Debut Album – Page 3 – the Classicyl Vine

Q&A: Mario Godoy

Composer Mario Godoy discusses “A Divine Image,” featured on Sputter Box’s debut album.

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

“A Divine Image” is Track 13 on the album.

“. . . The simplicity of the language that gets the point across is something that really appeals to me. It’s still extremely powerful, and it’s not hidden in tons of layers of prose. I find that really refreshing, even though this poem is centuries old.”

NATASHA NELSON: Would you talk a bit about your inspiration for “A Divine Image,” whether you’ve worked with Sputter Box before, and anything you’d like to share about the score, to start?

MARIO GODOY: Sure! So I had never worked with Sputter Box before, but I’ve been following them on social media via a few channels. I saw that they put out this particular call for composers to contribute a miniature, and it seemed like something I might be able to do pretty easily and quickly. It turned into something a little more challenging than I originally thought, but it was still a lot of fun to put together.

It was during the beginning portion of our quarantine period – our shelter-in-place period – and I was feeling kind of down creatively; I didn’t have anything to output at the moment. The world had just shut down. And then, when I saw this – that they still wanted to produce new music – I was really excited about it.

I decided to try to find inspiration from a text, rather than just trying to create some music. I did some digging around on the internet for something short that spoke to me, and I knew that I would only have a minute, right? A minute to get a message across.

I went through all the A’s, and then I got to the B’s: I got to William Blake and started looking at some of his poems. A lot of them are very, very long, but I found a couple short ones. This one stuck out to me. I put it aside and kept going through poets and poets . . . and I kept coming back to this one because it seemed like such a perfect, poignant piece. I thought that I could maybe make something really interesting from it.

Pictured: Sputter Box members Kathryn Vetter, Peter White, and Alina Tamborini. Photo by JT Anderson.

Have you written for voice and set text previously?

MG: I’ve done it before. I’ve written a couple of various art song cycles and I’ve written for chorus. It’s not something that I do too often—it’s definitely something I want to do more of because I really enjoy doing it. It’s the only kind of music that I write that I feel kind of almost writes itself, in a way, just because I’m so used to speaking and singing. I know how the human voice and how diction works, so vocal music comes very easily-ish. It’s something that I’d really love to explore more.

And have you written for this trio’s instrumentation before?

MG: No. That’s one of the other things that I was really interested in: the fact that this instrumentation is so unique. I’ve written for voice, I’ve written for bass clarinet, I’ve written percussion music, but I’d never written for djembe.

One of the things that Sputter Box sent along were [suggested] techniques, but they didn’t [request a] preferred notation. I tried looking up djembe notation, and there is a very specific notation that is not Western at all.

That would be so interesting to study!

MG: Yeah—it was really interesting to look at that and then see how people were interpreting it in Western notation. I decided to keep my notation very, very simple: a regular notehead is just a regular hit, an x is a muted hit, and then an accent is a slapped hit. I kept it pretty simple because the majority of the piece is not as simple, so I wanted to make sure that it was as clear as possible, without making it overly complex with notation.

I’m looking at your score here and your notation for djembe. Would you describe the original notation for djembe that you researched?

MG: [There are] various letters that indicate the portion of your palm that you hit or the portion of the drum that you hit. It’s laid out rhythmically just like Western notation is, as well, but it’s less about pitch, per se, and more about the specific kind of hit.

Did the fact that you were writing “A Divine Image” specifically for a recording, at least in its premiere, affect your approach to composing this piece versus other pieces you write?

MG: Yes. Well, not necessarily versus other pieces I write—I write a lot for pieces that have a lot of disparate parts that lock together to form a big texture. This piece is basically that, still, but those locking parts are the djembe part and the bass clarinet part, working simultaneously on two seemingly different things to create one texture. That’s a big thing I like to do in my music.

I created that underlying rhythmic texture, and then I placed the vocal line on top of it in long and juxtaposed rhythms. The bass clarinet and the djembe are on this constant eighth-note grid, and the soprano is floating on top—there are some syncopated pieces, but there are also triplets that kind of float over the top of this driving rhythm. It’s two things, coexisting.

“That’s what I wanted to bring into this piece: that there’s this rigidity—this constant drive from the djembe and the bass clarinet. Then there’s the human aspect – the voice – which is the most human thing, that’s coexisting with this rigidity underneath it.”

Would you like to talk, even furthermore, about how the text is portrayed in that texture, or any other musical elements you’ve mentioned?

MG: There are two elements to the text that really spoke to me: there’s the human aspect, and then the underlying tension and disassociation, in a way, because it has to do with the fact that these negative emotions or reactions – or what we would see as negative – don’t exist outside the human condition. They’re not tangible. We, as humans, are making these things and are willing them into existence. And, that the human heart, and the mind, and the way we interact is not necessarily loving and peaceful, and not everything is soft. Human interaction is more rigid and set.

That’s what I wanted to bring into this piece: that there’s this rigidity—this constant drive from the djembe and the bass clarinet. Then there’s the human aspect – the voice – which is the most human thing, that’s coexisting with this rigidity underneath it. So I did want to play with that juxtaposition of textures to make them really feel different—but they also fit together. So it was the fact that it’s all part of the same thing, it’s all part of the human condition—that’s the way I tried to approach it. Hopefully it came across.

And is there anything in particular about how this poem is written that really struck you when you first came across it?

MG: I think a lot of it is the simplicity of the language. It’s very straightforward and to the point—it gets the point across quickly and powerfully. It’s just saying, “Cruelty has a Human Heart.” Humans are cruel individuals; cruelty doesn’t exist [outside them]. It’s something that we had to give a name to because of the human nature of it.

That simplicity of the language that gets the point across immediately is something that I really enjoy in poetry. So [with] some of the other poems that I’ve set – I’ve done a Walt Whitman poem for chorus – again, it’s that the simplicity of the language that gets the point across is something that really appeals to me. It’s still extremely powerful, and it’s not hidden in tons of layers of prose. I find that really refreshing, even though this poem is centuries old.

Was any part of the compositional process for this score challenging or surprising?

MG: I think the hardest thing was figuring out the prosody of the text because it’s so unmetered. It’s very straightforward text and I wanted that rhythmic element to the bass clarinet and the djembe. The hardest part for me wasn’t necessarily writing the bass clarinet part or the djembe part, but figuring out how I wanted the voice to sit with those parts.

And it’s a very deep – as in low – piece for the most part. Even the soprano part doesn’t go extremely high—it doesn’t go into the money notes, per se, in the soprano range. The highest note is an F[5], which is not that high for most singers. But it does go pretty low—it goes [down] to a low A at the end.

I noticed that, as well, about the tessitura.

MG: I figured if it can [be approached] in this downward motion, even if it’s kind of guttural, it would still have the effect that I wanted right there. But it sits in a very easy range. The hardest part of this is obviously the counting. I knew that that was going to be the hardest part, so I sent a click track as a reference track so they could all be completely synched up.

And this piece actually is exactly—I think it was 59.7 seconds long [laughs]. And I actually had to whittle it down by [about] half a second in order to get it into that timeline. I think I had to eliminate an eighth note somewhere.

Oh, interesting! I could imagine that even though that’s a very short duration to eliminate, that could be a challenging decision.

MG: Yeah, it was challenging. I was trying to figure out where I could trim one eighth note.

Did that eighth note end up coming from a cadential area?

MG: I think it came from somewhere in the opening introduction. [The meter] goes from 3/4 meter to 5/8 – to 7/8 – to 3/4 . . . so it may have been 3/4 – 5/8 – 4/4 – 3/4, or something like that at some point. I don’t remember anymore, because I really have internalized the flow of this piece [as it is now].

That sounds ideal! How does one – or how do you personally, rather – measure the quantity or length of material in a score when writing a piece with a specified duration? Is that something that comes innately through experience composing?

MG: I like those kinds of constraints. It’s harder to just have a blank canvas and someone says “go.” So to say you have to get your whole point across in one minute, I actually found extremely refreshing and it gave me my whole road map: I have my intro, I have my two stanzas, essentially. I can separate the piece into those two sections with a little interlude in between.

My road map was laid out for me before I even started writing any notes. I look for those kinds of constraints and I often have to set them myself when I’m writing my own music, which is sometimes trickier to do than I want it to be. I do like painting with limited colors and I think that time actually is a color in music, for sure.

That’s a really poignant and interesting observation, and I’ve never really thought of it that way. I think of timbres in that kind of vein, but that certainly makes a lot of sense.

MG: Yes, you perceive timbres differently in a short period versus over an extended period.

That’s very interesting! What do you think it is about the window of time it fits in that changes how you perceive a given timbre?

MG: That’s a good question. I think that it’s – at least for this particular piece – the fact that there’s only a minute of music, but you’re hearing basically a cacophony of sound. It forces you to listen a little bit more. It’s harder to just zone and let the music envelope you, which is really easy to do with longer pieces of music. You just sit back, and with this one, you’re kind of forced to listen to how the instruments are interacting the whole time. I like that. Actually, I really like both things. So, I approach my music in that way.

For my longer pieces, you should be able to just kind of let the texture wash over you, or you can really hone into what’s happening and how the voices are interacting. I’ve compared it to an abstract painting in a way, where you can stand back and look at everything, and see how everything is forming one big picture—you just kind of observe it. Or, you can get close and look at how every individual element is interacting with one another.

That makes a lot of sense, and it’s interesting to think of paintings versus music because of how they exist in time, as you’re describing. They have those different layers to them, there to experience in different ways, given their different materials.

MG: Exactly.

The above interview took place in June 2020. For more music by Mario Godoy, visit mariogodoy.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

Q&A: Julienne Tsang

Composer Julienne Tsang discusses “Lorelei of the Leeches,” featured on Sputter Box’s debut album.

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

“Lorelei of the Leeches” is Track 12 on the album.

NATASHA NELSON: Would you begin by talking a bit about your piece for Sputter Box, including your inspiration for it and its text?

JULIENNE TSANG: To start, I play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. I had started a new campaign for it with some of my friends, and as I was making a character for the game, the opportunity to write for Sputter Box came up. So I was thinking, “Wouldn’t it be kind of fun to write a piece for them about my Dungeons & Dragons character? . . . Why not?”

That was my main inspiration for the piece and the idea behind it—and the text is actually all original. From that initial idea, I just kind of went with what felt like, to me, was appropriate for the character, who goes by the moniker “The Lorelei.” In a sense, I guess I wrote a theme song for the character.

That’s very interesting! What came first in the compositional process for the piece: the text or the melody?

JT: I feel like both came together, simultaneously. I heard a little [bit of] melody in my head, and then pictured my character: I was thinking about the background of my character, including what they went through in their past lives, et cetera. Then, it kind of evolved into its own little poem of sorts.

Listen to Tsang’s composition “Electricity” (2019) for clarinet quintet, here.

Would you explain in a bit more detail how characters are created for Dungeons & Dragons?

JT: Yes—you create your own characters with a set of guidelines—you take all these rules and then you kind of mix and match to create something of your own. I really like that about the game. It’s very fun!

Have you written for Sputter Box, or for this instrumentation, before?

Listen to “Snarinet” (2020). As the composer describes on SoundCloud, the piece, written for clarinet and snare drum, features “two unlikely allies together.”

JT: I’ve written for clarinet before, and for voice. I haven’t written for this type of ensemble, however, so it was really fun to take these different instruments that are not very traditional [in this specific combination in chamber music repertoire] and put them together.

Are any extended techniques included in “Lorelei of the Leeches”?

JT: Yes—I believe I used flutter-tonguing in the bass clarinet. I’m actually a clarinetist myself, and I was thinking of how flutter-tonguing – when done correctly – has this really lovely rolling sound . . . kind of like a mysterious thought. And, I thought, it would be a really cool effect and help with the setting of the piece.

Listen to Julienne Tsang’s piece “DeVoid,” a miniature for melodica and a musical response to isolation, also written in 2020. The featured image is a digital painting by the composer, created to accompany the composition.

Q&A: Matthew Slazik

Composer Matthew Slazik discusses “Unremarkable Brain,” featured on Sputter Box’s debut album.

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.

Opening measures, excerpted from Slazik’s score.

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.

Matthew Slazik. Photo: Fredonia Composition.

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.

Excerpt from score for “Unremarkable Brain.”

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.

Listen to “Silo Improvisation No. 2.” As described by the composer, the improvisation, played on melodica, was recorded in an empty grain storage bin.

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.

The above video recording of “Nocturne in Ab,” composed and performed by Slazik, features various locations in Tully, New York. (Recorded by the composer with John Salisbury. Video editing: Jeremy Jonczyk, Graham Wolfe; audio editing: Graham Wolfe.)

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.