A very magical thing - Ellen Taaffe Zwilich
[A.F.] “Just as the influence of Sessions and Carter is seldom if ever audible in Zwilich’s music, it is equally difficult to find much evidence of the composer’s great interest in Arnold Schoenberg. It is true that the cogently argued structures of Zwilich’s scores might be traced back to the leader of the second Viennese school, but in terms of her musical language, she is probably closest to Schoenberg’s late works — pieces which are still damned as untenable and reactionary by many of his admirers. I asked which aspects of Schoenberg’s work were of most importance to her.” p. 15
[E.T.Z.] “I think that Schoenberg was one of the most important thinkers about music in this century, and it’s impossible to be a young composer — or at least a composer of my generation — without coming to terms with him in some way. I do think that there was a whole breath of fresh air that came out of the new Vienna school, to do with thinking about tonal relationships. I think that when people 25 or 30 years down the pike look back at this era, they’ll find a lot more continuity than perhaps most people see at the moment. I think they’ll see and even hear connections between things that we think of as unrelated.” p. 15
[A.F.] “It is often said that the final years of the 20th century seem to be a period of stocktaking. Following the extraordinary musical developments of the first 25 years of this century, during which composers as different as Debussy and Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Berg, Bartók and Webern all pursued radical stylistic paths, there have few revolutions in. music. Now, at the end of the century, we are perhaps able to put those early years into perspective and see what was important — at least what was important for each of us personally. Is this Zwilich means by finding those connections?” p. 15-16
[E.T.Z.] “Yes, although I don’t agree with ‘stocktaking’. You see I think a composer is doing something out of a basic drive. And it’s not to exemplify a style or even to mirror your own period. You can’t help mirroring your own period: you live in your own time, you are of that time, and whatever you do will in some way be of that time. If we consider the history of music, we look at techniques, we look at the growth and development of certain ideas, but I don’t think that’s the basic impulse of the composer — at least it’s not at all my impulse. I do think there’s quite a natural continuity. For instance, today I think that most listeners find it hard to understand why there were riots over the first performance of The Rite of Spring: that music seems to us to grow so naturally out of the Russian music that Stravinsky grew up knowing like a break at all. I think that east has grown out of the new ways of thinking of Schoenberg and others is a new concept of tonality in the broadest sense of the term, where you really do have a twelve-tone tonality which is possibly becoming a kind of common language. I don’t know because I’m really interested in things much more basic than language. After all, language and ideas and feelings can be somewhat separate can’t they?” p. 16
[E.T.Z.] “I find myself interested in an ever broader palette; a wider range of expressions: that’s what I’m focusing on. Of course one works with language and different pieces have a slightly different approach ti language. I think my music is very connected, one piece to another, but certainly I’m always changing and in fact that’s something that I very much enjoy about composing. I like the idea of being in a continuum, not only with my own past but with the music of the past and the present; having these connections and yet always trying something a little new; you know, jumping into the water not quite sure of whether you can swim.” p. 16
[E.T.Z.] “I think music is a very magical thing. I mean we talk about it and try to tame it and codify it and put it into a nice little box and put a red ribbon on it. But it’s much more mysterious and profound than that. When you think of the music the touches you, it’s not all of one period or one composer or one kind of music. When a piece touches you and really changes your life — as happens to all of us who love music — somethings is happening that’s really, to me, beyond reach of the verbal. Maybe, if I could say it in words, I wouldn’t have to write music.” p. 16