Overstepping Interview with Eve Beglarian

MICHAEL DELLAIRA

"One of new music's truly free spirits," Eve Beglarian's current projects include an opera based on Stephen King's The Man in the Black Suit with co-librettist and director Grethe Holby, a Meet the Composer co-commission for The Bilitis Project; a song cycle/concept CD with boombox virtuoso and composer Phil Kline; music for Lee Breuer's production of A Doll's House at New York Theater Workshop; and A Book of Days, a long-term project of 365 multimedia pieces for live performance as well as internet delivery. For more information about Eve Beglarian visit www.evbvd.com.

DELLAIRA: I’ve taken the title of one of your pieces – a very moving piece, which is also the title track of the CD in which it appears – Overstepping – as a theme. If I understand “overstepping” as in overstepping oneself, going beyond what you think you can do, I’d like to apply that to your own life. Looking at your life's trajectory, it seems like you’ve overstepped in several places. You grew up in a house that was filled with musicians and music, and yet when you finally went off to college you went as a scientist. So in a way you started by rebelling – your first overstepping?

BEGLARIAN: That’s a nice way to think about it! I think in terms of getting started in music, growing up in the musical family that I did, it never occurred to me that I would want to be a musician, because in a sense the boundaries of what constituted music-making were very well defined. And not particularly interesting. It was very much in the tradition of classical-music performance and virtuosity. I had no way of applying the totality of my interests to that activity. I think people who are ready to become virtuosos have a way of putting their entire lives' thoughts into practicing Czerny or whatever, and I simply did not have the ability to be able to do that.

DELLAIRA: Did you play an instrument, have lessons?

BEGLARIAN: Yes, I started out with piano lessons when I was four or five years old, and then when I met Piatigorsky as an 11-year-old I was so enamored of him and his musicianship I decided to switch to the cello, and so I studied that all through junior high and high school. But I really did not have the sensibility to be able to apply myself properly. So it never occurred to me that I could be a musician.

DELLAIRA: Were you expected to pursue a musical career?

BEGLARIAN: No. Certainly my parents felt that having musical training was part of being a well-rounded person. In fact my main connection to music was going to a thousand concerts and also I worked at the radio station starting when I was 16 …

DELLAIRA: Your father was the Dean of the Performing Arts School at the University of Southern California.

BEGLARIAN: Yes. My father was trained as a composer and then he became the Dean of the School of Performing Arts at USC in Los Angeles which in those days – the 60’s and 70’s --had a whole group of incredible musicians on the faculty because so many people emigrated to LA before the war. There was this amazing émigré community, not just in music but in all the arts. So LA was this place where you had Hollywood on the one hand and that sort of corrupt business world depicted in the movie Chinatown, and on the other hand you had this amazing European émigré community, and the two never really made sense of one another.

DELLAIRA: And this was a community that represented European tradition, with a capital E and T. USC was not, for example, Cal-Arts.

BEGLARIAN: No, it wasn’t Cal Arts. And it wasn’t Henry Cowell going to Chinatown. It was squarely in the center of the classical European tradition. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like for me had it been more of an experimental community (the Henry Cowell, Harry Partch tradition) whether I would have latched onto it earlier and not had the same oppositional relationship – both loving it and feeling it couldn’t belong to me –

DELLAIRA: So you got to Princeton with really no idea that you were going to wind up in the music department.

BEGLARIAN: Right. When I chose Princeton I certainly wasn’t thinking about the music department. As a freshman I came in as sort of a pre-med; I wanted to do research on neurology, the chemistry of the brain. By October of my freshman year I was losing my mind.

DELLAIRA: That’s only a month into it …

BEGLARIAN: Exactly! I didn’t have a record player. I had all my records but no record player. I was waiting until fall break to go up to Boston to get advice from a friend about what stereo system to buy, so I hadn’t brought a record player with me, so I couldn’t listen to music for a month. I thought I would lose my mind. It was then I realized that if music was that central to my life, I was going to have to find some way of doing music as my profession – because I didn’t want to be a violin-playing physicist. That’s not my model of how to relate to music. There’s a wonderful tradition of that, scientists who love music, but I realized that was not going to work for me, that music was far more central to my being. So the question was, what am I going to do in music?

DELLAIRA: And you didn’t know anything about the music department?

BEGLARIAN: Well I knew Milton Babbitt as a child -- in fact I used to call him Milton Babbitt-Rabbit -- he was a family acquaintance and he and my father have known each other for years. But it wasn’t until my sophomore year that I took a music course and I absolutely loved it. And what was sort of wonderful and of course completely by chance was that the Princeton music department had (as most people who are going to read this know) had a logical positivist approach to what music is and a “fake” scientific idea of how to think about music.

DELLAIRA: Right, because, oddly enough, Princeton wasn’t CalArts either.

BEGLARIAN: I never did get to Cal Arts! But in a way Princeton fit perfectly with where I was coming from -- wanting to have a kind of intellectual pleasure that, in fact, the music department could supply endlessly, right? Because they had this whole way of talking about music that I actually hadn’t known existed. Coming from my background, the only writing about music I had ever seen were things like program notes and Tovey: descriptive writing about music that seemed completely lame to me. You go hear the Brahms Fourth and you read the program notes and you know this has absolutely nothing to do with the musical experience I'm having.

So at Princeton they were not having those kinds of descriptive conversations about music. And so the very scientism, if you want to call it that, of the way of talking about music I found completely delightful. And so I had a great time at Princeton.

DELLAIRA: You also knew at that point that this was something you could do, whereas back in Los Angeles growing up, music was something you thought you couldn’t do.

BEGLARIAN: That is certainly true. I started out, of course, doing theory. And the fact that there was no performance taught for credit was perfectly fine with me too because the last thing I wanted to do was practice the cello.

DELLAIRA: We want to keep this in line with where we're headed, since you do quite a bit of performing now.

BEGLARIAN: Exactly! The question then was what was I going to do. I knew I did not want to be a college professor and that I did not want to be a theorist. Even though I love theory that was not how I pictured living my life. And so the idea came to me that I would be a conductor: that would be the right use of my skills and talents. So I started thinking about what skills I would need to learn in order to be a conductor and one of the things that occurred to me was that I ought to write some music so I would know from the inside what it’s like to make a piece of music, and that would make me a far more effective and sophisticated conductor of other people’s music. And so I started writing music. And I absolutely loved writing music. It was like totally great. And I'm pretty sure that if I had said to myself in advance "I'm going to be a composer and now I’m going to sit down and write music”

I would never have had the courage to do it. I was only writing some pieces, and that's OK, and it was only later that then I could give myself the title "composer."

DELLAIRA: So what happened to conducting?

BEGLARIAN: After Princeton I moved to the New York area and started studying conducting privately with Jacques-Louis Monod. Who is by far the best teacher in music that I ever had. We were studying conducting (we weren't studying composition or theory), and his whole way of approaching the subject was totally incredible, totally intense, and totally marvelous. These were private lessons, so I would prepare the piece and I would go in with a baton and the score. He would sit and watch me and I would conduct.

DELLAIRA: Conduct silently?

BEGLARIAN: Silently. No music, nothing. And he would say “the horns did not come in on their entrance ….”

DELLAIRA: Wait, wait, wait a minute … You both have a score?

BEGLARIAN: We both have a score. And he is following me and knew where I was in the piece and would critique every technical error I made. And the two of us were having this brain meld of hearing the performance of the piece I was conducting.

DELLAIRA: It’s not like he said "The trumpet's flat!"

BEGLARIAN: No, he didn’t say that!

DELLAIRA: Incredible. How long did you do this?

BEGLARIAN: Three to four years.

DELLAIRA: These were one-hour lessons?

BEGLARIAN: Yes.

DELLAIRA: And you would do a whole piece? Or a movement?

BEGLARIAN: Standard rep. We started with Mozart and went through the classical repertoire and the last piece I did was Pierrot Lunaire. It was the best education in music ever. Because I had to learn to really hear those scores so deeply. At the same time I was studying with him privately, I went to Columbia for a masters in composition. That was not a good choice. I really should not have done that, because in a sense it was like a poor man’s Princeton at the time.

DELLAIRA: In what sense?

BEGLARIAN: The methodology of theorizing about music was the same as Princeton’s but it wasn’t as sophisticated because there were people at Princeton who were better at doing that than there were at Columbia.

DELLAIRA: And you were studying with Jacques Monod at the same time. He has a reputation for being severe and hypercritical, and it’s not like you had any conducting experience before, so that you were going to him to sharpen those skills or look at things differently. You were going in essentially as a novice to a person with a reputation that strikes fear into the hearts of a lot of people. What made you think you could do that?

BEGLARIAN: Well, in a sense, Milton was very generous and he said I should go and study with Jacques. So it didn’t occur to me that I shouldn’t do that. I didn’t feel it as a risky move at the time. Being a novice meant I had nothing to lose.

DELLAIRA: Well, you risked him saying, "This isn't going to work out, you have no talent for this."

BEGLARIAN: ...Yes.... That didn’t occur to me. It’s nice that you point that out. But he was very good to me. I remember when we got to the end of my studies him saying something like, "You’ve got the goods here and I don’t know what you’re going to do with them." I think he said it in the context of me being a woman. When it came to his trying to visualize what kind of life I would have, what career I would have, he really saw that was going to be quite difficult, and couldn’t imagine me in the professional world of managers and ICM.

DELLAIRA: Did that bother you? Were you really envisioning a career as a conductor?

BEGLARIAN: By that time I wasn’t really concerned with that. It hadn’t occurred to me that what I was going to do with what I learned was become the Assistant Conductor of the Houston Symphony or something. That was no longer on my mind as a goal.

DELLAIRA: Because you were also studying composition at the same time.

BEGLARIAN: That’s right. That’s right. And in fact by then I was done with Columbia. After the Masters I quit. That is, I did not apply to any doctoral programs or attempt to switch into the DMA program at Columbia. I felt very strongly that studying composition with these folks was not helping me or teaching me what I needed to learn.

DELLAIRA: What was the first piece you wrote after leaving? Your first work as a solo composer?

BEGLARIAN: It was for sax quartet and TR-808 drum machine and a monophonic synthesizer called a Pro-1 (a one-voice version of the Prophet 5), and it was called Fresh Air -- a four-minute 12-tone piece, completely and strictly Charles Wuorinen-like with time-points and everything, but that doesn’t sound like it. Who knew that the 808 drum machine was going to become the sound of a whole genre of music? It refers forward to all of hip-hop which is based on that kick drum.

DELLAIRA: Is it recorded?

BEGLARIAN: I have a pretty good live recording of it by Relache. What happened was I was fresh out of school and was mystified as to what was going to become of me and I sent the piece to Relache – they had a call for scores that included sax quartet. So I sent it down to them and Joseph Franklin called me up and said they were going to perform it. It was my first professional performance and it was like totally cool.

DELLAIRA: So that was major event for you.

BEGLARIAN: Yes. At the same time I was free-lancing for CRI as a producer. I got lucky that way. Carter Harman was still there and he was beginning to lose his hearing. And so there were recording sessions all the time and I quickly became the producer of about 50 records at CRI in the space of about two years.

DELLAIRA: Can you name a few?

BEGLARIAN: I remember a really cool duo by Lou Karchin, there was a Ben Johnston string quartet, a Bernard Rands CD. The last one I did was a Milton Babbitt CD.

DELLAIRA: I’ll bet your conducting studies with Jacque Monod came in really handy then.

BEGLARIAN: Yes, that’s when I became fully aware of it! It’s not like they gave me the score ahead of time and I would spend weeks studying it. No. I’d show up, they’d hand me the score and it’s like my job to say “we’re covered on this take, and we’re not covered on that.” It required this incredible virtuosity of listening, and definitely what Jacques taught me.

DELLAIRA: You were also meeting composers as a professional colleague, rather than as student.

BEGLARIAN: True. At the same time I was doing administrative work. I was the President of the League-ISCM, and that was a really great learning experience as well, because I was presenting five concerts a year and chairing the program committee and deciding what to program and all that kind of stuff. There was a board of 35 people that one had to answer to, and I really made an effort to transform the organization into a less stylistically limited presenting organization.

DELLAIRA: You mean less academic?

BEGLARIAN: Yes. That was in the days when you would still get reviews from The Times or New York Magazine and they would invariably say:, "The League-ISCM which is known for its really boring concerts of really bad music presented a strikingly uncharacteristic concert of interesting music last night…" But it was really hard work.

What I learned was that institutions have a personality just as much as people do. You can try to shift what an institution stands for and, if you put a lot of effort into it, yes, you can influence the organization with your own personality, but the second I left it went back to being what it had been before.

DELLAIRA: So, perhaps I should tread lightly here, but it sounds as if you’re now following in your father’s footsteps as administrator.

BEGLARIAN: It was important to me in relation to my father! Because he had taken his creative skills and devoted them to organizing things and making things possible for other people to do. And I realized that, yes, that is creative work and it’s interesting, and it actually has in certain ways more instant feedback than writing music because you see the results immediately. And you have a certain amount of visibility and a certain amount of power, and if you’re responsible you can use that power to do good and that’s really great. But I also saw that if you make that choice you’re making that choice.

DELLAIRA: Is that why you left? It was taking up too much of your energy?

BEGLARIAN: Yes. And I also realized that at a certain point – and this is a hard thing to say – I do feel that being of service to the community of music is a really important thing, but it’s definitely a balance. One can get sucked up with community building to the exclusion of the narcissistic “go in your room and do your own work”. It’s really important to be really conscious of maintaining that balance. And also it was becoming clearer and clearer to me that I was in the wrong community. I could present concerts and be visible from now to eternity and it didn’t mean that Speculum Musicae was going to play my music.

DELLAIRA: Pause there for a moment, because that isn’t obvious. You just mentioned a piece that Relache did, so the kind of music you followed that with was still in the wrong camp?

BEGLARIAN: What I did for about several years is write pieces which struggled with applying the techniques I had learned of 12-tone and serial music, combinatorial "fake" mathematics to make pieces I thought were beautiful. That was a really useful thing to do.

DELLAIRA: OK, but that description would apply to virtually every other person writing 12-tone or serial-based music …

BEGLARIAN: Right, but what I was doing was trying to use those techniques in ways that one would never say “that’s a 12-tone piece” -- that did not… I don’t know whether you remember Wuorinen’s book Simple Composition...

DELLAIRA: Yes.

BEGLARIAN: One of the things he said was that you really want to use a lot of minor ninths and tritones in order to really embrace the style. My answer to that was what if I could take these conceptual ideas about structuring a piece of music and not give preference to minor 9ths because we like minor 9ths better than, say, 3rds. I was trying to merge what I was hearing in Steve Reich with those structural solidities I was getting from Babbitt and Wuorinen. The piece that most fully embodied that is on the Overstepping CD: the electronic piece The Garden of Cyrus. Each movement is, in a sense, an etude (I hate that word!) that is structurally sound from a 12-tone structural point of view, but I don’t think when you listen to that piece you say yeah, gee, that’s right in the tradition of Charles Wuorinen.

DELLAIRA: What you’re saying is that there was still a gap between what you wanted to hear and the means by which …

BEGLARIAN: I was attempting to achieve that.

DELLAIRA: Yes, you’re saying that there is this middle ground that is too much work …

BEGLARIAN: Right, but what was great about doing that was that working it into something I liked meant that I had something I was banging up against. I wasn’t just improvising until I came up with something pretty. It gave me this technique so that now if I noodle at the keyboard I come up with something I can believe in. It also gave me tremendous confidence to have wrestled with this stuff long enough to actually achieve something I believed in. And that meant I didn’t have to do that wrestling anymore. I could do anything I wanted and I felt it had the solidity of all that time and all that effort.

DELLAIRA: So you needed reassurance that the piece could hold up under analysis?

BEGLARIAN: I think that’s a good question, yes. Having been in that academic environment where being able to come up with verbiage that explains the existence of every note in a piece and every choice that’s made -- yes, to me it was very satisfying that I could point and grunt at every note and claim it as part of an unassailable framework. And once I had succeeded in doing that, it was no longer necessary. I could put that aside.

DELLAIRA: We’re really not at that point yet.

BEGLARIAN: No, we’re only in 1986.

DELLAIRA: So you’ve left ISCM, decided not to pursue a DMA, finished studying with Monod, working free-lance at CRI, so in a way you’re a free agent at this point.

BEGLARIAN: Yeah, and at this point a New York performing ensemble commissioned a piece, and it also was a serial piece in some way. But I felt very strongly that it was step forward from The Garden of Cyrus and part of it was that it was much more emotionally available and I was able to struggle with the systems, not so much technically in terms of getting notes and harmonies and rhythms that I liked, but to give me the emotional resonance I was looking for. This piece was a really big deal for me – it took me 10 months to write it – and they premiered it, and they played it twice and that was the end of it for them. In fact many ensembles around the country took the piece on and performed it …

DELLAIRA: What’s the piece for?

BEGLARIAN: Pierrot ensemble plus percussion and tape, no voice. Standard new music ensemble. And it was so clear to me that other ensembles understood the piece so much better than these folks who had been my friends and colleagues at Princeton, that I felt really depressed. Really, really depressed.

DELLAIRA: Because? I mean isn’t that the kind of normal life span of a piece?

BEGLARIAN: Yeah, I guess it is, but it was specifically the reaction of the people who had commissioned it. I felt that other people who took it on understood it better and were more excited by it. I felt I had written this really great piece for those people who I really wanted to please and impress and give them something they would love and they didn’t love it, didn’t get it. For them it was just another piece. Perhaps it was childish of me to get so hurt by that but it really wounded me. Because I thought of these people as my closest colleagues and I realized there was a huge gulf between us. They weren’t my real colleagues and I didn’t know who my real colleagues would be.

DELLAIRA: And the other groups that were more enthusiastic -- like the Dinosaur Annex I imagine -- would be considered less academic, for lack of a better word?

BEGLARIAN: No, not really. Harvey Sollberger really championed the piece, and he’s certainly academic. It’s that I pictured myself part of a community of values and somehow something I was looking for in affirmation of that didn’t happen. It wasn’t simply an uptown/downtown schism. I had written a piece for Daniel Druckman and Alan Feinberg called Machaut in the Machine Age and it was the first in a series of pieces that take off from Machaut, and it was a little piece, not an ambitious piece, but a big deal for me because it was the first that didn’t use a system. And I remember playing it for someone, an academic, and he was like “what the fuck are you doing?” He was embarrassed by it, actually embarrassed for me.

DELLAIRA: That must have pointed out to you that a possible schism existed.

BEGLARIAN: Yes, and I realized where I was heading was away from the community I had built. That was a very hard transition. And pretty scary. I had thrown myself into a community and felt there was no way I could remain there and pursue what I needed to pursue in music. That was 1988, and I was 30. Because I really didn’t know where I was going to go. I got lucky.

I went to the American Dance Festival -- they had a program where they paired a composer with a choreographer and made a piece in the six weeks you were in residence down there, and I did that with Ann Carlson and was suddenly introduced to the dance world and suddenly the preoccupations I had in terms of emotional expressiveness in music were totally desirable and they needed what I could do and wanted to do.

DELLAIRA: And pieces that could hold up under analysis were irrelevant.

BEGLARIAN: Made no difference and was completely unimportant. And so for about four years a big percentage of the music I wrote was for dance.

DELLAIRA: But you’re not playing in these pieces?

BEGLARIAN: No, many were electronic. I got a sampler in 1989. Overstepping is from 1991 and is probably the strongest of those dance pieces and obviously incorporates sampling pretty heavily. So that was the transition and it really was this four-year bounded thing, because now I rarely do music for dance.

DELLAIRA: In retrospect it’s an episode, but at the time it wasn’t inevitable.

BEGLARIAN: I don’t think I ever thought I’m going to become a dance music composer.

DELLAIRA: Did you know anything about dance?

BEGLARIAN: No, and I still don’t. In a way I don’t really understand dance. And the most interesting choreographer I know, Elizabeth Streb, said that music is the enemy of dance. And she’s right. Music sets up a structure that dance is forced to respond to. And so she doesn’t use music -- she amplifies the sounds of the dancers, and it’s totally brilliant as sound as well as dance, and I feel like I do understand what Elizabeth is doing.

DELLAIRA: And next?

BEGLARIAN: In 1989 I moved to the village and I had this girlfriend -- Mary Rodriguez -- who insisted I join this band that she played bass in. It was a real rock band (all originals) and I was the keyboard player. The guitar player was the composer and we played bar gigs.

DELLAIRA: The name of the band?

BEGLARIAN: Que (pronounced "kay"). It was a real bar band. In fact adding a keyboard player was sort of a questionable thing. And that was my first experience as a performer. And it was a totally wonderful experience. I was out playing gigs every Saturday night for months as a keyboard player and it wasn’t about great art, it was about being able to play in a bar band. And it taught me how to perform, because if you can have any kind of charisma as the keyboard player in a bar band then you’ve learned how to do something. So I did it really late: most people do that when they’re 17 or in their 20’s and I was 30. In a way allowed me to cross the line …

DELLAIRA: That’s the key element …

BEGLARIAN: Yeah, and it was very useful that it was separated from being a composer somehow, because I could focus on performing rather than expressing myself as a composer and then figuring out …

DELLAIRA: Was there any tension? Because you probably knew more about music than the others …

BEGLARIAN: No, because I knew something different about music. And in fact it was fascinating sociologically. The bandleader, this guy named Rico, who’s brilliant -- we’d get together and orchestrate what the keyboard part should be. And of course we had no shared terminology. None. So it was kind of like intercultural collaboration. For me to be able to figure out what he was looking for and what he wanted …

DELLAIRA: What were you playing?

BEGLARIAN: I was playing synth -- a DX7 -- and had to figure out what sounds were cool and what weren’t. I remember I put in an augmented triad somewhere and he was totally down with it -- saying "wow" -- because there aren’t a whole lot of augmented triads in pop music. And the songs were good songs and he was a great guitar player.

DELLAIRA: How long did you do that?

BEGLARIAN: Maybe a year. Not long.

DELLAIRA: Were you thinking during that time of striking out on your own?

BEGLARIAN: Well in a sense it was its own thing in a corner. And I didn’t immediately say "Yeah, I wanna do this," because of course I didn’t want to have a bar band. But what happened, relatively soon after that, was that various people started calling me and saying "do you want to do this little show downtown" -- at CBGB’s gallery, next door to CBGB -- or these little bars doing experimental music, and the financial and sociological aspects of that is that there’s no money, or you get the door, or whatever. So it’s hardly like I could call up players and say do you want to come down and do this gig?

DELLAIRA: But how did someone know to ask you that? You weren’t writing pieces that featured yourself.

BEGLARIAN: Well, they were people I had met … I was doing electronic music, and so I think the mindset was that it wasn’t inconceivable I could present an evening of my work. And I had started doing pieces that incorporated spoken word in one way or another. Then I did this piece based on Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate. This was in ’93. David First asked me to do a half evening – a set – and so I decided I was going to do an exploded version of the Ursonate.

DELLAIRA: With keyboard?

BEGLARIAN: With electronics, yeah. But mostly I was singing and speaking against electronics, and the electronics were mostly sampled stuff. And I had a commission at the time with the California EAR Unit, so I got two of the members of the EAR Unit to record some text stuff, and that became the raw material for the tape part of my performance. And I called it YourSonata instead of Ursonate. And I loved doing it and it was great fun. And then I went back to the EAR Unit and said instead of writing this other piece I’m thinking about writing for you, why don’t we do this YourSonata as a collaborative ensemble piece for the whole band? And it turned into a thirty-five minute music-theater Dada text-sound wacky thing. None of them played their instruments. It wasn’t about the EAR Unit doing their stuff. It was music-theater in the context of a new music concert. So that was the initiation of three trends that have ended up being huge in my life. That was performing, spoken word stuff, and collaborations with other composers.

DELLAIRA: The idea of composers collaborating is unusual.