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.