Season Two
Episode 39
Composition with Lane Harder
Voyage Dallas Article about Lane Harder from February 13, 2019
TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
Jessica: Lane, thank you so much for talking today.
Lane: Very nice of you to have me.
Jessica: I'd love to know what your musical experience growing up was like.
Lane: The main thing I can say about my musical experience growing up is that it was very multi-faceted. My mom and dad were both avocational musicians. My mom played piano at home and played in the handbell choir in church and also sang in the church choir. In fact, one of my earliest musical memories is of sitting under the piano listening to my mom play Debussy and Beethoven. But then my dad played guitar around the house quite a bit. He had been a guitarist in a relatively successful band in Memphis in the 1960's. And so, I just, I was around it all the time, you know, in the house. I took piano lessons when I was a kid and really throughout high school. Eventually joined the school band where I played tuba and eventually transitioned to percussion which is sort of my main instrument now. That's sort of my primary instrument. And you know, I played in rock bands. I have hours and hours of just horrible midi experiments that I made in my bedroom and just all kinds of recording experiments of all kinds. So yeah, it was kind of all over the place, but the cool thing about that was that every activity kind of reinforced every other activity so I was learning about music in a lot of different contexts.
Jessica: And when did you become interested in composition?
Lane: When I was about twelve. I had been studying piano for about six or seven years at that time and I was kind of tired of it and I told my mom pretty unequivocally one day, you know, I really don't want to study piano anymore. My mom looked kind of disappointed when I said that, but she said, "You know what, just finish out the year. Just finish out the year and see how you feel about it." And I'm really glad she said that because it was right after that I - I don't know what happened - but there was like a switch that got flipped in my brain or something and I started to see the piano as a tool to write music.
I started, you know, I would just sit at the piano and just put different chords together with other chords and just ask questions about why does this chord sound so cool after this one. And what if I voice this chord this way? Hey, I could change key if I want to! That's crazy. So that's when it really started to kind of take off for me so I guess I was about twelve.
Jessica: Did your piano teacher encourage the composition aspect or did you even share any of that interest with anyone?
Lane: I didn't really share it for maybe a year or so, but yeah, my piano teacher was very encouraging and she would let me play my own compositions in addition to standard rep on piano recitals.
Jessica: I love that because I feel like, I had piano growing up as well and I also didn't want to continue taking piano at one point and I actually stopped in my middle school years. And my grandparents were concert pianists and so yeah, and my mom was a very successful pianist and so it's really, I'll say, in our blood. And the expectation was just kind of that's what you do. And so I stopped, but then come high school I just became fascinated with it again, picked it up and started self teaching for a couple of years before I got another piano teacher again, but it was mostly classically trained, but I didn't have that composition element and I feel like that's something that more teachers are a little more open to nowadays - that I've seen with some of my students anyways.
Lane: That's actually really good to hear because for those who have the creative need, especially kids, composition can feel like this isolating activity. It's hard, I think, to kind of build community around it sometimes and so yeah, if there are teachers whose students are interested in composition, it would be the greatest thing in the world if you would encourage them to do it because that can really go a long way.
Jessica: I completely agree. You spent time in Paris, France studying at EAMA, which is the European American Musical Alliance, and you served as a faculty member for several years. Can you share with us what that experience involved as a student?
Lane: Yeah, that experience was pretty transformative for me. It occurred to me after my undergrad that I had never been to any kind of summer composition program and that's something I really wanted to try to do. And I found EAMA online and it said - I just remember this tagline - 'Study counterpoint, harmony, and analysis in the tradition of Nadia Boulanger.' And I thought, like this light went off for me, I thought... for some reason I thought, that is exactly what I need. I wanted that sort of rigor and discipline that that tradition brought to these activities. But I thought this just looks so prestigious, I mean, I'm never going to get into this, but I applied and got in and it was really remarkable.
What I found was that it was a wonderful pedagogical augmentation to the training that I already had in the United States. And I've been fortunate to have a lot of truly wonderful teachers really in all musical disciplines throughout my life. I've been very, very lucky, but EAMA was really a capstone for me in many ways just in terms of taking all of those skills to the next level really. And just making all of music much more three-dimensional as a result. So I can't recommend that summer program enough. It's truly, truly transformative.
But in terms of the EAMA experience as a student, we studied counterpoint. I know some students have referred to it as like counterpoint bootcamp and it kind of is that. The first year was mostly of studying species counterpoint and eventually you get to, in subsequent years, invertible counterpoint, canon of various kinds, and fugue. Fugue in the style of Bach. But the sort of counterpoint that's taught is, in a way it's astylistic for many reasons. I think when you study counterpoint usually it's in a tonal style or a modal style, you know, and really Bach or Palestrina are sort of the models for those usually. And style studies are great. I think students should absolutely do as much style study as they can. However, one of the pedagogical challenges of counterpoint is dealing with style so sometimes you can pay so much attention to making sure you're adhering to the style that you're not always thinking about counterpoint itself. You know... In other words, you might break some stylistic rule even if your counterpoint is perfectly fine. You know what I mean? Even if you've written otherwise good counterpoint.
So what the director Philip Lasser has done is to really pair down counterpoint to its absolute essentials and make things possibly more restrictive than they really have to be necessarily to adhere to a style and as a result, it makes you work that much harder in a way. Finally then when you do write in a style it can feel like being let out of the cage or something. It's really liberating, but it's not liberating for its own sake. It's liberating because now you're armed with a lot of heavy artillery to sort of tackle contrapuntal issues in a style. So that's kind of one side of it. And then there's keyboard harmony as a really big part of the curriculum. This is the real like Nadia Boulanger tradition that she got from Paul Vidal and other professors in the Paris Conservatory. It's from that lineage. And it's a lot of work playing in four voices in real time and playing and singing. Harmonizing bass lines. Harmonizing melodies. Transposing. A lot of memorization. Right - just memorizing each voice. And singing in fixed do solfege, which for me was new when I went there. I had grown up using movable. And then analysis. The analysis classes are meant to replicate in a way Boulanger's famous analysis seminars that she gave. Musicianship classes and we all sing in a choir. There's a wonderful choir led by Mark Shapiro who is an extraordinary teacher and choir director. And then you study whatever classes or lessons are in your particular discipline so we have three: composition, chamber music, and conducting. So you might break out and have conducting class or the chamber musicians might have a master class with a visiting artist or composers take lessons and have readings. It's a really comprehensive, holistic training for musicians and I can't say enough about it.
Jessica: Sounds incredibly thorough which is great. And you mentioned Philip Lasser who is a distinguished teacher at Juilliard and the director of EAMA and also a composer of a wide range of musical works so what did you find most profound or insightful from your studies with him?
Lane: Well, I could talk about Philip Lasser for days actually. I've spent a lot of time with him over the years. And as I said earlier, I've been very fortunate to have had a great many truly, truly astonishing music teachers in my life. Philip is the one who has probably made the biggest difference, the biggest impact just in my own training. I could get into a lot of the specifics of what I've gotten from him, but I think it would be better to say just very generally that something Philip has done I think is really remarkable is that in his analysis of music, he really observes the very nature of music. He accepts music on music's terms and just observes what happens in music, if you like, naturally. Instead of trying to map some sort of philosophical or intellectualism of music onto it, a lot of his theories come from simply observing how composers have treated this funny thing that we all study and love called music. And then applying those qualities, those characteristics not only to his own music, but to his analysis of standard rep. And that is where I think a lot of his most profound insights come from. And for anyone interested, I hope this doesn't seem catch penny of me in some way, but his book - he has a book that I actually use (well, you know) that I actually use in my Analytical Techniques class called The Spiraling Tapestry: An Inquiry into the Contrapuntal Fabric of Music and it's published by Rassel Editions. That book - it's really a treatise and lectures that he's given around it as well as other lectures by my dear friend and Lasser student Benjamin Boyle - have done so much to enhance my understanding of music.
And then the really cool thing is seeing how composers deal with the issues that he brings up in the book. I mean, as a composer you can totally rip those things off and use them for your own purposes and so that makes the Spiraling Tapestry kind of like a secret weapon as a composer. I just can't say enough about it.
Jessica: Yeah, I remember that book from our Analytical Techniques class. I still have it. I need to refer back to it. I'd love to delve more into getting to know you as a composer and just have a few questions about the composition process as well. One of my questions you have already answered which is that you started composing at twelve. And I just wonder if there's an instrument that you have that's your favorite to use in compositions?
Lane: Yeah, that's tough to answer. For me it is just because I'm a percussionist so I tend to insert percussion sometimes into places where it might not need to be just because it's sort of my lingua franca. I mean it's what I'm most familiar with. But really I think my favorite instrument to use in composition is voice. If I could write vocal music for the rest of my life, I'd be really really happy. And primarily because I just love working with text. I read poetry all the time. I just kind of can't be without it. I'm always thinking 'oh would this make a good text for a song or a cantata or choral piece or something?'
Jessica: Are there composers whose works have influenced your own? I mean this is probably obvious that the answer would be yes. I'm just curious if there's styles or other composers that you've really emulated as you've written pieces yourself?
Lane: Yeah. There's so many and it's hard to say sometimes what is an influence. What I tend to think about is composers that I like and that I have really spent a lot of time studying and analyzing. And again, mostly to adapt techniques from different composers into my own music. I mean the big one for me, and I know it's a cliché - such a cliché, but it's true. The music of Bach. I just can't say enough about it. Bach is like my real obsession I think. I mean I truly...whenever I sit down to write, I always start out by usually playing some Bach chorales on the piano just to get the fingers and the brain warmed up and it's just amazing what all of that can unlock for you as a composer. You know, any spacing, any harmony, any dissonance you can imagine - it's all there. It's all in Bach's music. To say nothing of his, obviously, masterful treatment of musical line. So yeah, Bach is huge.
Increasingly over the years, when I was in college I didn't pay much attention to this composer, but increasingly after that and especially after studying at EAMA, Fauré. Gabriel Fauré is huge! He's become a huge presence in my life mostly because one thing I love about him is the fact that he just takes the whole idea of tendency, you know, harmonic tendency - moving from chord to chord - and just totally flips that on its head and just really gives you harmonic progressions and ideas sometimes that are really not obvious, but that still really, really work.
Kind of an unusual one or at least it seems unusual to me, an unusual influence is Percy Granger. The more I look at his music, the more I think, the more I realize how remarkable he was. And just little, very specific things like you know The Children's March? Do you know that piece for band? There's this little accompaniment figure at the very, very beginning of it and I remember hearing that piece a lot growing up and sort of wondering what these chords were that he was using because they didn't really seem to be in a key of any kind and I didn't really know what was up with that. Anyway, I finally saw a score and they're, now catch this, they're parallel augmented sixth chords. Parallel augmented sixth chords not in a key. They don't really function, but they're so beautiful and so perfect. And that really...that told me something. That taught me something. That really helped me sort of break out of a kind of diatonic box that I think that I had been in for a while and just helped me sort of see music much more - just the possibilities of chromaticism much more broadly as a composer. And it's funny. It's just this fleeting little little moment at the beginning. (singing) The ba-bum ba-bum's - those are augmented sixth chords.
Anyway, yeah. a lot of my influences a lot of times come from what I'm interested in at a particular time. So I know that recently a composer that's gotten my attention is Gerard Grisey, a French spectral composer, influenced some works that I was writing maybe about a year ago just cause my ensemble Szygy had played a large work by Grisey and I just sort of had him on the brain quite a bit.
Frances Poulenc - I can't be without his music. Speaking of turning tendency on its head, he was really really really good at doing that. To say nothing of sonority, I learned a lot about sonority from looking at Poulenc's music. And just the beautiful rich verticality that nonfunctional harmony can really have.
So those are some. I mean there are a million others. Britten, Duruflé - gosh, I could go on forever, but anyway, those are some.
Jessica: Yeah, there's an unending list I'm sure of composers that you could say have influenced. And have you ever taken a fragment of one of their works or another composer's works and then incorporated it into a new work?
Lane: I have. I actually use and respond to other composer's music quite a bit. You know, Stravinsky said something like (I'm paraphrasing this), "that the only true response to a piece of music should be another piece of music." In other words, not words. Not speaking about it, but writing something in response to it.
I tend to look at the repertoire as really fertile ground for taking things in new directions. And yeah, I have used other composers' works in a myriad of ways. You know, sometimes in quoting things ironically or sometimes taking an interval or a chord that might be really integral to a piece and then doing something new with it. And sometimes just recomposing an entire piece or movement. There's a wonderful Prelude and Fugue for organ by Maurice Duruflé - Prelude and Fugue on the name Alain. And I took his fugue subject and sort of recomposed the fugue with just, with different intervals and points of imitation and that sort of thing. So the DNA of it sounds like Duruflé, but I really just tried to take it in a completely different direction. And it's scored for a marimba quartet because of course you would arrange an organ fugue for a marimba quartet. Everybody does that.
Jessica: Do you consider what mode or scale you want to use for a piece before you begin in the writing process?
Lane: Not really and the reason why is because the mode or scale or key I'm sort of working in is sort of part and parcel with the musical idea itself. It usually sort of all comes together in sort of one little bundle and then what I do is maybe I'll write down an idea and then just sort of tease it out and take it apart and just ask questions like - okay, what key is this in really? And sometimes I don't know. Sometimes I need more information and sometimes I need more music to sort of give the idea a context before I can figure that out.
Jessica: So let's talk a little bit about that composition process. Is there a process you use in composing pieces or a certain atmosphere like you mentioned that you'll often start with Bach chorales and that kind of frees up your thinking to produce something new?
Lane: Yeah, it's amazing how that sort of exercise can be useful. It's also really handy - I stole this idea from Ernest Hemingway, who said that when he would wake up in the morning, he would always read through what he had written the day before he started writing and I always do that. I always play through everything I'd written up to that point. Sometimes I play it too much. Sometimes I'm like, 'Hey! This is good. This is finished. I'm good, you know. Who needs more notes anyway?' But that's very useful just to establish continuity. You know, just so you don't feel like you're starting from ground zero. It's more like you're continuing something that's already happening.
And another little Hemingway trick - he gave this little piece of advice that I always really liked. He said that to wrap things up when you're writing...to wrap things up when things are going well, like in other words when you know what you're doing and you know what's coming next, so that you can have a place to start the next day. And to him if you stopped when you've finished a chapter or finished an idea or finished something like that and then had to come back to it the next day and had to start something new, that can feel sort of daunting. So I mean little hacks like that have been, have actually been really really useful.
But yeah, in terms of process I mean, I don't really have one. I just sit at the piano and kind of grind it out, you know. And I don't always write at the piano. Sometimes if there's a passage I don't need the piano for, I'll sit at my desk or something and write that way. But I'm a big believer in just staying in contact with sound as often as possible and really thinking about resonance and sonority 'cause honestly, most of what I focus on when I write is the doubling and spacing of chords. That's really mostly what it is and again, that's from Boulanger. She really zeroed in on those aspects of harmony when she taught it with the idea that the doubling of a note within a chord maps on to the idea of tonality. And spacing - how a chord is spaced - maps on to the idea of sonority. And so those two things are crucial. I mean they're not just there for no reason. They can really help move a piece forward and really make a piece sound holistic and like it's all part of the same - to use a Philip Lasser term - part of the same utterance. Musical utterance. So that's what I try to do. I don't always succeed. In fact, geez - if I hit the mark half the time, then I'm happy, but I always try to do the best I can.
Jessica: Yeah. Don't we all!
Lane: You try to put up more good days than bad.
Jessica: Yeah. Yes. This one you kind of hit on I think a little earlier. How do you determine what key to place a piece? And the meter?
Lane: Yeah. Key and meter are both crucial to a piece of music and as a composer you should really be able to manipulate both of those perimeters quite a bit. You know, I think both can be really really fluid and really subtle and really interesting if that's what you want them to be. Or they can also be really really rigid if you want them to be. Something that one of my colleagues here and former teacher of mine and the chair of composition department, Kevin Hanlon, is fond of saying and I think he's 100% right, is that tonality wants to move. It wants to move around. You know, there's a built in asymmetry to any diatonic collection of pitches. There's sort of this built-in instability to it and you know, if you hear enough of a particular key and you feel that key is exhausted, then it's time to move somewhere else. And you know, that's something I try to impart to our composition students who may not have always thought about issues like this.
Don't be afraid to refresh your piece with a new tonality or some kind of new harmonic frame of reference because, you know, not all keys sound the same. You know, a piece in C Major is not going to sound the same in B Major. We don't just experience it as just a minor second lower. Even though geographically they're very close together, you know they're right next to each other, but harmonically I mean that's five sharps across the circle of fifths. I mean that's a huge leap so that entire key resonates completely differently in our ear. So yeah, this is something I think about a lot.
Jessica: When you're teaching composition to your students, what are some approaches that you take? In particular to helping them keep that tonality moving along?
Lane: The main thing I tell them is just look at the repertoire. I think a lot of students that have compositional issues of all kinds usually have them because they're not spending enough time looking at other people's music. Now that doesn't mean I want their music to sound like Haydn's music. I don't want their music to sound like Haydn's music. Haydn sounded like Haydn. I don't want it to sound like Beethoven or anybody else. That doesn't mean that you can't learn strategies about how to move say from key to key or from, I mean, pick your compositional perimeter, you know.
How long have I spent on this idea?
Do I have too many instruments playing all the time?
Do I have enough rests in my music?
I mean, honestly just little things like that can make a huge difference to whether or not a piece is successful and so I encourage students all the time to just look at the repertoire, look at the repertoire, look at the repertoire. A lot of times I'll direct them to very specific pieces to examine for particular issues.
Jessica: What are some unique challenges inherent to composition pedagogy?
Lane: Because composition is a creative discipline, you know, it's not like solving math equations...not that math can't be creative. I mean math can be wonderfully creative, but so much of it is about building a voice. Building an individual voice. Letting the students have opportunities to explore their voice. And I encourage the students, especially undergrads, to write as much music as possible, explore as many styles as possible. Throw everything at the wall and just see what sticks. And that's all well and good. The flip side of that, of course, is that composition is so personal. You know, it's such a personal thing and, you know, when you start dissecting someone's personal little baby of a composition that they bring in, that sometimes you have to cultivate a variety of approaches to dealing with different students because every student's personality's different. Some take criticism better than others. But ultimately, we're very fortunate at SMU, the students we get here are very open to criticism and really want to grow and learn and they're very open. They're very open to exploring lots of different styles.
But you know something I tell students all the time is - this is a great piece of advice that again I heard Benjamin Boyle give to a student once - he said, "Just follow your ear." If you follow your ear and what your ear wants to hear and where your ear wants to take you, that's really the most important thing. In other words, don't write music in some sort of intellectual framework because you think it's going to impress somebody. Write music that you love. That you truly love and really want to hear. For me, that's a big deal. Love actually figures into composition a lot for me and that's something, again, that I got from Philip Lasser. He got it from Boulanger. You know, there's stories that someone would bring in a...some kind of convoluted piece with all kinds of overlapping systems of composition and that just maybe didn't really work texturally or something and Boulanger's response would be, "But do you love it?" And that means something.
You know, especially if you're writing for something that is perhaps for posterity or even if it isn't. You're going to spend time with it and so if you're going to spend time with it, I would hope that you would love it.
You would think that would be such an obvious thing like, "Well of course I'm going to write music that I would love! Why wouldn't I?" Well, the reason why you wouldn't is because, you know, a lot of times students get into college and they start to see all these different styles of composition in which they can write. Some of which are very structurally and systematically sort of rigorous and I think sometimes they can kind of compose themselves into these little boxes without understanding, I think, how those systems can actually help them to be really, really, really creative. And without perhaps understanding always how those systems and ideas and strategies can help them write music that they do love. And so, in other words, seeing them as a tool and not as an end unto themselves. Not writing in a particular style for the style's sake. Styles are not really inherently better than other styles. You know what I mean?
Jessica: Does that come just from writing and writing and trying new things and listening to a wide variety of other music types? Like you said, you constantly have sound going...constantly listening. Is that one of the things that you think would help musicians with composition?
Lane: 100%. Listening and just listening all the time is crucial. And you know, it doesn't have to be music that you like! In fact, a lot of times you can learn a lot from music that you don't like because it gives you an opportunity to ask yourself questions about your own taste and about your own musical values. You know, you hear something you don't like - that's always an opportunity for a reflection.
Why don't I like it?
What is it I don't like?
Do I dislike everything about it?
Is there something in here that works?
Same thing with music that you like. Do I like all of this? Is there anything that can be improved about it? I mean being really, really critical about what you hear and really sort of in a way sort of putting your brain under the microscope. You know, what you're really doing is thinking about what your brain thinks about what you hear. It's not about your ear. Really. It's about how you interpret what you hear. That's something you learn in your first music theory pedagogy class by the way. That's why the term 'ear training' is problematic. It's not ear training - you're not training your ear. You're training your brain if you think about it. You're training your brain to interpret what you hear.
Jessica: Yeah. In addition to hearing and training your brain, what other advice would you give to a musician who is just beginning to compose?
Lane: Compose all the time! Just compose as much music as you can and not for the sake of volume. Not just to, you know, amass a collection of pieces, but hopefully that process of writing something and finishing it...writing something else and finishing it...writing something else and finishing it...will refine your ideas and refine sort of what it is you're trying to do.
The most important thing beyond that that I think you can do is to give your music to players or whomever you're writing for and hear it performed in real time, in a room, on actual instruments. Not on Midi. Not on a computer. You want to hear the real thing in space taking up space in a room or in a hall or something because that's how it's going to be performed. That's how it's going to be performed in a space. You have to imagine how the instruments are going to take up space. That's something by the way that I got from one of my teachers at UTD, Dan Welcher. He always talked to me about really actively imagining the performers on a stage and how those instruments really fill up a room because they're not the same. A marimba and a vibraphone resonate completely differently. That has to matter. And not only should that matter, that should be exciting! You know what I mean? Those little differences like that should really play a huge role in how your piece is actually written and so the more opportunities a young composer who's really just starting out can do that; to actually hear your own music, that's indispensable.
Jessica: One of the roles that you play at SMU is as the director of the Meadows Ensemble Szygy and it's a contemporary group that performs new music and music of living composers and the repertoire has included programming on themes such as gender roles, domestic violence, affects of politics, and even more. So can you share about that ensemble and kind of the works that they perform?
Lane: Yeah. Szygy is a chamber ensemble and that means that we can have anywhere from one and twenty or more performers. We had 30-35 in a show a couple of years ago. And yeah, we take a very broad view of the term contemporary. For example, one of the oldest pieces that we've performed is Parade by Erik Satie, which I think was from 1819. So you may think well how is that contemporary? Well, it's contemporary in spirit because of its experimental nature. I tend to take sort of a broad historical look at what it means for a piece to be contemporary, but we also are very strongly aligned with the composition department since I also teach composition and so we perform a lot of new student works as well. We've been very fortunate to do that.
But the great thing about Szygy is that I'm stylistically agnostic. It doesn't matter to me what style the music is in and in fact I actually want for us to perform music that's in a broad range of styles. Now sometimes I'll organize a concert around a particular style or a particular voice, but the great thing about that is just getting to see the diversity of approaches that composers have taken within a particular style. You know, usually it's very eclectic. I mean we've had serial pieces. We've had minimalist pieces. We've had music with pop or hip hop influence and it's really just been all over the map. We've had electro-acoustic pieces as well so stylistically things are all over the map and that's just, that's how I like it. But we also do a lot of collaboration not only with other divisions within meadows, but also with different organizations within the community.
Szygy is an astronomical term. It means an alignment of celestial bodies and I sort of view that as a metaphor for collaboration into these two different, two or more entities coming together to form something new.
Jessica: In addition to working with the ensemble at SMU and teaching at SMU, I know that you are continuing to work as a composer. Are there any projects that you're currently working on?
Lane: (laughing) I'm laughing just because yeah, I always tell myself...I tell myself I'm not going to do this - I'm not going to stack a bunch of projects up on top of each other. And I...it just keeps happening, keeps happening, keeps happening. I say yes to too many things at the same time. So yes, I'm working on a percussion ensemble that was commissioned for a concert that's coming up in the fall to honor the legacy of Doug Howard who was the Principal Percussionist of the Dallas Symphony for many years and who is now retired. I also...I just got a commission offer from Abby Hawthorn, a former student here, for a woodwind quartet to perform on her Masters recital next year. I've also been commissioned by Allison Reed, who is a wonderful harpist here in Dallas, for a piece for solo harp for her to use on outreach concerts that she gives for people to remember the victims of gun violence. And so it's kind of a largely a meditative piece - the whole goal there is just to give space for however you want to think about that issue. And a non-commissioned piece that I'm working on is a song cycle for mezzo-soprano and piano on poetry of Wallace Stevens who is probably my favorite poet. I have a collection of nine poems that I'm trying to wrangle into something cool so we'll see. We'll see what happens there.
Jessica: I figured you wouldn't have just one project going. In kind of closing, a few months ago I had approached you about the podcast and asking you to share and you were in a place where you were needing to take some time and you're now kind of, I'll say, crusading to help students access mental health resources and sharing your story about your experience to help those who may be going through something similar. Can you touch on that?
Lane: Sure. I'm always happy to talk about this issue. Well, not happy happy, but certainly glad to. Yeah, you know I try not to flash a neon sign about this necessarily, but I have been - I've tried to be pretty open about my own history with depression and anxiety. Yeah, you're right. There was a time a few months ago when all of that got really bad and I was having to cancel things and say no to things. You had very generously asked to interview me and I had said yes and you were very gracious about rescheduling. I just felt that I needed to just clear my schedule and just exercise some self-care for a while. But you know, all that's being treated now and things are much, much better. But yeah, I remember dealing with this when I was in undergrad here at SMU. I was a student here and I remember really feeling like there were times that I was very confused. I didn't know where to turn. I didn't know what resources were offered.
And yeah, I have noticed more and more over the past several years that students not only here, but really everywhere seem to be and I don't know if incidents are increasing, but they seem to be dealing with some of these mental health issues more and more and they're bringing those issues into the classroom more and more. And you know, I know that we are not a treatment center - we're a school of music, but at the same time I feel responsible for at least trying to help guide them toward resources that the university has and that the community has, but also resources that they can find online that in the absence of, perhaps, trained professionals that can help or maybe even concurrently with professional help. Resources that augment their therapy and their own personal self-care that they can curate however they want. It's everything from books to podcast to youtube channels to all kinds of things.
But the main thing I try to do is model a certain openness about these issues. As a result of that, a lot of students come to me and want to talk about these issues and I'm always happy to do it. So I hope that this is something that we can continue as teachers to try to understand these issues among members of our student population and try to deal with them in appropriate ways. The main thing I do really is just listen. I mostly just listen to them. I'm not a trained professional. I don't want to be. I've seen their job and I know the kind of training that goes into it and holy cow. I have no interest in taking that on, but you know, if I can be a sounding board for students or for anybody really, I'm always happy to do it because I remember what it was like to... I said earlier that composition can feel really isolating and depression and anxiety can really really isolate you quite a bit and so I remember what that was like. I remember what that felt like and so yeah, I try to stay open and available for this sort of thing.
Jessica: Yeah, I agree. I see that even with middle schoolers as well, you know, that stress and having experienced it myself as well having gone through my life with that, I'll say, being open about it and sharing simply kind of opens it for others to go 'okay I'm not alone in this' and also making it more comfortable to talk about that taking off that stigma or those things. But same thing, I wouldn't ever claim to be a professional on it, but listening is huge and just being aware and helping others know they're not alone and I think that's great that you're available for that for your students.
I'm going to ask one last question in case those listening are interested in finding your work and getting in touch with you. How would they do that?
Lane: They can always go to my Soundcloud page which I need to update. I think every composer probably needs to update their Soundcloud page or maybe I'm just projecting my own lack of updating onto onto everybody else. It's https://soundcloud.com/lane-harder. You can also find information about me on the SMU Website. My bio and contact information is on there. And I don't know - I'm on Facebook. I'm on Instagram. I post stuff whenever I am able to.
Jessica: Well thank you so much. This was a real treat for me to get to talk with you and I have no doubt that the people listening will get a lot out of the episode as well, but I really thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me.
Lane: Thank you Jessica. I love your podcast and it was great to chat with you.
Episode 39
Composition with Lane Harder
Lane Harder teaches composition and music theory at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He holds degrees from Southern Methodist University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Texas. He completed a year of resident study at Kings College in London and earned three certificat de stage from the (EAMA) European American Musical Alliance Summer Program in Paris, France. Dr. Harder is a composer and percussionist. His works have been performed by the Meadows Symphony Orchestra, Peabody Opera Theatre, Bachanalia Chamber Orchestra, Percussion Group 72 (Japan), Ju Percussion Group (Taiwan), The University of Texas New Music Ensemble, and many other artists in North America, Europe, and Asia. His music has been performed on programs at PASIC - The Percussive Arts Society International Conventions - in 2004, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017. His performances and his original music appear on the Albany, Gasparo, Music = Hope, and BCM&D record labels. His original music and transcriptions are published by Universal Edition, KPP, Rassel Editions of New York, and Alternate Chords. He is a member of ASCAP
Voyage Dallas Article about Lane Harder from February 13, 2019
TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
Jessica: Lane, thank you so much for talking today.
Lane: Very nice of you to have me.
Jessica: I'd love to know what your musical experience growing up was like.
Lane: The main thing I can say about my musical experience growing up is that it was very multi-faceted. My mom and dad were both avocational musicians. My mom played piano at home and played in the handbell choir in church and also sang in the church choir. In fact, one of my earliest musical memories is of sitting under the piano listening to my mom play Debussy and Beethoven. But then my dad played guitar around the house quite a bit. He had been a guitarist in a relatively successful band in Memphis in the 1960's. And so, I just, I was around it all the time, you know, in the house. I took piano lessons when I was a kid and really throughout high school. Eventually joined the school band where I played tuba and eventually transitioned to percussion which is sort of my main instrument now. That's sort of my primary instrument. And you know, I played in rock bands. I have hours and hours of just horrible midi experiments that I made in my bedroom and just all kinds of recording experiments of all kinds. So yeah, it was kind of all over the place, but the cool thing about that was that every activity kind of reinforced every other activity so I was learning about music in a lot of different contexts.
Jessica: And when did you become interested in composition?
Lane: When I was about twelve. I had been studying piano for about six or seven years at that time and I was kind of tired of it and I told my mom pretty unequivocally one day, you know, I really don't want to study piano anymore. My mom looked kind of disappointed when I said that, but she said, "You know what, just finish out the year. Just finish out the year and see how you feel about it." And I'm really glad she said that because it was right after that I - I don't know what happened - but there was like a switch that got flipped in my brain or something and I started to see the piano as a tool to write music.
I started, you know, I would just sit at the piano and just put different chords together with other chords and just ask questions about why does this chord sound so cool after this one. And what if I voice this chord this way? Hey, I could change key if I want to! That's crazy. So that's when it really started to kind of take off for me so I guess I was about twelve.
Jessica: Did your piano teacher encourage the composition aspect or did you even share any of that interest with anyone?
Lane: I didn't really share it for maybe a year or so, but yeah, my piano teacher was very encouraging and she would let me play my own compositions in addition to standard rep on piano recitals.
Jessica: I love that because I feel like, I had piano growing up as well and I also didn't want to continue taking piano at one point and I actually stopped in my middle school years. And my grandparents were concert pianists and so yeah, and my mom was a very successful pianist and so it's really, I'll say, in our blood. And the expectation was just kind of that's what you do. And so I stopped, but then come high school I just became fascinated with it again, picked it up and started self teaching for a couple of years before I got another piano teacher again, but it was mostly classically trained, but I didn't have that composition element and I feel like that's something that more teachers are a little more open to nowadays - that I've seen with some of my students anyways.
Lane: That's actually really good to hear because for those who have the creative need, especially kids, composition can feel like this isolating activity. It's hard, I think, to kind of build community around it sometimes and so yeah, if there are teachers whose students are interested in composition, it would be the greatest thing in the world if you would encourage them to do it because that can really go a long way.
Jessica: I completely agree. You spent time in Paris, France studying at EAMA, which is the European American Musical Alliance, and you served as a faculty member for several years. Can you share with us what that experience involved as a student?
Lane: Yeah, that experience was pretty transformative for me. It occurred to me after my undergrad that I had never been to any kind of summer composition program and that's something I really wanted to try to do. And I found EAMA online and it said - I just remember this tagline - 'Study counterpoint, harmony, and analysis in the tradition of Nadia Boulanger.' And I thought, like this light went off for me, I thought... for some reason I thought, that is exactly what I need. I wanted that sort of rigor and discipline that that tradition brought to these activities. But I thought this just looks so prestigious, I mean, I'm never going to get into this, but I applied and got in and it was really remarkable.
What I found was that it was a wonderful pedagogical augmentation to the training that I already had in the United States. And I've been fortunate to have a lot of truly wonderful teachers really in all musical disciplines throughout my life. I've been very, very lucky, but EAMA was really a capstone for me in many ways just in terms of taking all of those skills to the next level really. And just making all of music much more three-dimensional as a result. So I can't recommend that summer program enough. It's truly, truly transformative.
But in terms of the EAMA experience as a student, we studied counterpoint. I know some students have referred to it as like counterpoint bootcamp and it kind of is that. The first year was mostly of studying species counterpoint and eventually you get to, in subsequent years, invertible counterpoint, canon of various kinds, and fugue. Fugue in the style of Bach. But the sort of counterpoint that's taught is, in a way it's astylistic for many reasons. I think when you study counterpoint usually it's in a tonal style or a modal style, you know, and really Bach or Palestrina are sort of the models for those usually. And style studies are great. I think students should absolutely do as much style study as they can. However, one of the pedagogical challenges of counterpoint is dealing with style so sometimes you can pay so much attention to making sure you're adhering to the style that you're not always thinking about counterpoint itself. You know... In other words, you might break some stylistic rule even if your counterpoint is perfectly fine. You know what I mean? Even if you've written otherwise good counterpoint.
So what the director Philip Lasser has done is to really pair down counterpoint to its absolute essentials and make things possibly more restrictive than they really have to be necessarily to adhere to a style and as a result, it makes you work that much harder in a way. Finally then when you do write in a style it can feel like being let out of the cage or something. It's really liberating, but it's not liberating for its own sake. It's liberating because now you're armed with a lot of heavy artillery to sort of tackle contrapuntal issues in a style. So that's kind of one side of it. And then there's keyboard harmony as a really big part of the curriculum. This is the real like Nadia Boulanger tradition that she got from Paul Vidal and other professors in the Paris Conservatory. It's from that lineage. And it's a lot of work playing in four voices in real time and playing and singing. Harmonizing bass lines. Harmonizing melodies. Transposing. A lot of memorization. Right - just memorizing each voice. And singing in fixed do solfege, which for me was new when I went there. I had grown up using movable. And then analysis. The analysis classes are meant to replicate in a way Boulanger's famous analysis seminars that she gave. Musicianship classes and we all sing in a choir. There's a wonderful choir led by Mark Shapiro who is an extraordinary teacher and choir director. And then you study whatever classes or lessons are in your particular discipline so we have three: composition, chamber music, and conducting. So you might break out and have conducting class or the chamber musicians might have a master class with a visiting artist or composers take lessons and have readings. It's a really comprehensive, holistic training for musicians and I can't say enough about it.
Jessica: Sounds incredibly thorough which is great. And you mentioned Philip Lasser who is a distinguished teacher at Juilliard and the director of EAMA and also a composer of a wide range of musical works so what did you find most profound or insightful from your studies with him?
Lane: Well, I could talk about Philip Lasser for days actually. I've spent a lot of time with him over the years. And as I said earlier, I've been very fortunate to have had a great many truly, truly astonishing music teachers in my life. Philip is the one who has probably made the biggest difference, the biggest impact just in my own training. I could get into a lot of the specifics of what I've gotten from him, but I think it would be better to say just very generally that something Philip has done I think is really remarkable is that in his analysis of music, he really observes the very nature of music. He accepts music on music's terms and just observes what happens in music, if you like, naturally. Instead of trying to map some sort of philosophical or intellectualism of music onto it, a lot of his theories come from simply observing how composers have treated this funny thing that we all study and love called music. And then applying those qualities, those characteristics not only to his own music, but to his analysis of standard rep. And that is where I think a lot of his most profound insights come from. And for anyone interested, I hope this doesn't seem catch penny of me in some way, but his book - he has a book that I actually use (well, you know) that I actually use in my Analytical Techniques class called The Spiraling Tapestry: An Inquiry into the Contrapuntal Fabric of Music and it's published by Rassel Editions. That book - it's really a treatise and lectures that he's given around it as well as other lectures by my dear friend and Lasser student Benjamin Boyle - have done so much to enhance my understanding of music.
And then the really cool thing is seeing how composers deal with the issues that he brings up in the book. I mean, as a composer you can totally rip those things off and use them for your own purposes and so that makes the Spiraling Tapestry kind of like a secret weapon as a composer. I just can't say enough about it.
Jessica: Yeah, I remember that book from our Analytical Techniques class. I still have it. I need to refer back to it. I'd love to delve more into getting to know you as a composer and just have a few questions about the composition process as well. One of my questions you have already answered which is that you started composing at twelve. And I just wonder if there's an instrument that you have that's your favorite to use in compositions?
Lane: Yeah, that's tough to answer. For me it is just because I'm a percussionist so I tend to insert percussion sometimes into places where it might not need to be just because it's sort of my lingua franca. I mean it's what I'm most familiar with. But really I think my favorite instrument to use in composition is voice. If I could write vocal music for the rest of my life, I'd be really really happy. And primarily because I just love working with text. I read poetry all the time. I just kind of can't be without it. I'm always thinking 'oh would this make a good text for a song or a cantata or choral piece or something?'
Jessica: Are there composers whose works have influenced your own? I mean this is probably obvious that the answer would be yes. I'm just curious if there's styles or other composers that you've really emulated as you've written pieces yourself?
Lane: Yeah. There's so many and it's hard to say sometimes what is an influence. What I tend to think about is composers that I like and that I have really spent a lot of time studying and analyzing. And again, mostly to adapt techniques from different composers into my own music. I mean the big one for me, and I know it's a cliché - such a cliché, but it's true. The music of Bach. I just can't say enough about it. Bach is like my real obsession I think. I mean I truly...whenever I sit down to write, I always start out by usually playing some Bach chorales on the piano just to get the fingers and the brain warmed up and it's just amazing what all of that can unlock for you as a composer. You know, any spacing, any harmony, any dissonance you can imagine - it's all there. It's all in Bach's music. To say nothing of his, obviously, masterful treatment of musical line. So yeah, Bach is huge.
Increasingly over the years, when I was in college I didn't pay much attention to this composer, but increasingly after that and especially after studying at EAMA, Fauré. Gabriel Fauré is huge! He's become a huge presence in my life mostly because one thing I love about him is the fact that he just takes the whole idea of tendency, you know, harmonic tendency - moving from chord to chord - and just totally flips that on its head and just really gives you harmonic progressions and ideas sometimes that are really not obvious, but that still really, really work.
Kind of an unusual one or at least it seems unusual to me, an unusual influence is Percy Granger. The more I look at his music, the more I think, the more I realize how remarkable he was. And just little, very specific things like you know The Children's March? Do you know that piece for band? There's this little accompaniment figure at the very, very beginning of it and I remember hearing that piece a lot growing up and sort of wondering what these chords were that he was using because they didn't really seem to be in a key of any kind and I didn't really know what was up with that. Anyway, I finally saw a score and they're, now catch this, they're parallel augmented sixth chords. Parallel augmented sixth chords not in a key. They don't really function, but they're so beautiful and so perfect. And that really...that told me something. That taught me something. That really helped me sort of break out of a kind of diatonic box that I think that I had been in for a while and just helped me sort of see music much more - just the possibilities of chromaticism much more broadly as a composer. And it's funny. It's just this fleeting little little moment at the beginning. (singing) The ba-bum ba-bum's - those are augmented sixth chords.
Anyway, yeah. a lot of my influences a lot of times come from what I'm interested in at a particular time. So I know that recently a composer that's gotten my attention is Gerard Grisey, a French spectral composer, influenced some works that I was writing maybe about a year ago just cause my ensemble Szygy had played a large work by Grisey and I just sort of had him on the brain quite a bit.
Frances Poulenc - I can't be without his music. Speaking of turning tendency on its head, he was really really really good at doing that. To say nothing of sonority, I learned a lot about sonority from looking at Poulenc's music. And just the beautiful rich verticality that nonfunctional harmony can really have.
So those are some. I mean there are a million others. Britten, Duruflé - gosh, I could go on forever, but anyway, those are some.
Jessica: Yeah, there's an unending list I'm sure of composers that you could say have influenced. And have you ever taken a fragment of one of their works or another composer's works and then incorporated it into a new work?
Lane: I have. I actually use and respond to other composer's music quite a bit. You know, Stravinsky said something like (I'm paraphrasing this), "that the only true response to a piece of music should be another piece of music." In other words, not words. Not speaking about it, but writing something in response to it.
I tend to look at the repertoire as really fertile ground for taking things in new directions. And yeah, I have used other composers' works in a myriad of ways. You know, sometimes in quoting things ironically or sometimes taking an interval or a chord that might be really integral to a piece and then doing something new with it. And sometimes just recomposing an entire piece or movement. There's a wonderful Prelude and Fugue for organ by Maurice Duruflé - Prelude and Fugue on the name Alain. And I took his fugue subject and sort of recomposed the fugue with just, with different intervals and points of imitation and that sort of thing. So the DNA of it sounds like Duruflé, but I really just tried to take it in a completely different direction. And it's scored for a marimba quartet because of course you would arrange an organ fugue for a marimba quartet. Everybody does that.
Jessica: Do you consider what mode or scale you want to use for a piece before you begin in the writing process?
Lane: Not really and the reason why is because the mode or scale or key I'm sort of working in is sort of part and parcel with the musical idea itself. It usually sort of all comes together in sort of one little bundle and then what I do is maybe I'll write down an idea and then just sort of tease it out and take it apart and just ask questions like - okay, what key is this in really? And sometimes I don't know. Sometimes I need more information and sometimes I need more music to sort of give the idea a context before I can figure that out.
Jessica: So let's talk a little bit about that composition process. Is there a process you use in composing pieces or a certain atmosphere like you mentioned that you'll often start with Bach chorales and that kind of frees up your thinking to produce something new?
Lane: Yeah, it's amazing how that sort of exercise can be useful. It's also really handy - I stole this idea from Ernest Hemingway, who said that when he would wake up in the morning, he would always read through what he had written the day before he started writing and I always do that. I always play through everything I'd written up to that point. Sometimes I play it too much. Sometimes I'm like, 'Hey! This is good. This is finished. I'm good, you know. Who needs more notes anyway?' But that's very useful just to establish continuity. You know, just so you don't feel like you're starting from ground zero. It's more like you're continuing something that's already happening.
And another little Hemingway trick - he gave this little piece of advice that I always really liked. He said that to wrap things up when you're writing...to wrap things up when things are going well, like in other words when you know what you're doing and you know what's coming next, so that you can have a place to start the next day. And to him if you stopped when you've finished a chapter or finished an idea or finished something like that and then had to come back to it the next day and had to start something new, that can feel sort of daunting. So I mean little hacks like that have been, have actually been really really useful.
But yeah, in terms of process I mean, I don't really have one. I just sit at the piano and kind of grind it out, you know. And I don't always write at the piano. Sometimes if there's a passage I don't need the piano for, I'll sit at my desk or something and write that way. But I'm a big believer in just staying in contact with sound as often as possible and really thinking about resonance and sonority 'cause honestly, most of what I focus on when I write is the doubling and spacing of chords. That's really mostly what it is and again, that's from Boulanger. She really zeroed in on those aspects of harmony when she taught it with the idea that the doubling of a note within a chord maps on to the idea of tonality. And spacing - how a chord is spaced - maps on to the idea of sonority. And so those two things are crucial. I mean they're not just there for no reason. They can really help move a piece forward and really make a piece sound holistic and like it's all part of the same - to use a Philip Lasser term - part of the same utterance. Musical utterance. So that's what I try to do. I don't always succeed. In fact, geez - if I hit the mark half the time, then I'm happy, but I always try to do the best I can.
Jessica: Yeah. Don't we all!
Lane: You try to put up more good days than bad.
Jessica: Yeah. Yes. This one you kind of hit on I think a little earlier. How do you determine what key to place a piece? And the meter?
Lane: Yeah. Key and meter are both crucial to a piece of music and as a composer you should really be able to manipulate both of those perimeters quite a bit. You know, I think both can be really really fluid and really subtle and really interesting if that's what you want them to be. Or they can also be really really rigid if you want them to be. Something that one of my colleagues here and former teacher of mine and the chair of composition department, Kevin Hanlon, is fond of saying and I think he's 100% right, is that tonality wants to move. It wants to move around. You know, there's a built in asymmetry to any diatonic collection of pitches. There's sort of this built-in instability to it and you know, if you hear enough of a particular key and you feel that key is exhausted, then it's time to move somewhere else. And you know, that's something I try to impart to our composition students who may not have always thought about issues like this.
Don't be afraid to refresh your piece with a new tonality or some kind of new harmonic frame of reference because, you know, not all keys sound the same. You know, a piece in C Major is not going to sound the same in B Major. We don't just experience it as just a minor second lower. Even though geographically they're very close together, you know they're right next to each other, but harmonically I mean that's five sharps across the circle of fifths. I mean that's a huge leap so that entire key resonates completely differently in our ear. So yeah, this is something I think about a lot.
Jessica: When you're teaching composition to your students, what are some approaches that you take? In particular to helping them keep that tonality moving along?
Lane: The main thing I tell them is just look at the repertoire. I think a lot of students that have compositional issues of all kinds usually have them because they're not spending enough time looking at other people's music. Now that doesn't mean I want their music to sound like Haydn's music. I don't want their music to sound like Haydn's music. Haydn sounded like Haydn. I don't want it to sound like Beethoven or anybody else. That doesn't mean that you can't learn strategies about how to move say from key to key or from, I mean, pick your compositional perimeter, you know.
How long have I spent on this idea?
Do I have too many instruments playing all the time?
Do I have enough rests in my music?
I mean, honestly just little things like that can make a huge difference to whether or not a piece is successful and so I encourage students all the time to just look at the repertoire, look at the repertoire, look at the repertoire. A lot of times I'll direct them to very specific pieces to examine for particular issues.
Jessica: What are some unique challenges inherent to composition pedagogy?
Lane: Because composition is a creative discipline, you know, it's not like solving math equations...not that math can't be creative. I mean math can be wonderfully creative, but so much of it is about building a voice. Building an individual voice. Letting the students have opportunities to explore their voice. And I encourage the students, especially undergrads, to write as much music as possible, explore as many styles as possible. Throw everything at the wall and just see what sticks. And that's all well and good. The flip side of that, of course, is that composition is so personal. You know, it's such a personal thing and, you know, when you start dissecting someone's personal little baby of a composition that they bring in, that sometimes you have to cultivate a variety of approaches to dealing with different students because every student's personality's different. Some take criticism better than others. But ultimately, we're very fortunate at SMU, the students we get here are very open to criticism and really want to grow and learn and they're very open. They're very open to exploring lots of different styles.
But you know something I tell students all the time is - this is a great piece of advice that again I heard Benjamin Boyle give to a student once - he said, "Just follow your ear." If you follow your ear and what your ear wants to hear and where your ear wants to take you, that's really the most important thing. In other words, don't write music in some sort of intellectual framework because you think it's going to impress somebody. Write music that you love. That you truly love and really want to hear. For me, that's a big deal. Love actually figures into composition a lot for me and that's something, again, that I got from Philip Lasser. He got it from Boulanger. You know, there's stories that someone would bring in a...some kind of convoluted piece with all kinds of overlapping systems of composition and that just maybe didn't really work texturally or something and Boulanger's response would be, "But do you love it?" And that means something.
You know, especially if you're writing for something that is perhaps for posterity or even if it isn't. You're going to spend time with it and so if you're going to spend time with it, I would hope that you would love it.
You would think that would be such an obvious thing like, "Well of course I'm going to write music that I would love! Why wouldn't I?" Well, the reason why you wouldn't is because, you know, a lot of times students get into college and they start to see all these different styles of composition in which they can write. Some of which are very structurally and systematically sort of rigorous and I think sometimes they can kind of compose themselves into these little boxes without understanding, I think, how those systems can actually help them to be really, really, really creative. And without perhaps understanding always how those systems and ideas and strategies can help them write music that they do love. And so, in other words, seeing them as a tool and not as an end unto themselves. Not writing in a particular style for the style's sake. Styles are not really inherently better than other styles. You know what I mean?
Jessica: Does that come just from writing and writing and trying new things and listening to a wide variety of other music types? Like you said, you constantly have sound going...constantly listening. Is that one of the things that you think would help musicians with composition?
Lane: 100%. Listening and just listening all the time is crucial. And you know, it doesn't have to be music that you like! In fact, a lot of times you can learn a lot from music that you don't like because it gives you an opportunity to ask yourself questions about your own taste and about your own musical values. You know, you hear something you don't like - that's always an opportunity for a reflection.
Why don't I like it?
What is it I don't like?
Do I dislike everything about it?
Is there something in here that works?
Same thing with music that you like. Do I like all of this? Is there anything that can be improved about it? I mean being really, really critical about what you hear and really sort of in a way sort of putting your brain under the microscope. You know, what you're really doing is thinking about what your brain thinks about what you hear. It's not about your ear. Really. It's about how you interpret what you hear. That's something you learn in your first music theory pedagogy class by the way. That's why the term 'ear training' is problematic. It's not ear training - you're not training your ear. You're training your brain if you think about it. You're training your brain to interpret what you hear.
Jessica: Yeah. In addition to hearing and training your brain, what other advice would you give to a musician who is just beginning to compose?
Lane: Compose all the time! Just compose as much music as you can and not for the sake of volume. Not just to, you know, amass a collection of pieces, but hopefully that process of writing something and finishing it...writing something else and finishing it...writing something else and finishing it...will refine your ideas and refine sort of what it is you're trying to do.
The most important thing beyond that that I think you can do is to give your music to players or whomever you're writing for and hear it performed in real time, in a room, on actual instruments. Not on Midi. Not on a computer. You want to hear the real thing in space taking up space in a room or in a hall or something because that's how it's going to be performed. That's how it's going to be performed in a space. You have to imagine how the instruments are going to take up space. That's something by the way that I got from one of my teachers at UTD, Dan Welcher. He always talked to me about really actively imagining the performers on a stage and how those instruments really fill up a room because they're not the same. A marimba and a vibraphone resonate completely differently. That has to matter. And not only should that matter, that should be exciting! You know what I mean? Those little differences like that should really play a huge role in how your piece is actually written and so the more opportunities a young composer who's really just starting out can do that; to actually hear your own music, that's indispensable.
Jessica: One of the roles that you play at SMU is as the director of the Meadows Ensemble Szygy and it's a contemporary group that performs new music and music of living composers and the repertoire has included programming on themes such as gender roles, domestic violence, affects of politics, and even more. So can you share about that ensemble and kind of the works that they perform?
Lane: Yeah. Szygy is a chamber ensemble and that means that we can have anywhere from one and twenty or more performers. We had 30-35 in a show a couple of years ago. And yeah, we take a very broad view of the term contemporary. For example, one of the oldest pieces that we've performed is Parade by Erik Satie, which I think was from 1819. So you may think well how is that contemporary? Well, it's contemporary in spirit because of its experimental nature. I tend to take sort of a broad historical look at what it means for a piece to be contemporary, but we also are very strongly aligned with the composition department since I also teach composition and so we perform a lot of new student works as well. We've been very fortunate to do that.
But the great thing about Szygy is that I'm stylistically agnostic. It doesn't matter to me what style the music is in and in fact I actually want for us to perform music that's in a broad range of styles. Now sometimes I'll organize a concert around a particular style or a particular voice, but the great thing about that is just getting to see the diversity of approaches that composers have taken within a particular style. You know, usually it's very eclectic. I mean we've had serial pieces. We've had minimalist pieces. We've had music with pop or hip hop influence and it's really just been all over the map. We've had electro-acoustic pieces as well so stylistically things are all over the map and that's just, that's how I like it. But we also do a lot of collaboration not only with other divisions within meadows, but also with different organizations within the community.
Szygy is an astronomical term. It means an alignment of celestial bodies and I sort of view that as a metaphor for collaboration into these two different, two or more entities coming together to form something new.
Jessica: In addition to working with the ensemble at SMU and teaching at SMU, I know that you are continuing to work as a composer. Are there any projects that you're currently working on?
Lane: (laughing) I'm laughing just because yeah, I always tell myself...I tell myself I'm not going to do this - I'm not going to stack a bunch of projects up on top of each other. And I...it just keeps happening, keeps happening, keeps happening. I say yes to too many things at the same time. So yes, I'm working on a percussion ensemble that was commissioned for a concert that's coming up in the fall to honor the legacy of Doug Howard who was the Principal Percussionist of the Dallas Symphony for many years and who is now retired. I also...I just got a commission offer from Abby Hawthorn, a former student here, for a woodwind quartet to perform on her Masters recital next year. I've also been commissioned by Allison Reed, who is a wonderful harpist here in Dallas, for a piece for solo harp for her to use on outreach concerts that she gives for people to remember the victims of gun violence. And so it's kind of a largely a meditative piece - the whole goal there is just to give space for however you want to think about that issue. And a non-commissioned piece that I'm working on is a song cycle for mezzo-soprano and piano on poetry of Wallace Stevens who is probably my favorite poet. I have a collection of nine poems that I'm trying to wrangle into something cool so we'll see. We'll see what happens there.
Jessica: I figured you wouldn't have just one project going. In kind of closing, a few months ago I had approached you about the podcast and asking you to share and you were in a place where you were needing to take some time and you're now kind of, I'll say, crusading to help students access mental health resources and sharing your story about your experience to help those who may be going through something similar. Can you touch on that?
Lane: Sure. I'm always happy to talk about this issue. Well, not happy happy, but certainly glad to. Yeah, you know I try not to flash a neon sign about this necessarily, but I have been - I've tried to be pretty open about my own history with depression and anxiety. Yeah, you're right. There was a time a few months ago when all of that got really bad and I was having to cancel things and say no to things. You had very generously asked to interview me and I had said yes and you were very gracious about rescheduling. I just felt that I needed to just clear my schedule and just exercise some self-care for a while. But you know, all that's being treated now and things are much, much better. But yeah, I remember dealing with this when I was in undergrad here at SMU. I was a student here and I remember really feeling like there were times that I was very confused. I didn't know where to turn. I didn't know what resources were offered.
And yeah, I have noticed more and more over the past several years that students not only here, but really everywhere seem to be and I don't know if incidents are increasing, but they seem to be dealing with some of these mental health issues more and more and they're bringing those issues into the classroom more and more. And you know, I know that we are not a treatment center - we're a school of music, but at the same time I feel responsible for at least trying to help guide them toward resources that the university has and that the community has, but also resources that they can find online that in the absence of, perhaps, trained professionals that can help or maybe even concurrently with professional help. Resources that augment their therapy and their own personal self-care that they can curate however they want. It's everything from books to podcast to youtube channels to all kinds of things.
But the main thing I try to do is model a certain openness about these issues. As a result of that, a lot of students come to me and want to talk about these issues and I'm always happy to do it. So I hope that this is something that we can continue as teachers to try to understand these issues among members of our student population and try to deal with them in appropriate ways. The main thing I do really is just listen. I mostly just listen to them. I'm not a trained professional. I don't want to be. I've seen their job and I know the kind of training that goes into it and holy cow. I have no interest in taking that on, but you know, if I can be a sounding board for students or for anybody really, I'm always happy to do it because I remember what it was like to... I said earlier that composition can feel really isolating and depression and anxiety can really really isolate you quite a bit and so I remember what that was like. I remember what that felt like and so yeah, I try to stay open and available for this sort of thing.
Jessica: Yeah, I agree. I see that even with middle schoolers as well, you know, that stress and having experienced it myself as well having gone through my life with that, I'll say, being open about it and sharing simply kind of opens it for others to go 'okay I'm not alone in this' and also making it more comfortable to talk about that taking off that stigma or those things. But same thing, I wouldn't ever claim to be a professional on it, but listening is huge and just being aware and helping others know they're not alone and I think that's great that you're available for that for your students.
I'm going to ask one last question in case those listening are interested in finding your work and getting in touch with you. How would they do that?
Lane: They can always go to my Soundcloud page which I need to update. I think every composer probably needs to update their Soundcloud page or maybe I'm just projecting my own lack of updating onto onto everybody else. It's https://soundcloud.com/lane-harder. You can also find information about me on the SMU Website. My bio and contact information is on there. And I don't know - I'm on Facebook. I'm on Instagram. I post stuff whenever I am able to.
Jessica: Well thank you so much. This was a real treat for me to get to talk with you and I have no doubt that the people listening will get a lot out of the episode as well, but I really thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me.
Lane: Thank you Jessica. I love your podcast and it was great to chat with you.
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