Wayne Horvitz (IV)

This interview with Wayne Horvitz took place by email during May 2015.

Tony Reif: This project has an interesting genesis, which you go into in the liner note. As you say there, Richard Hugo isn’t a household name, but you knew about him for years before you actually read his poems. After that, you write, “it didn’t take much convincing.  They are inherently ‘musical’, and I loved the language, the era, the places.”  What is it about these poems that connects with the music you’ve been making since living in and getting to know the northwest? Does the history, geography, art, literature of the region (literally) resonate for you or lead to a musical response? I’m interested in the idea of language being musical – of course there can be a very direct connection (thinking for example of Janacek’s way of setting Czech speech rhythms in his operas), but here we’re not dealing with text directly but with some more nebulous connection between language and music. Any thoughts on how that process worked in this case?

Wayne Horvitz: I think Hugo’s poems are “inherently musical” because of the way they sound, the way they read, and the way they are structured. Why that is, I believe, is a result of Hugo’s own aesthetic approach to process and structure. Best to just quote the man himself. This is from the opening page of his book, The Triggering Town-Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing:

    When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music. If you believe the first, you are making your job very difficult, and you are not only limiting the writing of poems to something done only by the very witty and clever, such as Auden, you are weakening the justifications for creative-writing programs. So you can take that attitude if you want, but you are jeopardizing my livelihood as well of your chances of writing a good poem…

A couple of things I find compelling and charming about this paragraph. First, at the end of it, his obvious sense of humor and lack of self-importance, something I find essential in almost every artist I admire. More importantly, his obvious reverence for music as a kind of gold standard when it comes to discerning the importance of the conscious and the intuitive; how much of each, how they interact with each other, and so forth.

TR:  What kind of jazz and other music did Hugo himself listen to? Do you ‘hear’ him improvising in his poems? How did you select the poems to use – did you have any criteria in mind?

WH: I think he listed to the radio mostly. He was not a collector or a hard-core fan. I think he loved Mozart and Benny Goodman and Brahms and Duke Ellington. I love these lines from “Driving Montana”:

Miles from any town

your radio comes in strong, unlikely

Mozart from Belgrade, rock and roll 

from Butte. Whatever the next number,

you want to hear it. Never has your Buick

found this forward a gear. Even 

the tuna salad in Reedpoint is good.

Music was, clearly, a visceral pleasure to him. We have to keep in mind that this was an era when so much music was chosen for the listener, radio was king, and his love of jazz was in many ways a love for what we might call ‘popular’ music. But that includes Mozart and Bill Haley. However, old friends of Hugo do say he particularly loved jazz. Of course we may never know what that means, but it wasn’t unusual for writers of his generation to be drawn to the spirit of a music that was more improvisational, and so quintessentially American.

I don’t hear him improvising the poems per se. I liken it more to what I, or other composers, do. Some composers, and poets, and novelists, work very methodically, in that they start with a complete structure, then an outline, then a complete draft, and so on. I believe Hugo, like some novelists I know, and certainly some composers, including myself, was inclined to begin somewhere and see where it led him. That is certainly what he implies in his essays from The Triggering Town” But I also am sure that they were drafted, revised, re-considered, and carefully crafted.

TR: Do you feel a particular connection with Hugo himself, as an artist, a smither of thoughts and personal experiences into artistic experiences to share with others, as a lover of the natural world (perhaps akin to his teacher, Theodore Roethke, but without the transcendental overtones)? Did you ever once feel like ‘arguing’ with Hugo about his attitudes, personal failures, alcoholism, depression, or anything that seemed more the product of his time and personality than utterances that speak about things that still and always matter? As an American, how does he speak to you about being American? About being human? He has a keen sense of vulnerability and transience, doesn’t he. (And he died relatively young.) But also, it seems to me when reading the poems you selected, an appetite for life, deeply emotional but also detached enough to connect things up in sometimes amazing ways. His voice, his language, really grabs you…

WH: First place I am certainly younger than Hugo, but in the big picture not by much. Hugo was younger than my father for example, though like my father he fought in WWII. Having grown up in the culture of the 60s, and seeing the transformations of American culture, I am always fascinated by the part of that generation that didn’t buy into “The Greatest Generation” mystique, the one of miracle drugs and progressive capitalism and assumed endless upward mobility. But instead, the writers and poets and painters and musicians that were the precursors to the giant sea change that happened in the 60s. Obviously artists like Kerouac and Ginsberg and Pollock and Cunningham, and of course Cecil Taylor, Mingus, Coltrane. It is a sort of psychological no man’s land. It’s so much easier now to identify as an artist, to maintain progressive ideas about gender and class and race, to worship the individual. To me this era is analogous to America in the late 1800s. Modernization and industrialization standing side by side with what remained of the plains Indians and the last of the frontier. The opera house that was built in the middle of nowhere waiting for the city to arrive.

And then there is the region. I have hitchhiked and backpacked and driven around this part of the world really my whole life, and it’s simply a part of my DNA. And you are correct about his appetite for life, he celebrates its grandeur without sentimentality. Yet he seems to not be baffled in the least by its transience. He gets it.

TR: Did the idea of writing for a septet combining the Sweeter Than the Day band and the Gravitas Quartet come before or after you’d read Hugo’s work? Was the process of writing for this group much different from composing you’ve done for these bands separately? Did you map out the soloing and other aspects of the arrangements as you composed? At what point did you determine the balance between composition and improvisation in different pieces and overall? And between popular music influences (e.g. tremolo guitar), classical, jazz, etc.? Since the band has not performed the music live, did you try out different things much during the recording session?

WH: I have been thinking about putting these two bands together for a while. Gravitas provides such a variety and texture and color and personal improvisational language. Sweeter Than the Day has just become such a great band; we have learned to play as a single organism. But past a point that isn’t even relevant, these are just some of my favorite musicians on the planet.

In point of fact the music is fairly structured, and in ways that are not typical of me. I think that was a result of the poems. They are really instrumental songs, more than vehicles for improvisation and ensemble playing, although those elements certainly occur. And we didn’t have a lot of time in the studio to experiment, although we did play two nights of “warm-up” shows.

As for the balance between styles and genres, I have to say, and forgive me if this sounds trite, I just don’t think about that stuff. Tim has a sound he likes, if I like it too we go with it. Eric plays a beat I wouldn’t have thought of for my tune, and I like it, I go with it.

TR: How did you and your daughter Nica go about creating and connecting up the poems/music with the photos? Were the photos shot for the project, and do they picture any of the places in the poems, or do they predate it?

WH: The pictures were shot for the project, sort of. Nica and I took a 2-week road trip into Montana to visit friends, meet people, make new friends, and visit towns and other places that Hugo wrote about. It was a research trip, and an excuse for an excellent road trip. Lois Welch arranged for us to stay in the cabin where Hugo spent a lot of time in the last decade of his life, which was incredible. Very spare, and right by the south fork of the Teton River, with no running water and heated by wood. It did have electricity, and it was amusing to note that all the beds, cots really, with sleeping bags and old blankets, were all crammed into two tiny rooms, and were not exactly comfortable, but they all had reading lamps. This was a gang that liked to eat and drink and hike and lay in the sun and also clearly loved to read.

Nica took a lot of pictures during the trip, and afterwards we knew they had to go in the booklet. She also created a blog, which is gorgeous. Originally I thought I would contribute to it on a regular basis, but every time I open it I am reluctant to spoil it. It seems perfect the way it is.

We started with the most compelling photos, and just went from there. Some are more literal than others. The blue house is actually from the Cataldo Mission, other connections are less obvious, and others are more intuitive. My friend Lois Welch wondered what the picture of the woods had to do with “Missoula Softball Tournament”, and I honestly couldn’t tell her, it just fit my mood whenever I read the poem.

TR: Why did you decide not to set Hugo’s words to music? Are you interested in doing any more such projects, maybe something more classical than jazz? If so, any poets that intrigue you?

WH: I like to set text to music. I did it with text by Robin Holcomb and Rinde Eckert based on the novel by James Welch, The Heartsong of Charging Elk. I did it in my piece Smokestack Arias which used text by Robin Holcomb based on the events around an iconic moment in American labor history, the Everett massacre. Also with Joe Hill, with text by Paul Magid. I have written an art song based on a Pablo Neruda poem, and even written a small amount of words myself for music, including a song based on Huck Finn for The Bushwick Book Club.

It never occurred to me to do so in the case. I wanted music that reflected the poems, but I didn’t ever conceive of having voice involved. The structure of the entire work, when it is performed live, is to play each piece, and then have the poem read afterwards. Many of the readers will be people who either knew Hugo, or have a long time relationship to his work, including Frances McCue, who wrote the great book about Hugo entitled The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs.