For the journal Strumenti e Musica, Ancona, Italy

 Francesco Cuoghi: I would like to begin this brief interview with your thoughts on Darmstadt. Darmstadt as a point of reference and confrontation today for many young composers and the Darmstadt of memory, the “Historical School of Darmstadt”, the work and thoughts of composers like Boulez, Nono, Maderna. What does going to Darmstadt mean to you?

 Rodney Sharman: The Darmstadt I know is Darmstadt from 1982 to 1992, long after the days of Maderna and Boulez. Luigi Nono is another story, for I knew him in Freiburg, and assisted him in his Klangexperimenten (experiments in sound) at the Heinrich Strobel Studios at Sundwestfunk. I was still active as a flutist, knowledgeable in extended techniques, and had something of a gift for playing bass flute. Nono made recordings of me playing multiphonics for electronic processing. This was the early ‘80’s, at the time he wrote his wonderful flute parts for Roberto Fabricciani. Nono was not easy to work for, and the student instrumentalists he selected for his experiments were never paid, he never even bought us lunch! Curious, considering his professed politics… Still, he was a very passionate and inspiring man. Bruno Maderna is buried in the cemetery next to the current Darmstadt Summer School, and I visited his grave several times, always on hot Summer days, the cemetery bordered with enormous, fragrant Linden trees.

 I first visited Darmstadt in 1982. I was twenty-four years old, and had been studying composition in Freiburg with Brian Ferneyhough since Fall 1980.  I had no money, no place to stay and no expectations beyond hearing a few concerts and visiting school friends. As luck would have it, one of my colleagues was "having it off" with one of the more distinguished members of the performance faculty, so I was able to take her apartment for as long as I wished. I simply "crashed the party", brazenly attending all the lectures and concerts without paying admission, cafeteria meals provided gratis by my colleague who was busy with summer romance and late-night suppers in Italian bistros. And yes, I did hear some marvelous concerts and lectures: new music by Rihm, Lachenmann, Ferneyhough, Levinas, Grisey. I was intoxicated by the atmosphere and excitement of the opposing aesthetic camps, boos and cheers for "new complexity" (Ferneyhough), "new romanticism" (Rihm) and "musique spectrale" (Grisey). The following courses were just as exciting. Morton Feldman’s lectures in 1984 and ’86 were very controversial, I think most English-speakers perceived him as equal parts Moses and stand-up comic. The European premiere of his four-hour Second String Quartet by the Kronos Quartet remains one of the most important experiences of my life.

 F.C. Would you recount the circumstances around which you received the prestigious Kranichsteiner prize in 1990?

 R.S.: I returned as an official participant every two years from 1984 to 1992, winning the Tuition prize in 1986, a special Commission Prize in 1988 and the Kranichsteiner Prize for Echo and Narcissus (1990), a work for amplified string quartet and piano performed by Yvar Mikhashoff and the Arditti String Quartet at the Orangerie

 In 1984 I was pretty quiet and didn’t really participate except as an audience member. In 1986, I began to take a much more active role and my music was performed to boos and cheers in Darmstadt. Erstarrung, Dark Glasses, In Deepening Light, Narcissus, The Proximity of Mars, September, Opera Transcriptions: Madama Butterfly, Apollo’s Touch and Echo and Narcissus were all performed in Darmstadt between 1986 and 1992. This was very important time for me. I began to lecture there, and when Harry Halbreich, the normal translator for most of the lectures, failed to appear, I stepped in as interpreter German/English and English/German for many of the participants. Younger composers started asking me for lessons, and faculty and students alike began to play my music in their own countries (including you, Francesco!). In eight years I went from “gate-crasher” to prizewinner. It all happened amidst the chaos and brilliant eclecticism of the Darmstadt Summer School. I remember these years vividly and with great affection. I would not be who I am as an artist or human being without them, not only for the life-changing experience of hearing so many great performances and premieres, but for the many musicians I met who came to play an important role in my life as interpreters, teachers, students, friends.

  F.C.: Several diverse figures with a profound impact on the history of contemporary music have played a role in your development as an artist: Morton Feldman, for example, but not only him. How was your apprenticeship affected by these encounters, at festivals contemporary music festivals in Germany and around the world?

 R.S.: I have had the pleasure of knowing many important figures in new music over the last twenty years. Of composers with whom I eventually studied, I was closest to Morton Feldman, Louis Andriessen and Fredeic Rzweski, of composers who were not my teachers, I would say Michael Finnissy and John Cage. I first met Cage in Metz at the premiere of Metzment (a happening) and Thirty pieces for Five Orchestras in 1981. We had a mutual friend, Martin Bartlett, so it was easy to introduce myself. We began to correspond; I sent him a programme from the premiere of Thirty pieces for String Quartet from the.1984 Darmstadt courses. He wrote me back, saying that mine was the first word he had heard from the performance, and invited me to visit him in New York. We met several times after that, in Europe, Vancouver, Buffalo and his home in New York City. I arranged for the premiere performance of his work for voices, Ear for EAR at a festival I programmed at the Music Gallery in Toronto in 1988, “Morton Feldman: Portrait and Legacy”.

 Cage and I were once staying at the home our friends Sheldon and Mary Berlow in Buffalo, NY. Sheldon was making tea for John and boiling water in a designer kettle on the gas stove. When the water boiled, it activated a harmonica that could be heard in any part of the Berlow’s large house. John Cage was delighted, smiling his big open-mouth smile. Sheldon made tea and turned the gas off under the kettle, which continued to sing, even as the pitch slowly began to droop. The sound went on and on. Knowing Cage’s philosophy of letting sounds be themselves, Sheldon did nothing to move the kettle, although the sound by this time had become irritating. Suddenly Cage sprang from his seat, moved the kettle and said in his characteristic soft, fey voice: “Well! That’s enough of that!”

 My friendship with Michael Finnissy has been very important to me. He is a composer who has the courage and technique to go wherever his tremendous imagination takes him. He is also one of the few living composers to address social, political and sexual issues in music in Britain, a country in which there is considerable opposition to this. Michael also writes music wonderful music for amateurs and children, something my teachers Morton Feldman and Brian Ferneyhough would never consider. My two books of Opera Transcriptions for solo piano are dedicated to Michael Finnissy, as is Canonic Toccata for solo piano, written in celebration of his fiftieth birthday.

 F.C.: Many changes have taken place since the milieu of the1980’s and the present. One often speaks of the absence of a “school”, of a greater freedom of language. The concept of “score” is increasingly difficult to define, also for the interpreter. How do you define what you do in music notation?

 R.S.: One of the great advantages of coming to artistic maturity in the eighties was this tremendous freedom from any one “school”. In Germany in the early eighties, this freedom was won with tremendous amounts screaming and kicking from all sides regardless of youth or age, those in favour of direct expression or the obscure, simplicity or complexity, those who believe that music is incapable of expression or that is the very soul of expression all fought a losing battle in the quest for one dominant aesthetic. It was a passionate period in music history, one in which the very idea of progress in music was being questioned and eventually rejected, perhaps for the first time. I welcomed this change with open ears and open arms. I believe strongly in artistic pluralism and freedom of expression. It is no accident that I am the only composer who studied formally with Brian Ferneyhough and Morton Feldman, a fact which, by the way, amused John Cage enormously.

 In regard to notation, this freedom has been extremely advantageous to all composers, regardless of their aesthetic. I always notate in what I feel is the easiest and clearest way for the performer. Most of my music is notated strictly in the usual Western music notation, but I use proportional or indeterminate notation whenever it is advantageous to the music or the performer.

 F.C.: Let us turn now to the guitar. A large percentage of your xhamber music catalogue includes the guitar, Erstarrung, Nader tot U, etc. In all of these works written for various combinations, you include the combination of three plucked instruments: the mandoline, guitar and harp. What is the function of the guitar in this ensemble?

 R.S.: I first used the combination of mandolin, guitar and harp in Erstarrung, written for the Dutch group, het Nieuw Ensemble when I was living in Amsterdam in 1983-84. Their ensemble was clarinet, mandolin, guitar, percussion, violin and doublebass. I found this ensemble too limiting, and only agreed to write for the them if I could also use harp and Baroque flute: the harp to add a luxuriousness and sustain to the sound, the Baroque flute to add tenderness and a timbral “mirage” in pairing the bass clarinet. I also used Baroque rather than modern flute to avoid obscuring the upper harmonics of the plucked instruments, violin and doublebass.

 The inspiration for putting the mandolin, guitar and harp together came from listening to recordings of the characteristic, rich sound of Nicolas Harnoncourt’s continuo realizations of Monteverdi. The harp, as I said, provides luxuriousness and sustain, the mandolin delicacy and “pointedness”. The guitar in this combination adds a flexibility and warmth, even a kind of legato that is not satisfactory on other plucked instruments, i.e.: when the guitar plays more than more than one pitch per attack, as in the guitar’s measured trill in Erstarrung.

 F.C.: There is also a recent piece for mandolin, guitar and harp, Suspended Waltz, which probably defines your idea of “plucked sound” (Italian “a pizzico”) of the guitar.

 R.S.: Suspended Waltz is adapted from my chamber opera Elsewhereless. This is dance music which accompanies a dreamlike scene in which Eugene, gay partner of the Canadian Ambassador in a third world country, is giving an English lesson to Malcolm, their manservant. Here, the combination of plucked sounds is like a music box, a sound infused with an innocent, fragile eroticism made audible only through the combination of these instruments. The opera’s libretto and direction is by filmmaker Atom Egoyan and this dance sequence has some of the opera’s most touching cinematic projections and choreography. The adaptation was made at the request of Francesco Cuoghi for Ensemble Orphée.

 F.C.: What about September for three guitars? This piece is dedicated to Morton Feldman. Perhaps you can say a little bit about the systematic use of extreme high harmonics at the distance of two octaves above the fundamental. The resulting sonority is extremely fragile, also their method of production. What made you decide to use them?

 R.S.: September was written painstakingly over the period of nearly two years. I do not play the guitar, but I have written for it often and always in chamber music. Because I am not a Classical guitarist, I am perhaps more likely to use techniques relatively unfamiliar on the guitar but very common on the electric guitar or the violin, for example. The secondary harmonics used in September are unusual, but not, I think, so difficult to produce. They are, however, extremely delicate and soft and extend the guitar into an unusually high register. This piece was first performed in the noisy Aula of a public highschool in Darmstadt where it was booed and cheered at length, later at a concert for meditation at the following Darmstadt Summer Course in the great Dom of Speyer, the largest Romanesque cathedral in Germany, where a member of the very hushed and respectful audience told me it was “like listening to dust settling in the cathedral”.

 F.C.: The rhythm in September is particularly original and enigmatic… talk about complexity and simplicity! Simplicity, because each guitar part on its own is not particularly difficult, neither in rhythm nor figuration. Complexity, because the sparseness and extreme independence of the three figures when played together produces characteristic “small sound”, an idea of “new minimalism”, objectively and obsessively varied. Comments?

 R.S.: I could not have described this piece better. I can only add that the scordatura is identical for all three guitars, the octave quartertone C/C# was designed to resonate a kind of “A major/minor” sound, in the same way the regular tuning creates a resonant “E minor, adding to the work’s characteristic sound and delicacy. As to producing a music that is at once simple and complex at the same time, you have correctly identified an important characteristic of all my work.

 F.C.: Let’s finish up by talking about another work, The Black Domino, for three electric guitars. Why did you use the electric guitar? What are your thoughts about the possible development electric guitar writing in respect to other electronic instruments?

 R.S.: The Black Domino is a sin of my youth. I had broken the wrist of my writing hand in a bicycle accident at a time before computers could master music notation. To pass the time productively, I wrote out as a dictation one of my own pieces for computer-generated tape – my only piece that uses a random algorhythm. I “froze” this piece in conventional notation, and made two arrangements of the work, one for solo organ for my Swedish colleague Hans-Ola Ericsson, later for three electric guitars, asking the players to use a rough, “uneducated sound”. It is my only pop/post-punk influenced piece from the height of Deutsche Neue Welle (German New Wave) ca. 1980.

 I have written a few pieces with an electronic element, including a full-length multi-track tape work for modern dance, but it is not really my milieu. I write for electronic instruments when I have an idea which can be expressed only through the medium of electronics. Curiously, I am now writing a piece which includes electric bass guitar for this reason.

 F.C.: Will we soon have a solo guitar piece by Rodney Sharman?

 R.S.: I have been commissioned to write a work for solo guitar by guitarists Michael Strutt, Vancouver, Canada, and Jürgen Ruck, Würzburg, Germany and hope to complete the work in Spring 2002. It should be available to other guitarists through Doberman/Yppan sometime in 2003, a year after the first performances of the work. You can know when it’s available by checking my website: rodneysharman.com

Francesco Cuoghi is a guitarist and animateur living in Rome, Italy. Interview via email, January, 2002, Rome/Vancouver

N.B. Since this interview, Rodney Sharman has completed In a room for solo guitar. The European premiere will take place in July, 2002 in Darmstadt, Germany, Jürgen Ruck, solo guitar; the North American premiere will take place in Autumn, 2002 at the University of British Columbia Recital Hall, Vancouver, Canada, Michael Strutt, solo guitar.

Rodney Sharman/Works with Guitar

solo guitar:

chamber music:

voice and instruments:

opera:

(CMC)= available from the Canadian Music Centre, 20 St. Joseph Street, Toronto, Ontario, M4Y 1J9 Canada, tel: (416) 961-6601, fax: (416) 961-7198 e-mail: cmc@interlog.com

(d/y) = published by doberman/yppan, C.P. 2021, St. Nicolas, Québec, G0S 3L0 Canada, fax: (418) 836-3645 email: doberman.yppan@videotron.ca

(ms) = available only in manuscript or on tape from the composer, e-mail: sharman@sfu.ca

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