This interview is a reprint of one published in Journal of Contemporary Sounds, June 2010. Reproduced with permission.
At the door
Willis: From inside Who's there?
MacMillan: It's Ed MacMillian, from Contemporary Sounds. We talked earlier about an interview...
W: I don't do interviews!
M: But you said on the phone - just yesterday...
W: I don't do interviews!
M: What about American Music, August 1996? Or Gramophone, June 1985, or Rolling Stone, December 1979? Or for that matter, how about Cat Fancy June 1994, September 1992, February 1984, and May 1979?
W: Smear jobs! I've learned my lesson, and I'm not interested in explaining myself to anyone, especially some two-bit copy writer from some no-name music rag. On your way, now! Get going!
(Note: at this point I stepped away from the porch for about a half-hour before coming back and knocking again.)
W: Who is it!?
M: I'm from ASCAP. I'm here with your check.
W: You boys are doing hand delivery now? Well, that's nice. Opens door. Are you in a hurry? Would you like some tea?
M: Oh - my! Is this a bad time?
W: Not at all! Why do you say that?
M: You're naked!
W: No, I'm not.
M: I mean, you literally don't have any clothes on.
W: Appearances can be deceiving. Please, come in. I so rarely have visitors these days.
Inside
W: This tea is quite something, let you tell me. I came upon this particular blend when I was traveling through upper Tibet back in the `60s. It was at a certain Gompa in Ladakh, I recall. Lama Dao Lao Shin taught me how to make it while I was learning about the Eight Pillars on the Path to Enlightenment.
M: Path to Enlightenment? That sounds...
W: Boring, I know. But the tea is delicious, isn't it? I was hoping that trip would help get me out of that awful rut I was in with For Eighteen Instrumentalists and Tractor, but in the end I had to abandon it. Quite a shame, really. I suppose that marks the end of my indeterminate phase.
M: You wrote some really remarkable pieces in those years. I heard a performance of Under the Brooding Sun not too long ago, and I was stunned to find out it was you that wrote it.
W: That old thing? What a train wreck! I'd just heard a few things by Morty Feldman and didn't want to get left out of what he had going on. Twenty minutes of somebody opening and closing a pair of scissors, isn't it? Frankly I'm embarrassed that people still play it. No, my real masterpiece from that time is sadly, unknown.
M: Really? Please, tell me about it!
W: The trouble is, well, I can't really. That's the whole point. You know Cage's 4'33", don't you?
M: Know it? Of course I do. Who doesn't?
W: Yes, who doesn't, indeed. Well, I'll be honest, that really swept me off my feet. What an idea! What an idea! Halfway through the piece I was so utterly taken with the breathtaking silence that I literally forgot to breathe and woke up two hours later in the emergency ward. I haven't had the nerve to hear it live since - though I do have a few cherished recordings.
It got my mind working, though. Cage really proved that intentional sound is really, basically, it's really incidental to the actual music. That emerges from nature itself - you know, directly from Mother Earth or something like that. Us composers, we're just conduits, transferring all that energy between the air around us and the listener. So I had this idea for a piece, you know, where there wasn't any need for performance at all. It just exists. Just like that - all around us. It's beautiful.
M: What do you call it?
W: Call it? You think I'm so arrogant that I'd name something like that? It just is.
M: That's the best thing you've ever written?
W: Without a doubt. But there have been other highlights.
M: Yes, I'm curious about this tractor piece. What did you have in mind?
W: It was going to be quite the experience. Eighteen performers on stage - instrumentation unspecified, of course, (that was pretty much the rule back then) but of course I expected lots of saxophones and maybe a shawm or two. Then there would be the Tractor. Originally I envisioned it progressively running over each of the performers until there was only one left. Obviously that was a bit impractical - Yoko liked it, of course - but I had to figure out another way to get a similar effect without killing anyone.
M: And that's what led you to Tibet.
W: Basically, yes. That particular artistic question has dogged me my whole career, I think. It started with the Americana.
M: Oh, of course. The Stripes and Stars Overture - it was - well, it's certainly a novelty.
W: That's putting it nicely. That sort of thing was all the rage back during the war. I mean, I practically did that as a personal favor for Roosevelt...
M: You knew President Roosevelt? What was that like?
W: Not President Roosevelt. I'm talking about Lenny Roosevelt, who lived over in the battery back in those days. He had a little amateur band he conducted sometimes and needed something for a USO dance they were playing. Money was tight - you know, I think almost all composers' confessions start with those words, don't they?
M: You may be right. Still, the piece shows some real craftsmanship.
W: You flatter me. I wasn't the first to discover that you could play the Star-Spangled Banner upside-down and backwards on top of the America the Beautiful augmented and in a whole-tone scale. I think that was Ives. He enjoyed that piece, actually.
M: Really?
W: He came all the way out from Danbury to see the premier; surprised us all. Said it was sissy-boy music and told me I was an effeminate namby-pamby or something like that. I think that was his way of saying `nice work.'
M: So you knew Charles Ives?
W: Of course I did. (Take that, `My Father Knew Charles Ives' Adams!) He personally handled my Father's insurance policy, actually. I didn't know he was a composer until I was in my thirties and he won that Pulitzer. So there really wasn't a whole lot of influence, there, honestly. My first love - you know, my piano teacher, Mrs. Periwinkle, was one of those middle-class Chopin-lovers who got all blushy and nervous when I played a tritone, so I was into dissonant stuff by default at first just to get her goat - but I mean, things really came alive for me when I heard my first Stravinsky.
W: So you were a modernist from the start, then?
M: You could say that. I remember when I was just eleven years old Mrs. Periwinkle was forcing me to listen to some awful Elgar trash on her phonograph. I wrote him a letter telling him that his music was terrible and that he was an old man who ought to quit already. He never really wrote anything after that, did he?
M: Thank goodness. You weren't at the New York premier of Rite of Spring, like Carter, were you?
W: I - well, no. I did catch the third performance of Pulcinella, anyway. But I could tell Stravinsky was more than just your run-of-the-mill 17th century ballet arranger. He was a brilliant 17th century ballet arranger. But I jest, of course. I got a hold of some of his scores first thing I could and studied them religiously. From him I really gained a passion for objective, balanced music and a healthy respect for unbridled egotism. It's just so much easier than all that false humility those other composers put on, you know? Personally, I knew from the get-go that I was something pretty remarkable, even if my early stuff was just a lot of bad fake jazz and pseudo-profoundly "spiritual" polytonal chorales.
M: Am I right in understanding you spent a few years in Hollywood?
W: Oh, well, that came before the war. I just had to get away from New York and my overbearing parents (William and Angelie Willis, one a well-known haberdasher and the other a socialist socialite). So I made for LA and spent a few years writing some perfectly awful film music just to scrape by. Those were rough times, you know. I was lucky to get work at all. Take Hovhaness for example - Hovhaness, he was reduced to taking government hand-outs, the poor sap. Not that his music was worth anything anyhow, of course, but you get the picture. I mean it's just an example. I'm sure some talented composers had it hard as well. So I was happy to have work, at least. Well George - he did all right for himself, `til he dropped dead, poor guy.
W: Gershwin?
M: That's the one. I sort of detested him, actually. There was this one time we were hanging at at Arnie Schoenberg's place and he cheated me in a game of snooker. And I'm sure he got the idea for Porgie and Bess from my Negro folk-opera Dow' o'er by dat dere ol' Bayou, which was successful enough at the time but hasn't remained in the repertoire because it makes frequent use of a certain word that seemed perfectly innocent at the time but is apparently rather offensive these days. No doubt about it, that Gershiwn was a nasty little Jewi- - er, I mean nasty little jerk. I'm sorry, but all this talking is getting me a bit tired. I'm not forming my words quite right, it seems.
...
Of course, that was when I met Angela, too. What a story that was...
M: Angela Hayward, the MGM starlet?
W: That's the one. My first wife. We met at an after-after Oscar's party the year we both came up empty in our respective nominations. Mine for best score in the hit musical Youth's Gay Follies and her for best supporting actress in the comedy Blueberry Hill. What a body that one had! It almost made up for her lack of intelligence. But not quite. When the chance came for me to travel to Paris and study with Boulanger, she told me I had to choose -
M: And you did, apparently.
W: I didn't even have to think twice. She wound up dead in a bathtub full of barbiturates not too long after that, so I was lucky to get out when I did.
M: She was full of barbiturates?
W: No, the bathtub was, actually. Don't ask. But Paris - now that was a revelation. Imagine a naive little American boy, out of the country for the first time in gay Paree. I was simply giddy. Of course everything I learned there musically speaking was a waste, but in terms of personal development, it can't really be beat. And of course I met my second wife there; though oddly enough, I can't seem to remember her name. Angelina or Angelica or something; her name was sort of a coincidence, come to think of it. My therapist would have a field day with that if I ever told him. Anyway, that went by awfully fast. There was this sort of collective insanity right before the war started and half of the people I knew were either married or divorced that week - or both.
Anyway, the whole Neoclassical movement sort of beguiled me for a while, but eventually I really came to recognize its basically emotionally dishonest underpinnings. All any of us were doing at the time was warming our hands over a fire lit from the bones of dead genres and composers. It seemed bright and cozy enough at the time, but there was no life in it. And no future. I mean, there were a couple exception - Olivier Messiaen, for one, though I think it bugged him that I always called him Ollie - but even there you have this obnoxious, cloying Catholic mumbo-jumbo were all his pieces were `L'Ascension' this and `Dieu parmi' that. The Ondes Martenot stuff, that had legs, but it never really caught on. No, I don't regret that I left Paris in 1939. I mean, it wouldn't have been much fun to be there when the Nazis showed up, but even if they hadn't, the place was starting to close in on me. Henry James hits it right on the nose when he talks about the inherent cynicism and moral corruption you find there. Not to mention the fact that the place is filthy and swarming with gypsies.
M: So back to America you went.
W: Thankfully, yes, and not a moment too soon.
M: What was it exactly, then, that prompted such a startling shift in your style in the early fifties?
W: Well, I think I just summarized it for you. I needed to cleanse myself, find a new rigor and just a healthier perspective, if you will. All Boulanger ever did was make me copy fugues and inventions and improvise said fugues and inventions, and the go back and copy some more, and I felt like it was just another dead end. But then I heard Webern's Op. 21 and it was like a light just went off inside my cerebellum. What had before been a collection of uneasy misgivings floating indistinctly somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind abruptly coalesced into an outright disgust at my promiscuous use of harmony - and too many notes! Far too many notes! I immediately disavowed all my previous works and started on my Facsimiles. I guess it wound up having more notes than anything I'd ever written before - but they were all necessary, for once. Absolutely necessary.
M: Yes, Facsimiles was quite a departure. I can almost hear the influence of some contemporary Carter in that music.
W: Not a chance! I was there first.
M: I mean - sorry to assume, I was just -
W: You can't prove anything!
M: No, no, of course I can't.
W: It didn't help when Forte wrote that lousy book and stole all my ideas, either. But the serial thing was pretty useful. Really cleaned out my system, metaphorically, and on one occasion in `52, literally as well.
M: Which of the composers of that time would you say that you admired the most?
W: Again, I'm not exactly one of those so-called `generous' types that pretends to actually enjoy what his colleagues are doing. Most of it was worthless, though Babbitt had a few interesting ideas. He was really on to something when he started serializing the rhythm and timbre along with pitch. The only thing wrong with him was the he didn't take it far enough.
M: What more is there to serialize?
W: Why, the audience of course. That's why I wrote Segregations. A lot of people misunderstood that one, which is probably why you don't see it done very often these days; but I really meant it as an abstract statement, not actually - you know - literal, or anything.
M: Of course.
W: If I could do it over again, I think I'd specify that the black people sit in the front of the concert hall instead of the back. Or maybe that would have gotten me in even more hot water. You know, technically I'm still under boycott from the NAACP. Those people don't really get what I'm all about, though I suppose it's not entirely their fault. These are very sophisticated ideas.
M: A few exceptions aside, though, that was a successful time for you, was it not?
W: Oh, sure. I was awfully busy shuttling back and forth between Colombia, Harvard, UCLA, Princeton, and so on. It seemed like every music department in the country wanted me to come and explain all the technical minutiae of my latest piece. That started to get old, eventually; I remember on one occasion, I had just flown in from the West Coast and was completely exhausted. Dave Johnson was showing me something or other involving a tape recording over at Harvard and I fell asleep on the poor kid. A little embarrassing, for sure. And to be honest, I was just throwing those pieces together during plane rides and stuff.
M: That's remarkable! Those scores are some of the most complex ever created. How did you do it?
W: I wrote small. At any rate, it was at one of these visits to Colombia that I became involved with Angelita Gomez; a little Mexican chica over at Princeton studying philosophy, probably not even - well, I know how old she was but it might not be a good idea to say; let's just say she was eighteen - she was capable beyond her years in several respects.
M: Your third wife.
W: Yes, and this one lasted five years; a personal best of sorts. She was the one that got me involved in the Downtown scene; she had a couple hippie friends that used to frequent Terry Riley's all-nighters - well, I suppose hippies hadn't quite been invented yet, but you get the idea. They dragged me along to one, and I'd never felt so old in my life, even now that I'm 100. This kid was blowing his heart out on a saxophone and driving that crazy little harmonium into the ground, and here I was worrying about whether or not I was going to get a good inverted double canon at the minor ninth out of my twelve-tone row.
W: So the most critically acclaimed composer in America turns his back on Serialism and writes Meditations on the Eternal Chord
M: Exactly. It took the critics quite a while to realize that I was for real. My goal had always been to keep the audience fully awake and attentive, to the point where people often walked out of my concerts unable to even blink properly. In this piece I sought to put as many of them to sleep as possible. I've had performances where even the players nod off after awhile. Some of the finest interpretations of any of my works. It was hard to sustain that kind of lack of energy, though, and I really reached a dead end on this path faster than usual. Hence my trip to Tibet. It was the sixties, of course, and Spiritual Enlightenment was all the rage. At least I got this delicious tea out of it. You wouldn't like another cup, would you?
W: No, thanks. It is quite - distinctive, though.
M: Thanks. I didn't have much more luck, creatively, with my trip to Senegal in `73, either; by this time Angelita and I had been separated for several years and I was feeling restless. That hotshot Stevie Reich seemed to have gotten something out of his Africa trip, so I figured it couldn't hurt to give it a try. Well, I guess I was expecting something more... primitive, I guess. Just two years had gone by since he had been to Africa and experienced all that authentic drumming. Meanwhile I had to dust off my French (of all things!) just to talk to anybody, and none of the people who worked at my resort even knew what a sabar or atama was. I think I taught them more about drumming than they taught me. That just goes to show what tragic results we're getting from the rampant cultural appropriation that we're committing upon primitive peoples such as those.
W: Yet somehow you managed to stay relevant.
M: Of course I did. What saved me were two things, really: first was that I finally found a measure of spiritual fulfillment as a member of a local group of Reformed Egypto-Syriac Utopian-Zoroastrians. The other was a return to the expressive language of tonality. I don't really remember if it was me or George Rochberg that instigated it, but at some point I felt an urge to go back to the tension between concreteness and abstraction, and my long neglected tonal vocabulary suddenly seemed urgently needed again. That's when I began my cycle of symphonies.
W: You're up to 24 now, aren't you?
M: Yes, that's correct. They just seem to be pouring out of my mind faster than I can write them down. Number sixteen in particular has been my most lucra- - err - successful.
W: That's the one with 24 variations on Pachabel's Canon in D, right?
M: No, actually, I think you're thinking of something else. It's actually got a set of variations on Fur Elise.
W: What do you make of the increasing fragmentation of genres we're seeing as the old distinction between avant garde and conservative seems to be breaking down?
M: Frankly, it has me worried. There was a time not too long ago, when people like me got a certain amount of, oh, I don't know... deference, I guess you could say. If I woke up one morning and decided that Chance music was out and improvised vocal clicks were in, then you could be sure that the next morning, every Tom, Dick, and Harry (with Charles Wuorinen bringing up the rear, I expect) would have his own piece following suit with his own collection of vocal fricatives. I use that as an example because it actually happened back in the spring of `67.
W: Oh, of course, the April-May Click-in. I believe there was a festival devoted to those extended techniques...
M: Yes, but by then I'd already moved on to something else. You can't sit still in music. It's fatal. If I'd sat still at all by now I'd be a dead man. Always explore, always push the boundaries, whether in matters of technique, or taste, or common decency, or whatever you like. Some of these young composers nowadays worry me. Not that my music is even all that different from theirs these days, but they seems to just do what they want because they want to, whereas I am compelled by the enormous powerful force of musical history to compose music practically against my will. More credulous individuals such as Bach and Stravinsky saw it as the hand of God.
You turn your back on the past at your own peril. Mostly, people of that milieu just aren't acting like great composers, and if they can't see - or present - themselves for what they are, how will anyone else?
W: I have a quote here from Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times - "While Roscoe Willis once had his sail firmly set in the direction of prevailing musical trends, he seems to have cast himself adrift into a sea of meandering melodies and kitschy feel-good finales that do little service to his long-term reputation, or to his various neglected masterpieces. We can only hope that he has one last color to show us in his long, chameleon-like career, or else we will lose one more fine composer to the nightmarish wasteland that is the American contemporary musical scene." What do you make of that?
M: Are you sure Tommasini wrote that? That doesn't sound like him.
W: Oh, sorry. I had them switched. That one was Andrew Clements of The Guardian. Here's the Tommasini: "Roscoe Willis, the unjustly forgotten centenarian American Master, has provided us with yet another unforgettable symphonic experience. At once deeply personal and strikingly objective, it exposes a mind still at the height of its powers - and still capable of surprises."
M: Do you think I could have my check now?
