Berkeley-based composer/musician Paul Dresher, 54, has developed a unique musical vocabulary and sound that is as much his own as it is identifiably “West Coast.”

On November 12, 2004, the Paul Dresher Ensemble marks its 20th anniversary with an all-Dresher program in Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall as part of the second “In Your Ear” Festival. Violinist David Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg, whose artistry has inspired a number of works by the composer, perform on several selections. Less than a week later, Dresher and crew (minus Abel-Steinberg) perform kick off their 20th anniversary season in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Performing Arts.

Dresher performs in Carnegie Hall at the invitation of composer John Adams, curator of the In Your Ear Festival, who has known Dresher since 1975. As Adams explains,
“Paul Dresher exemplifies the spirit of West Coast music both in the richness of his sound world as well as the inventiveness of his mind. In the long tradition of Harry Partch, Conlon Nancarrow, Lou Harrison and Bill Colvig, Paul has invented new instruments, both mechanical and electronic, each of which has expanded his musical thinking. To that he adds a background in North Indian and Balinese traditions, all of which results in a music of exceptional individuality and beauty. He is a composer who has always made his own way, producing his own theater pieces and creating his own group, The Paul Dresher Ensemble. He's a maverick in the very best sense of the word.”

Dresher's works, which have been performed throughout North America, Europe and Asia, range from scores for opera theater, dance and film to works for chamber and orchestral ensembles. Notable commissions and collaborations include The Library of Congress, The Walker Arts Center, The Kronos Quartet, choreographer Margaret Jenkins, playwright Charles Mee, director Chen Shi-Zheng, and a number of projects with Rinde Eckert. His Ensemble not only creates and tours its own creations, but also performs works by such notable composers as John Adams, Terry Riley, David Lang, Carl Stone, Eve Beglarian, Ingram Marshall, and Anthony Davis.

In this long ranging interview, which took place five weeks before Dresher's Carnegie Hall performance, he talks at length about his music and its genre-defying electro-acoustic elements.

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Jason Victor Serinus: When I started listening to your Concerto for Violin and Electro-Acoustic Band, it hit me that in a way it could serve a 9-11 concerto. It has so much driving energy and what to my ears is a horror and dread that in the second movement transitions into a touching, almost romantic, lyrical sadness. Are you performing the whole thing in Carnegie Hall?

Paul Dresher: Yes, we are performing both movements of the concerto. From Elapsed Time, another work on the CD, we're only doing the last movement, “Racer.” It's a time issue. When John and I worked out programming stuff, we wanted to cover a lot of bases in my music, and there are a lot of bases in my music. We wanted something that was completely acoustic, something that was electro-acoustic, and something that was all invented instruments while showing a range of musical styles.

The concert includes the full Concerto for Violin & Electro-Acoustic Band (1996-1997), written for violinist David Abel; “Racer,” the last and longest movement from the three-movement Elapsed Time (2002) written for David Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg; In the Name(less) (2002), the longest work on the program, written for two invented instruments, the Quadrachord and Marimba Lumina; Din of Iniquity (1994) for Electro-Acoustic Band which closes the CD; and the second movement of Double Ikat (1990), a trio written for the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio. Double Ikat is the oldest work on the program, and was included on my first New Albion CD, Dark Blue Circumstance.

The last time the Electro-Acoustic Band played in New York City was 1997. That Merkin Hall concert included my Cage Machine plus works by David Lang, Eve Beglarian, and Jay Cloidt. Then in 2001 I performed a Merkin Hall collaboration with Ned Rothenberg for which we co-composed a piece for a band of performing and improvising musicians. It was just as much based in jazz as in contemporary music.

JVS: When did you begin writing music?

PD: In the early ‘70s. I was writing songs as a teenager and always wanted to be a composer. The first piece of mine that was not juvenilia and from which you can trace a logical evolution to where I am today was written 1974-1975 when I was 23-24 years old.

JVS: What's the earliest work of yours that has been recorded?

PD: This Same Temple (1976-1977), a very big work for two pianos that was quite well recorded by Ed Neimann and Nurit Tilles from Steve Reich's group. Lovely Music issued it on vinyl in 1982 and again CD in 1996. The Labeque Sisters used to play it.

There's a Guitar Quartet I wrote in 1974-1975 that's still played quite a bit. While I consider it a very rudimentary piece, it seems to be popular.

JVS: Let's talk about your stylistic evolution.

PD: Rather than saying evolution, let's say the range of styles I work in.

When I give lectures to college students, I explain that came of age in the ‘60s. I grew up with American popular music all around me. I was in love with Elvis Presley and totally immersed in the folk and blue revivals. Rock and roll was a part of me when I started writing songs and I was completely immersing myself in music in 1965-1966.

I also grew up with a very strong awareness of classical and contemporary classical music. My father taught mathematics at UCLA and was a very avid music consumer. I went to concerts and operas in Los Angeles as a child, and attended lots of concerts in Schoenberg Concert Hall.

For some reason, I become a sponge for information. I was well aware as a teenager who John Cage was. Not that I was particularly interested in him in that point. I first became obsessed with him at age 18 after I read Silence, his first published collection of writing from that late ‘50s or early ‘60s. It really influenced me, and not always in a good way. Cage posed a lot of intellectual challenges to intentional choices and liking certain harmonies. It took me several years to overcome his biases and find my own relationship to the issues he brought up.

I had classical piano training from a very young age. I also had pop music all around me and really loved it. Then, as a teenager, I became very interested in world music and started studying Indian music and listening avidly to music from Indonesia and other places.

I also began messing around with tape recorders, discovering what happens if you turn the tape backwards or try to overdub or play at different speeds. I did the kinds of things you could do back then with home tape recorders. And of course after hearing Jimi Hendrix, one starts to experiment with feedback. So I started doing things that were the beginning of my interest in electronic music – manipulating sound in a different way than you would as a performer (except in the case of feedback, which is very performer-based).

Then in 1968 I built my first musical instrument. I dropped my math classes in high school, and instead took woodshop and built psychedelic guitars and psychedelic sitars, things like that. I'm still building instruments, but I'm now more inspired by the work of Harry Partch, Lou Harrison and world music.

The only pursuit that wasn't there in high school and the early years thereafter was my current interest in opera and music theater. One of the main reasons I've been able to have a professional composing career outside academic is that early on I got involved in opera and music theater, initially by working with Rinde Eckert. There's a much bigger audience for theatrical things than for pure concert work.

JVS: One of your influences was the music of the Far East. You include a memorial to one of your teachers in Double Ikat. Tell me about your teacher.

PD: He was also a performer. His name with Nikhil Banerjee, a Bengali from northeastern India. He was a classical Hindustani musician who studied with the same teacher as Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. That teacher in turn was Ali Akbar Khan's father, Allaudin Khan, one of the most famous and important 20th century musicians and teachers. He lived to a very old age, and taught many generations of performers.

Banerjee was a musician's musician, not flashy like Ravi Shankar. He had more technique than anybody, but used it for deep introspective musical exploration rather than flash. He didn't teach Indian students because he felt it was too big of a responsibility to become a true guru. Instead he toured all the time, and liked teaching American students because he liked spending summers in America rather than India.

As soon as I finished high school, I moved to Berkeley.

JVS: Just to get out?

PD: To be with my girlfriend. It was 1968, it was hippies, you know… I was here for People's Park and heavily involved with that.

The first time I heard Nikhil Banerjee on record, I was 18 or 19. I bought a used record at Moe's Bookstore on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley. I used to play for spare change in front of Cody's Bookstore. I'd make enough money to eat and pay rent, because rent and food were cheap back then. I'd spend half my money on used records at Moe's. I had a routine: I'd buy one rock ‘n roll record, one classical or contemporary record, and one world music record. (There weren't many world music records then).

When I played the record, I said, "Oh my God, this is some of the greatest music I've ever heard."

I'd never heard of Nikhil Banerjee. I'd gotten sick of Indian music. I listened to all these Ravi Shankar records while I was in high school, and it stopped moving me after awhile. It was kind of okay. Then I heard Nikhil Banerjee's record and said ‘Oh my God, this is a musician. This music is so much deeper than I ever imagined.'

I found out a couple of years later that he was coming to teach in the Bay Area. I had started studying sitar with a younger Indian musician, Krishna Bhatt. He told me about Nikhil Banerjee's visit and encouraged me to study with him.

I studied with him for many years until he died unfortunately in 1986. He was only 54 or 55 when he had a heart attack and died. I wrote the end of the second movement of Double Ikat as a memorial. It's a slow funeral dirge in 6/4 time. It has a huge, arcing violin line that David Abel plays absolutely beautifully.

JVS: David plays almost anything absolutely beautifully.

PD: True. I first heard him play Lou Harrison's The Varied Trio with Lou and his life-partner Bill Colvig at Cal Performances. There's a movement in it that's almost a violin solo. I was all goose bumps knocked back in my seat when that movement was over. I said, "Oh my God."

Willie Winant had wanted me to write something for the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio for awhile, but until then, I was only vaguely interested. Once I heard David perform, I said, "Yes, I want to write for you guys."

JVS: If David and Julie had chosen to tour all over the world, they could have.

PD: Yes, but David's personality is not right for touring. He wisely chose a different path because he's not suited to volume music-making where you travel-perform-travel-perform, doing the same thing over and over again. When he did tour, he was very unhappy, especially doing the orchestra thing where you rehearse for a couple of hours and then do a concerto. David likes to be perfectly prepared.

JVS: And Julie is constantly working up new music with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the San Francisco Symphony, etc.

What more can you say about the influence of Asian music on your composing?

PD: When I first heard Asian music, something about it reached inside me and said, "You understand. This is music that is part of you. It's not alien, it's not exotic. It feels like something you understand and know."

That's how I've come to a lot of music. It reaches inside me and I have this epiphany where I can hear how the music works. Then, if I have a profound emotional response, I say, "I have to really study to fully understand this."

For example, I heard Javanese Gamelan quite a bit and found it very interesting. Then, one night in 1974 at the Center for World Music, I attended a Javanese Shadow Play. I smoked a joint before I went in and I kind of fell asleep around midnight. When I awoke a few minutes later, I was completely in that world. I wasn't in my day-to-day world; I was in the world of that music and that shadow theater. It was so compelling to me that I said, "I have to study Javanese and Balinese music and understand how they put these different elements together."

JVS: Since your father was obsessed with classical music, did any 18th or 19th century European composers touch you in the same way?

PD: Not until later in life. When I was growing up, I took the traditional piano lessons where you played Mozart Minuets and simple pieces by Bach that were never simple – the simplest piece by Bach is so complicated. But it wasn't until post-high school, when I started to listen closely to traditional classical music that I started to have a great emotional response to it as well.

There's certain classical music that's imprinted on me that I still listen to almost as comfort food. That includes almost all the late Beethoven String Quartets (except the Grosse Fugue – I find it too obsessively relentless in its rhythmic motive). Chopin Nocturnes make me melt. And I love almost anything by Bach.

I have a less consistent response to vocal music. But for vocal, Mozart's the pinnacle of opera for me, at least until the 20th century. I think Figaro is a perfect piece. Cosi is amazing. When I think of the great operas I think of Mozart, because he also had great humor and irony. There was no bombast. Except for a little self-aware intentional bombast in Don Giovanni, his operas have none of the default bombast of 19th century opera. There are arias that give me goose bumps – a lot of the classic arias do – but I don't go back to them over and over again.

I'm also a traditional contemporary music person in that there's not a lot of the 19th century that I spend time with. It's usually earlier or later, althoughI'm also a huge fan of Mahler, especially his orchestral songs like the Rückert lied. The first time I heard the song, “I've become Lost to the World—Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” was on a final exam on our music history exam for CAL. I had never heard it before, but Janet Baker's rendition made me cry.

JVS: She and Kathleen Ferrier would be my first two choices for those songs. You've heard Ferrier do some of the Rückert lied? She recorded them in 1952 with Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic when she had already been diagnosed with breast cancer.

PD: I don't know her. I'm happy to find someone else to fall in love with.

JVS: I once played Ferrier accompanied by Bruno Walter for David and Julie and they were really transported. There is no other contralto like hers. She'll tear your heart apart.

When Janet Baker sings Schubert's Ave Maria, I hear God in her singing. Similarly, Ferrier is somehow in touch with God in a way that transcends the moment, the note, or the music that's coming through her.

PD: I know what you mean. Fortunately, we can't define it and it can't be taught.

JVS: I can play you a host of singers who have that ability. But let's stick with the specific pieces you're doing in New York and what we can hear in each of them.

PD: The Violin Concerto represents a strong attempt to deal with the assets of the electro-acoustic medium. It was written for David Abel because he is probably my favorite musician. He's like my muse; I feel that when I write for David, I write my best. His expressiveness and depth of his playing inspire me.

My Electro-Acoustic Band was a few years old at the point I wrote it (1996-97). After composing Din Of Iniquity (1994) and performing quite a variety other composers' works for the band, I felt I really understood how to approach the medium. The concerto for violin and electro-acoustic band is perhaps my signature piece for combining the strengths of acoustic instrument performance with electronic instruments.

JVS: What are the strengths of electronic performance in your musical lexicon?

PD: It offers timbres that are not otherwise obtainable in the real world. In the Concerto, most of the timbres are actually samples of the set-up Julie Steinberg created when she performed John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano at a Cage Fest at Mills College in 1995 or 1996 after Cage died.

I had been in love with Cage's Sonatas and Interludes For Prepared Piano ever since I heard them when I was 20 years old. I thought the prepared piano was an amazingly inventive idea for prepared piano, and so sonically rich. I sampled the sounds of Julie's preparation, altered them in computers, combined and manipulated them in various ways, and created fictional instruments that could be played by MIDI keyboard and percussion instruments.

The Concerto's pallet consists of these sampled sounds that I absolutely adore. The guitar, which is an electro-acoustic instrument that has an actual vibrating string, is only heard through the electronic medium and is manipulated in that medium. So the piece contains a combination of totally electronic, totally acoustic, and hybrid instruments. The CD's liner notes explain some of this.

Concertos are typically thought of on an orchestral model: soloist in opposition to or doing battle with the orchestra. However, in the first movement of the piece, my ensemble model is really a rock and roll band that has a soloist with a very intense rhythmic section. The movement's title “Cage Machine” refers both to its rhythmically driving, machine-like energy and the origins of its electronic samples in the prepared piano music of John Cage.

The second movement – big, lyrical and romantic – is modeled on an orchestral relationship between the soloist and ensemble. The electronic sound is that of strings. Although the percussion is a prepared piano, it is, in contrast to its primarily rhythmic function in the first movement. It's rhythmically very languid, lyrical and flexible – the opposite of a machine.

JVS: How does your music make you feel when you write it? What are you trying to say?

PD: That's kind of an impossible question to answer.

I'm not trying to say anything. There are certain experiences in music that have deeply moved me and that I absolutely adore. I'm capable of creating experiences that are similar to some of those in certain ways, as well as some experiences that I hope are new. I do that by manipulating and being very attentive to the passage of time and where the attention is.

In creating a style, a spark, an argument, a flow – I don't know which word is right because they're all wrong in a certain sense – I hope to give the listener an experience that, when they come to its end, feels like they've been on a journey.

JVS: A journey that takes people on a journey similar to one that has moved you?

PD: That's not really it. I know that this experience can happen. I know from listening to late Beethoven String Quartets or other great music that one experience of listening to music is to go on a journey to places that you've never been before, places that are both new and familiar. It's almost like discovering parts of yourself that you didn't know existed. That's sort of what I'm doing, oftentimes by creating sounds that are new and unusual to the context – sounds used in ways you wouldn't expect. Yet they make sense.

In a certain sense, one of my important goals is to say ‘We can experience all sound in the world as music. There's no such thing as alien music, music we cannot understand.'

What I love about music is that through it, you can learn something about the world that is unknown to you. For example, you learn something about Japanese culture by listening to Japanese music.

JVS: In the same way that I learned a lot about nature by listening to the water, birds, and trees in the songs of Schubert.

PD: Yeah. Sometimes there's an intermediary to translate something, and music can serve as that medium. I love to take sounds that are not typically considered musical sounds – I'm one of many composers who does this these days – and find a way to make them completely sensible in a musical environment. I think pop artists also do this, but it was Cage or maybe Charles Ives who first posited this notion.

JVS: Who else is doing this now?

PD: Alvin Curran. Alvin's work completely fascinates me. I love his music. He can take anything and make it wonderful.

JVS: Let's talk about some of the other pieces on the New York program.

PD: Elapsed Time is a totally acoustic piece written for David and Julie's virtuosity.

JVS: Their dynamics are really as one.

PD: The work was very much written for them, which is why they're taking it to New York. The title Elapsed Time refers to how the piece addresses how time passes, and how different musical environments and different ways of developing music affect our perception of how time passes.

Each of the three movements examines and expresses a different way for ideas to evolve. As a result, the listener experiences the passage of time in a different way in each movement.

Probably the piece that will sound most unusual to people is In the Name(less). I'll play it in both New York and San Francisco. It is performed on one of my invented instruments, the Quadrachord, which has strings 14 feet long. Joel Davel plays the Marimba Lumina, the other invented instrument that is entirely electronic. It's about 22 minutes long, has many sections, and combines improvisational passages – elaborated differently in each performance – with fully composed and determined sections.

I often like to write pieces where as either the soloist or principal performer I improvise on the structure of the piece. My piece for electric guitar and tape loops, Dark Blue Circumstance, has a completely composed structure with a number of improvisational sections or details within it. It's on my first New Albion CD, aptly titled Dark Blue Circumstance. That disc also contains Double Ikat.

Din of Iniquity closes both programs. It's the first piece I wrote for the Electro-Acoustic Band, and was my first attempt to create for a hybrid of electronic and acoustic instruments. At the time I wrote it, I was listening to a lot of music by Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, two very hard industrial rock and roll bands. I love the studio wall of sound and layers that they created, all with a very intense and heavy beat. Sections of Din of Iniquity really reflect my transformation of that kind of aesthetic and intensity.

The piece also slams very contrasting things together in a relatively short duration. If you follow the flow of a piece like Double Ikat, sections gradually morph from one thing into another. Eventually it's a completely different section with a different structure, but the transitions are very easy to follow. In Din of Iniquity, I included jump cuts, radical slamming together of juxtaposing elements, overlaying, and different ways of making transitions that lack a kind of logic. There are radical contrasts of texture and dynamics, including contrasts of tenderness vs. intensity and lyricism vs. driving rhythmic intensity.

JVS: Those sometimes abrupt contrasts are one of the reasons why, even though you're considered “West Coast,” I think New Yorkers will pick up on your music. If you walk down the street in midtown Manhattan, all these different things come slamming at you. You can't stop them. You can choose to totally blank out. But if you instead leave yourself open, you can go through ‘oh God there's this person suffering on the street, oh God this taxi almost just hit me, what's that noise and that horrible smell?' all compressed together while walking down a single bloc.

PD: the ensemble's 20th anniversary season kicks off in San Francisco on Nov. 17th & 18th at the Yerba Buena Center. Although my preference was to include Julie and David, they won't be available because they're staying in NYC after the Carnegie Hall performance.

Besides my own work, the performance includes three pieces by other composers that the Ensemble commissioned.

The first commissioned work is from Ingram Marshall. Another is by Neil Rolnick, who was a graduate student at UC Berkeley with me in 1975. The third is by Jim Mobberley.

The Paul Dresher Ensemble got its start doing music theater, specifically the work Slow Fire I did with Rinde Eckert. We'll have a 20th anniversary tour of the work next spring that will premiere at the Mondavi Center at UC Davis. It goes to Stanford April 2, to Philadelphia for three or four shows in May, and then back here next season.

JVS: What would you say to try to coax the uninitiated to come hear your music?

PD: If I could do that well, I would be in a very different situation. I'm not good at sound-bite marketing explanations; I'm much better one-on-one over a bottle of wine.

People tell me that listening to my music is like going on a journey that they love. They often don't know beforehand that they're either capable of it or that they'd even look for it.

JVS: What can we do about all the publications and all the media that don't give a shit about any of this?

PD: The only answer is to keep going and support the people who can make it happen. There aren't that many.

- Jason Victor Serinus -

 

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