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Steven Mackey Interview
Posted on Saturday, May 05, 2007. © Copyright 2004-2008 David Bruce
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C:T talks to Steven Mackey, whose piece Dreamhouse is given its US premiere by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project on May 19.
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Steven Mackey
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Tell us something about your background.
My father worked for the US government and they moved around a lit. So, I was born in Germany, started school in England, and lived in many other countries until settling in California at the age of 10. My first musical passion was playing guitar in rock bands in northern california. I entered college (UNiversity of California) to be a Physics major (in case the rock start thing didn't pan out). Then I discovered classical music and learned to play the classical guitar, the renaissance and baroque lutes and then found my true calling as a concert music composer. I went to graduate school at The State University of New York at Stony Brook and Brandeis University.
How did you start composing?
I was "making up" music from the age of 12. First i would make up songs for myself then when I started playing in bands I would make up original material for them. My first notated composition was at age 20 in college.
Which composers have influenced you the most?
Josquin, Monteverdi, Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Stravinsky, Ives, Berio, Ligeti, Led Zepplin, Jimi Hendrix, Louis Andriessen, Paul Lansky, Sarah Snider
Which non-musical influences have affected your music most?
Between the ages of eighteen and twenty I was a professional freestyle skiier. My vision of perfection was to careen down the mountain, head over heels, arms and legs flailing, on-lookers gasping, and somehow end up at the bottom with a smile on my face as if it was all on purpose ...was it? I'm not sure if that was an influence or just another manifestation of a deeper sensibility that also shows up in my music. Having spent a lot of time at high altitude, the timelessness, aloofness, and austere beauty of the mountains are a constant influence. Also, the feeling that the universe does not intrinsically make sense but we as individuals must make sense out of it is a recurring theme.
Tell us something about your working method as a composer. Give us something that might be or might have been a starting point for a piece.
I had the revelation that "how" one composers has an enormous impact on what one composes. When i was making up music for rock bands we would go into my parents garage, burn incense, turn on black lights and improvise. I try to incorporate some of that activity still by improvising in my basement alone or with friends and i still have psychedelic posters down there. In graduate school I worked with a sharp pencil and paper at a big well-lit desk and I still do some of that as well as work on the computer. I have a big stack of paper and each page has 27 randomly selected and ordered pitch class sets. I have begun many pieces by picking one of those pages and then spending the next 3 weeks figuring out a way to turn that randomized chaos into something what would guide me with as much authority as the tablet Moses brought down from the mountain.When I go on ski trips now they are not vacations. I go alone and work. I wake up early in the morning and compose for a few hours before skiing. While I ski I muse over what I am working on and as soon as I come of the mountain in the afternoon I compose for a few more hours while the exhilaration of the mountains is still raging.
When I start imagining music and feel intimidated by the process of how am I going to wrestle this fantasy down into notation, I try to focus on the process not on the goal. Instead of trying to take dictation directly from the universe, I first invent an activity that will get me engaged with the material and lead me to composing.
Interview by David Bruce © Copyright 2004-2008
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