WHAT'S WITH THE ORCHESTRA? ©2004 Deborah Henson-Conant
This interview was conducted for the March '04 edition of our e-newsletter.

(Spring 2004) Deborah's been incredibly scarce around her own office lately. Usually we see her at least once a day for our daily staff meeting, and often she's here more often. "We," by the way, are the three people work here on a regular basis: Eugene, Matt and Raisa, along with Carol, who came in to help get the music out to the orchestras last month.

Turns out Deborah's not just being reclusive. She's been holed up in her studio, composing and arranging for the "Celtic Celebration" shows she'll be performing this month with the Syracuse and West Virginia symphonies. She's been working furiously away at these scores at all hours of the day and night ... ordering huge servings of Korean food, drinking thermos-after-thermos of exotic teas, hoarding huge bars of chocolate,and apparently even dreaming about monster orchestras. Meanwhile the whole schedule of the office has been disrupted, people coming and going with instrument cases -- we wanted to know what was happening. "We" are the people who work in Deborah's office: Eugene, Matt and Gina. So we interviewed her to find out what exactly goes into composing a piece of music for orchestra!

US: People are coming and going at all times of day, carrying instruments or brief cases... Who ARE these people and how are they involved with these new pieces?

DHC: Those people are musicians of many different kinds. Some are instrumentalists -- those are people who help me translate my musical ideas so they'll work more gracefully for the individual instruments.

Other times the musicians are traditional or folk musicians. For example, I asked a fiddler and a Celtic flutist and pianist to help me when I was first working out the "Celtic Minstrel" pieces I'll be premiering with the Syracuse and West Virginia symphonies this March. In that case, they played the music they're familiar with and I stopped them, tried playing along, and asked them probing questions about the styles they were playing in. Then I worked to create the effect of those traditional styles in a way that would work for full orchestra. At the back-end of the process, I had a violinist (not a fiddler) come in and play what I wrote -- to see if I'd gotten fairly close to what the fiddler had originally shown me.

Sometimes I get a conductor to help me go over the scores, find potential problems. For this last set of pieces I wrote, I had a string quintet come over one night to play through the pieces and help mark the parts so they'd be easier for the orchestral musicians to play.

US: How long does it take to write a piece?

DHC: Sometimes a piece "happens" in an instant. I get the idea , the words become music, the rhythm is there and I'm ready to sing it. Sometimes pieces take years -- many years before I feel they're really "finished."

Preparing a piece for orchestra is somewhat different from "writing" the piece . Most of the pieces I've written for orchestra already existed in another form -- for solo harp, for voice or for ensemble.

For me an orchestra version of a piece is simply one way that the piece could be. For me, pieces are often "ideas," so depending on the ensemble I'll play it with, the idea present itself differently.

US: How do you get an idea for a new piece?

DHC: Getting ideas is rarely a problem for me. Recently my neighbor mentioned that he wished there was apiece on my new album about love gone bad -- and within 24 hours I was singing the next song. At Thanksgiving, I started thinking about what I'm most thankful for, and realized how thank I am for the garbage man. Almost immediately, I was singing the song "The Garbage man," which I'm now arranging for orchestra.

Other ideas sit in my belly for years. I started writing the piece "Catcher in the Rye" in the early 90's while I was in Scotland. I've just now finished an arrangement for orchestra and will be playing it on my next tour.

Each name or phrase seems to have at least one inherent melody and every idea or story seems to evoke harmonies and rhythms. I think that, because my parents sang constantly -- much more than they spoke -- music is simply a given. Everything seems musical to me.

I've been very curious what music is to deaf people and read once that a deaf person described the movement of wind over wheat as what she thought music must be. That makes perfect sense to me: that music is simply one way of perceiving the world.

US: How many servings of jahp-cheh would you say you eat in a given day? What does this do for your stress level?

DHC: When things start getting hairy, like when the music needs to be sent to the orchestras, that's the time when my stress level is highest, I'm getting less sleep, and I'm working hours and hours at the computer.

Translating music from the idea stage to notes on a page that can be played by 70 people at once is very detail-oriented. It can make you hate music, at least for a while. I have dreams where I'm being chased across a huge page of music by accented timpani notes.

That's when I start sending out for comfort food, and for me jahp-cheh, which I consider to be the Korean equivalent of spaghetti, is serious comfort food. You can pretty much gauge my stress level by how much jahp-cheh I order. Last month, it got pretty intense: one day I got three orders -- not because I was going to eat all of them, but just... you know... for security.

US: Do you write the scores out in long hand?

DHC: I write very little in long-hand. Since I was a kid, I dreamt of a typewriter or computer that can write out music. Once that technology was available, I was right on it and that's how I do most of my writing.

US: Do you play the music out first and then write it down?

DHC: I generally "invent" the piece before I write it down, but the writing of it is an integral part of the composition.

US: How many hours a day do you work on a piece?

DHC: That depends on how intense a deadline I have. THere are times when I'm working 12-16 hours a day for extended period of time. I'm not crazy about doing that, but it happens. I get obsessed with a musical idea and just keep going.

US: Do you do concentrated periods of composing or write down bits and pieces as you think of them?

DHC: Both. I want to get better at writing down bits and pieces when I think of them. But, for me, since words and music are so inextricably linked, it's usually enough to write out some words. I can go back to songs I wrote when I was a kid and so long as I have the words written out, I can almost always remember the melody verbatim -- because words and melody are basically the same thing in my mind.

US: Do you ever get inspiration in the middle of the night?

DHC: I often get inspired when I'm out running, walking or on my bike. I think it may be the rhythm of what I'm doing that thrusts my brain into song mode. Occassionally I wake up with a melody, but that's pretty rare.

US: What is the wildest inspiration story you have?

DHC: One of the most dramatic inspiration stories is the story of the song "Belinda." The song itself tells the story, really. The gist is that I was enamored with a tree in my neighborhood and eventually one day, someone told me the tree had a name and the name was "Belinda." The next time I passed the tree I looked and said, "There's Belinda," and within 30 yards I was singing the song "Belinda" -- it seemed to have popped into my head fully formed.

US: Do you play all the other parts?

DHC: When i'm writing orchestral parts, I sometimes try to play them on the actual instruments, because we have a lot of instruments around the house. Generally I only do that to see if the violin double- or triple-stops I want to write are even possible. Mostly, I sing each line. I figure that if I can sing the lines, then they'll be fairly comfortable for the players. I definitely bang out the percussion parts on anything I can find, and often try to get my family to help.

US: Do you need to know how to play all of the instruments? Why or why not?

DHC: I don't need to know how to play all the instruments, but the more time I spend with instrumentalists going over parts, the easier it is for me to write for those instruments. I have fantasies of taking off a year or two and learning the rudiments of each instrument. I know it would help me immensely in my writing -- but right now it doesn't look like a very realistic plan. So in the meantime, I rely on my voice, my basic sense of music and the players who come help me work on the pieces.

US: Is writing music fun?

DHC: Hmm. Good question. It's definitely compelling and it's absolutely thrilling to hear the orchestra perform the music. Inventing it is wonderful. Actually writing it out it can be painstaking and maddening. Maintaining consistency between all the different players, making sure it's all legible, etc -- that's the kind of thing that can drive you crazy.

I didn't learn to read music until I was in my late teens, so my entire experience of music was as an improviser and inventor. Music simply didn't exists as a "written" form in my mind. It was something you just "did." For example, the idea of writing out dynamics (loud and soft) made no sense to me: you played loud if it seemed like the music needed to be loud, or if someone was singing loud; you played soft when the story called for soft. The idea of "accenting" a note made no sense to me. Since the music followed the words or the action, I just accented naturally, copying the sound of the language or the emotion of the play or the feeling of how people were moving on stage. I generally emphasized the "syllables" of music in the way that made sense as if the music were words. It was all intuitive. So it's a long process to train my brain to think of those marks on the page as "music."

Here are the questions she never got around to answering. Maybe next time ....

How many new pieces have you written for these shows? Can you describe them at all?

Why did you write so much new music for these shows?

(© Deborah Henson-Conant / 2004)