Pneuma
This interview with Ayelet Rose Gottlieb, François Houle, James Falzone and Michael Winograd was conducted during March 2019.
Tony Reif: I’m interested in the genesis of the project. What was the impetus behind doing a record of mainly poetic texts, and how did this particular group come together to develop the idea?
Ayelet Rose Gottlieb: I’ll answer from my personal perspective… I’ve always loved working with poetry, even the kind that doesn’t “naturally” lend itself to composition – poems in long form, that don’t have a very clear rhythm to them. The whole idea was born from my love of Christina Rossetti’s poem “Who Has Seen the Wind?”, which Michael composed music to, and which I used as the foundation for the musical form of my mini-suite within the full set of music (tracks 2 – 7). To me it felt natural to “speak” through poetry and wordless sounds in this collection of songs.
Michael Winograd: Ayelet and I had been working together for quite a long time (starting with the 2006 record Mayim Rabim which she included me on), but there would be long gaps between collaborations. She had been toying with this idea for some years, and when it finally looked like it was going to happen, that’s when the fun started. We had a really nice improvisation afternoon some years ago at my home studio in Brooklyn, using some texts that Ayelet brought in, and I took our improvisations and started slicing and dicing them and adding additional orchestrations to make them into somewhat more coherent compositions. That’s how some of the tunes I brought in came about.
James Falzone: The genesis was Ayelet, who first posited the idea, which certainly resonated with me quickly. I’ve always enjoyed the sound of groups with multiple clarinets – I have a group called Renga with 6 of them! – and working with Ayelet was something I had been trying to do for some time. Same with Michael and François. I took the opportunity to create several pieces using texts from medieval Japan that I had been interested in for some time.
François Houle: I first got approached by Ayelet to discuss the possibility of putting together a group with two other clarinetists. Intrigued by this proposal, I suggested we meet to explore material using graphic scores and maybe texts, to generate ideas for compositions. After an initial meeting at her place, we somehow decided to focus on poetry that had the theme of wind as a focus point. The little session we did was captured on iPhones and we made some notes on poetry that would seem suitable for the project. It was all very organic, with decisions and ideas sprouting very spontaneously.
TR: Btw I just found out that Ayelet, Michael and James, you were all students of Ran Blake at the New England Conservatory and that’s where you three met back around 2000. Tell us something about those days.
ARG: I only spent two years at NEC, and that time is one of the most significant times of my life. The music I was exposed to there and musicians I met there continue to appear and make ripples in my music-life. The connection between James, Michael and me is a great example of that. I don’t believe James and I played much during our time at NEC, but his sound and warm disposition always stood out to me. Ran Blake held “soirées” where people would play short pieces of music, eat and converse. Sometimes they were held at a local Indian restaurant and sometimes in his home, among his LP, book and art collections. I remember James’ playing on one particular night. He stood there alone with his clarinet and played what I believe was an improvisation. The purity of his intention and sound resonates in my soul to this day. Perhaps that was when the seed of Pneuma was first planted.
Through Michael (and Hankus Netzki) I learned to appreciate and eventually love klezmer music. Growing up in Israel, I was very cynical about klezmer. I thought of it as music for old people or Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews. I never considered it worth a listen and was even repulsed by it to a degree. In Israel the balance of power between secular and Orthodox Jews is a very prominent issue, and I was locked into that way of thinking at the time. I definitely didn’t notice the depth and richness of colour this music held. It just sounded outdated to me. Since I speak Hebrew, I was immediately invited by Hankus Netzki to be a guest singer in his klezmer ensemble. Yiddish, a sister-tongue to Hebrew, broke in my mouth. It felt foreign to me. I was having a very hard time finding myself in this music – until I heard Michael. Michael’s tone, humour, and artistic approach to music resonated with me profoundly, and finally melted the tall walls that separated me from this musical tradition that is so intertwined with my roots. A few years later I found myself in NY composing my song cycle Mayim Rabim, based on erotic Biblical texts from the Song of Songs and inspired by various Jewish musical traditions. Naturally, I invited Michael to record and tour with me. Michael’s playing elevated the music to another sphere as far as I was concerned. On the concerts he couldn’t make, when a sub was playing his parts, they just didn’t taste the same. Michael is truly a unique player who is able to bring his traditional klezmer style into contemporary music, improvised music and beyond, making his playing all the more profound.
Ran Blake, Gunther Schuller, George Russell and Dominique Eade are just a few of the incredible teachers who were teaching at NEC at that time. Dominique is still there, raising generations of incredible vocalists. Their third stream aesthetic deeply informs my music to this day, and the same is probably true for James and Michael.
TR: How was the final selection of poetic texts decided, and could you describe the collaborative and often improvisational process that led to the final form of certain songs?
ARG: Choosing the poems was an organic part of the process. I’ll speak to tracks 1 – 8, in no particular order. As I mentioned, “Who Has Seen the Wind?” was the seed of the idea to form this band, and I used its text as the foundation for the form of the mini-song-cycle. But I found it hard to set this poem to music myself, on its own, as a stand-alone composition. So I asked Michael if he would like to work on that text, which he did, beautifully, loosely basing his composition on some improvised variations that he and I played when I visited him in NYC.
Mayumi Terada’s poem has been resonating with me ever since I first read it after seeing her exhibition of photography + poetic texts at the Robert Miller Gallery in Chelsea, NY in 2003. I found “The Wind Will Take Us” on a poetry blog online when I was beginning to work on these compositions, and it felt directly connected. Learning more about Forugh Farrokhzad, a very famous poet in Iran, a woman, who struggled with depression and ended up dying in a car accident at a very young age, I wanted to bring her words into our music.
François, who has a wonderful collection of poetry, brought Joyce’s “Alone” and Richard Jeffrey Newman’s “Light” to our first, duo improvisation session. They both echoed the wind theme, and they spoke to me. “Alone” made me think of my friend Ora, to whom one of our wordless compositions (track 5) is dedicated. We played “Alone” for the first time shortly after her passing, and the reeds that whisper “a name – her name” connected to her in me.
FH: Many of the pieces came as sketches and bits of recordings that got exchanged amongst us, with Michael taking a bit of Ayelet’s ideas or mine and transforming these embryos into realized compositions. By the time we all got together to rehearse for our premiere performance at the 2017 Vancouver Jazz Festival we had several sketches, some completed compositions, and poems that were left fairly open to build improvisations on top of. I brought in an arrangement of the Tom Waits song
“The Last Rose of Summer” as I felt the project needed something very harmonious and light to provide contrast to the rest of the material, which already covered so much ground stylistically.
MW: I drove down to Atlanta to see Tom Waits play in 2008. 17-hour drive from Brooklyn. Too many cigarettes smoked on the drive for a clarinetist. Absolutely worth it, one of the more epic concerts I’ve been to in my life.
JF: We set different texts that Ayelet sent round, and it really was not until the first rehearsal that I was exposed to all the different poetic traditions we were referencing. This felt perfectly natural, honest, and fitting for four musicians from very different backgrounds who navigate the world in unique ways. The Tom Waits came about in the same way as any of the other texts in that we approached the song with sincerity and asked its fittedness. I set the four medieval Japanese texts (tracks 9 – 12), all by women, which I learned from my friend Margaret Chula’s book Just This. I’ve become more and more interested in Asian poetry traditions and the concept of saying as much as possible with the most refined (and smallest) amount of words. This is analogous to my ambitions as an improviser and composer: how can I say what I want to say with as much clarity and intention as possible? The texts I used are the epitome of this to me, each one encapsulating so much meaning about the human condition in so small a space.
TR: Ayelet, how does this project relate to others you’ve done involving poetry (often focusing on Israeli writers)? Also, could you comment on the songs without lyrics that are homages to Israeli family members and friends? And have you thought of your music as a way of bringing people together, as a celebration of our shared humanity?
ARG: Poetry has always been a very essential part of my work and my artistic life. I’ve worked with Biblical poetry, contemporary Israeli and Palestinian poetry, with fragments of essays and speeches as poetic material (by Wassily Kandinsky, John Cage, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and more…), contemporary and classical English and translated poetry…I work with contemporary Israeli poets as a translator (Hebrew to English) and have been writing poetry and lyrics ever since I knew how to write. I also love composing and singing wordless compositions, which allow me to perform as an instrumentalist. But using texts adds an additional layer to the music, the performance and the interpretation of a piece. The set of music that we put together for this band is a very natural progression for me within my work.
I also enjoy working within a theme or concept. In my song cycle Mayim Rabim (2006, Tzadik, on which Michael played clarinet) I composed music to selections from the erotic Biblical poetry “Song of Songs.” For my 2016 release Shiv’a I composed an instrumental cycle for string quartet and percussion around the theme of rituals of mourning. Similarly to my mini-cycle in this collection, where each song is titled after a fragment of Rossetti’s poem, the form and titles of the sections of Shiv’a were derived from a quote, in that case a Biblical quote, where The Great Spirit reveals itself to the prophet Elijah just before he is taken from this earth in a carriage of flames.
I find that taking a theme and approaching it from many angles allows for deep observations that surpass the particular topic at hand. It provides an opportunity to untangle many concepts, thoughts and emotional content under the umbrella of that particular idea.
I absolutely think that one of the most meaningful things I do with my music is the breaking of barriers, bringing together people (and sounds) that seemingly shouldn’t be matched to each other, and yet that work when I bring them together.
Our set stems from Rossetti’s poem, which has a sweetness to it. The wind theme could have taken many directions. It could have led to a new-agey, meditative-sounding set. And we do have moments of sweetness on the album, such as François’ beautiful arrangement of “The Last Rose of Summer” and “This Pine Tree” and “Wakened by the Scent” composed by James. But most of our music reflects on the more unsettling aspects of Pneuma / Ruah / Wind. Wind as an empty space, exposing a sense of loss, in “Who Can Say What Loneliness Is” and “Passing By / The Shape of Tears.” Buffeted by the wind to the point of losing yourself in “The Wind Will Take Us.” A turbulence of emotions entangled in love in “Alone” and “Trembling / Light.” Open conversations with the spirits (ruah) of dead loved ones in “Passing Through / Lament for Harry” (my grandfather, who played the clarinet his whole life) and “Neither You nor I / Conversation with Ora.” And observing the beauty that survives the wind’s destruction, in “Ruined House.” The four elements, which are reflected in the images we chose, are the way we visualize the wind – it appears to us in the burning fire, in rough waters, in smoky air, in a sand storm.
TR: Was the group name, Pneuma (ancient Greek for air in motion, breath, spirit, soul) there from the start as a kind of unifying image for the music? And how about the title, Who Has Seen the Wind? It seems equally archetypal…and reinforced by the images we’ve used in the design which reference the four elements (earth, air, fire, water).
ARG: The group name was chosen after all the music was composed – when, working towards the Vancouver Jazz Festival concert, we realized that we were a band! The project started as an idea of mine and was under my name. But when we started working on it, it really shifted and became a collective work, so we decided to name it and continue as a collective. James came up with the name, inspired by the set of music we had composed, with the wind theme.
JF: Yes, I have to claim responsibility for Pneuma. Obviously we all need our breath to create our work so it felt like a natural extension of the project. But as you point out, the word has larger and more far-reaching connotations beyond “breath,” referencing soul and spirit as well. With these deep texts and these deep people, it seemed fitting. Breath is so foundational to existence and is so important in myriad faith traditions.
TR: How did you three clarinetists work out how you would interact in different songs, and did those (loose?) arrangements change much from take to take during the recording session?
FH: Again, it was a very organic process. What complicated matters is that we all felt very involved and at ease with the group direction, so there were never any arguments or a reticence towards the decision-making. Composers had some prerogatives as to who they wanted to improvise, and where in the pieces. In the end, we all agreed to strike some balance so that everyone had a featured solo, some improvs, and some compositional input.
JF: We were using our instincts for sure but there are some basic orchestration tactics at work as well. Anytime you have a homogenous sound you have to start thinking about blend, balance, and a concern for the harmonic spectrum (overtones) and where things are “situated” for the ear. We spent some time working on the blend, finding the sonic space. It helps that we each, individually, have unique sound concepts on the clarinet, so we could work on subtle blending. Additionally, occasionally I’m playing Eb sopranino clarinet, and Michael is playing C clarinet, which allows some space and blend naturally. The arrangements were very open and loose and changed from take to take for sure. That’s the beauty of them, though there definitely are some through-composed moments where we were are all playing parts. But those are often quickly followed by improvised moments.
MW: Some aspects were pre-orchestrated, either with standard notation or ideas that were thought through; but most of the interactions between the clarinetists had to be learned on the spot and pretty quickly. It’s a challenging idea, to learn to play with musicians whom you have never met, perform a concert and make a record in a week…but I suppose it worked out pretty well! A lot of listening and trust. I think that because we are all clarinetists, there was a subconscious lingo that helped us communicate musically. That said, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t intimidated at the start by the superb level of these guys as improvisers and technicians on their instruments. However, the intimidation morphed into inspiration. It’s also fun to make funny sounds on the clarinet.
TR: Another theme that seems to flow through this song cycle is some link or relationship between the intensely personal (yet almost trans-personal – I’m thinking for example of the medieval Japanese lyrics or, in a different way, Richard Jeffrey Newman’s poem) and the group, society, the political realm, across eras. The inclusion of the poem by Forugh Farrokhzad, now Iran’s most revered female poet, might have some political implications (as Ayelet mentioned, she died young in a car accident, long before the Islamic revolution, which banned her poetry for over a decade) – but it’s also interesting how her perspective and Newman’s apparently less conflicted and a-political American one seem to end up speak to each other in their deepest needs. And I’m wondering whether any of you think that this theme of the relationship between the individual and the group is somehow reflected in the music-making, perhaps in the relationships between composition and improvisation, the shifting roles between the four of you from one song to another and sometimes within songs.
ARG: A very interesting thought, Tony! I didn’t tie it into that, but now that you’ve brought it up, there are moments in which our sound is more blended and unified (such as the song “Who Has Seen The Wind?), and other moments in which the individual shines through. Those are some of my favourite moments in the album, I’m thinking of James’ emotive solo on “Neither I nor You / Pneuma” and Michael’s soulful solo on “Passing Through / Lament for Harry,” which brings into the contemporary sound of this ensemble the old Ashkenazi-Jewish sound, also Francois’ playing on our duo “Trembling / Light,” his tasteful use of effects to create this layered, oceanic tremble…
JF: That is a beautiful question, Tony. Improvisation is, for me, always a celebration of the moment and the human spirit. Like my colleagues, I am involved primarily in improvised music and, especially, the flow between the composed and the improvised, what I refer to as “the already and the not yet.” Pneuma continues this thread and is a collective that rests on its individuality. More than any other group I’m a part of, the four members of Pneuma have very different backgrounds and yet 10 minutes together and the common language is obvious. It’s a beautiful mystery in a way, how we can both retain our individuality and yet commit to the whole. It is like a family or the truest of community.
MW: A loaded question…I’m going to be vague here, because I’m not sure a detailed response is going to get us anywhere. But I’ve become either comfortable or at the very least accepting of the fact that in some fields it’s nearly impossible to be apolitical as a musician. At least for me, playing Jewish music all over the place, it’s not even an option anymore. And, clearly, this is the case with most of the music that folks like us play to a certain extent. What I do find interesting about these kinds of questions in this context is that this program of music is jam-packed with multiculturalism, yet that’s pretty well masked by our somewhat genre-less aesthetic…which is interesting for me, because most of the music I play is not like that. And in those circumstances, being multicultural to this extent requires extra care to avoid misguided appropriations. I’m losing my train of thought here a bit, but it occurs to me that maybe because of this “genre-less” aesthetic we have found a loophole in the endless vigilance about responsible musical appropriations.
TR: Now that you’re planning to tour this music for the first time (the only public performance so far was the premiere at the 2017 Vancouver International Jazz Festival), are you thinking of perhaps expanding the present, approximately 45-minute cycle, or do you consider this essentially the work’s final form?
ARG: I’m hoping this band will have a long life ahead. Stravinsky has a composition for three clarinets and voice, which we talked about learning and putting our own spin on. And I’m sure that we will all be inspired to write more music as the band evolves. For this first tour we’ll probably play primarily this wind material.
FH: I’m not averse to keep seeking out new poems to set to music for this group, perhaps on another theme. Now that we’ve completed the album, and see how it all came together so wonderfully, I personally feel inspired to do more.
JF: I’m always open to expansion and I would love to set some additional texts. The Japanese poetic tradition would be an almost endless fount of source-material. At the same time, this body of work is just seeing life, so I imagine we’ll need to spend some time allowing it to incubate and see where it is, where it needs to go.
MS: Sure! why not? What if we have to play a second set? It will be interesting to see what we want to do next after touring the record, it can go in all sorts of directions.