Mark Carlson
Mark Carlson was my music theory professor at UCLA for two years, and so I have mostly encountered him in his 9 am lectures. But this time we sat down over coffee at the Faculty Center to talk about his latest work, to be premiered by Pacific Serenades in March, as he put the finishing touches on it.
I have heard many of his works before (my particular favorite was page-turning for the performance of his Piano Trio at a UCLA Faculty Composers’ Concert last year), but since this is a new work, I got the chance to riddle him with questions about the inspirations behind the piece, the particular type of instrumentation, and his general compositional work ethic. Over the course of an hour, the atmosphere was full of good humor with the occasional laugh or two. While I had many specific questions for him, his soft manner of speaking usually brought the conversation around to broader topics about his new work. I began our conversation by asking him about the instrumentation.
The piece is for clarinet, who doubles on bass clarinet, violin, cello and piano. It’s an instrumentation that Messiaen started with his Quartet for the End of Time. He chose those instruments because they were the only instruments he could work with in the concentration camp, and because of that piece, which gets a lot of performances, the combination is gradually becoming a standard ensemble.
Is there a particular reason why you wanted this instrumentation?
I’ll write for anything, but I really like instrumentations that combine winds, strings, and piano. This is the third piece that I’ve written for this particular type of quartet. The first, A Family Portrait in Five Scenes, I composed four years ago for amateur musicians. It was commissioned as a “life gift” from Dr. Thomas Loewe, of Iowa City, for his wife Carolyn. Then, two years ago, for Pacific Serenades, I wrote Songs of Rumi, using this instrumentation as an accompaniment to a bass-baritone, which Michael Dean sang. I like the combination so much that I wanted to write for it again, but this time a work that is neither accompanimental nor for amateurs. Songs of Rumi is still a difficult piece-one of those pieces where you have to know what everyone is doing or it just won’t gel-but I thought it would be fun to write for the ensemble again, when it can be “no-holds-barred” for the players.
What was the inspiration for this type of instrumentation-a certain melody, chord progression, or a certain sound you heard in your head?
No, it wasn’t that. It was just the sheer fun of just writing for that type of quartet. I haven’t written anything specifically for Gary Gray for a long time, so that was on my mind, and I thought, “wouldn’t it be fun to write for him in this combination?” The players will be Gary Gray, with David Speltz on cello, Roger Wilkie on violin, and Joanne Pierce Martin on piano. I knew them all first as musicians, and over the course of our making music together for years, we are all friends, as well. And I have written for each of them in various contexts and so know their playing styles very well.
Since you knew who you were writing for, did you tailor it to their particular talents?
Well, I always do, which is one of the reasons why I love writing for Pacific Serenades-because I know who the specific players are before I start writing the piece. I really love writing for people I know. And I already know how they respond to my music-they always seem eager to play whatever I come up with-so I don’t feel like I have to write in a specific style to make them happy.
When did you start writing this piece?
Actually, I started writing this piece about six years ago. It began as a piece for Jeff Anderle, a UCLA clarinet major who graduated in 2004, who asked me to write a piece for bass clarinet and piano for his senior recital. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t finish it in time, and so I abandoned it. I just always meant to finish that piece but never got around to it, so when I started writing this piece, I thought “Oh! The material I had for that is perfect for bass clarinet,” which is why I have the clarinetist doubling on bass clarinet in this piece. The first big movement of the piece is begins with that material.
Is it just in the first movement, or the others as well?
I’m a very concise kind of composer, so all of the music of the rest of the piece is based on that material, as well.
How many movements are there?
Five.
I’m glad you said that, because one of my questions is based on your concept of movements: when you start a piece, do you specifically want it to be in a four-movement classical style, or do you follow late-Beethovenian ideas about movements, such as his late string quartets?
Well, when I started thinking about this piece, my conception of it was that I wanted to write a big piece-the last few pieces that I’ve written have been sets of shorter pieces, and so I really had this urge to write something grander than a series of shorter movements. But there is something to the idea that a piece, at some point, starts asserting itself, what it wants to be.
It takes on a life of its own.
It does. And I couldn’t figure out this piece-I struggled with it more than I usually do. Nothing came very easily in this piece, which was very frustrating, and I think part of it was because I was trying so hard for it to be-not really classical-but I thought it was going to be three big movements-the first movement being energetic and aggressive, coming from the previous material, with the middle movement being a slow movement, and the third movement being fast. But it just hasn’t turned out that way.
Who was the piece commissioned by?
It was commissioned by my cousins and their cousins, aunts, and uncles, owners of Leavens Ranches in Ventura County, where my aunt Dorothy Leavens Carlson grew up. They all decided to commission this piece in honor of her. My uncle and aunt were always huge supporters of the arts, particularly of painters and sculptors in the Seattle area, but were always music lovers, as well. They actually gave me my first commission, and they had a tradition that at each other’s major birthdays, they would commission a new work by me in honor of the other person. They would fly my musician friends and me up to Seattle, where the new works were performed on whole concerts. They were amazing birthday parties! I was so honored and happy when my cousins asked me to write a new piece in honor of my aunt, because she has been such a huge supporter of my work and of me throughout my entire life.
So it seems as though the meaning of this work has changed, as it transformed from a bass clarinet-piano work for a senior recital into a quartet that is written in honor of your aunt.
Yes, it absolutely has. It took on a meaning that it didn’t have before, but not necessarily in a programmatic sense. I never know how much of a programmatic association to reveal, because I think it should not matter-if the piece is any good, the listener shouldn’t need to know that there was a particular motivation behind it. A piece needs to be able to stand on its own; but that doesn’t mean that the programmatic aspect wouldn’t enhance the listener’s experience. I read once that Beethoven was frequently working with some type of program, but he didn’t necessarily tell anyone what that program was, which I found pretty reassuring. I don’t believe, like Strauss did, that you could literally tell a story word-for-word through a piece of music-that two people sitting in a room and listening to Ein Heldenleben would come up with the same story. They might come up with stories, but totally different ones.
How many hours a day do you compose? And do you compose directly into your computer program, or do you use paper and pencil?
I am working on a piece all the time once it gets going, but otherwise I’ve never been able to chain myself to the piano and just work. I’m very inspired by the deadline! It was such a relief when one of my composition teachers told me a story, that Schumann supposedly said, “The greatest inspiration is the deadline!” I always start out with pencil and paper, and once a piece starts to take shape, I then start copying it into Finale [the music notation software]. Soon, I’m constantly going back and forth between the piano and the computer.
Does being a music theory teacher influence you in your compositions?
I think so. It isn’t anything having to do with avoiding parallel octaves and fifths-in fact, I like the sound of those and write them whenever I feel like it. I don’t think of the rules we learn in theory class as rules, anyway. They are just principles of the way music has tended to work during a certain time. But I think that talking so much about the nuts and bolts of music and analyzing one great piece after another in class, year after year, gives me such reverence for the loving care, the amazing attention to detail, that composers take in their work. Those works are definitely inspired, but they don’t turn out so beautifully by accident, either. And I want nothing less for my own music: that it come to life through my own loving care and attention to detail.
