Yes, that’s true. I remember one time Earle Brown and I were in Felix’s Oyster 
         House, in New Orleans in the mid-1960s, and we discussed that if a new music
         was to be imagined, the implications would involve “cambio formas.” I actually
         described that discussion in Sonda, a periodical published in Madrid, when I
         wrote an article on my own music for them.” I still use variations of that variable
         form process, but I combine them in different ways now.
        
           
NS  “I’ve heard some of your colleagues say that your nomadic existence may be
         hurting your career as a composer.  From what I know of your background you
         haven’t stayed in any one place for very long before moving on to another place.
         Do you think that not belonging to some stylistic school or group, and regularly
         disappearing from the major world music centers for long periods of time, 
         has hurt your career?

JD  “That’s a complicated question, Nicky. We all have our own reasons for making
         choices—right or wrong. My moving has been mostly out of necessity—for
         better working conditions, money, for consideration of others. I never thought of
         career very much. I guess I focus on my music and that I have the privilege of making
         it.  It’s an exciting way to live, you know. It’s a sacred act.  
 
        
NS  “You are a teacher, too. At Yale and other universities, currently here
         at UCLA.  Do you enjoy teaching?

JD  “Absolutely. When I’m teaching I give a hundred percent. But, I have a problem
         with what universities think is teaching. Let me give you an example, I know
         you’re going to agree with me, but here I am at UCLA, which is a great school, and
         I was confronted by another faculty member who asked me WHY I was teaching
         renaissance counterpoint to a freshman theory class. Can you imagine this
         scene? Like you didn’t teach this until sophomore year or something. Who cares
         about the beginnings of music, right? Unbelievable. I also had these kids
         composing chants which the entire class sang from scribblings on the chalkboard
         every day. There’s no substitute for creating and performing music. To learn by
         doing is wonderful.
             

NS  “Are you enjoying yourself in Los Angeles?

JD  “Absolutely. I’ve met some really talented people out here—like Ed Han who is
         Director of the Space Gallery. He’s presenting my “traveling theatre” piece,
         Songs of Death and Bluelight Dancing, at Space this winter—and Lloyd Rodgers
         and C.E. Estes, who I met while teaching at Cal State-Fullerton. Both non-academic
         types and fine composers. 

NS  “Are you staying here for awhile then?

JD  “No. I’m going back to the east coast at the end of the semester.”             

 
    
 Italian Theatre & The Sonorous Circus (SAI News)        

According to Italian opera director, Anatole Vecchi, composer-playwright Jacopo (James) Drew is creating yet more new theater forms, with performer/actors combined with singers, and non-speaking "presences" (reminiscent of puppet theater) who are cast in productions that are both comically tragic and ritualistic with their eerie lighting, drones, and ever present gongs. Newly revised English and Italian versions of Drew's The Clown's Evening, are being planned for the 2002-03 season. Drew began creating these forms, first in the solo setting of the monodrama Cantolobosolo, featuring Bertram Turetzky as contrabassist, actor, singer (9 Winds Records CD Tenors, Echoes and Wolves) and then expanded the concept in his para-opera Survivors in Pale Light (filmed in the United States by UCSD Television). Drew continues to compose new music for children through his Sonorous Circus, performing works he has composed exclusively for them, most recently, the Piccolo Sinfonia di Stratti, for acoustic, digital and non-pitched instruments. A catalog and history of Drew's works is being compiled and translated by Germano Rossi in Genoa.

Notebook

I have long agreed with my colleague Toru Takemitsu that there should be “strong” sounds placed in just the right places.  In my case, those sounds have also been slow moving long resonating structures.  That’s strong.

"Music is either sound or silence. As long as I live I shall choose 
sound as something to confront a silence. That sound should be a 
single, strong sound." — Toru Takemitsu

A single strong sound is from eastern thought. A further Zen statement might be no sound is the strongest sound. In my own music whatever sounds emerge in my thinking, I want those sounds to be remembered. I could never compose music that I might think would not be remembered. What kind of music would that be?