Richard Festinger: Then and Now

Then and Now collects five chamber works by Richard Festinger dating from the past two decades. Amid the shatterings of classical convention that have characterized the 20th and 21st centuries, Festinger’s work has remained stubbornly tonal and chromatic. He composes melodies, builds harmonies, and writes in phrases – all in a distinctive and, based on these selections, a very likable voice.

Active Voices, Hidden Springs

“Invocation” (2019) for woodwind quintet features masterful counterpoint and smooth if not always standard harmonic shifts. The five voices of the Calefax Reed Ensemble – oboe, clarinet, alto saxophone, bass clarinet, and bassoon – converse and coalesce, expressively singing and gently sparring. One feels that there’s not a single wasted or inessential note in this compelling piece’s 10-and-a-half minutes. Though fully abstract, it feels like a narrative, almost is if it were a film score.

Remarkably, the five timbres meld so smoothly that I’m reminded of a string quartet (or quintet) where all instruments hail from the same family. The next piece combines voices from very unrelated families. Festinger composed “To a Pilgrim” some 18 years earlier, but it’s easily recognizable as from the same pen, this time writing for the unusual combination of bass clarinet and cello.

The two instruments sometimes wind phrases around each other; at other times, one sustains background tones while the other spins swirls of melody. Often they move from their lower to their upper registers together, creating interesting timbral commentary. The writing is so active and engaging that during some passages I could almost have sworn there were at least three instruments playing. At a climax in the sixth minute their exchange becomes so heated that they have to stop and breathe, before returning in a more subdued mode and finally trailing off in uncertain harmony.

Festinger’s experience as a jazz guitarist no doubt informs the longer piece “Hidden Spring,” composed for six players on nine instruments including two guitars and a mandolin. At times the music has an improvisatory flavor suggesting jazz lurking in the background. But its sustained intensity evidences a keenly intentional drive. Woodwinds and strings create smooth textures as the guitars deftly intertwine.

Movements Then and Now

The fascinating three-movement Il était une fois… harks back to tradition, both in its instrumentation (piano trio) and its first movement’s partial adherence to sonata form. The slow but active second movement builds on a cello theme from the first that’s worked into interesting interplay between cello and violin, while the piano supports with clouds of related chords. A creepy crescendo subsides to a spacious restatement of some of the earlier angular leaps, as jazzy piano chords slowly propelling haunting melodies from the violin and cello.

A choppy start to the third movement leads to gritty string duets over coruscating arpeggios and scale fragments from the piano. A feeling of nervous unsteadiness prevails. In all these works Festinger can leave your ears happy while your nervous system remains unsettled.

The earliest composition comes last. Windsongs (1996) shows in three compressed movements how Festinger’s essential methods and sensibility haven’t changed over the intervening years. The woodwind quintet City Winds motors through the tiny first movement, passing sixteenth-note figures hurriedly from one to another. Awkward dissonances convey a series of quizzical statements in the slow movement, the flute finally rising from the harmonic foundation to pull the whole ensemble into a final chord with all instruments widely separated in pitch, an uneasy resolution. The closing “Allegro” seems to gather all of the composer’s signatures and inclinations into a playful not-quite-two-minutes.

David Hoose in his liner notes sums it up better than I could: “Remarkable — and admirable — is the consistency of [Festinger’s] musical language, even as none of the five compositions sounds like any of the others.” A lot of contemporary music comes my way, and rarely do I hear a collection as appealing as this one, full of interesting ideas and curiously beautiful sounds.

The five works on this album also demonstrate the tremendous skills of the musicians and ensembles the composer has worked with over the years. Without their superb realizations this music wouldn’t sound half as good.

— Jon Sobel, 5.23.2025

This is my first acquaintance with Richard Festinger, who has been reviewed several times in Fanfare and now has four CDs devoted entirely to his music. This latest collection of five adroit and appealing chamber works is titled Then and Now. The span of years being covered is wide, from 1996 to 2022, which affords a portrait of stylistic changes that might have occurred over a quarter century, although Festinger, born in 1948, was already established in his mature phase by the 1990s. He came to composition late, having studied jazz in Boston in the 1970s and performing with his own groups in the San Francisco Bay area before turning to composition under Andrew Imbrie at Berkeley.

Festinger rose to become a professor of composition at San Francisco State, going on to win acclaim and awards, along with prestigious commissions from the Koussevitzky and Fromm Foundations, Harvard, and leading New Music ensembles, four of which are represented here as performers. This thumbnail sketch gives some idea of the expectations I brought to this collection, almost entirely in a good way, but with an implicit proviso. I sometimes find that veteran American composers who are deeply immersed in academia and find ample rewards publicly can wind up producing music that lies at the conformist end of eclectic.

That’s relevant to these five works, a fact that is hard to state without sounding prejudicial. But that’s not what I intend. Festinger shows himself strongly tied to tonality—New Focus says that his aesthetic “springs from the pitch-centered modernists of the late 20th century”—which he handles with detailed technique and skill, giving the impression of correctness and a respect for boundaries. Jazz doesn’t seem to enter into the vocabulary of these generally modest, self- contained pieces, the closest affinity being a certain mellowness.

This depiction is nicely displayed in a woodwind quintet, Invocation, that opens the programs. The Colefax Reed Quintet, a Dutch ensemble that commissioned the work in 2019, differs from the typical instrumentation by having an alto saxophone and bass clarinet along with oboe, clarinet, and bassoon. The piece begins with a gentle, reflective call-and-response but steadily gathers in layered complexity—as the deft program notes by David Hoose put it, “all five instruments begin to wrap around each other in a web of subtly connected counterpoint.” Hoose finds two apt words for the smooth impression made by Invocation, “chocolate-like” and “sinuous.”

To a Pilgrim makes for a natural transition, because its instrumentation, a duo for cello and bass clarinet, deepens the coloration of Invocation in the direction of somber lyricism. The key to the success of both works, I think, is how well Festinger manages to express himself with measured reserve while remaining interesting. Once invited in, the listener’s ear finds every moment quietly engaging. The primary distinction that sets Festinger’s style apart is his sophisticated chromaticism, while a sizable quotient of contemporary composers have moved into microtones and extended performance techniques. Novelty certainly isn’t being pursued here.

Festinger composed his piano trio, Il était une fois..., for the 50th anniversary of the Boston-based Collage New Music, which performs it here. The piece is contoured like a traditional piano trio, the three movements being a sonata-form Allegro, a central Andante, and an exuberant Allegro finale. More crucial, however, is the musical depth with which Festinger honors the form, applying a wealth of gestures inside a compact space. Ideas weave in and out, juxtaposing quickly shifting moods. It rewards close listening in the way that one striking gesture follows another. That’s a dry encapsulation of a work that testifies to how fruitful a contemporary allegiance to tonality can be even at this late date. Festinger’s deftness at aligning constant inventiveness with beauty is very striking.

I don’t mean to equate harmonic conservatism with hidebound traditional tastes. There’s an air of freshness in Festinger’s style, which is particularly brought out in the flute and two guitars that are featured in Hidden Spring, a sextet in which nine instruments are used (oboe doubling on English horn, guitar on mandolin, and flute on alto flute). The work’s 15 minutes tend to be preoccupied with airy, pointillist figures and a scurrying restlessness. Constant motion is occasionally relieved not by lyrical interludes so much as the long breath of held notes sustained until the next burst of nervous energy takes off.

The final work, Windsongs, is set for a traditional woodwind quintet with French horn. At just over six minutes in three brief movements, the piece keeps lightly afloat through devices like the perpetual motion of Presto scales in the first movement tossed from one voice to another. The second movement Lento proceeds in slow, grave chords that hint at Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments and has much the same cloak of mourning. Quick, spare intervals impel the finale, where every phrase contains a trill or embellished squiggle, a bit like abstract birdsongs. In essence Windsongs consists of three epigrams worked out with impeccable clarity.

Even though certain adjectives were never far from my mind—light, mellow, modest, airy, quietist—appreciating Festinger is akin to appreciating how the painter Paul Klee could create compact worlds in miniature by varying his meticulous craftsmanship. Meticulous is another adjective I can add to the list of Festinger’s leading traits. Eschewing the experimental side of New Music, he has created a satisfying aesthetic that deserves all the respect he has won, to which it is important to add that this music holds continuous appeal across a broad spectrum of listeners.

— Huntley Dent, 12.15.2025

It is fair to say the music of Richard Festinger has not been welcomed with open arms in these hallowed pages: Lynn René Bayley found an over-similarity of discourse over four pieces in Fanfare 38:1 (a Naxos disc), although Art Lange found a “fetching spay of colors and nuances” to Festinger’s A Serenade for 6 in Fanfare 21:5. But, although not mentioning Festinger by name, Raymond Tuttle referred to the music on the multi-composer EARPLAY disc (Centaur) as “neither very interesting, individual, nor forward-looking” (20:1). Let’s take another look and see what happens. Everyone’s worthy of a second (or fourth) chance, right?

Thing is, I kind of agree with Bayley and Tuttle rather than booklet annotator David Hoose, who calls Festinger’s music “sophisticated, fresh, and vivid.” I do agree, though, that Festinger’s music “breathes”; there is a sense of natural ebb and flow, and one can hear this in the awakenings of the 2019 Invocation for reed quintet. Performed here by the excellent Calefax Reed Quintet (Oliver Boekhoorn, oboe, Bart de Kater, clarinet, Raaf Hekkema, alto sax, Jelte Althus, bass clarinet, Alban Wesly, bassoon), this is a piece that seems predicable on the outside but careful listening finds many subtleties. Oliver Boekhoorn’s oboe is called upon in many a soliloquy, with clarinet, sax, bass clarinet and bassoon offering close harmonies as support. The piece is consistent rather than monochrome, and the attention Calefax has obviously lavished upon it pays huge dividends in terms of inner lines.

The scoring of bass clarinet and cello for To a Pilgrim (2001) might seem sparse, but Festinger deploys his forces well, while the sound of a bass clarinet links the first two pieces in the listener’s mind. An “In Memoriam” for Festinger’s mentor, Andrew Welsh Imbrie, this piece plays with “suggestive imitation” as well as instrumental rocketing. Alan R. Kay is incredibly expressive in his responses, which Michael Nicolas is the perfect partner. The two “voices” seem to revel in their independence until the latter stages of the work, when finally they “find each other.”

Performed by Cygnus under conductor John Ferrari, Hidden Spring (2004) is scored for flute, oboe/English horn, violin, cello, and two guitars, one doubling mandolin. The title comes from Robert Frost, but the composer deliberately distances it from the musical surface (a sort of Abstract Expressionist painting in music). Here, the idea is better than the music itself which, although dazzlingly scored despite the piece’s overall restraint, is rather nondescript. The booklet annotator sets Festinger’s piece alongside Boulez’s Dérive I and Ravel’s Trois Poèmes de Mallarmé; although not embarrassed in that august company, Festinger’s piece is decidedly of a lesser league, and a duration of just shy of a quarter hour does rather stretch its materials.

The piano trio Il était une fois ... (Once upon a time ..., 2022) was composed for the 50th anniversary of Collage New Music, who perform it here: Catherine French plays violin, Jan Müller-Szerawa, cello, and Christopher Oldfather, piano. Perhaps in line with the title, this music is more immediately accessible, albeit featuring a certain angularity of line. Formally, this is interesting as a foreshortened recapitulation in the sonata form first movement creates an imbalance the other two movements attempt to satiate. Although there is not much difference in tempo between the first two movements (Moderato followed by Andante), the textures are markedly different, lighter in the latter. The Andante does rather meander though, and Festinger’s harmonies seem rather nondescript here. All credit to French’s expressive, perfectly in tune playing, though. The finale is marked Allegro but does not really sound fast: I find it hard to locate what the booklet notes’ claim is an eruption of “splintering frenzy.” Judging the music on its own merits, though, the music has charm and some energy. The performance is definitely committed, but the somewhat muted recording does not help the music itself (each piece is recorded in a different venue).

Finally, Windsongs (1996), performed by Windscape, a wind quintet comprising Tara Helen O’Connor, flute; Randall Ellis, oboe; Alan R. Kay (mis-spelled as “Kaye” in the booklet); clarinet, David Jolly, horn; and Frank Morelli, bassoon. Originally written for the San Francisco-based City Winds, Windsongs offers the most overt fun of the disc and therefore makes for a fine conclusion. The opening Presto energico is nicely frothy; and while the Lento is again a meander, the trills of the final Allegro hold a certain exuberance.

So, were Bayley and Tuttle right? I would certainly agree that Festinger’s music works best if one takes one piece at a time. The music is well written, the ideas fine, but the whole lacks memorability, unfortunately. It is impossible to criticize the devotion of the performers, though, nor the enthusiasm and detail of Hoose’s annotations.

— Colin Clarke, 12.15.2025

In his thorough and insightful notes, Boston based musician and educator David Hoose groups Richard Festinger’s output with his contemporaries Nicholas Maw, John Harbison, Joan Tower, Fred Lerdahl, Peter Lieberson, Oliver Knussen, Stephen Hartke and Tobias Picker, as composers who “have acquired the technique and imagination to realize the expressive possibilities within fully chromatic languages,” as opposed to a more overtly avant-garde approach. That is a very fine cohort of artists. I especially appreciate the attributes of “technique and imagination”; what a wonderful combination of strengths, neither to be taken for granted, although it does not always amount to easily approachable work. Festinger has not always been well received by some of my more conservative colleagues on these pages for that reason, although Art Lange, a reviewer whose insight and curiosity about new music I have long admired, described a chamber music work by Festinger as a “delicate latticework of sound, a fetching spray of colors and nuances.” That hews more closely to my own take on this superbly constructed music.

The opening work is played by the dedicatees, Calefax, a reed ensemble including oboe, clarinet, alto saxophone, bass clarinet and bassoon. The music proceeds with a calm sense of deliberation, with Festinger taking an obvious delight in the timbral blending of the instruments. The easy, conversational banter of Invocation is in stark contrast with To a Pilgrim, a memorial piece for his teacher, Andrew Imbrie, scored for bass clarinet and cello. In this music, Festinger is again quite skillful at playing with the distinct sound of the instruments, at times contrasting, elsewhere sounding almost as one voice. Although the overall tone of the music is appropriately mournful, there is a determined playfulness that emerges as well, until settling back down with a rather Slavic weightiness.

Hidden Spring is performed by Cygnus, an ensemble of six musicians playing nine instruments (but not at once!). The inclusion of guitar adds a pleasant texture to the mix. Festinger’s propensity for a kind of subdued intensity characterizes the opening of the work, followed by a very gradual crescendo and then a pause, as the music returns to a dreamy quietude. This is at the heart of the restlessness of the work, as if the composer is searching for a resolution, both harmonically and emotionally.

Il était une fois… is a three movement trio for violin, cello and piano. It was written for the Boston based Collage New Music, frequent champions of Festinger’s music, who play it here with wonderful conviction. This instrumentation, and the structure of a moderato/andante/allegro arrangement of the movements is traditional, and Festinger even employs a Classical sonata form in the first movement, but his edgy, emotionally complex harmonic language places the music firmly in the Modernist camp. Here especially, but in all of the music on this album, a keen appreciation of the sound of the instruments, and the potential for dramatic effect, is vividly displayed. The program concludes with the oldest music here, the 1996 Windsongs, where that sense for the idiomatic qualities of specific musical instruments rings out, as if the woodwind quintet was a choir.

— Peter Burwasser, 12.15.2025

The present disc, Then and Now, contains five chamber works by an innovative San Francisco-based composer, Richard Festinger, whose appealing compositional aesthetic promises—and delivers—many musical rewards.
Opening the recital is Invocation (2019), written for the Dutch reed quintet Calefax, likely the best-known example of a quintet formed by single- and double-reed woodwinds. Indeed, this group launched the genre, and has brought it to the attention of music lovers around the world, even resulting in the formation of other reed quintets. The long-flowing simple lines that characterize the opening of this work eventually increase in busyness to yield a complex interweaving of lines. The tonal complexity is mitigated through simpler sonorities from time-to-time as Festinger carefully balances the auditor’s capability to absorb the musical materials that make up this arresting work. I find the combination of oboe, clarinet, saxophone, bass clarinet, and bassoon most attractive (and have written for this combination myself).

This complex yet satisfying musical style carries through the remaining works in the recital. To a Pilgrim (2001) bears the subtitle “In memoriam Andrew Welsh Imbrie,” the friend and former teacher of its composer. As a work in the elegiac genre, it is rather dark, a quality fostered by its being scored for bass clarinet and cello. Although the composer employs the full range of both instruments, a good number of the notes reside below the Middle C on the piano. Occasionally, a playful spirit pokes its nose through the dark textures in a compelling divagation from its otherwise somber spirit. Each of the instruments is given quite a technical workout here, too, sometimes one instrument engaged in quick figuration while the other has sustained lines that act as an anchor to the proceedings. Festinger proves himself a master of contemporary counterpoint in this moving tribute to his mentor and friend.

Hidden Spring (2004) is a work that features Festinger’s own instrument by employing not one, but two guitars in the scoring of the work. Indeed, half of the players in this sextet do double duty on more than one instrument during its course. I find that the combination of plucked and bowed stringed instruments augmented with winds produces an intriguing flavor that I’ve not heard elsewhere. The pairing of the two guitars to produce gestures unplayable by the single instrument is complemented by similar doubling of two winds or two strings. Much of the piece exudes a nervous energy with unexpected stops and starts, changes in textures, registers, and moods. Yet, the piece successfully—even cleverly—carries the listener along through this musically bumpy journey to its satisfying conclusion. This may be my favorite work on the recital, although I like them all a good bit.

Il était une fois… (Once Upon a Time…) (2022) calls for the most traditional ensemble—the piano trio—of any work offered here. The piece was composed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Boston ensemble, Collage New Music, which has frequently performed works by the composer. Traditional also here is the employment of the sonata form in the first of the three movements, although unlike 19th-century works of this nature, the listener will be challenged to a greater degree to apprehend the use of this form because of complexities in rhythm, harmonic language, and texture. The composer is not content to use the sonata form in unmodified form, however, as he omits an expressive cello solo heard in the exposition when he comes to the recapitulation, leaving the auditor with an unsettled feeling. Festinger’s consummate skill in the interweaving of the parts of the instruments he employs is once again on full display here, but each of the instruments is also afforded various moments in the spotlight. Some of the dissonant sonorities—especially those in the second movement—have an elegance in their sound to my ears. The third movement sounds the most traditional to me, and I find its restless quality particularly attractive.

The concert concludes with Windsongs (1996), a work for woodwind quintet cast in three brief movements, beginning with a whirlwind perpetuo moto opening movement with mercurial lines in various instruments that are supported by sustained notes in the other instruments. The latter also provide short, punctuated interjections along the way. Following are a lento movement full of subtle shifting colors, albeit largely cast in a dissonant idiom and an allegro piece full of spikiness, overlaying of voices, trills, and the like to yield a delightful bon mot to conclude this work in a most satisfying way.

Festinger’s music might be described as “difficult listening,” or in other words, the polar opposite of “easy listening” music that yields whatever generally slender rewards it contains on a single hearing. This music demands repeated listening to extract its subtleties and nuances, but any listener with well-tuned ears and a willingness to give the music what it demands will come away both impressed with and grateful for the experience. I also cannot heap enough praise on the five ensembles that bring this difficult music to life. These works require performers of consummate skill to bring off, and each work is blessed to have just such musicians in its service. Festinger’s music has not always been well-received in these pages, but I give it nothing less than unalloyed praise. Highly recommended on all accounts.

— David DeBoor Canfield, 12.15.2025

A Festival of Festinger

American composer Richard Festinger is Professor Emeritus of Music Theory and Composition at San Francisco State University, where he taught for many years, and the founder of Earplay, a local contemporary music ensemble, which he continues to direct. He also served as Artistic Director of the Morrison Artists Series, San Francisco’s longest established series of chamber music recitals. I caught up with him in July of 2025 to query him on his new compact disc entitled Then and Now as well as other aspects of his musical activities.

Let’s begin by telling the reader about your journey to becoming a composer. What (and when) was the beginning of the process for you, and how did it develop?
It was a somewhat circuitous path. My mother was an excellent pianist, so there was always music in our home. I started young with some piano studies (which didn’t last long), and was able to read music before I could read English. I actually penned at least one “piece” of music from that time, very short, and all in whole notes. I wish I still had a copy.

Growing up, there were a number of instruments in our home that I picked up: from the age of 7 I studied trumpet, and simultaneously from the age of 9 guitar (both classical and folk), which became my first great musical love. Later on, I also briefly studied the cello. I had already begun improvising on the trumpet, to popular songs of my parents’ generation, that my mother played on the piano; and during my high school years, I wrote pop songs with friends.

I had a college roommate who was quite an accomplished guitarist in traditional folk/blues/finger-picking styles, and it was thanks to his encouragement that I began improvising on the guitar. I soon developed an interest in jazz, and studied the playing of guitarists like Wes Montgomery, Jim Hall, George Benson, Joe Pass, and others, as well the music of the great jazz pianists, saxophonists, and trumpeters. And of course all jazz musicians are composers: even when they aren’t writing tunes as vehicles for improvisation, they’re always inventing ideas to imbue their improvising.

In 1968–69 I interrupted my pursuit of jazz briefly, when I was invited to tour with Joan Baez as her accompanist. It was in every way a wonderful experience, working with such a naturally gifted musician. But it also made me certain that I wanted to pursue music of a more complex kind, so in 1970 I entered the jazz arranging and composition curriculum at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. I had wonderful teachers there, including Herb Pomeroy (arranging), William Maloof (orchestration), Mick Goodrick (guitar), Jeronimas Kačinskas (conducting), and I was fortunate to take a number of classes with Gary Burton, who had a lot of very interesting and original ideas on ways to organize materials for improvising.

It was during my Berklee years that I really started writing very seriously. I wrote a large number of jazz charts for ensembles of various sizes, and it was there that I first tried my hand at writing in a “contemporary classical” style. Gunther Schuller, Ran Blake, and George Russel were prominent presences at the New England Conservatory, and the city offered a rich concert life. I also began listening to Bartók and Stravinsky. I was always drawn to music that I didn’t understand, whether it was, for example, the quartal harmonies and “outside” playing of John Coltrane, or the spontaneous dynamism of Cecil Taylor. Bartók and Stravinsky definitely fell into the category of music whose tonal and formal organization eluded me, and I took it up as a challenge.

I left Berklee after two years, and returned to California, where I played with a number of jazz groups over the next several years. It’s timely to say a few words here about the remarkable woman who was my mother. In addition to being the epicenter of a large and active amateur chamber music scene in Palo Alto, she had an insatiable curiosity about music, and continually sought out chamber music scores of modern composers wherever she could find them. I remember we purchased the score and first recording (by the Juilliard Quartet) of Elliott Carter’s overwhelmingly complex String Quartet No. 3, which we listened to until we could really follow the score. It must have been for my 24th or 25th birthday that my mother presented me with the scores of The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring as a birthday present. Her curiosity, musical acumen, and encouragement meant everything to me at the time.

Adding Aaron Copland into the listening mix, I began, somewhat in isolation, composing music in earnest. My early efforts included a piano trio (inspired by Ravel), a string quartet (somewhat after Bartók), and an atonal setting of William Carlos Williams’s poem, Rain, for soprano, violin and piano. Soon I began to feel that I needed feedback and criticism from more experienced composers. I got introduced to Gerhard Samuel, at that time the conductor of the Oakland Symphony, who looked at my work, and was very encouraging (he was particularly enthusiastic about the string quartet). I also chanced to meet, at a party, a pianist, Mortimer Markoff, who was studying composition with Andrew Imbrie, with whom he put me in touch.

I called Andy, who very generously invited me to his home in Berkeley (the other Berkeley!), and spent a long afternoon talking with me and looking at my compositions. At the time, he was writing his opera, Angle of Repose, based on the Wallace Stegner novel, an American bicentennial commission from San Francisco Opera, and didn’t have time to take me on as a private student, but encouraged me to undertake graduate studies in composition. Having as yet no undergraduate degree, in 1975 I enrolled at San Francisco State University, working with Roger Nixon and Wayne Peterson, and graduated with a bachelor of music degree after two semesters. I began graduate studies at the University of California in Berkeley in the fall of 1976. As luck would have it, Andy Imbrie was directing the graduate composition seminar that fall, and so he became my mentor.

What was Imbrie’s teaching style like? Are there particular things he conveyed to you that have stuck in your memory?
Not every teacher is right for every student (and vice versa!). But Andy was in every sense what I wanted in a teacher. He had a deep knowledge of classical repertoire, from at least the Baroque up to the present. And he had exceptionally acute hearing abilities. I recall that after a performance of my solo flute piece, Triptych, whose score he had not previously seen, he opined, “so the second movement is just an alternation of two chromatic hexachords, right?” And he was.

An accomplished pianist (with hands large enough to span a 12th!), in a seminar or private lesson Andy could quickly read through a student’s work-in-progress. My sense at the time was that little of importance escaped his notice. He would offer observations, for example, on whether a composer was inadvertently making an unwanted connection between details, or, on the other hand, whether a desired connection needed to be made clearer. A contrapuntalist at heart, his ear was exquisitely attuned to issues of voice leading and melodic direction. He had great experience in issues of instrumentation and ensemble balance. He was ever vigilant of the need for contrast in a work, not only in terms of contrasting moods, characters, textures, etc., but of the desirability of variety broadly construed, as in, for example, the desirability of a variety of techniques of formal articulation, from the most gradual of transitions to the most abrupt of juxtapositions. Most importantly for me, Andy always had interesting ideas about where a piece might go: what the formal implications were of a piece-in-progress, for how it might continue to unfold. After all, in the end, form is the most expressive element of a composition, bringing, as it does, all the other elements—thematic, harmonic, developmental, climactic, recollective, recapitulative, etc.—into relation with one another in a satisfying, integrated, organic, and—above all—dramatic whole. It was through his observations regarding formal implications that I began to develop my own grasp of dramatic form and construction.

Andy also took the laudable position that a musical composition wasn’t finished until it was performed, and I add here that when, in 1985, I and some others of my cohort at Berkeley founded the contemporary music ensemble, Earplay, now in its 40th season, Andy found this of great importance, and was extremely helpful and encouraging. And by the way, the composition To a Pilgrim on the Then and Now CD is dedicated to Andy, in memoriam.

There were other important teachers during that time, including Olly Wilson, who always had eminently practical suggestions on offer; Michael Senturia, who taught me reams about analysis and conducting; and later on Mario Davidovsky, who I met at the Wellesley Composers Conference. These three in particular figured significantly in my development as a composer.

I find your compositional voice in the five works offered on Then and Now to be both distinctive and consistent between the works, even though each has its own character and sound. At what age did you realize that you had found your style?
Let me answer this question in a slightly roundabout way. In some ways style for me is something that is always changing, always evolving. At the same time there’s something that inevitably remains the same in a composer’s voice, as long as his or her music is not just derivative imitation of another composer’s music. Every composer has a personality, which is made up of things like the way one hears pitch tendencies, how one is apt to construct a phrase, what constitutes a cadence, whether one’s approach to composing is instinctively harmonic or instinctively contrapuntal, etc. In a word, a composer’s personality is equivalent to his or her sensibility, which is one’s sense of what sounds “right,” and what doesn’t. One can never completely escape one’s personality, because one can’t really change one’s deepest sensibilities. We’re only ever provided with one set of ears.

But a composer can, and probably should struggle against personality, and above all against habit. I do think my pieces, the pieces on the Then and Now CD for example, are, as you say, each distinctive, though as you also note, there is a consistency in the musical language that clearly defines the pieces as mine, and not those of some other composer. If the individuality of the pieces were not there, if I were writing the same way today that I wrote twenty years ago, or even five years ago, I might well conclude that it was time to move on to some other field of endeavor. How exactly one goes about change, evolution and growth is a bit mysterious, because it entails the attempt to create something whose qualities are as unknown as the techniques for achieving them; one is “raging in the dark,” as Yeats had it; or to paraphrase Wendell Berry, when you don’t know what to do, that is when the real work begins.

Maybe your question really gets at the issue of maturity. When I revisit pieces I wrote during my years as a graduate student, some of them seem already surprisingly mature to me. Those include, for example, the short string quartet, Encomium (1977); the mixed quintet, Ontogenesis (1978); Triptych, for solo flute (1979); and Beauty is a Shell from the Sea, for SATB and 10 instruments (1981). I think that’s because I had already acquired a good deal of technique writing jazz compositions and arrangements at the Berklee School.

But getting back to your question, there are some very identifiable elements that clearly mark my style, or voice. While no one would listen to my music and think that it sounds like jazz, my experiences playing jazz influenced me in several important ways. Firstly, jazz already boasts a very rich harmonic language, albeit often derived largely within a diatonic framework. In my composing, I immediately set out to work with an even richer harmonic palette, which meant exploring the full harmonic possibilities of the chromatic scale, where any combination of intervals can function as a stable, beautiful, perfect sonority. Secondly, I’ve always been drawn to the rhythmic vitality of jazz, and often try to capture that same kind of dynamism, but through other means than by adopting the conventional rhythmic idioms of jazz. Finally, I typically strive to capture a spontaneous quality in my writing, to impart an almost improvisational quality to important lines.

Beyond jazz, the other great influence on my musical style is counterpoint, such an important driving force in the history of western European art music, which at present has been largely eclipsed by more homophonic idioms. I am nothing if not a contrapuntalist. My experience is that the thread guiding the ear through a complex piece of music is the melodic thread, or, more generally, the horizontal element, i.e. line; and counterpoint is precisely the coordination of multiple, independent musical lines.

Having enumerated these influences, and while I and my ear have never tired of these various preoccupations, I have found myself moving more and more towards an interest in color, or timbre, as a means of creating an even richer and more evocative musical experience.

Have you retained the works that antedate your development of this style?
I’ve recently gifted my personal archives to the University of California, Berkeley, libraries. That archive includes a number of compositions that I consider either juvenilia or pedagogical studies. Those works are not part of what I consider to be my catalogue, i.e. those works that are in circulation, and are listed in the “works” section of my personal website.

What percentage of your music would be considered as chamber music? In what other genres have you composed music?
The lion’s share of my compositional output is chamber music. I love the agility that can be achieved in music played by small to medium sized ensembles with one player to a part. The potential for both soloistic writing and ensemble virtuosity is virtually unlimited. Equally vast are the possibilities for ensemble color, for example in ensembles that mix winds, strings, keyboard and percussion instruments.

I’ve also written a large amount of vocal music. Looking back, this surprises me a little, because it was not in my mind when I started out. But the human voice is both beautiful in sonority, and a compelling protagonist in a musical work. Perhaps even more important is the focus of meaning that a text imparts. Music in the abstract is, ironically, mute from the standpoint of meaning. By employing a text, the composer, and hence the music, suddenly becomes articulate.

Do you have a work you’ve written that is closer to your heart than any other?
My works, as a body, seem to me like old friends; or maybe a better metaphor would be like my children, children who leave home, and have varying kinds of lives of their own, some perhaps more successful, or more publicly loved than others. At any given time, I myself might have favorites, but that can change from one week to the next. It’s entirely natural that a composer is always most interested in the work he or she is currently writing. Every completed work is both a joyful accomplishment, and at the same time a disappointment for the ways in which it doesn’t quite match up to what lived in one’s imagination; for in the process of transferring imagined music to the written page, something is inevitably changed, something nascent and inchoate becomes fixed and invariable. This is the same for artists in any creative genre.

From the sound of it and the intricacies therein, your music must be difficult to perform. The artists involved bring it off in an exceedingly compelling fashion, but I’m wondering about the amount of rehearsal time that was required for even these exceptional artists to bring it to performance level?
The relationship between performer and composer is central. You note that my music is often quite intricate, and makes certain technical demands on the performer(s). Indeed, technical demands are often intrinsic to the ideas a composer seeks to explore. I can say with complete confidence that the amount of time an individual performer spends mastering one of my works is nowhere near commensurate with the time I spent composing it. Thus there arises the question of commitment: I am absolutely committed to investing whatever time and effort is necessary to achieving my musical goals in composing a new work. What I require is, like any composer, interpreters who are equally committed to achieving excellence in performance. There are more than a few performers who bring the necessary level of joy, skill, understanding and commitment to contemporary music, and I’ve been fortunate over the years to have worked with many.

But let me go a step further, and point out that there are many works in the standard repertoire that make technical demands on the performer easily commensurable with the demands in my own work, or the work of some other modern composers; and performers don’t balk at those demands. How many hours of practice time does a pianist invest in preparing Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata? How many hours of preparation are needed for a string quartet to prepare a large-scale work by Brahms, or Beethoven, or Bartók, both in individual practice time and ensemble rehearsal time? Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello is a highly demanding work, that nonetheless offers substantial rewards to the performers willing to take it on, not to mention the listeners who will delight in its adventurousness. Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 1 is concerto-like in the demands it places on the pianist, but few works in the piano trio genre are as exhilarating.

In the case of contemporary music, a number of obstacles can arise that work against the composer of ambitious works. Economics is a powerful factor. A professional chamber ensemble, preparing repertoire it will play during an entire season, may well be reluctant to invest rehearsal time in a modern work that may receive only one or two performances, even though the technical and rehearsal demands may in fact be no greater than those of many repertory pieces. The conductor of a symphony orchestra may be resistant to allotting sufficient study time to master an unfamiliar contemporary score, as opposed to repertory works with which he or she has long been conversant. A chorus may be hesitant to take on a work whose harmonic language diverges from “typical” choral sonorities, thereby escalating rehearsal demands. Arts administrators and boards of directors of performing organizations visualize budgetary demands mounting with added rehearsal time; and marketing departments cannot easily drum up audience enthusiasm trading on composers with little to no name recognition. All this puts composers in a bind, loading the dice in favor of the creation of music that is easy to learn, perform, and listen to. A composer thus willing to sacrifice writing works of ambition and scope in favor of practicality will find many more performance opportunities than a composer whose ambitions are more akin to those of a Beethoven or a Stravinsky, exploring new ground in the creation of works of breadth and power that may impose greater demands on performers. The history of music is replete with anecdotes reflecting the difficult acceptance of works like The Rite of Spring, or La Mer, that today are among our most admired recent classics. One thinks, too, of Franz Schubert, who never heard his symphonies performed by full orchestras. One begins to think that the great Babel of styles that are today uneasily assembled under the rubric of “contemporary music” may be in part a result of confusion and uncertainty as to which way to turn for the composer seeking both an elusive musical relevance and an even more elusive public. The danger is that our present epoch will be remembered, if at all, for the creation of an excessive amount of conventional and unimaginative music, contributing relatively little to the development of our musical culture.

There is a conductor (John Ferrari) listed for one of the works. How did you meet him?
Yes, John Ferrari conducted on the recording of Hidden Spring. In addition to being an excellent conductor, John is a first-rate percussionist, which is how I first came to know him. More on that in a moment. But to digress briefly, it’s very interesting to me how many top percussionists have turned their prodigious musical talents to conducting. I’m thinking, for example, of Bradley Lubman, Jeff Milarsky, James Baker, and Steve Schick, to name a few who I’ve been privileged to work with. All are highly skilled conductors and bring with them a deep immersion in contemporary music, since so much of their evolution as percussionists was nurtured by modern works. Perhaps many percussionists turn to conducting because it opens up so much more repertoire to them—I don’t know; but they do bring with them a love of modern music and an impeccably precise sense of time, meter and rhythm.

In any case, I met John in 1994 at the June in Buffalo festival, when he was the percussionist of the New Millennium Ensemble, a crack new music group that went on the following year to win the coveted, not to say highly competitive, Naumburg Award in chamber music. New Millennium performed my Serenade for Six at June in Buffalo, and went on to record it for their Here Comes Everybody CD on the old CRI label, released in 1998. I went on to write another sextet for them, After Blue, commissioned by the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, which they also recorded. So John was already very familiar, from those pieces, with the intricacies and complexities of my style, and it was quite easy for him to slip in to conduct Hidden Spring with the great players of the Cygnus ensemble (and by the way, Tara O’Connor of Cygnus was also New Millennium’s flutist). We had two rehearsals of Hidden Spring, followed by a performance at Loft 393 in Tribeca to get well prepared for the recording session. So working with John was really just a matter of sorting out balances and details of interpretation during those rehearsals.

Do you have any further CD projects in the works?
The next CD will feature three of my string quartets, each recorded by a different, great, young American quartet. The release will include my String Quartet No. 2 (recorded by the Verona Quartet), String Quartet No. 4 (recorded by the Telegraph Quartet), and String Quartet No. 5 (recorded by the Jasper Quartet). I’m very excited about the project, which should come out in the winter or spring of 2026. In September I’ll be in New York to record several works, which will complete two more CDs, one of vocal music, and another of instrumental chamber music. As preparation for those recording sessions, we’ll be presenting a concert on September 21 at Symphony Space in Manhattan. The concert will feature my String Quartet No. 3, (with the Jasper Quartet); Smokin’ with Cocuswood, for oboe, string quartet and piano (with the addition of oboist Noah Kay and pianist Peggy Kampmeier); and my song cycle, Letters and the Weather of Six Mornings, with Peggy Kampmeier and soprano Alice Teyssier. It’s truly exhilarating to work with these superb musicians to bring great recordings of so much of my music to the public.

Well, I sincerely hope I’ll be assigned the reviews of these coming issues!

— David DeBoor Canfield, 12.15.2025