Billy Childs

Billy Childs, whose new string quartet will be premiered on our May concerts, is a man who lives his life immersed in music, whether as composer, pianist (or both at the same time!), arranger, or as an astute listener with a voracious appetite for getting to know music unfamiliar to him.

I recently enjoyed a quiet conversation with him, and he shared his thoughts about music, about his life as a composer, and about his new piece for Pacific Serenades.

Though well-known and highly regarded as a jazz musician-in 2006 he was the recipient of two Grammy awards: one for Best Instrumental Composition, for Into The Light from his 2005 release Lyric, and the other for Best Arrangement Accompanying a Vocalist, for Chris Botti and Sting, (and
those are on top of a string of previous Grammy nominations he has received)-I am well aware that he has written for and collaborated with many classical musicians, as well. So I was curious to know if he sees the worlds of jazz and classical music as separate and if, perhaps, his work is bridging those worlds. His response first took him back to his early years as a musician.

“I started out playing jazz at first, but really, I was just a person interested in learning music, whether classical, jazz, funk, or fusion.” And the early 70s-later on, when he was in his mid-teens-was a time when a lot of cross-genre music was being invented, and that was part of what gave him “the desire to put together-in an organic sense-disparate kinds of music in one piece.”

“I don’t think of the music as separate, but the people in those worlds who identify themselves by those worlds often make jazz and classical separate. But when you listen to the music, and if it has something it is trying to say and is saying it at a certain skill level, then there is no separation. Sure, there are idiomatic things that make music more jazz, and Western classical music more ‘classical,’ but I judge music by the effect it has on me: if I like it, I think it is good, regardless of its genre.”

He listens to a lot of music and listens to it with the open mind he described, and that affects his own music. “I try to get what I need from everything I listen to, whether I’m listening to Bart�k or Coltrane or Ravel”-whom he describes as one of his big influences and so was delighted to know that his piece would be sharing the program with the Ravel string quartet. What he listens to are the influences he draws from.

He also draws on his own varied experiences as a musician. For example, in The Voices of Angels, a cantata for chorus and orchestra, written for and premiered by the LA Master Chorale at Disney Hall in 2005, he drew on his experience as a songwriter. He describes it as his most successful piece to date.

About his new string quartet, he told me, “”I’ve written for string quartet before in conjunction with other instrumentation, and also some little pieces for string quartet, but never just for straight-up string quartet until now. In this, I am trying to expand myself a lot orchestrationally, finding out the things strings are capable of. I’m not a string player, though I took cello lessons, and I have spent almost as much time on the phone as writing, asking string players, ‘Can you do this?’ I wanted to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid.”

He was clearly very excited about the piece when he described some more details of its composition. “I am stretching myself in this piece, trying things that are new to me. It has a lot of tonality in it, a lot of bitonality, and I’m trying to stretch and go in a different direction harmonically, including not having things so harmonically clear. I have had a tendency to focus on making sure things work out harmonically, but sometimes it creates more drama when things don’t resolve. It’s a very rhythmic, angular piece. I tried to incorporate some serial writing, some jazz or blues things. The first motive is…”

He played it for me on the piano. My ears perk up. I am so intrigued! This is beautiful!

“And the second motive is…”

Again, he played it for me. No wonder he is so excited about the piece. And no wonder I can’t wait to hear it!