AJL=Anthony
Joseph Lanman
DBK=Dennis
Bathory-Kitsz
DG=David
Gunn
DBK
– Tony Lanman welcome! What
are you going to tell us about yourself?
AJL
– I can tell you my life story if you want (laughs)…
DBK
– (laughs) Let’s start with it – since you’re so young
it won’t take long.
AJL
– (laughs) That’s right.
DBK
– Do tell – where did you come from – you don’t sound
like you’re from
DG
– Do you want to move this way so you can see him, or do you want to see
him? (he’s asking if I want a better view of DBK)
AJL
– I don’t have to or, even, want to really.
DG
– Yes yes, I understand.
AJL
– I come from
DBK
– Ahh – that explains some things…
AJL
– In Des Moines.
DG
– des moi!
AJL
– But moved outta there when I was only a year old. Grew up in
DBK
– And we still let you on the show.
DG
– How about them Oilers.
DBK
– Woo!
DG
– Do they still have the Oilers?
Nevermind…
AJL
– (laughing) Yeah – so…
DG
– Yes carry on – we’re doing fine here.
AJL
– Yes,
DBK&DG
– (laughing)
AJL
– So, that’s what I did.
I was a normal kid and never played any instruments and never played any
music. I started playing electric
guitar at, I don’t know, eleven years old probably – twelve, and
played rock music…all the way up until 22 probably…age 22
maybe…
DBK
– That would make it what year?
AJL
– That would make it umm…
DBK
– Just so my back can feel worse.
AJL
– That would make it 1995.
DBK&DG
– (both grunt and groan as if in pain)
AJL
– (laughs) So I was playing old, old music like Nirvana! I mean the oldies!
DBK
– Yeah they were all dead by then – well at least one of them.
AJL
– So that’s what I did up until that time…
DBK
– You know I heard Courtney Love hit someone with a music stand last
night.
AJL
– Is that true?
DBK
– At a concert, yeah.
AJL
– That’s pretty cool.
DBK
– I just thought I would tell you that.
AJL
– I’d like to do that.
DG
– Wow. Can we pursue this
later?
DBK
– What – hitting people with music stands? You can write an essay.
DG
– Yeah, I will.
DBK
– So you were playing, and then you stopped
AJL
– Well I didn’t stop playing, but I just stopped that kind of music
and went into another kind of music.
DBK
– Did you go to school, did it just happen by accident, did you hear
something that was an epiphany?
DG
– Courtney Love would - to that – to – person maybe? (ed. ?????)
AJL
– Well, I got hit in the head with a stand…
DBK&DG
– (laughs)
AJL
– I don’t know if there was one piece that I heard that was an
epiphany, I don’t really have a story like that – like I heard
Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra
or something, and ever since then I wanted to be a composer. There wasn’t really a moment like
that that happened. It was just
kind of a slow process.
DBK
– Well when you realize how important it is to have an epiphany, you will
make one up.
AJL
– No it’s not – it’s not important.
DBK
– (laughs) OK.
AJL
– So, I think I had never really been exposed to concert music, classical
music, anything like that. Nobody
in my family – although they love music, no one plays an instrument, and
I wasn’t exposed to that kind of music. Until…I kind of exposed myself
– haha.
DG
– Ha – whew – ok.
DBK
– (laughs) I’ll let it go – I just have to let that one go
by. But how does that just
happen? Did you press the wrong
button on the radio? I mean..I
don’t know of too many people who just sort of, suddenly, begin to listen
to that out of nowhere.
There’s gotta be something in your experience…
AJL
– Yeah, I think there were a few things that happened that exposed me to
a few things that I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise. In the very, very beginning – one
example that I can remember now – is when I was a teenager, I used to
love this band Faith No More. They
came out with this album – I don’t even remember what song it was
now, but there were samplings in the song of Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8. I
didn’t know what it was, but I looked in the liner notes, and it said
there were samples from this piece, and so I went and got the recording of that
piece, and it kind of blew my mind.
I just started to explore more from there. So I went to college right out of high
school, but I was studying something other than music.
DG
– This was still
AJL
– Still Houston. I was going
to the
DBK
– What were you studying when you started?
AJL
– I was studying Radio and Television.
DG
– Repair?
AJL
– (laughs) That’s probably the only way I could’ve made money
doing it. I mean I was studying,
you know… I mean, it was
pointless – the theory of…
DBK
– Yeah, just look at us (laughs)
AJL
– I was taking classes on the History of Animation and all these things,
so anyway. While it was fun
watching cartoons in class, it wasn’t really conducive to anything. So I knew I wanted to go into music
after about five semesters of this, and I knew I wanted to go study this music,
and hey, I want to be a composer – naïve – as I still am. So, my fifth semester, I just, one day
decided I had had it, and after my class I went down and dropped out –
dropped all my classes. I walked to
the music school and said “I want to go to the music school here”. They said “well, what do you want
to do?” I said “Well, I
want to study Composition”.
They said, “Great, well what do you play?” I said, “I play
guitar”. They said “oh,
you can’t go here”.
DBK
– (laughs)
AJL
– I said, “I don’t care!
I just want to study composition” “Well, we don’t have
a guitar program, and you have to study your instrument”, whatever. So then I found out that I had to play
classical guitar to go to the
DBK
– Did you bring anything early along with you? Something you could embarrass yourself
with?
DG
– Something from your Nirvana days?
AJL
– Oh man – no I didn’t – and there’s no way that
I would. (laughs)
DG
– Look at all those things…he has all these? Oh they’re duplicates – oh wait,
are they? Oh I see – Eleven
– is that eleven years of age?
DBK
– I wish – so let’s hear the earliest possible one that
we’ve got on these things.
AJL
– Wow – they’re not even going to, like, give me a choice
here. So I’m going to lie or
something. Well, my earliest works
date from 1998, so it’s not that long ago.
DBK
– hmm – ok – my back hurts even worse now.
AJL
– Really, the earliest work on here is what you just played the beginning
of.
DG
– Ohh – the Duo 46?
AJL
– Yeah
DG
– Oh – Sonata 46!
(they play the beginning lick)
AJL
– Yep – that’s it!
I stole that from one of my own pieces, a solo flute piece…
DBK
– An earlier piece?
AJL
– From the same year, but earlier.
DBK
– Oh good, well let’s hear the whole piece, the whole Duo 46
piece. It’s a good thing to
introduce you with anyway – it’s well played. Tell the story of how this came to be.
DG
– How did you meet these folks?
AJL
– Well, just out of sheer luck.
They were attending the
DG
– Plus it has this beginning lick – I mean, it captivated me the
first time I heard it. Whew.
DBK
– Absolutely – and he just gave us the name for today’s show
– clueless and excited.
(laughter)
DBK
– Our guest is Tony Lanman.
Here it is, a piece for Duo 46, this is Sonata 46 from 1998.
Audio –
Sonata 46
DBK
– Good thump at the end, I like that. Sonata 46, Duo 46 playing, music by
Anthony Joseph Lanman, our guest today on Kalvos & Damian. That’s a dog gone good piece for
just like, oh…I’ll write ya somethin’.
AJL
– Thanks – thank you.
DBK
– How do you work? How do you
write a piece like that? Do you
start out with crystal clear ideas, or do you just fool around?
AJL
– At that time?
DBK
– Oh so long ago…
AJL
– (laughs) Oh so long ago. It
was basically, at that time I had that beginning lick (sings beginning lick) I lifted from, like I said earlier, a solo
flute piece of mine that I’d written previously. Then I had this lick and like any
clueless composer first starting out, they just kind of stumble along from
beginning to end, you know, kind of stumbling around until you have a
piece. You know, there was no real
method, except that I had this sort of loose, one movement sonata form,
blah-blah whatever. Umm –
yeah, just really kind of stumbled through, and ended up with something decent.
DBK
– Yeah – yes indeed.
DG
– Has anyone else played it?
AJL
– No. A lot of people,
especially guitar players really like the piece a lot, because guitar players
love to show off, and if you know anything about the guitar world, it’s
very male dominated, and it’s all about, you know, who has the biggest…whatever.
DG
– Sequins.
DBK
– Sequins?
DG
– Yes, sequins.
DBK
– Allright.
AJL
– The piece is very flashy – you know, I wrote it to be this way,
and Matt is an incredible player.
To make a long story short, every other guitarist that has looked at this
piece – they first heard it and they’re very interested, then they see what they have to do, and they go
tell me to…I’m not going to tell you what they tell me…
DBK
– (laughs)
AJL
– This is a very good piece in how not to write for the guitar. Very, very good piece in how not to
write for the guitar.
DG
– It sounds idiomatic.
AJL
– Yeah, it does because Matt is very, very good. I would never have inflicted these kind
of licks on a classical guitarist had I not known it was going to be Matt that
was doing it. So if you know
you’re writing for an incredible guitar player that has these kinds of
strengths – the fast scale work, very technical, very clean, all this
kind of stuff, then you can write something like this. If you’re just writing generally,
never, never do that.
Station break
DBK
– Our guest is Tony Lanman
DG
– Also from
DBK
– Also from
DG
– Yes, carry on with your story from,
AJL
– Well, I went to the
DBK
– And you did end up studying composition?
AJL
– I did yeah. I went to the
DBK
– Just four years ago.
AJL
– In 2000 I graduated.
DBK
– (laughs)
DG
– Oww – I’ve got this pain in my back too now.
DBK
– He graduated in this millennium – oohhh.
AJL
– (laughs) Yeah, and then went
to
DBK
– Since you’re so in touch with the sort of, educational system
right now, because you’re in it, what’s it like? What do you do?
AJL
– It’s very free – I can’t speak for other schools, I
can only speak for IU, but at IU it’s very open – extremely
open-ended. You can basically do
whatever you want. You can write
whatever kind of music you want – I mean, as long as they think it’s
concert music.
DBK
– Who’s they, I mean do you study with somebody, do you sit down
with somebody, how does it work? Do
you just sort of work at home and bring something in once a month, do you
attend something – a seminar class or masterclass?
AJL
– Well, usually how it works is we have a weekly “lesson”.
DBK
– Those were air quotes folks.
AJL -
…lesson where it can be anything from your teacher plowing through the
score note for note, rhythm for rhythm, or you know, sitting there talking
about some conceptual thing, or, you know, going to Bear’s Place and
having a burger. And there’s
masterclasses of course – more like a seminar.
DBK
– What happens in those? You
say they plow through a score note for note, measure for measure – what
does that involve? Does somebody
sit there with you and say, “What do you mean by this?”, or do they
say “this doesn’t seem to work orchestrationally” or do they
say “this is a really good idea”, I mean what kind of stuff goes
on?
AJL
– Right – It’s different for different people. I think it’s more common for the
undergrads to get the note crunching, and the umm, “I don’t think
this will work” and the orchestrational things. It usually just…I think a lot of
the professors don’t like listening to MIDI renditions of things, and so
you bring in a score and they just plunk it through on piano to kind of get a
sense of harmonies or whatever.
Just trying to get a sense of what they’re looking at, and maybe
trying to make sense of what you’re trying to do. You know, sometimes you might bring in
some kind of fragment, as you guys both know, and you’re trying to explain
the overall concept. Sometimes I
imagine it would be pretty hard for them to really get what you’re trying
to do.
DBK
– Do you learn anything, or is this just kind of, you give them money and
they give you a degree?
AJL
– No no, I’ve been very, very satisfied.
DG
– Another satisfied customer!
AJL
– Another satisfied customer, yeah.
I think I’ve learned a lot and I think I continue to learn. The environment there – they
really encourage you to move around from teacher to teacher. It’s not like, where you go to
study with someone, and you’re with that one person forever, and
you’re their student. So, everybody has something different to
offer, and you move around, and, yeah…
DG
– So who are the “they” at
AJL
– That would be Don Freund, Claude Baker, P.Q. Phan, Sven-David
Sandström, David Dzubay, Eugene O’Brien, and Jeffrey Hass in
computer music.
DG
– But wait, I don’t think any of those are affiliated with the
AJL
– (pause) no.
DG
– Oh – how did we miss that?
You don’t write for the marching band?
AJL
– The marching band!? No, no
one has written for the marching band.
DG
– Oh man – what an opportunity!
AJL&DBK
– (laughing)
AJL
– I was thinking about doing a little Sonata
46 for the marching band but…
for trombone.
DG
– Yeah of course!
AJL
– Yeah, so it’s been really good there. Really positive experience. There’s no cut-throat competition,
everybody’s really cool and supportive, and, yeah. It’s been a great place.
DG
– And do you have a stable of musicians who will play your music?
AJL
– Oh man, there’s a barn full of musicians at this place.
DG - *gasp* Oh, hurt!
DBK
– (laughing)
AJL
– I mean, just last semester, we did three movements of this alto flute concerto
that I had just written, and I mean, I and the conductor put together the whole
orchestra – in a very short amount of time. I was told that I had this spot kind of
last minute because someone backed out, and one rehearsal, they did a great
job. You can do things like this at
this place. They have literally
hundreds of amazing musicians walking around at your disposal.
DBK
– You let slip in there just a little thing that always intrigues
us. You said something to the
effect of “they don’t like to listen to
AJL
- Yeah – not all of them
don’t like it. There’s
a couple of them who don’t mind it at all, and who actually like it, I
think. But – I don’t
know, it will be interesting to see when people of my generation become –
in their positions. I don’t
know if it’s a generational thing, or what. I don’t mind, personally,
listening to MIDI renditions for a live piece, because you obviously know the
limitations of
DBK
– (laughs) OK. Let’s hear something else of
yours, what’s a good piece to follow with?
AJL
– Umm…. Why don’t
we hear Eleven?
DBK
– Give us a way in to this piece, and we’ll listen to it and come
back. We’ve got fifteen
minutes ahead, so give us a cushion.
AJL
– OK. This piece was
commissioned by a group in
DBK
– When we come back we’ll talk a little bit about MP3.Com because
it’s quite a saga and quite a sad ending in a way, but first let’s
talk about this piece.
AJL
– Right. So, this came out of
that. They discovered me on this
site, and they were doing a concert of all American, young-ish composers, and
they had never had a piece written for their whole group. Everything they had done up to that
point had been sub sets of this whole group. And so they asked me if I wanted to
write a piece for their whole group, and of course I …
DBK
– You bet! Like “oh, I
– I’m not sure” – like that would happen!
AJL
– Yeah right. So um –
yeah! So, I did, I wrote this
piece, and umm, I don’t know how much dirt you want behind it.
DG
– What are the instruments?
AJL
– The instruments in this piece are flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass
clarinet/tenor sax, with the clarinet player doubled on saxophone,
flugelhorn/trumpet, electric guitar, 2 percussionists, piano, violin, viola,
cello, bass.
DG
– Woah.
AJL
– Yeah. And, my big challenge
here was…
DBK
– That’s fifteen – that’s not eleven that’s
fifteen.
AJL
– I included the doublings.
DBK
– I see.
AJL
– Yeah (laughs). Trust me, there’s eleven
players, and the big challenge in this piece was the electric guitar –
you know – balancing the electric guitar with the rest of the
ensemble. I knew I wanted to write
kind of a flashy showy, kind of chamber concerto type piece, and I wanted the
guitar to be abrasive and distorted, and, all these kind of things. So – I think it worked.
DBK
– Our guest is Tony Lanman, here it is – Eleven!
Audio: Eleven
DBK
– Tony Lanman – Eleven! As it turns out, not played by
Eleven.
DG
– well, eleven people…
AJL
– But not played by Ensemble – yeah, that was not Ensemble
Eleven. That was an ad-hoc group
from
DG
– From – good barn…
DBK
– People you just sort of kidnapped off the green.
AJL
– Uh-huh. People I convinced
to do it.
DG
– (laughs) They sounded
convincing!
AJL
– Yeah, yeah! I was super happy
with the performance.
DBK
– Very lush – does that account for your success on MP3.Com?
AJL
– I think so – I think a lot of my stuff is, I guess pretty
accessible to a lot of people.
It’s got a lot of, you know, pop music and stuff in it, so –
I think so, yeah. I think
that’s one reason, yeah.
DBK
– Tell us about the saga of MP3.Com as you remember it. How you got involved, and what it meant,
and what it actually was.
AJL
– I got on very, very early – I remember we were talking about this
earlier. When I first got on there
were only a handful of people – maybe four or five – you being one,
and umm…
DBK
– Jeff Harrington, one of our guests.
AJL
– Also Jeff Harrington, yes.
So, it was great back then you know.
DBK
– It was a site where composers, songwriters, you name it could upload
their music. It was genre based, so
if you were looking for something you could find it pretty easily. They featured things every week.
AJL
– Right, right. It was all,
as far as the composer was concerned, it was free web space, it was unlimited
storage for music files, you know – it was a pretty good deal. I had a lot of success with that
site.
DBK
– You said you had 100,000 people listen to your stuff.
AJL
– Yeah, by the time the whole thing was done, I had well over 100,000
plays which went way beyond what I thought would ever happen with that
site. I received commissions
because of that site, and because of that site alone.
DBK
– More listeners in your short stint on MP3.Com than Mozart in his entire
lifetime.
AJL
– Well…OK if that’s true (laughing)
I guess so! I never thought of
it quite that way but…but anyway – yeah, that was a great, great
thing, especially in the early days, you got paid based on how many downloads
you got, and…
DBK
– That’s always nice.
AJL
– Yeah, it was like a little free money, you know, here and there…
DBK
– (sarcastically) Free money
– you do the work – right – you know – and you
don’t expect to get paid, yeah sure – free money.
AJL
– Right, right – That’s very true. It’s not free money at all. It was very, very nice. Of course in our society, it seemed like
free money, although it wasn’t really. But, that took a very – slightly
downhill turn very gradual kind of, and all of a sudden, the very end was kind
of like, got guillotined really, really quickly.
DG
– What happened – explain this.
DBK
– This is one of those stories of modern technology. By the time MP3.Com was in its maturity,
which was only about three years after it started, it had the largest audio
archive in one place in the history of humanity. And then, it started to go downhill in
terms of revenues, because the ads were not generating the revenues that it had
been. They tried to make the site
generate more ads by dividing pages for composers and songwriters and bands up
into sections, one with a biography, one with the music, one with… all
sorts of things. It became
cumbersome. And so it became
expensive to use. They started
charging fees to post there and get any attention at all, and then they sold
the whole mess to Cnet – the whole MP3.Com thing to Cnet, and Cnet says
because it did not care to re-negotiate the license agreements with all the
artists, which seems like a flimsy excuse because a single email could’ve
done that, they claim to have erased, it seems like… – well you
mentioned earlier Tony Lanman, you mentioned earlier that it was like the
burning of the Library of Alexandria!
AJL
– Yeah, it was kind of. It
was this huge storehouse, and then all of a sudden, in a kind of flash
it’s gone. It was really
weird as an artist, because, literally one minute I’m going along and
everything’s great, and then in – how much notice did we get? A month maybe?
DBK
– Oh, not that!
AJL
– Yeah, maybe three weeks or something, we get this email that says
“thank you for having your stuff on MP3.Com, it’s been sold, as of
December 12th or something, all files will be deleted, thank you
very much, see ya later” you know, kinda like that. And so, it was just all of a sudden,
like one day, and then right when they said they would, it was gone.
DBK
– For those who were sort of later-comers to the online world, it seems
like, well so what, but it just seemed to me that somewhere down the line,
twenty, thirty, forty years, someone will say – how did that happen? How was that allowed to happen? How
did this sort of corporate theocracy allow the destruction of this massive
archive of creativity with the stroke of a contract signature?
AJL
– Right. I suspect – I
don’t know this is the conspiracy theorist in me, but I suspect
there’s more behind it because – with this MP3.Com thing, and all
the other things – you know, the Napster and all that kind of stuff
– I mean really for a while there, all the record companies, they really,
really did lose control of things.
It went completely out of their hands at an incredible speed. I think they just didn’t see it,
and then all of a sudden – it just happened. And so, I think maybe there’s an
intensive push now to kind of get some of that back. You know – I don’t know – I don’t have anything
to substantiate that really ,as far as MP3.Com is concerned. For us, for the classical artists,
it’s not like I had Virgin records knockin’ at my door or something
– like I was taking any money away from them (laughs) – but there were pop artists on there that might
have been.
DBK
– So how – is that how you got famous? I mean I have this biography in front of
me – let me rattle the page that I have, but it tells me about reviews in
Gramophone Magazine, intense, and The Strad, wild, edgy and raw to
contemplative, sonorous and seductive…
DG
– Ooo!
DBK
– …and performances in Turkey and Cyprus and England and Greece and
performances by the California EAR Unit and others. How does that happen to a guy who was
just still working on his BA four years ago?
AJL
– It happens because of the internet. The internet kind of – I kind of
went right along with it – you know everything on the internet moves at
hyper speed, and that’s kind of what happened to me. You know, early on I just put stuff up
on MP3 and whatever – so my friends and my Mom could hear –
whatever…
DBK
– (laughs)
AJL -
…whatever just happened last week at the concert, and uh, other people actually started to
listen. I don’t know where
they came from, I don’t know who these people are, but somebody listened,
and some things got around, and that’s what happened. So I was particularly bummed when the
MP3 thing went away. I think I got
lucky in that I got into it early enough, to where I could – not have to
compete with a thousand other guys on their Casio keyboards throwing ten pieces
a day up on the site. I got in
early enough to where I got my pieces, I guess in the rankings or whatever it
was, you know, so they were always up in the first few pages. So it might not have been as good for me
if I had gotten in later. As a lot
of my friends did – many, many talented people that I pushed to be on MP3
because I had such great success with it, and I think that everybody was
expecting, you know, all these 100,000 plays and whatever, so I think later on
it was a lot tougher to break through all of that – you know –
really, a lot of garbage on there towards the end because you fall into that
– it’s really great that it’s this free thing that anybody
can post on there, and it really sucks that it’s all free and anybody can
post on there.
DBK
– (laughs)
AJL
– It’s the whole, kind of a double-edged sword, so…
DBK
– Um-hmm. Let’s hear
some more.
AJL
– OK! Is it my choice again?
DBK
– Of course, it’s always your choice! We’ll just over-ride the things we
don’t like.
AJL
– (laughs) You can pump Wagner
or something over it later.
DBK
– Please no commercials for the competition. They’re currently running the Das Reingold over at the public monolith
radio.
AJL
– That’s right, and uh…
Let’s hear il dolce stile
nuovo.
DBK
– Allright, that’s good!
2001 piece what’s this – who’s this for –
what’s the performance?
AJL
– This was for nobody, this was just something that I wrote for myself,
and then shortly after I wrote it, a piano trio in
DBK
– We’re here live with Anthony Joseph Lanman on Kalvos and
Damian. Our number is 802-454-7762
if you’d like to speak with him.
In the meantime we’ll listen to this composition il dolce stile nuovo.
Audio: il dolce
stile nuovo
DBK
– il dolce stile nuovo – music
by Tony Lanman. That was recorded
in
AJL
– The story of Prague?
DBK
– Where you recorded this and how wonderful it was.
AJL
– Yeah, it was a really, really cool recording studio that we did this
in. It was a converted, seventeenth
century ballroom – huge, huge ornate ballroom that was really, really
interesting because it still had a lot of its original splendor, I guess you
could say, and was really, really beautiful – really high ceilings, and
it also had things where, later on – I don’t know when they did
this – when they added electricity – instead of – you know,
putting it into the walls they just got a hammer it looked like and just beat
the plaster, just beat a big groove out of the plaster wall, and stuck some
wires in there. So you had these
big grooves that had been beat out of this wall, and chords running through
them where you could see them, and umm – pretty interesting. Very interesting experience.
DBK
– And great players!
AJL
– Great players, yeah.
DG
– Umm… No, sorry I just
lost my thought – it went past and now I can’t remember it. Well we did want to ask about, you have
graduated from guitar and gone on to lute?
AJL
– That’s right.
DBK
– How did that happen?
AJL
– I just – frankly I got a little sick of the classical guitar
repertoire, and a little tired of tending my nails, which is a process like an
oboe player has to go through – you know, making reeds all the time and
stuff. You know, you have to file
your nails, and buff them with special sand paper, and all this kind of stuff. And I’ve always loved that
music. I’ve always loved
early music, especially John Dowland – love John Dowland. I just had played a lot of that stuff on
guitar and wanted to play it on lute, and being at
DG
– Have you thought about writing music for lute?
AJL -
Yes, absolutely, in fact right now I’m writing a piece for cimbalom and
theorbo.
DG
– They’re a duo – don’t they play the
DBK
– (laughs) They’re
lawyers – they’re lawyers too.
DG
– Oh, they’re lawyers.
The theorbo is that giant bass lute, with the additional courses, and
then the cimbalom is a hammered dulcimer.
AJL
– Yeah, so, I plan on doing a lot more with early instruments –
viols – and umm – yeah, viols and lutes especially.
DBK
– You have a piece here on Dowland as well?
AJL
– Yes.
DBK
– And it happens to be my favorite Dowland of which I wrote and
arrangement, In Darkness Let Me Dwell.
AJL
– Oh OK.
DBK
– So what have you done with it here?
AJL
– This is the final movement to this concerto that I wrote for alto flute
and string orchestra, and this is kind of meant to be, kind of an epilogue to
the piece. The rest of the
movements are all based on different pieces of Dowland…
DBK
– Musically based on, not just the titles?
AJL
– Yes, and some more obviously than others. In some there’s some literal
quotation, or fragmented, distorted quotation - in others, in much more
abstract ways. But this last one
– the song In Darkness Let Me Dwell
is so beautiful and wonderful and profound…
DBK
– It is a very amazing song, you remember it right?
DG
– Except for that last wrong note…
DBK
– Oh right right right – yeah.
It’s an amazing song because at the very end, Dowland stops the
accompaniment of the song with a suspention on a note above the tonic, then
let’s the note drop down after the chords have gone away. It’s an amazing piece of work.
AJL
– Yeah – so I felt that I wanted to, in the sixth movement of the
piece to really end the piece. And
then this movement here is basically what I termed a “stylized
performance” for the alto flute, two violas and bass – just this
quartet. And that’s basically
what it is, it’s basically the Dowland is what it is, but just stretched and compressed in certain
places, and I fleshed out a lot of the counterpoint with my own, and I just
felt like this would be kind of a profound closure to the piece.
DBK
– Let’s listen to your ideas on his famous one, Flow My Tears, and then we’ll
listen to In Darkness Let Me Dwell.
AJL
– OK.
DBK
– OK – our guest is Tony Lanman.
Audio –
Seven Lamentations on the Death of John Dowland I. Flow My Tears
DBK
– We took a little interruption after the first of these because
they’re all so lovely, that we’re going to hear, instead of just
two, we’re going to hear all three.
We heard the Seven Lamentations,
the first one Flow My Tears, and
we’re now going to hear the, Seven
Lamentations, the Semper Dowland,
Semper Dolens, or as some historians will now say, it’s supposed to
rhyme – Semper Dowland (pronounces
it Doe-land), Semper Dolens.
DG
– Oh no!
DBK
– The musicologists decided his name is now John Doeland because of that one piece of evidence.
DG
– Oi…
DBK
– (laughs) Uh-huh – Then
we’ll wrap it up with the last of these In Darkness Let Me Dwell.
Audio –
Seven Lamentations on the Death of John Dowland IV. Semper Dowland, Semper
Dolens
Audio –
Seven Lamentations on the Death of John Dowland VII. In Darkness Let Me Dwell
DBK
– EEEEEEEHEHEHE!!
DG
– Amazingly, there are three people in this room – three
contemporary composers who are sub-vocalizing the entire piece!
DBK
– Sang the whole piece – we sang the whole piece from beginning to
end along with that! (laughing) My
goodness, it’s been… 25 years since I’ve sung that piece.
DG
– But what a glorious piece.
DBK
– (laughing loudly)
DG
– And it still works!
DBK
– Any you, Tony Lanman, you left that one pretty much intact, you just
orchestrated that one.
AJL
– Yeah, pretty much.
DBK
– A few rhythmical extensions here and there, but..
AJL
– Yeah.
DBK
– Fantastic – Three honorifics here to John Dowland (pronounces it Doe-land), or John
Dowland, depending on which side of the musicological divide you stand. (laughs) First “Flow My Tears”, the
second “Semper Dowland, Semper dolens” and the last “In
Darkness Let Me Dwell”. Thank
you caller for calling up and letting us know how depressed we were making
you. (laughs)
AJL
– (laughing)
DG
– And we can do it here.
DBK
– We share it with the weather.
(laughs) Ahh – tears
for all. Ahh, goodness –
where you goin’ from here Anthony Joseph Lanman? What’s your next project?
AJL
– My next project is this cimbalom and theorbo piece – I
can’t remember if I told you about that on or off the air before, but
yeah, doing that piece.
DBK
– Sort of extended plans – sort of, compositional development, ways
of thinking, synthesizing your previous sort of pop music experience with this
now or discarding it entirely or using this PhD as a springboard to new ways of
composing?
AJL
– I think I’m just on a continual quest to develop and find my own
voice – my own personal voice.
All these things will still be there – all these pop music
things… I was once told by a
well known American composer long ago that I should stop listening to pop music
immediately, and never ever listen to it again. But these things have been ingrained into
my musical psyche from the time I was a kid, so it’s always going to come
out in my music in some way. So,
right now I don’t have any plans to throw anything out and try to do
something radically different than I’ve been doing, other than just
develop – you know, keep developing my own thing and try to integrate
things that I’ve been doing lately like playing the lute. I’ve been playing a lot of early
music, and I’ve been finding that what’s really absent in pop music
is a true sense, really, of delicacy – true delicacy.
DG
– Well you can’t be a headbanger and be delicate.
AJL
– No you can’t. So this
is kind of something that’s new to me, you know, I grew up on pop music,
I grew up on rock music, I grew up playing Metallica or something, so this is kind
of a… revelation to me, this sense of delicacy. I think this flute concerto is one of my
first forays into something dealing with different things on a real delicate
level – or a certain level of delicacy, where you have the other extreme
– a piece like “Eleven”, where you have the electric guitar
banging and you have a guy banging on a brake drum – you know –
nothing delicate about that. So, I
think I’ll continue to explore this and continue to explore writing for
early instruments, and mixing that with new instruments like electric guitar
and odd instrumentations, and these kinds of things.
DBK
– I’m thinking that, you know for example, one of the pieces that I
heard as a developing composer was Charles Wuorinen’s variations on early
music called the “Bearbeitungen ueber das Glogauer
Liederbuch”, where he did these marvelous, note-for-note re-castings of
these early pieces from the 13th and 14th centuries into
modern instrumentation – quite spectacular. So yeah, there’s lots of places to
go with that. Everybody had enjoyed
touching the work – earlier work and making it their own.
AJL – Oh yeah – the first thing that I heard, of this
– the first thing that kind of got me interested were these arrangements
that Peter Maxwell Davies did for the Fires of London.
DBK – Right.
AJL – You know – of Dowland, and Bach Preludes and
Fugues, and all these weird, great orchestrations. Some were more straight than others,
some were wacky – they were all just really interesting in how he passed
around lines of counterpoint in this kind of Pierot-ish type setting. That was sort of the first time
I’d heard that done, and I thought it was pretty cool.
DG – You know, there is a slippery slope that we must warn
you about, that once you start studying this early music, it’s very easy
to slip into “musicologicalism” – where you just start
talking about Dooland and Dowland…
DG & DBK – Doooland – Dooowwwland –
Dooo……
AJL – No, no – I would never do that.
DG – Well that’s what you say now! You say it on the radio but…
(all laugh)
AJL – Of course, everybody knows it’s DOW-land!
DBK
– It will all come back top haunt you. What should we play to wrap this up?
AJL
– Umm – what have we not heard?
DG
– We’ve not heard your Nirvana music.
DBK
– Hehe – that’s right.
We haven’t heard the study for guitar, we haven’t heard the
“Meditation, Dance & Sacrifice”…
AJL
– Let’s hear that.
DBK
– Yeah, that sounds like we’ve got just about enough time
there. Just a quick mention for our
local listeners, there’s a spring equinox celebration- sacred dance
offerings – that’s at the
DG
– But not for us.
DBK
– But not for us, no, it’s at the community center at 8PM tonight
– spring equinox celebration.
DG
– Spring forward, fall back
DBK
– You must go – for me it’s always fall forward, spring
back. My state in life is to always
be surprised or tripping – here I go crashing face down (laughs). Uh, yes! Ok, quick intro to this piece?
AJL
– This is a solo guitar piece, and that’s all I’ll say about
it, it’s just kind of a, seven and a half minute solo guitar piece.
DBK
– (laughs) Anthony Joseph
Lanman, thanks so much for joining us.
AJL
– Thanks for having me - it was fun.
DG
– Yes it was. Is this
it? Are we coming back?
DBK
– This is it! We’re not
comin’ back! So we’ll
see you all next week. Our guest is
Bruce Gremo. Back when we talked to
him he was just back from his tour of
Audio –
Meditation, Dance & Sacrifice
END