Composer/guitarist/rapper Gene Pritsker has written over three hundred compositions, including chamber operas, orchestral and chamber works, electro-acoustic music, songs for hip-hop and rock ensembles, etc. He has been described by The New York Times as “Audacious….multitalented”, and he is the founder of Sound Liberation; an eclectic hip hop-chamber-jazz-rock ensemble who have released cds on Innova Records. But perhaps most importantly, he loves Zappa, Stravinsky, and The Wu Tang Clan. Something tells me he’s not your typical composer. Here’s what he had to say in our interview:  

 What’s your pet’s name and why?

Poochini, because he is very musical. I am planning to record his howl and create an electronic composition out of it.

How do you spoil yourself?

I write music every morning.

If you weren’t making music as a career what would you be doing?

I would not be DOING well. This question is too abstract for me.

Where do you live and how does that affect your music and the way you make it?

I live in New York City (represent, represent). I love the noise, the hustle, the constant action, it all rubs off in my music. I used to live next to an above ground subway train in Harlem, it surfaced every five minutes or so and my house shook. I think I wrote louder music back then.

What is your first sound memory?

Records played in my parents’ apartment in the old country (Soviet Union). Also, me trying to practice (scratching) the violin.

Name three Desert Island discs (or MP3s), recordings that you feel especially close to.

I can’t think of particular discs but I definitely would want some of Stravinsky’s greatest hits, Zappa’s greatest hits, and an early ’90s hip-hop compilation (Wu-Tang, Tribe Called Quest, etc).

What has been your most memorable or inspirational performance and why?

I can’t pinpoint ONE, but a few memorable ones would have to be:

- My bass concerto played by the Adelaide Symphony to a crowd of thirty thousand and me having to do a short interview in front of all those people before the performance. I got a high when thirty thousand people laughed at a joke.

- My opera Money being performed at the Etna Festival in Catania, Sicily. This was a great energy performance and a great tour with my group.

- Performing the solo DJ part (on my laptop) in my piece “3 Poems from Flowers of Evil” with a fifty piece choir (Latvian state choir) and the Absolute Ensemble chamber orchestra.

- Performing my violin concerto in an amphitheater in Greece to thousands of people.

Describe your most mind-blowing art experience (in any art form), something that instantly changed your life.

Hearing the “Rite of Spring.” I could not understand it. I was like ten, so I kept listening to it over and over until it started to make sense. But I knew this was something greater than me and I need to understand it and be it. Also being in the chorus for Mendelssohn’s “Walpurgis Nacht”; that’s when I knew I needed to write music for sure.

What is your greatest fear?

Death of others.

What has been your career low point?

Late ’90s, post music school blues, working part-time jobs just to pay the rent and not writing enough or performing/producing enough concerts.

What were your first compositions like?  How have they changed?

My very first compositions where heavily inspired by romantic composers (especially Mendelssohn) but I was also writing heavy metal songs and had a jazz fusion band. I found my voice when I was able to blend many of these eclectic influences into a coherent style.

What did you learn from your teachers? Any words of wisdom to share?

My first composition teacher was a wild guy who would talk about the music of George Crumb and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Those two things influenced me in strange and good ways. My main composition teacher at Manhattan School of Music was Giampaolo Bracali. I learned so much from him. He let me have my own voice and concentrated on the technique of composition. A word of advice to young composers out there: DO NOT let a composition teacher dictate to you what you should write, think, express, etc. Just have them focus on the technique of composition, orchestration, and form. That is what a real composition teacher does; everything else is hot air.

How are you like your music?  Would an outsider see/hear any similarity between your personality and your music?

My music has been described as eclectic. I am an eclectic personality, whatever that means. My tastes, though, in everything are very varied and I am open to all forms of art and expression. In that way I am just like my music.

Tell us about your new release and some of the thinking behind it.

Varieties of Religious Experiences Suite is music from my opera William James’ Varieties of Religious Experiences. I adapted this music as an instrumental suite for cello, two electric guitars, bass and drums. I was interested in how I can keep the essence of the opera while adding elements of freedom for the musicians to improvise. So it’s a mixture of very composed music and very free music, and I was experimenting with merging these two seemingly opposite approaches to musical composition. I do not consider it jazz music or contemporary classical music or whatever other categories it has been described as. But it is new chamber music. New because I wrote it a few years back, chamber because five people are playing together a written composition. Any other description, genre or style is superfluous to me. Many critics found very direct relation in this music to the text of William James’ lecture. I like to think that this was subconsciously written by me. I did read the text carefully but did not purposely try to convey its exact meaning, yet one critic wrote:  ‘It is amazing how masterfully Pritsker explored the opportunities offered by James’ poetic vocabulary.” And I like that this is heard in this composition.

‘Michael Nyman: Composer In Progress’ and ‘Michael Nyman in Concert’ Might Make You Po-Go!

Mentored by Henry Cowell and directed in electronic music techniques in studios under Ianis Xenakis,  Barton McLean has experienced both the academic and the professional worlds of the composer, having undertaken a 20-year career as a pioneering director of major university electronic/computer music programs.  In 1983 he and Priscilla McLean left academia to develop a full time career with their electroacoustic duo The McLean Mix, which has proven itself in hundreds of concerts and installations throughout the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific Rim.  His major interests have been the integration of natural sounds into the web of traditional and non-traditional structures, the use of technology to articulate ideas based on environmental and cultural concerns, and the development of new instruments such as the “Composers Playpen” and the sound/light project the “Sparkling Light Console.” 

We got lucky and landed an interview with McLean. Enjoy!

What’s your pet’s name and why?

Of course everyone likes dogs and cats on a gut level, including me. But as someone who has been concerned with the environment in my life and my music, I just can’t see how I can personally justify owning a pet. Consider the immense amount of our natural resources that go into feeding these pets. If these resources were directed toward feeding the hungry or restoring our precious prairie, which is now almost totally destroyed in grain production much of which eventually winds up in dog and cat food, I expect that many of our terrible economic problems would be solved and much of the world hunger would disappear.
 
How do you spoil yourself?

We live in a beautiful mountainous area on the NY-Mass border, and I can think of no better way to spoil myself than to explore around the area of some of the many hiking trails, or just bushwhacking with a compass.
 
If you weren’t making music as a career what would you be doing?

I started out as a kid fully intending to be a research biologist. I am still fascinated with bugs, microbes, and all sorts of living things, especially the smaller kind.
 
Where do you live and how does that affect your music and the way you make it?

I am exposed to some of the most cutting edge sounds in the world emanating from such venues as MASS MoCA (with the Bang on a Can festival, etc.) on one side and EMPAC on the other (at RPI, Troy, NY). I’ve also found that, although there is no lack of fine performers willing to collaborate (and I’ve done just that from time to time), there is a definite lack of venues for these performers to perform my music. And so although I can get it composed and recorded (in our state of the art studio in Petersburg, NY, the whole performance scene with touring artists is lacking here. That is one criterion that directs me toward electronic and computer music (not the only one, I hasten to add).
 
What is your first sound memory?

That’s easy. When I was around 5 or 6, a house wren sang every spring near my window in Wappingers Falls, NY. It was only gradually that I realized the beauty of this sound, at first not even recognizing it as a thing of exquisite beauty and capable of inspiring my sound world. It was also my first realization that music could not be confined to the horribly constraining grid of notation.
 
Name three Desert Island discs (or MP3s), recordings that you feel especially close to.

London Symphony Sibelius symphonies (any of them, but especially the 7th)

Xenakis “Pithoprakta”

Michael Gordon’s “Van Gogh”
 
What has been your most memorable or inspirational performance and why?

In the early ’70s, David Burge played my “Dimensions II” for piano and tape in Jordan Hall, Boston, for the SCI (Society of Composers, Inc.) conference. That being the ’70s in New England, the whole conference was dominated by hard-core serial works. Our concert had one piece after another with academic and boring post-Webern styles. When David Burge performed my work, which was extremely antithetical to that esthetic, being dramatic, dreamy, biting and at times tonal, and playing it so beautifully at that, the whole audience was so mesmerized that they clapped repeatedly, and a long line formed after the concert to congratulate me. It may have been the piece, but it was also the fact that it was such a relief after all those other wallpaper serial compositions

Describe your most mind-blowing art experience (in any art form), something that instantly changed your life.

Browsing the dial on my grandfather’s short wave radio in the 1940s, and stumbling onto a symphony orchestra playing what must have been a Mozart or Haydn symphony, my first ever contact with classical music and with a symphony orchestra. After that, I was drawn to classical music like a moth to a light, and could not ever listen enough. When I did my undergrad work at SUNY-Potsdam Crane School of Music, it was my goal to listen to every classical record in the music library. Over a 4-year period, I very nearly succeeded. I became able, quite accidentally, to play from memory much of the classical symphonic literature on the piano.
 
What is your greatest fear?

That, with the dumbing down in our culture, classical music and everything that goes with it will cease to exist.
 
What has been your career low point?

A performance of my “Voices of the Wild” by the Albany Symphony, in which the conductor was so bad and cared so little that the performance was a disaster. I have since ceased to write for orchestra, or for any ensemble for that matter. And both of us are better off for it.
 
What were your first compositions like? How have they changed?

Bad Schubert would be a good description. Then Hindemith, Elliot Carter, and Xenakis.
 
What did you learn from your teachers? Any words of wisdom to share?

From Henry Cowell (my mentor) I learned curiosity, humbleness, courage to experiment. Most of my life I was going against the grain of what was acceptable, and Henry gave me the courage to keep doing it — to find my own voice. I still remember those composition seminars at Eastman School of Music, where Henry would climb into the piano and perform his “Banshee.” The more academically correct students and teachers would laugh at him and dismiss him, but I think he had the last laugh.
 
How are you like your music? Would an outsider see/hear any similarity between your personality and your music?

I do not conform to peoples’ expectations. In my life, career, and creative output, I have had to find my own path, which was different from most. One example would be the way Priscilla (my composer wife) and I have left the academic world for a lifetime career in touring with our duo, managing to sustain us creatively and financially full time since 1983. No one had done it in the USA up to that time (without university or organizational support), and there are very few doing it today. We succeeded against all sorts of odds.
 
Tell us about your new release and some of the thinking behind it.

The life of an artist is often a litany of wrong turns, opportunities missed, and, if one is lucky, a few really great prospects. My recent Innova CD Soundworlds is such an opportunity, in that I had happened to accumulate a trove of finished work that was ready for prime time, the result of a fascinating 36 years composing and performing with our husband-wife duo “The McLean Mix.” To be sure, there are other CDs of mine (7 to be exact, many in collaboration with Priscilla, along with 10 LPs and 3 DVDs) but this one came at a very special time when three brand new works from recent McLean Mix performances were allowed to stand alongside my very finest earlier work, the best of the best being “Rainforest Images II,” never before released on a CD.

New Sounds: With Michael Nyman.  Definitely need to have a listen!