Category: Feature

Sputter Box’s debut album, Sputter (SHRINKS THE) Box, features more than 25 brand new miniatures, each scored for bass clarinet, voice, and djembe.

“Unremarkable Brain” is Track 11 on the album.

NATASHA NELSON: I wanted to of course ask you about your piece, “Unremarkable Brain,” for Sputter Box. Would you begin by discussing the composition and its text?

MATTHEW SLAZIK: So the piece arose out of convenient timing, or inconvenient timing, depending on how you want to look at it. I got a message about the collaboration opportunity the same week that I ended up having a medical issue. I was walking up in the woods and out of the blue, my vision just went doubled vertically. It was really weird. I thought it was a fluke thing, because it was the first week of online classes, and I thought maybe I was looking at a screen too much, so I said I was going to give it 24 hours to clear up.

That day went by and it didn’t clear up, so I contacted my doctor’s office and told them my symptom. They suggested I either go to the emergency room or see an eye doctor immediately, because that kind of thing is symptomatic of some pretty serious stuff. Given the pandemic, that was kind of tricky to manage because not many places were open and we didn’t want to go to the emergency room. Fortunately, we got in with an eye doctor. She wasn’t sure what it was, so she sent me in for some MRIs.

I had an MRI done and it came back all clear. After a couple more tests, they determined that it’s perfectly treatable. My vision is pretty much 99% normal, so it’s not a big deal, but this MRI scan kind of became representative of the whole situation: this uncertainty of what it could be and this fear, and the report itself coming back entirely normal—kind of looking back on a really scary situation and seeing, in retrospect, that it wasn’t that big of a deal, but it was at the same time, if that makes sense.

I got my hands on the MRI report, and I looked at the different language used in it. I found the most interesting bits from it and I basically wrote a poem out of the MRI report. I used that text as the basis for the piece, trying to convey this idea of anxiety associated with an unconfirmed diagnosis, and then in the end finding out that it’s not really anything all that serious, and life goes on, and all those sorts of things.

Was “Unremarkable Brain” the first piece you’d written for this particular instrumentation?

MS: Yes. In fact, aside from soprano voice, I don’t think I’ve ever really written for bass clarinet or djembe before, so it was definitely an interesting experience trying to write for those—not only those instruments individually, but also together as an ensemble.

Would you describe your compositional approach applied to this piece?

MS: Generally when I’m writing, my personal process is I tend to think about harmony pretty heavily. Whether it’s tonal, functional, or non-functional, I’m always thinking vertically. In this case, I figured that really wasn’t going to work quite as well because there are really only two melodic instruments, and that’s going to be kind of tricky to convey harmonic information.

What I ended up doing was thinking in terms of line: thinking horizontally. First, I wrote the vocal line: I analyzed the scansion of the text I had and set that for soprano voice. Then, I determined that I wanted to convey this idea of things being out of focus – things being shifted – so I wrote a tone row for the bass clarinet. It’s actually a derived tone row on the tetrachord “HEAD,” using the German spelling of “H,” and then I shifted that by one note so that it’s kind of out of focus.

I really focused on how those two lines were interacting, and the djembe serves to accent different points of importance, and different points of things being out of focus and coming back together. It was really interesting to experiment with that and also figure out, for example, “How’s the singer going to get her pitch?”—especially when I have a lot of these clashing intervals to convey this idea of things being out of focus and not being quite right.

Does the score use traditional notation?

MS: For the most part, yes. There were a couple points where I [wrote] a spoken-word part; Alina, instead of singing some parts, just spoke the text. Even then, that’s pretty traditional notation: x-noteheads. I was happy that I was able to create what I think is a pretty interesting sound for the ensemble without having to do anything too crazy. I wanted to avoid that. For a one-minute piece, especially, I wanted to make sure that it was really accessible and really easy to understand.

Something that really interests me with regard to compositional choices is Sprechgesang or Sprechstimme, and the options a composer has in notating spoken text. When crafting the vocal part for this piece, how did you decide which phrases to take out of the overall context to be spoken, rather than sung?

MS: That’s a really interesting point actually. In fact, I was looking back, listening to [Sputter Box’s] performance, which was fantastic. They did a wonderful job. It would’ve been interesting to hear it as Sprechstimme throughout, especially because the piece is cusping on this mesh between German Expressionism and the frivolity of Les Six, [a] countermovement to Impressionism. I particularly think of Poulenc in this instance, because his lyrics are just so funny sometimes, and so lighthearted, even though he’s oftentimes talking about sometimes serious subject matters. That’s what I was trying to go for.

Got it! Yes, I’m a huge Poulenc fan.

MS: Yes, he’s wonderful. The text for “Unremarkable Brain” is not lighthearted, but it’s definitely got some moments where it isn’t meant to be taken too seriously, which was an intentional choice. So it’s for that reason that I had those lines spoken. I think it was “Incidental cystic lesion / There is no midline shift.” Those were a pairing in the MRI report, so that’s part of the reason that I had those phrases spoken. Part of it was intuitive, because I wanted a break in the sound. It was a lot of singing and I wanted to break that up a little bit. The other reason is because it adds to that idea that this isn’t meant to be taken too seriously.

One thing I noticed with this piece was, there’s a lot of medical jargon in it:

“Flow voids at the skull base; Incidental cystic lesion; Vertical Strabismus.”

It’s kind of representative of diagnoses and how there are oftentimes a lot of these scary terms that are thrown around that, in reality, really don’t mean anything significant. I wanted to add to that idea by having those lines spoken.

That’s very interesting. Were there other extended techniques indicated for the piece?

MS: I don’t think so. I considered doing some timbral trills in the bass clarinet, but I decided to leave it where it was.

Is there a particular style or instrumentation that you are most inclined to write for, or have written for?

MS: Early on, definitely. I started writing for Big Band. In fact, the very first piece I ever composed was a Big Band chart, fully notated, which is kind of weird [laughs]. I’ve been making a really conscious effort to try and expand what I’m writing for. I’ve been trying not to fit in any box because right now, early in my career, it’s a great time to figure out what I like, what I’m good at, what maybe I don’t like, what I’m not good at. I’ve been trying to dabble in everything.

I did this piece, I just finished up an electro-acoustic piece, I’m currently working on a progressive rock tune, and I’m actually going to be doing another Big Band arrangement. I’ve been dabbling into art songs, and eventually next year I’m going to do some choral arranging. So I don’t necessarily have a style, but I do tend to find in general that writing for instrumental ensembles is something that I really enjoy.

And when you composed this piece for Sputter Box, did you compose at the piano or did you notate directly onto staff paper? How did that part of the process develop, with regard to envisioning the timbres and other aspects of the piece as you were writing?

MS: It’s one of those things that’s changed a lot. I went through a phase where I was constantly composing at the piano, and I found that that was also very restricting at times.

How so?

MS: You talked about timbre, for example, and also range, and things that are pianistic don’t always translate to other instruments. I’ve been making a marked effort to shift away from that, and now I primarily compose away from the piano on staff paper. I’ll have the piano nearby so if I need to get a pitch or to make sure I’m audiating something correctly, I can do that. But I try as much as I can to write away from the piano these days.

This piece started on staff paper, entirely. I notated the vocal line and then figured out the primary tone row that I was going to use. Then, I did a matrix to show all the different transformations of that tone row. From there, I started sketching ideas on staff paper, and then I moved to notation.

Has this process – with regard to composing for a digital medium, specifically, and writing during this time – been a somewhat novel experience?

MS: Yes, it has been. In a general sense, this whole thing has really taught me just how much I rely on people to be creative. I never thought that I did, but I realize that now. I come from a very small town. And even then, contact is so hard in this whole thing (the pandemic). It can be really challenging. So it’s definitely been different: trying to figure out how am I going to stay creative, and how am I still going to make contact with people?

It’s become more focused for me. It’s become a very inward form of composition. I’ve been doing a lot outside. The electro-music piece that I wrote used entirely field recordings that I gathered myself from various locations around my house. I went to a waterfall, a couple streams, the woods. I even went to my friend’s farm and got some recordings there.

I’ve also been doing outdoor recordings. That’s the big project I’m working on right now. I have a piano piece I wrote, and it’s got seven sections-ish. And I’m going to record each section in a different location outside around my town, and then stitch it together to form this continuous piece with changing scenery.

What town is that? Is that the same town you mentioned earlier, where you’re from?

MS: Yes. It’s Tully, New York. It’s definitely a very beautiful place. It’s kind of a hidden gem in New York. So it’s shifted, I would say—a lot of my creative inspiration comes from the other musicians and people around me, and nowadays – not to say that it doesn’t, because it still does – but there’s definitely a larger portion now that comes from the places around me and the things that are happening to me. And that’s been really interesting to experiment with and translate to my music.

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This article is part of a series, featuring interviews with 16 composers whose work is featured on Sputter Box’s debut album. Read the feature article here!

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. #ShelterInSound

NATASHA NELSON: I enjoyed reading the program note in the preface to the score for “La Dame”! Would you begin by sharing a few details about the miniature for readers?

MAVIS MACNEIL: Sure! It’s funny—I always write a program note to put in my score, but I feel like I always have to pick [just] one little slice of what a piece is about. I had a lot of fun writing “La Dame” because I really love these three instruments, specifically. I would say percussion, bass clarinet, and voice are some of my favorite instruments to write for. I think if I were asked to name my three favorites, they might be those, plus cello. So that was really exciting.

I really loved getting to write a sort of microcosm of a piece. That was a cool thing, to try to write with a time constraint, because so often I feel like I’m aiming for a longer duration.

Did the goal of composing this piece specifically to be recorded influence how you approached the writing?

MM: Yes, definitely. As I was thinking about the piece, there were things that I wanted to write that I realized wouldn’t be ideal for the approach Sputter Box was taking for this particular project, for recording separately. I tend to like to add contrapuntal and hocketing elements [in my scores], and the ensemble asked us to avoid the latter for this project. I really liked that challenge because I think it’s so easy for me to try to put [numerous] ideas into a composition and make things complex. This really forced me to focus on simplifying.

I was excited to see that “La Dame” (“The Woman”) features a text by Guillaume Apollinaire! I’m familiar with some of Poulenc’s settings of his poetry and I have a book of Apollinaire texts and translations stored away somewhere.

MM: Oh wow, cool!

Have you written for voice previously?

MM: I’ve written for the voice quite a lot. I’m a singer.

Me too! In which languages do you usually write vocal music?

MM: This might’ve been my first foreign language text, actually. I think I’ve primarily set text in English.

What was it like setting text in another language?

MM: It was fun, definitely. This spring, I joined C4 Ensemble (the Choral Composer/Conductor Collective), which is a collective in New York. It’s a really good choir. Most of the members are also composers or conductors and they’re serious singers. In hearing people talk all the time about how they think about text when they’re setting it – in terms of vowels, and especially French vowels as applicable here, passaggio, and very specific things that, as a singer, you think I would automatically be thinking of – I was more conscious of it. I was glad to have that in mind as I was approaching it.

Did you have Apollinaire’s poem in mind for this project from the start?

MM: I have a lot of books of poetry, and I usually start with text when I’m composing. My first thought was Mina Loy, a Modernist poet. She was a really interesting person. I remembered her having some really vivid imagery in short passages from longer poems. I was looking through a book of her texts – her poetry – but nothing really felt quite right. Then I noticed the Apollinaire book on my shelf.

I was reading through a bunch of poetry and I came across “La Dame.” It was the right length, I thought. It ended up being a little long for a minute-long piece, but I thought it was really cool. As I say in my program note, it’s dark, but it also has this silliness to it, because it depicts a little mouse running around, watching a corpse being carried out of this building.

I see! So would you say it conveys a level of absurdity that’s heightened, to the point where one could see it through an almost-comical lens?

MM: That’s what I thought. What happened, though, was after deciding that was the text I was going to set, I wrote it down in my manuscript-paper notebook. Then, the following week – this was in March – my partner and I decided we were going to leave New York and come to Vermont, which is where I’m from. After much deliberation, we decided that was the right choice. I brought my notebook, but I didn’t bring the book of poetry. I was kind of glad I [ultimately] didn’t have [the published translation] in front of me, because I think the English translation is under copyright, and I didn’t want to be influenced by it. It’s such a short poem—it’s pretty easy to do a literal translation of it, but I didn’t want to be looking at the other one.

What’s your vocal fach?

MM: I’m a soprano. I’ve written some songs that I’ve performed myself. I started writing the piece by going through the text and thinking about how I wanted to set that. The vocal melody came first. Alina has such beautiful, shimmering high notes. She’s amazing—it was so cool to get to write for her.

Absolutely! I see this cool indication in the score for the vocal part. It says: “Act startled by other parts (maybe jump a little).” Would you consider this marking theatrical in nature?

MM: Yeah! I was thinking about it being theatrical since I knew it would be a video performance. I think I had seen a few posted before I sent my score in to Sputter Box, so I knew they were using these tight camera shots [for their recordings] and that a facial expression would be really visible. I don’t tend to put theatrical indications in my scores, but it just seemed like a fun little thing to include.

How about extended techniques? I see there are a couple indications for bass clarinet, such as key clicks, and for djembe.

MM: Yeah! Because of the medium, I didn’t want to do anything too crazy, and the ensemble actually gave guidelines about that, so I was trying to keep it simple in that regard. I like having some different timbral things and sounds that are [somewhat] extended.

I heard this Meredith Monk interview once where she talked about when writing a piece, not letting the extended techniques be your priority or dictate how you’re writing it. I think some people do that really well and it can be fun to emphasize this one extended technique in a score. But personally, it resonated with me just to think of [extended techniques] as a bit of color to use once in a while. And that tends to be my approach.

What are some of your particular areas of interest in composing, with regard to instrumentation, style, or other aspects that come to mind?

MM: It’s shifted a lot. I think that’s true for everyone. I went to a really small liberal arts school, so I was a general music major—I didn’t get to take private composition lessons until my senior year. Even though I was trying to figure out how, it was just tricky. Since I was either the only composer at my school, or one of a couple, I didn’t really have much of a context to think about identity. Later, I went to Bowling Green State University for my Master’s, which is very avant-garde focused, so I definitely became experimental, for me. My earlier stuff was not tonal, but very harmonic. Then I played around with some more challenging sounds.

After grad school, I think the first piece I wrote was a duet for soprano and violin, which my brother and I performed. It was a setting of a passage from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. I incorporated some folk melodies. It was really satisfying to perform that piece, because my family liked it. [laughs] That shouldn’t really be the measuring stick, but it made me realize that I want to write music that is approachable. I don’t want to be unadventurous, but at the same time, I want to write music that the people I love will enjoy. I also think a lot about performers and who I’m working with, so that tends to drive the music that I want to write. I guess I get more adventurous or experimental if I’m writing for someone who is comfortable in that realm.

Is there anything you’d like to add that we haven’t discussed?

MM: I thought this was such a cool project. I feel like everyone has been struggling to figure out how to respond to the COVID-19 crisis, and I haven’t seen any other chamber ensembles do quite the same thing. Sputter Box also jumped on it so quickly. They have been extremely organized—they had this great idea and they took it and ran with it. It’s been a really positive experience. I feel really lucky to have gotten to be a part of it.

This interview preceded MacNeil’s second composition for the “Sputter (SHRINKS THE) Box” project. Her second miniature, “Trapped,” is a setting of a poem by Adelaide Crapsey (1878–1914). Crapsey’s poem is quite different from the narrative about the attentive mouse and its energetic movement conveyed in Apollinaire’s “La Dame.”

The poem “Trapped” instead gives the sense of an ellipsis: it’s a small capsule of fragments that expresses volumes of expansive, lingering, and hesitating phrases of time. At first read, the poetry appears to exceed its own bounds in its succinct length. MacNeil writes an instrumental texture in her score for Sputter Box that conveys that very sense of suspension in a lilting, oscillating sequence of motives for bass clarinet, punctuated with flickers of urgency in the rhythmic writing for the djembe.

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Find Mavis MacNeils website at mavismacneil.com.

This article is part of a series, featuring interviews with 16 composers whose work is featured on Sputter Box’s debut album. Read the feature article here!

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. #ShelterInSound

Sputter Box’s debut album, Sputter (SHRINKS THE) Box, features more than 25 brand new miniatures, each scored for bass clarinet, voice, and djembe.

“PSA” is Track 09 on the album.

NATASHA NELSON: So your piece is called “PSA“! Would you begin by speaking about your inspiration for the composition, including its notation and text?

BRENDAN SWEENEY: The whole miniature series was really, really cool. It’s an interesting way to do pieces and to see a bunch of different pieces from different composers. We started it right, I think, in the first month of quarantine. I said yes to writing the piece before I had an idea for it, which is how a lot of these first projects started—and that’s different from when you go to commission a piece with an ensemble, usually with an idea already in hand.

With everything that was going on, it felt really difficult not to address those circumstances. I felt like it was going to come out in what I was going to write in some way or another, so I decided to take a little bit of a [lighthearted] take on it.

At the time – around March – everything all across social media was about informing people: it was about telling people about social distancing rules, and informing people on how to flatten the curve and stop the spread of the virus. I made a piece that commented on that. It’s an actual PSA, using the CDC’s instructions for washing your hands as the text.

And so it was fun. It kind of became something that captured the weirdness of the time that the piece was made in, and the [uniqueness], not in a negative way, of making music with people who are miles away from one another, recording in separate houses. It captured that in a way I thought was a genuine reflection of what I wanted to do at the time.

What was it like setting a text that’s sort of clinical in nature, versus setting text from a poem? Was it a challenge in any way? Was it fun?

BS: It was fun. And that’s what I’ve been looking for more in my projects, too. The idea for that was in the spirit of another piece I was working on, exploring that idea of taking a text that’s not traditionally beautiful, per se, but still has something to latch onto, in either its bizarreness, or its weirdness, or a different kind of feeling. That’s a lot of fun.

It’s very different from a text I would’ve used for a large choir group. I like the freedom that writing for a single vocalist, within an instrumental [texture], offers.

Did the text’s vocabulary and style influence your compositional approach with regard to timbre or other aural characteristics we hear in the music?

BS: It definitely had an influence on rhythm, I find, because the vocal line came first, and then the instruments [join in] through mirroring, repetition, and supporting certain lines.

The rhythm was very key, because it set up motifs for the other instruments to play off of, especially if we’re talking non-pitched percussion. Having that little thing that the instruments can connect on – the middle part of the Venn diagram of what they can do – and exploiting that as much as possible is always, I think, a key ingredient to making a piece work. Finding a rhythm that would work for the text and for the vocalist, that could then be echoed and manipulated by the other instruments, was key.

This is so interesting. Would you describe the piece’s visual elements, and any extended techniques included in the score?

BS: I asked for half-keyed bass clarinet playing at some point, to generate some quasi-quarter tones – mainly as an effect, not really to be strict in the pitches – and the vocalist does that, as well. She sings in between the pitches on the line “Between your fingers.” It felt fun because it exaggerates a lot of the text with word painting. “Between the fingers,” being between the notes, was fun. I also asked the vocalist to mimic all the gestures that she was saying in the text.

Was the approach to collaborating here different from how it would have been if social distancing hadn’t been in place?

BS: Yes. I’ve never met any of the ensemble members in person. The first time we’ve ever really spoken to each other was purely over email, and I think maybe one phone call. And that’s different—I’ve done pieces with different collaborators across the country before, but usually there’s some kind of connection there previously; we might have met at a festival, or at a conference or something.

It’s different making music like that, especially for a new performance medium, which is really what all this new recorded music in different spaces is: it’s a completely new medium for people to experience art through.

It’s very different from a live concert, or even from a recording where everyone [involved was together] in the same space. Now, we’re taking three separate acoustic spaces and combining them—and non-traditional acoustic spaces, too, if you consider recorded music that’s mostly been created in production studios and [more standard acoustic] spaces. And so there are a lot of elements that are very different that kind of dictated creativity in the writing and in the rehearsing of this piece. The ensemble was very upfront with suggestions to avoid anything that was too intricately metric, or that required severe hocketing—anything that would be difficult to put together as three separate performances that then get layered.

Do you imagine “PSA” being performed live eventually, or is the work’s creation for a digital medium, specifically, an essential facet of the composition?

BS: I think it could be performed live—I’d like to see it performed live. It would be very different, though. Putting it in front of a live audience, you’d get the shared experience a lot more. So you take it from the individual experience of someone watching it on a device, just by themselves, and we turn that into an audience all sharing that experience at the same time – listening alongside the people next to you – which feels so weird to talk about now. People might laugh at the same parts—those interactions that happen are what would make it a little bit warmer, probably, and a little bit more of a collective thing.

I suppose a piece with a touch of humor in its tone would indeed be experienced quite differently when viewed with a group of people, versus by oneself: audience members, as you mention, tend to bounce energy off one another. Do you think that presenting the work in a live performance setting, versus online, could in fact transform an aspect of the music, itself, in some way?

BS: Well it will be inherently different, just because live music’s different every time you play it. It’s one of the nice things about live music. It would be interesting to see how the performers create the piece in real time, as opposed to separately, in layers.

It would really be that special element of everyone [experiencing a performance together]. It’s like when you go see a comedy in the movie theaters: there’s a big difference between watching a comedy with a bunch of people in the audience, all laughing and feeding off of each other’s energy, and then watching it at home on your couch.

Absolutely. Is there anything you’d like to add today that we haven’t discussed?

BS: I’m really grateful for the opportunity to work with Sputter Box. They’re a great ensemble and I really appreciated the professionalism from them, and the opportunity to create something during everything that’s going on. It didn’t quite take my mind off things clearly, but it gave me an outlet for the things I was thinking about.

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Find Brendan Sweeney’s website at www.brendansweeneymusic.com.

This article is part of a series, featuring interviews with 16 composers whose work is featured on Sputter Box’s debut album. Read the feature article here!

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. #ShelterInSound