Weekend Gems: Exclusive Smart and Soulful Music interview with Mark Applebaum!

Weekend Gems: Exclusive Smart and Soulful Music interview with Mark Applebaum!

Enjoy this exclusive Smart and Soulful Music Blog interview with contemporary composer Mark Applebaum!  Applebaum’s Wristwatch Geology was featured in this post during the week of music dealing with time and clocks.  You can listen to Wristwatch Geology here:

The Smart and Soulful Music Blog thanks Mark Applebaum for his time and thought in answering the interview questions.  He’s also a really nice guy!  Enjoy

S&SMB: Who is your most influential teacher?

MA: Brian Ferneyhough has had an enormous impact on my musical thought.  Musicologist Charlie Kronengold was a graduate school colleague, not a professor, but his thoughts on music have been extremely influential on my outlook.

S&SMB: Where do you find inspiration?

MA: It is everywhere.  If you keep your eyes open you’ll see it in all things.

S&SMB: In thinking about the nature of your work to date, can you point to one specific piece that seemed to point the way?

MA: I think that the early Janus Cycle (1992-1996) pieces were important in concretizing some of my ideas about form that persist today.  From that cycle, Tlön (1994) for three conductors and no players was an important piece because it challenged some traditional, received ideas about musical ontology and convention (e.g., that music must involve sound) in a carefully considered manner.  That piece embodies levity/absurdity and rigor/discipline.

S&SMB: What sort of qualities and accomplishments are you most attracted to in prospective students?

MA: I respond favorably to obsessive, idiosyncratic artistry.

S&SMB: What experiences during your childhood are you most grateful for having informed your knowledge base and current creative process?

MA: Studying classical piano gave me some chops on which I still rely.  Playing in a high school rock band was important as a social construction.  But the most impacting experiences probably revolved around constructing strange electronic things in the basement with friends, designing dungeons & dragons labyrinths, drawing pictures of impossible architectural curiosities, writing weird stories with self-indulgent wordplay, and the like.

S&SMB: What are you currently working on and why are you excited about it?

MA: I’m writing some pop songs off an on.  It is really fun to commune with musical convention—and not just any convention, but the most formulaic, cynical, commercially-oriented kind, something which is quite foreign to me.  My grad students said that they thought that, for me, this was the most experimental thing I might do.

S&SMB: What kind of ideas and projects do you see yourself getting to and exploring within the next 10 years?

MA: I have no idea.  I hope it will be stimulating for me (and, optionally, for others).  With luck it will be characterized by obsession.  Anything I might predict now could not satisfy the kind of stimulation that I hope for.

S&SMB: Do you think you will work in music for your entire career, or can you see yourself attracted to any other field(s) in the future?

MA: Practically speaking I don’t have the education or skill to do something else.  But I spend most of my time fantasizing about doing “not music” (because music is so boring—an occupational hazard, I suppose).  If you look closely, you’ll notice that easily half of my music composition is already a ploy to do “not music” (i.e., pieces in which my role is equally choreographer, instrument designer, dramaturge, etc.).  So, in that regard, I’m already working in quite a few fields.

S&SMB: If you could go back in time and study with any Common Practice master, who would you pick?

MA: Vermeer comes to mind.

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Music about Time and Clocks, Day 5 – Wristwatch Geology by Mark Applebaum

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Time and Clocks!  Every piece of music this week deals with time or timepieces in an interesting way.  None of us can escape the existential dilemma to which time subjects us and dealing with that can motivate humor or deep contemplation.  This week we will experience a mix of both and plenty that is in between.  If you think about it, music is constantly governed by time.  It necessarily exists in time and is always regulated by a meter which musicians often describe as simply the music’s “time”.  But beyond these obvious artifacts of its nature, many musicians have used the medium to explore and illustrate time in other ways.

Day 5 – Wristwatch Geology by Mark Applebaum

What is the oddest musical score you have ever seen?

I bet Mark Applebaum’s students and colleagues have a deep and true appreciation for the gem of a contemporary composer that he is.  His music strikes me as having an honest authenticity that I don’t always feel from present day composers, or maybe it’s just that the personality that comes through is appealing to me.  Whatever it is that strikes that chord with me about him, I remember feeling it when I met him and heard his music for the first time in 2006.  I was a graduate student working on my master’s degree in composition at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in northwest Ohio, just 20 miles or so south of Toledo on the I-75.  One of the strongest features of the composition program at BGSU is the large quantity of guest composers who make visits, have residencies, present concerts and the like.  This is most concentrated in the annual New Music and Art Festival that consumes the College of Musical Arts for a few days every fall, keeping lots of music students, graduate students especially, busy taking care of guest composers and performers.  It’s a real whirlwind, so students generally don’t get to speak with guest composers that much and no one except the featured composer is really the subject of intensive focus.  There’s also often multiple simultaneous events to choose from, so you will inevitably miss things that happen.

But outside of the Festival there were always a handful of composers coming through each year in individual residencies.  I think I actually preferred these events to the huge Festival.  They were more intimate, less overwhelming and, as I remember them, more meaningful.  The guest composers were able to relax into their residencies, interacting more completely with everyone who was interested, as they were not caught up in the hustle, bustle and logistical complexity of the New Music and Art Festival.  I was able to have long and interesting conversations with many of the visiting composers during these residencies that would just not have been possible during the festival.  And it was rewarding to focus on just one composer and consume their insights, philosophies and works during concerts, lunches, masterclasses, seminars and lectures.  I am glad to have met Mark Applebaum during one such residency.

The handful of experiences I had of Mark and his music during those couple days stand out in my memory as one of the most enjoyable and inspiring during my time at BGSU.  His personality and unique strengths were evident in every musical work, lecture, conversation and piece of advice in which I was able to partake.  I felt that he really had put his finger on something unique and true about the endeavor of creating “New Music” as it is often referred to in contemporary academia.  HIs ideas seemed to flow effortlessly and naturally from his personality which comes across in conversation and lecture as endearing and easy-going, but perhaps deceptively so, as it can conceal a careful and painstaking rigor that is always evident in his works and performances.  His concepts are unusually well thought-out and fresh, and he has the technique and precision to realize them effectively on every level.

Are you getting a mental image of him?  Before I go any further you might want to watch his recent Ted Talk given at Stanford University which well encapsulates all my impressions of him and his craft.  If this is your first experience with Mark just open your mind and let him wash over you.  I guarantee there will be a handful of elements you just don’t expect:

If you enjoyed that you can search for his name on YouTube and see a couple other similar videos that flesh him out even more.  But the impression of Mark that you get from that presentation is just about as I remember having lunch with him.  He is a most delicious set of contradictions: brilliant yet self-effacing, focused yet zany, professional yet irreverent, sardonic yet innocuous.  He is somehow able to deconstruct his world and most cleverly reassemble in it with skill and care, all the while misaligning everything so that we can easily see the cracks, holes and absurdities in the whole mess.  This is his gift and it is always insightfully offered, as is his personal advice which I remember him unreservedly and most genuinely dispensing when I had the chance to talk with him in 2006.  Mark speaks from, well, if not from the heart, certainly from a very honest place and seems to bear no ill will to anyone.  During his mentorship you know that the narcissism is really just an act, kind of a defense mechanism, and that he really cares about you.

And from this complex character comes music that is constantly peering around corners, poking at boundaries, and most importantly finding magical places where others don’t even think to look.  Mark’s music breaks conventions in the most delightfully surprising ways.  One major theme that runs through his work is the way music is notated.  Notational practice seems to be almost a fetish for him, and that’s saying something during this age of augenmusik, notated aleatory, graphic scores and staggering New Complexity.  Mark has his take on all of these things and more.

All of his scores are hand-written, which reveals a true investment in detail and painstaking process.  This also allows him to slip in and out of conventional notation practices with ease dexterity.  But are there boundaries beyond graphic notation?  How about…fabricated notation?  Watch the TED talk and skip to 9:53.  When I saw Mark Applebaum’s recital in 2006 he probably filled at least 90 minutes with original works.  He began with a monstrously raucous but calmly controlled piano improvisation which was just breathtaking.  He improvised on his Mousketeer, and if I remember correctly, performed (or someone else did) Echolalia, the absurdly entertaining succession of “dadaist rituals”, some tape music (still some of the best I’ve heard) and I know there were a couple others.  

But for some reason the piece he had performed with wristwatch scores stands out to me. Maybe it was the cleverness of the concept.  Maybe it was the fact that it was simple enough for my fellow students to perform with minimal rehearsal.  Maybe it was the fact that it was scored for small pebbles.  And maybe it was the fact that the overall sonic texture yielded by the canonic statements of the performers making various motions with their rocks to produce sounds was incredibly intimate, quiet and detailed, as my favorite electro-acoustic music tends to be.  But for whatever reason, Wristwatch: Geology stands out in my memory as a particularly magical moment from an entrancing evening, all in the midst of an enjoyable and inspiring couple days spent absorbing the best insights and creative products of a mind that cracked the contemporary music nut in an unexpected and exquisite way.

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