An Interview with Patrick Greene
The following is an interview with the composer of Year of Glad, Patrick Green.
1. First question I would like to ask is what are some of your personal musical influences?
Like many composers of my generation, I got into this stuff by way of popular music. I grew up singing and playing guitar in rock bands, and the musicians who most imprinted on me then – Radiohead, Jeff Buckley, The Beatles, Metallica, post-Diorama Silverchair – continue to inspire me today.
I spent the first six or so years of my music-making life singing as a boy soprano in the Anglican choral tradition, too, and the composers I gravitated towards back then – Benjamin Britten, Maurice Duruflé, JS Bach – exerted an immense pull on my early creative imagination.
But my real musical “awakening” (i.e. when I realized I would rather compose than perform) really happened when I was a freshman at Trinity College. I heard a live performance of Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major, and knew within, oh, four measures that I was going to be searching for a way to make music like that for the rest of my life.
So Ravel was, and continues to be, perhaps my most prominent influence.
Other composers I especially like (and listen to) include Stravinsky, Mahler, Satie, Shostakovich, Wolf, Debussy, Berio, Ligeti, Reich, Adams (John and John Luther), and the music of many of my peers.
I’ve also been getting more and more into electronic music; I love Skrillex, Diplo, Daft Punk, that sort of thing. I’ve been trying to emulate some electronic-production textures into my acoustic works (and, for that matter, my electronic stuff), and it’s sort of gradually starting to make sense.
2. How were you introduced to David Foster Wallace and do you have a favorite story or quote of his?
I’m not sure when exactly I was introduced to DFW. I’ve long been a fan of “complex” literature; at some point, somewhere along the way, someone told me I seriously needed to read Infinite Jest.
So I did, and it changed my life. Top to bottom, changed my life. Almost as much as that first hearing of Ravel’s string quartet.
I finished IJ while on our honeymoon, on the island of Capri, in the middle of the night, and by the time I got to “the tide was way out” I almost physically couldn’t breathe. It was just a transcendent reading experience.
I’ve since read just about everything by (and, for that matter, written about) him.
If there’s one quote that truly sticks out, though, it’s “this is water.” That speech crystalized so many things for me, and I find myself revisiting it continually as the years go by. My wife and I each got tattoos of the phrase on our left arms; it’s a constant reminder to question our default settings and to be present in the world.
Perhaps my favorite DFW passage, though, is in The Broom of the System, when Rick Vigorous revisits his undergraduate campus and becomes lost in an awkward memory. When he emerges, with his ears still ringing from the airplane, and realizes how powerful his feelings for Lenore are, it just absolutely kills me.
3. During the writing of Year of Glad, did you draw inspiration solely from Wallace’s work? If so, what works and why? If not, what was your other inspiration?
Well, the chief inspiration is really Jenni Baker’s poetry. I was introduced to it last spring when The Howling Fantods shared her poem (p. 222, which is the seventh (and penultimate) movement of Year of Glad) on Facebook. It was just so beautiful, and the way it recontextualized that passage from IJ was tremendously exciting.
Her poetry affects me on two levels: as poetry in and of itself – which I would love regardless of whether or not it’d been derived from IJ – and as a fresh lens with which I can revisit this work that’s assumed such a central place in my artistic life. I’m able to read it, simultaneously, as something new and something deeply remembered, and that’s a really intoxicating combination for me.
I was also inspired by Joelle Kross’ voice and dramatic abilities. We’ve been friends for years, and I’ve seen her perform numerous times. I composed the entire thing with her specifically in mind; I wrote every note imagining her – specifically her – singing it, so the turns of phrase, dramatic pacing, etc. all bears her unique performative imprint. So she’s just as much an inspiration for the composing of the thing as Jenni’s poetry.
The last overarching inspiration is Robert Schumann’s setting of Adelbert von Chamisso’s Frauenliebe und –leben (“A Woman’s Love and Life”). It’s sort of the prototypical soprano-and-piano song cycle. It tells a very straightforward – yet universally powerful – narrative: a woman falls in love, gets married, and outlives her beloved. A stylistic trait I share with DFW (and with, you know, every vaguely postmodern artist of the past thirty years) is a playful relationship with convention. Using tropes, forms, quotes, etc. that are recognizable, and then taking them to new – and, hopefully, unexpected – places. So the structure of Year of Glad mirrors Frauenliebe, but updates it with passages about the value of independence, the messy nature of love in modern life, etc.
4. How do you approach a project with base material from a book, which exists as a more visual medium, and transition it into music, which exists as an auditory medium?
Good question! I guess I start from the most literal place possible: I explore the way Jenni’s words are arranged on the page. Her poetry has a wonderfully visual aspect: words stretch apart, arrive in dense clusters, are separated by wide gulfs, etc. I mark these waypoints on the printed page, and think about their sung implications (dragging vowels out, inserting silences, etc.).
I then try to map the dramatic arc. I look at points of tension and release. I try to see what the poem is leading towards, what it’s receding from, that sort of thing. That way I have a basic idea of its ebb and flow; I know if there are climaxes to approach, denouments to respect, that sort of thing.
Finally, the sounds of the words themselves do much of the rest of the work. Passages with lots of consonants lend themselves to “choppy” textures; vowel-intensive lines call for liquid, melismatic material.
So by the time I’m sitting down with staff paper, I have a pretty solid skeleton awaiting the actual musical material. Then it’s just a matter of letting the poem tell me its story, and seeing what that story wants to sound like.
5. During the writing Year of Glad, did you run into any difficulties? If so, how did you overcome them?
There weren’t difficulties, per se, but there certainly were some challenges. First, there was the issue of whittling down the poems into a cohesive set that’d fit together into a meta-narrative. There were dozens – literally, like, fifty – poems that I wanted to set to music, but the piece had to fit into fifteen minutes, and had to begin and end somewhere distinct. The eight poems in the cycle took months to lock down, and that process required some tough choices.
Also, some of the poems are extremely short; one of the most powerful, for example – p. 175 – contains just ten words. So I had to find ways of maintaining that sense of compact power while spreading them out into a proportionally appropriate musical movement.
6. Finally, if there was one thing you hoped people would take away from your work what would it be?
That love is worth it. No matter what the cost, love is worth it.
