15. Voice Memories - Mary Denney

[Aaron] Hello and welcome to the Theorist Composer Collaboration, a podcast interview series highlighting modern composers and their compositions, hosted by music theorists. My name is Aaron D’Zurilla, and I'm a graduate music theory student at Florida State University, and I will be your host for today. The music that you were just listening to is an excerpt from the piece Voice Memories by the composer Mary Denney, who, alongside her music, is the featured guest for this episode. That leads me to welcome Mary Denney herself to the program. How are you?

[Mary] I'm doing well, Aaron. It's really nice to have me on here. I'm super honored and really excited to get started and chat with you about this.

[Aaron] Of course. You know, a good collection of people that I've had onto the show so far, probably with a lot of people's startup podcasts, or people that I personally know, or I've had daily interactions at some point in my career so far. But you in particular, well, I've had a couple of people, but you are one of the people where I looked up your music from seeing your social media accounts, loved it, I believe I watched your senior recital.

[Mary] Yes. That's kind of the main thing that's on my YouTube page right now. I'm still working on building up the catalog, putting up all of those videos, just going back and getting that. So it's really just kind of the senior recital that's up there now.

[Aaron] It's very nice to have someone I don't personally know outside of the podcast on, you know, a diverse pool of opinions. And speaking of a diverse pool of opinions, how about introduce yourself personally, professionally, academically, however you choose.

[Mary] Hello, my name is Mary Denny. And as you already mentioned, I'm a composer. That's really kind of the main thing that I do. But I also, you know, I'm pretty active in a lot of different areas of music. I've been playing piano since I was small. I also was pretty active as a French horn player throughout my undergrad years. And I also do quite a bit of work as a sound engineer as well, recording and mixing works, primarily just stuff for my friends. But I've gotten to do some recording studio gigs as well, which has been pretty cool. I just recently graduated with my Bachelor of Music in Composition from University of the Pacific. A lot of people don't know where that is, but it's a small liberal arts school in northern California, just probably like 40 miles south of Sacramento in a town called Stockton. And it was a pretty small school, but I got a really good experience. And I made a lot of close friends through making music and, you know, finding people to play my music once I'd written it. And so I'm just about to start my master's degree at the University of Michigan this fall. I'm moving out there in August. So I'm really excited to just get to keep working on music and keep doing it. I think it's, yeah, like I said, I'm just really excited. So I've been making music, composing probably since I was a kid as well. And I never kind of really thought it was something I could do. And then it came time to, like, start applying for colleges and things. I couldn't really see myself doing anything else. So it just felt pretty natural to go into it. And you know, everything I've done has kind of led me to this point. I've had a lot of really great opportunities. Some people might have heard my music. Last year, I was a fellow at the Cortona Sessions for New Music. And I've also was a fellow at the Women Composers Festival of Hartford for their 2023 season. So it's been also just, you know, going through and getting a lot more of those performances, performance opportunities. I'm definitely still kind of in that emerging category. But you know, we're getting there.

[Aaron] We're getting there indeed. And California to Michigan, just a little road trip, I imagine.

[Mary] Yeah, 2000 miles, just I think a little over 2000 miles. It's pretty significant. Yeah.

[Aaron] Yeah. And you know, there's a lot to say about starting small in terms of the size of school that you go to. I talked about when we were meeting in our preliminary before the recording of this, I talked to you that I first went to a community college and then I went to University of Florida which although a big school, the music program was not particularly big. And then going to Florida State University where the college of music is massive and even the theory department, for a theory department, is really big, you know, and a little bit different. But in some ways, I understand that feeling of going from small to big. But then again, I lived most, I've lived most of my life in Florida, and I went to three Florida schools. I'm not going to Michigan. So there is that, there is that. Wow, that is quite the accomplishment about the Cortana sessions, I have to say.

[Mary] Oh, thank you. Yeah.

[Aaron] What was that experience like?

[Mary] It's a really wonderful experience, I think for performers and composers alike, just, you know, having a lot of these educational programs that are so committed to new music in particular, you just see a lot of these festivals where, like, I think having a composition program is kind of an afterthought. But at Cortona, it's really like part of the culture there is working with the composers, you know, like there it's closely, worked closely with their chamber music program. So I was able to write a piece specifically for one of the chamber ensembles that was going to be attending. And I think I also met a lot of really awesome people. And then, you know, there was so much music that we had, you know, this, really long concerts of just new music of brand new world premieres. And I think, yeah, it's definitely an experience I would recommend. The people there are just wonderful, incredible people. I think sometimes collegiate composition programs definitely can get into that competitiveness. But you know, just the amount of diversity in the composers, the composer styles, all of that, that was there. And the environment there is just so inviting.

[Aaron] I really, I really want, I've never been to a composition festival. I really want to, well, I mean, with this podcast, I really should at some point. But you know, I really want to go just for the experience because not too long ago, I went to my first, I would say major music theory conference at MTSE, Music Theory Southeast, in Nashville. And it's a different experience. It puts the name, it puts faces on the names and personalities on the names that you see. And yeah, I would love to go one day to a composition festival. 

[Mary] Yeah. And I mean, the fact it's, you know, I think, I will not, I'm unfortunately not, it's happening right now, but I'm just seeing all the pictures and just being reminded of the amazing time that I had, you know, and the location definitely does not hurt either. I did it, you know, in the heart of Tuscany last year. They're in the Netherlands this year. So it's also just a really good excuse to get and go to travel and see the world and then, but also, you know, it's a good resume builder. So yeah, I think it's, yeah, they're definitely, you know, especially in terms of new music that really are up there for those summer programs.

[Aaron] Oh, certainly, certainly. So speaking of, you know, you said up and coming, of course you're about to go into graduate school. That's a huge step. And of course you're starting to, I'm sure you already have started to codify what your own musical soundscape is personally, but how would you describe your music? How would you describe your process yourself as a composer?

[Mary] You know, while I am still developing, there's a couple of, I think, through lines. I've had a lot of people tell me, you know, I definitely kind of for a while was in that kind of, like, minimalist style. I take a lot of cues from minimalism, kind of the Terry Riley, Philip Glass style of minimalism, but I also really like to make it my own. You know, I'm not really into just writing, you know, very long pieces that is really more just about, kind of the development of a single idea along, you know, a very long time. But I really do resonate with some of those practices of just, especially just in tonal materials too. I think one of the things that has kind of set me apart, I've realized, and a lot of these other compositional spheres that I've been in, is that I do write more on the tonal side. I'm not completely like a diatonic composer, but I think I definitely draw a lot of inspiration and influence from tonality. And while I say it does influence quite a bit of what I do, it's not, I'm not, I don't feel necessarily solidified by it. So I think you'll hear a lot of, kind of things like these rhythmic motors of just kind of, you know, these triadic harmonies. But I also really just kind of write a lot by intuition. Like, as I've mentioned, I've been making music for a long time since I was a child. One of the ways that I really got into composing was through improvisation, and just playing whatever I felt like on the piano, even before I had a really solid understanding of music theory, or the structures of music theory and how to construct scales and things like that. I would just kind of sit and feel it, essentially. And that was kind of where a lot of my pieces started when I was growing up, just sitting at the piano, putting some notes on the page and just kind of feeling it. And I think as I've gotten older, well, my compositional structures and my writing process has definitely gotten a lot more concrete. That element has always been there. There's kind of a spontaneity to it that I think has definitely really driven a lot of how I write my music nowadays. And yeah, I think-

[Aaron] To interject about a couple of things real quick. One thing that sparked my interest there is describing your compositional process as part or a lot of intuition. Now, I remember, well, at the time of the release of this episode, it'll have been a little while from now, but a recent episode, Brian Junttila, we were discussing the difference between programmatic and absolute music and the process of writing. And he was talking about where he is as a middle ground and through his intuition. So I wanted to ask on the topic of that, programmatic music, absolute music, how do you feel about that? Well, what's your, composition is not a straight binary like that, but how do you feel about those labels? How would you describe your music in those contexts?

[Mary] Oh gosh. I think now I actually am kind of skewing more on the programmatic side. I mean, I think for this piece that we're about to talk about Voice Memories there definitely are some very strong programmatic aspects to it, even if kind of in an abstract way, which I don't even know if that makes sense. But there's definitely kind of this, like, through line here. And you know, when I first started composing and I started my degree, I was kind of, like, really against writing programmatic music for some reason. Kind of saw myself as more of like an absolutist where it's like, I just write music to write. Like it's kind of just like it, the music speaks for itself was kind of the way that I was kind of feeling. When I started writing, and I think that might've been just, you know, a younger me wanting to, people to take me more seriously. I think as I got older, I kind of realized how silly that sounded.

[Aaron] It's, it's, I don't know how I feel about that. I'm not judging you, you know.

[Mary] No, and it's something where I've kind of moved more towards the programmatic side just because I think music is such a powerful tool to convey these messages and these stories. And I think that we deny ourselves a lot by just wanting to write exclusively, you know, like absolute music. I think that we don't necessarily have to go, you know, in the whole like Symphonie Fantastique direction where, you know, the whole reason why the term was coined in the first place. But I think that absolute music is just, you know, it denies yourself the ability to tell those stories or even just convey a feeling that I think there's a lot of people that associate programmatic music, I think, with that kind of really bombastic, like linear storytelling, when it doesn't have to be that. Sometimes what you're trying to convey is just a vibe or a feeling.

[Aaron] Completely. Yeah, yeah. It's, from my, I personally agree with you for my personal taste in music. If I'm to, typically if I end up connecting, not that I choose to connect with something, if I end up connecting with something, it was usually written in some kind of programmatic text, I'm not always the hugest fan of literal, strict programmatic storytelling within the music as you're saying. That can be really fun and enthralling. I would say, like, A Vietnamese Mother's Letter to Nixon from Ky Nam Nguyen is highly programmatic in almost every way.

[Mary] Of course, yeah.

[Aaron] But also, you know, actually a piece that, from another, I keep referencing other episodes because this is all the music I've been studying this summer is from everyone on the show, is Gabe Gekoskie's Modest Mutilation, which was the result of a granular synthesis from Philip Glass's Knee 5, where just as you're saying you take inspiration from minimalist and post minimalist and some of that tradition, he took granular synthesis data from Knee 5 and composed a piece around that data to give the overall vibe and sensibilities of it without it directly telling the story or so on. So, totally agree with you on that. I hear, well, okay, before I add anything else, was there anything, I kind of cut you off a little bit earlier. Was there anything else you wanted to say about yourself as a composer or your music?

[Mary] I mean, yeah, just kind of, I'm still pretty young and I'm trying not to limit myself too much about, kind of, what I can do as a composer. And I'm really kind of interested in exploring these kind of blurred edges between tonality and atonality. I don't really see myself becoming, you know, a serialist anytime soon. 

[Aaron] This might be controversial, but I'm going to say good.

[Mary] Yeah, I definitely am not going to be going in that direction anymore. But there, you know, some of the things I've explored with this piece of just finding these like edges, these moments of blurriness are really kind of things that I've been kind of just, I kind of, I kind of dig that and want to really just kind of explore it some more.

[Aaron] I don't want to give too much of it away because I have one more tangential thing to bring up, but all the things you were saying are perfectly reflected within Voice Memories, the piece for today's episode, which we will get to what processes you did to achieve such things. But one thing I was, you know, over the past handful of days, more so the week, I've been continuously listening to your piece. And yesterday and the day before when I sat down to really analyze it, you know, we naturally, in experiencing new music, a new medium, new anything, we immediately related to what we know from before. And I was trying to, like, classify in my head how to best describe, like, what is this? What is Mary's sound? What is, what's the idea? What's the gist overall? Like characterizing your style as a composer, which you can't do totally off of one piece, obviously, but I was really thinking about it. And I would argue, I just, I'm bringing this up because this is a thought that I had today and I want to know what your opinion is on this. I think your music is a very quintessential 21st century sound. That can mean a lot of things.

[Mary] Oh yeah, that's kind of like, oh, are you ready to open that can of worms?

[Aaron] Yes. But no, no, no. So yeah, that's the thing about a 21st century sound. It's a can of worms, literally, because one of the definite, you can comment on this as a composer, but in my experience in composition classes and in theory classes that concern themselves with some newer music, which is not very often, quite frankly, a 21st century sound is usually defined by the exploration, abstraction and combination of older idioms in a new context that become greater than the sum of its parts. How that manifests in your music, in my impression, is I find it interesting that you said you have some minimalist ideas because you have a certain idea at the end of the first movement. You have some of the repeated ostinato patterns, which mix up the meter in the given moment. I'm spoiling it a bit, but your aleatoric ideas remind me of something from the 1950s to the 1960s. It's hard not to think about Penderecki when you see that kind of notation and kind of atmosphere. But when I was looking at your music, I was like, well, I see this inspiration here. I see this, this, this, this, this, and this. And I realized that, well, of course you are your own person and you are your own style. You're not defined by what some guy or some, well, honestly, the way that we compare things, it's usually some guy, but also some, some woman at some other point did. And this is meant to be a compliment and a good thing in my book, at least, that the mixture and production altogether of your music defines an exploration that's really, in my experience, mostly in 21st century music. 

[Mary] I mean, yeah, that's, I think a pretty fair judgment. Oh, and well, yeah, thank you. That's very humbling and encouraging to hear. But yeah, I think this piece I would definitely describe as that kind of just amalgamation of sound. I draw my, I find influence and inspiration all over the place. I think at the time of writing this, I think you mentioned kind of, like, Penderecki, I was thinking, you know, Lutosławski, I was kind of, like, listening to him and looking at his note, his notation. And that was definitely kind of, I was definitely drawing a lot of influence and in just, kind of, looking at a model for how to do some of the things that I wanted to do with this. As I mentioned, improvisation was where I started composing. And so it felt really important to me to write a piece that incorporated those elements and gave it some of the compositional process back into the hands of, you know, the performers. And of course, there's a lot more ways that I could have done that a little bit more freely. But I think it was important to me to make sure that that was there, where it's more just about playing to achieve a sound than it is about getting every single note on the page right, than it is about, you know, following a conductor beat by beat. I was kind of, when we rehearsed this, I was telling my players, because some of my players at the time had not really experienced playing, playing aleatoric music before. We were all undergraduate students. And so, same thing, like I went to a small university, not a whole lot of graduate students. So it was mostly just my friends. And I kind of said like, oh, you know, for this opening part, there's no meter, just vibes. Like you just kind of have to, it's not anything rigid. And if you're thinking about it in terms and rigid terms, like in measures or bar lines, you're kind of doing it wrong.

[Aaron] I have to say, if I was in that set as a classically trained violinist, if I was told it's just vibes, I don't know what I would do at first.

[Mary] And I think I kind of saw like when I told my players that I kind of just, like, saw like the gears turning in his head where he's trying to, like, process what I just said, like, oh my God, how do I do this? And so that was another kind of, I guess, hurdle in getting this piece performed was just some of the players I had, you know, that, like I said, we're all undergraduate students. Some of us, you know, were not quite as far along in our education as others. And so some of us just didn't have that experience. You know, they hadn't seen the Penderecki and the Lutosławski scores before. You know, they hadn't just like for some of them, this score was their first experience with aleatoric music, which in a way I think was a really cool opportunity in and of itself, because it gave us the ability to really ,kind of, fine tune it to the way that we wanted and that the players could really start actually feeling like they were part of the process as well. And then I wasn't necessarily just handing them something like play it. You have to have it perfect two days from now when we perform it. And so I think, yeah, aleatoric music and improvisation, it's important to me. And it's something I think I need to do more of just because I found myself being able to do things that I otherwise wasn't able to do. And it was just getting to hear the players do that and feel that for the first time, I think was really special. Definitely, I think a learned skill for a lot of musicians. You know, you see some of these contemporary players that just are so used to used to seeing this stuff. You know, I'll name drop here a little bit. One of my former professors and great mentor of mine, the oboist Kyle Brockman, he is just, like, aleatory and like improvisation is what he does. And it's kind of gotten to the point where he's been, you know, doing it for years that he can see these scores and kind of, you know, already know what he's going to do and already know, like, how to practice. And I think for this one, you know, where I'm working with students who just haven't had that experience, it was kind of important for me also to just leave some of those guard rails up just by kind of like telling them like what notes to what pitches to play and kind of just giving not necessarily specific but giving like general like entrances just so we're not kind of having, so that they don't have to feel like they're pulling everything out of thin air. You know, certainly players there are, you know, players can dedicate their entire careers to this kind of thing. And it's incredible. They're, you know, we've gotten really awesome players out of it. But I think, yeah, it was important for me to just keep, keep a little bit of that restriction in there just so that those players wouldn't feel like they've been completely left behind, especially, like, this, you know, box notation here. I also lifted a lot of that from David Biedenbender, who I think does incredible stuff in writing music that's really accessible for younger players, but also includes these, includes these really interesting, aleatoric, free improvised sections. His piece Ghost Apparatus comes to mind for Wind Ensemble that was also kind of important to me where it was kind of, you know, coming up with how I wanted to write this was just looking at other composers and kind of seeing how they did it and kind of what the end result was and just trying to be on the other side for a minute of thinking about myself as a performer, where I might be just from my experience with improvisation, be a little bit more comfortable just looking at more of a prompt or like a very vague prompt, like a series of images or notes or something like that. But a lot of these players I was working with, that was just this was kind of their first experience playing aleatoric music. I also kind of felt, found it important too to have, you know, something like the electronics, for example, the fixed electronic tracks where that also kind of gave them some, some sort of reference, just because all of the pitch material that I'm using is in that, those fixed electronic tracks. 

[Aaron] My music theorist and socially inclined self really wants to talk about instrumental pedagogy and how new music is so often boxed out of such things, because that it's not an uncommon thing in the slightest. And if anything, it's probably more common at larger institutions for new music to be boxed out of any repertoires. Like I could say personally with violin, having a repertoire that spans the history of most of what we deem classical music, modern, a really modern violin piece in a violin recital, let's say, unless if you personally go out of your way to choose something, maybe the 1920s, maybe the 1910s, and even then that level of chromaticism is usually not in an undergraduate studio curriculum. It depends on the, depends on the professor. But and so, okay, so we've been not really dancing about it. We’ve kind of gotten into it already. But let's talk specifically about Voice Memories and all those things about 21st century sound. I'm glad that you are receptive to that. And to give away, maybe I didn't give a great explanation as to why that's a mildly controversial, or for some people, meaningless thing is because there's so much diversity in sound, thankfully, in the 21st century that it's very hard to pin down a sound, which is fine. But those were just some of my thoughts, and the exploration of ideas outside of the norm for performers is great as well. But Voice Memories is a three movement work for large chamber ensemble, fixed electronics, a soprano singer, and you have some electric guitar.

[Mary] Yes.

[Aaron] And so as you've talked about, I'm really glad that you were talking about what the rehearsal process was like. But this piece has already been premiered and performed, which is, of course, how I found out about your music. But can you talk about what the context was for the premiere, performance, writing this piece?

[Mary] Yeah, so to start out with, I think as I mentioned, I just graduated with my bachelor's degree in composition. And for the program that I was in, I was required to do a senior project that was really vaguely defined as just something that was larger than anything you'd ever done before. So it was really, I could just kind of go with whatever I wanted. And I was really lucky that my teacher at the time, his name is Dr. Andrew Conklin, really wonderful composer and person. He just really let me do what I wanted to do. And so I kind of like, you know, getting more intrigued by this new music sphere and just the kind of culture around new music. I really wanted to collaborate. So I kind of got in touch with there is a new music ensemble at my university, which is super uncommon for a really small university to have a new music ensemble that is A) student run and B) comprised mostly of undergraduate students. It's just super rare and super uncommon. And I found I just thought that was going to be a really cool opportunity to get to work with them some more. So I kind of pitched it to their directors and just said, hey, I have to write this big piece and I want to work with you guys. And they were super receptive to it at first and just really at first.

[Aaron] At first?

[Mary] At first. Yeah, of course, there were definitely some bumps in the road kind of when there was a leadership change with this ensemble. But I got a lot of the players that I needed out of it. And so this instrumentation kind of came about for this was in the spring of 2023 when I first, so, like a year, year and a half ago now that I first started meeting with them. And I just kind of started talking with, like, what instruments that they had. And so that's kind of where this instrumentation came from, where I just, was wanting kind of a mixed chamber ensemble, something, you know, chamber orchestra adjacent. But I also didn't want it to feel like it was orchestra repertoire either. I really wanted it to feel like it was its own thing. But one of the things that stood out to me about this ensemble is that they had an electric guitarist in their, on their roster. And coming from me, you know, I've talked a lot about like, oh, minimalism was a big part of my musical influence. But I think, you know, growing up, I was a little bit more, you know, musically disadvantaged than some of my other friends where, you know, I was just, I grew up in a small town. I was really far from the nearest youth orchestra. And a lot of my musical experience came from this, you know, amalgamation of sound where I was like taking classical piano lessons with the one classically trained teacher in town. My parents were playing, you know, all the music from their childhood, which was the 1970s and 1980s. I was getting, like, really into, like, you know, indie rock, alternative rock. And so I just kind of had this, like, weird like ball of different things that were all coming together. And I found that in my identity as a musician and where I came from, that electric guitar just felt so natural in it. And not to mention the player, Don Parker was, he's just, he's just phenomenal. Also, also a wonderful composer and really talented performer as well. And so I kind of pitched him and was like, I want to write guitar in here. Like I kind of, I have the opportunity to write for an electric guitar. So I'm going to write for an electric guitar. And so I really kind of not necessarily wanted to make it the focus of this piece, but make it important nonetheless. And I think just kind of giving it these moments to shine and, you know, almost like shred, so to speak, and just do this, these really kind of electric guitar-esque things that other instruments can't do. And I think I'm overall, I'm just really glad that I decided to go with that, because I think, you know, a little bit more modest composer might have said, oh, that doesn't really fit. It was a challenge for sure. But I'm glad that I went with it.

[Aaron] Yeah, I would also say, you know, about the electric guitar, not I'm not calling out a specific composer piece, and I don't really have anything in mind. But I was, I was a little puzzled by that at first. Well, because I didn't look at the score. I never looked at the score when I first listened through when I received something for this show. And I was we're going to talk about this moment in a little bit about when the electric guitar is first very clearly present in the texture. In my experience, this might be a little bit of a cynical take, but when you have something that is outside the zeitgeist of you have like a miniature orchestra in simplicity, that's what it is. And then electric guitar is in my experience with that, it's, it's usually like, oh, here's an electric guitar part and then orchestra, orchestra. Here's electric guitar. Like it's almost a gimmick, but you incorporate it into the texture and treat it like its own instrumental family within the others, which is, I would imagine, a little bit difficult given its timbre. But it was successful. 

[Mary] Oh, thank you. Yes. And that was also kind of a really interesting thing to deal with, just because, you know, I'd written for string trio before. I love the string trio. And so that was kind of important for me. I was like, I want to do just the string trio.

[Aaron] I was wondering why no bass?

[Mary] I guess in the, in the, you know, in the most honest sense, I guess it just never really came to me because I think if I thought about it more like, well, you know, got the electric guitar there, so do I use, you know, double bass? Like do I use an acoustic double bass or do I actually go for it and use electric bass? And just kind of for the sake of the time and the players that I had access to, it just was not, I think, something that was really important to me at that moment in writing it. 

[Aaron] That’s important to be honest with that, because sometimes, sometimes people would just, you know, throw an instrument in because it's expected. 

[Mary] Yeah. And I kind of also just didn't want to be the person that did that where I would because I kind of felt like for what I wanted to do with this piece, the double bass or bassist, whoever was going to would have been up there would have just kind of been sitting there and then, you know, kind of do the, like, pizzicato plucks or whatever. And then kind of also just do like, you know, doubling the cello an octave lower. And I think there were a couple of things-

[Aaron] Hey now, hey now, that's most of classical bass repertoire right there.

[Mary] Yeah, exactly. And you know, I think double bass, I need to get into it more because it's just an instrument I haven't written for. And you know, the contemporary repertoire is really starting to come into its own. But I think at the time of writing it, I just was not, it was just not really on my radar. I think I was very specific in what I wanted to do. And unfortunately, I hope I'm not going to offend any bass players here. I just didn't really find a way to fit that in there. 

[Aaron] No, I, you know what, I would, I'm not a bass player, but knowing a handful, in my time as a violinist, I would say that that sort of attitude is appreciated because bass very often, as we joke, is like a tacked on instrument that is just meant to reinforce the sound, which it does great. But I feel like especially in contemporary music, when we're exploring new ideas and new styles, it's good to be honest about what is needed and not needed in an ensemble. That's a mature and important thing to do as a composer, I would imagine. And also, a practicality too, if you don't need another instrument or performer, then don't. 

[Mary] Yeah, and I, so, you know, I'm, no hate to the bass. I think it's a great instrument, but I think just for what I wanted to do, there just wasn't a whole lot of space for it.

[Aaron] Sure, sure. So let's talk about a little bit of the naming of this piece.

[Mary] Oh yeah.

[Aaron] The title, the titles. So it's titled Voice Memories. And as I said before, it's a three movement piece. And here are the movement titles. Now you can get a lot from titles. I remember Will Davenport told me, a friend and a composer, that often there's so much importance on titles because sometimes program notes are not accessible or sometimes people don't read them. And titles are one of the few times that a composer has complete constructive ability to tell you what the piece is about. So Voice Memories, an intriguing title, nothing out of this world, you know, but it's something interesting. And then you have the movement titles, which are all a little bit different. So the first movement, A Great Big Garden, movement two, Eulogy for a Red Prius, and then movement three, Tearing a Hole Through Space and Time. Interesting. Even more interesting. So can you talk about how you named this piece, what it means? We talked about programmatic writing a little bit before, and we're going to get into the explicit meanings of the movements as we go through them. But what were you thinking about when titling this piece? 

[Mary] So the title for the whole piece, Voice Memories, kind of came first. So as you kind of might hear, some of what was in the, a lot of what, it comes from the voice memos, like on my phone, of just kind of writing of one of another way that I will do it sometimes is I will play or even just sing into my phone microphone when I have an idea and record it on my phone. And so I just have, you know, like hundreds of these like little like 15 second tidbits of something.

[Aaron] That's a great, I love that. Voice memos, Voice Memories. That's a really good turn of that.

[Mary] Yeah. And so a lot of these little ideas that came about throughout the piece came from those little voice memos on my phone, where I'd go back and just listen to them and be like, I don't know if I like what I did there, but maybe I can take it and do something different with it. And similarly, a lot of the sounds that you're hearing are, that are in the fixed electronic tracks are, you know, voice memos, are voice memos of recorded sounds. So you'll hear wind chimes and things like that. The wind chimes I think are the most prominent one, which kind of gets me into the Great Big Garden title, which is our first movement. So the wind chime sound, I kind of started by manipulating it. I found it online. It was just, it was a really good sample because nothing I could get with my phone or any of my other equipment was just quite as good as the one that I found. So I started by taking it into a spectral editor and just removing all of the upper partials from the recorded sound. And then I slowed it down like half speed. And so it, you ended up getting this like really ambient textural fixed electronic sound where there's kind of a lot missing. And that's kind of what is like, you know, the under, underpinning for the basis of that aleatoric opening section for the players. So they're playing along with this track. And then eventually you kind of hear that wind chime sound come in unedited in its pure form. And that, those wind chimes come from my grandparents garden. I was writing a lot about, kind of, just, these weird, not necessarily like specific memories that I had, but memories of places of people, of things, of feelings that were kind of always have kind of always been a part of me. And so that great big garden is referencing my grandparents garden. They just have this huge garden full of flowers and everything. It's massive. And in the summertime, it's just in full bloom. And they have these wind chimes. And when I hear them, I just associate it with that garden. And so it felt very important to me as well. I keep saying this is all very important to me. Anyways, it just felt very important to me to kind of recognize that and kind of pay a little bit of a tribute to that. And not to mention that I have a lot of fun with spectral editing and, you know, just chopping out the partials I don't want.

[Aaron] Two things about that. One, about the spectral. That was a brilliant idea. This is why I can't be a composer. I would never think to do something like that. That's such a cool, I mean, I've heard of that before, but what compelled you to do that? That's really cool. A really cool way of getting that effect.

[Mary] Yeah, I started by using, so I found this program online called Spear and it's a free program. I think it's the composer Michael Klingbeil. I can't remember how to say his name. He made this free spectral editing software. I think it was just his dissertation. I came across it and I downloaded it and I was just playing with it. It's actually, you know, for just this kind of free software that some guy made, it's really intuitive and really user friendly. And so I kind of just started experimenting with it. And then I was like, I should do that with this wind chime sample, just because I kind of liked the idea of use. I wanted to use it, but I also wanted to save the actual wind chime sound for a very specific moment. I didn't want to give myself away too soon. And so it kind of gave me the opportunity to keep using that sound, but to modify it into something completely unrecognizable, where it turned into its own thing, I think felt like a good fit for what I wanted to do. And that way, you know, listeners already kind of heard the wind chimes, even though they didn't know it. 

[Aaron] Stuff like that always amazes me. I suppose that's why you're doing what you're doing and why you're going to Michigan University.

[Mary] Thank you.

[Aaron] Yeah. And the other thing is, this is more on a personal note, but the inspiration that you had for A Great Big Garden is actually strikingly similar. It started to get me a little bit emotional there for a second. The last piece that I ever wrote, see, I'm not going to school for composition. I don't consider myself a composer, but the program at University of Florida is heavy composition based and I enjoy taking composition things. I think it's important for theorists to understand the other side of how music is constructed. But the last piece I ever really composed and then had performed, well, it was at a reading. I didn't have a performance, but, was a piece I wrote called The Man at Sunset Drive. And it was for brass band, which is a really fun, as a string player, it was a very difficult, but fun ensemble to write for. Oh, I love writing for brass ensemble. I think it's just, it's a great instrumentation because you have such a wide range. Like if you're working from, like, tuba all the way up to trumpet or even like piccolo trumpet, you just get a really full range. And you kind of don't have to worry too much about blend issues in the same way you have to worry about blend and say like a woodwind quintet. 

[Aaron] I was surprised by how, it's not easy, but like how natural it was to write for brass band. I had such a hard time writing for symphonic band. As an orchestra player, that was wild.

[Mary] Yeah, symphonic orchestration, it's its own skill, I think, that you kind of have to develop to write for wind bands and symphonic bands just because, yeah, the blend is a huge thing that needs to be addressed.

[Aaron] Going back to my little personal tangent here, that piece I wrote, The Man at Sunset Drive was in dedication to my grandfather who had passed away a few years prior. That piece had gone through a handful of different iterations. It was originally called Morning at Sunset Drive, morning as in like sunrise, morning part of the day. And because I used to spend, when I was much younger, many of my summers, and some winters, in Rochester, New York, it was in a, well, it was outside of Rochester in a town called Holley. It was quite rural. It was very out of the way. And my grandparents had this, well, looking back, it wasn't huge, but as a kid, it felt like a huge whimsical backyard garden with ponds, birds. I would do bird watching early in the morning with my grandfather just in the backyard of their trailer. And the atmosphere of when the sun was coming up and when it was setting, that's what I wrote that piece based off of. It was my, well, specifically the time with my grandfather, but just the atmosphere of my grandparents, like you're saying right there, the atmosphere of the garden. And so thinking back to the movement that we're, you know, thinking of what it sounded like, that makes me a little emotional with that because that was a very important piece to me. But I, you know, we were talking about programmatic. I can really, I really appreciate and love that kind of, it's not totally atmospheric writing because that's not the atmospheric music is its own thing, but evoking a feeling and an atmosphere is something that's really special when done successfully as of here. Anyway, so there's my tangent about that, but it's just when you were talking about that, that's really cool. I really like it.

[Mary] First of all, I would just say thank you, it really means a lot to me. I think as composers, I think that kind of emotional reaction should be number one. And that is what I think programmatic music means to me. You know, the more that I think about it where I didn't have to write these broad sweeping narratives, I just kind of became so fascinated in this connection between, like, sound and music and memory and the way that hearing certain sounds just triggered these memories and wanting to be able to recapture that. In a musical setting that, I needed that wind chime sound in there where I wanted to be able to have that being played and give the listener the feeling that they're being brought back here to this kind of, like, wholesome, nostalgic memory of just being in this really peaceful place. And that, I think, you know, I owe a lot of that my development to, you know, this kind of place and just spending a lot of time outside. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so we have, you know, really wonderful summers, lots of rain. So I'm definitely very used to the rain. But this, you know, the rain always brings just these incredible blooms. And you know, in the late spring, early summer before the sun really has the chance to, like, bake everything, there's just a really beautiful, like, green shine on everything. And I think that's the feeling I really wanted to evoke, that is the programmatic element of it, is that, just hearing the sounds and being reminded of a memory that's just so vibrant.

[Aaron] Oh, you. Sorry.

[Mary] Oh, no.

[Aaron] No, you. I just wiped a tear. I'm sorry. I mean, you certainly have. So your music is highly successful in that. I'm sorry. This is a little embarrassing.

[Mary] Oh, no, not at all.

[Aaron] You are very successful in that because that is exactly what the music captured. And it's funny because I think it was, I think it was Gabe Gekoskie who talked about, we also talked about evoking an atmosphere and a memory and a space. And one of the most beautiful things and what I think, and we talked about that, I think telling a specific story is beautiful when it's done successfully, but also being able to tell your own personal story and making it adaptable to other people's lives is really where the magic is. And well, I can attest to at least from my reaction just now to that movement that I you definitely got that. All right. Let's get away from the emotional part before I get broken down a bit more.

[Mary] Yeah, I guess we can kind of move on to talk about the second movement now. Because the second…

[Aaron] Well, no, I have some things that are specific to the first movement that I want to talk about.

[Mary] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. 

[Aaron] So we've talked a bit about your ale- your use, uses of aleatory, which is very present at the beginning of this piece. And there's a stark change at rehearsal B. That goes into a metrical section and the rest of the movement is at least literally metrical.

[Mary] Right, yes.

[Aaron] And the character also changes at letter B, and you have, you know, chugging away eighth notes. It really lays down the fact that we are now in a consistent metrical landscape. I talked earlier about, or we were talking about your minimalist inspirations and one thing I thought was really cool was the ostinatos that you put at the end of the first movement and they're not completely metrically even. I mean they are in their note placement but in the micro sense, their accented direction, and where the prominent parts of that ostinato lay start to muddy the water of the very firmly metrical lively moments in the movement. And although it stays metered and it's not aleatoric, near the end of the movement we start slipping back. Of course the first movement ends low instead of high but it was my observation that through the looser ostinatos, the thinning of the texture, it seemed like you were trying to return to the freer aleatoric feel. And not quite aleatory, and it's not quite as quote unquote free as the beginning, but it felt like an arc of the movement where you go, often movements or pieces will start one place, go on a journey and then somewhat return, of course a bit different. Was that essentially what it was?

[Mary] I mean yeah, I'm really glad that you noticed that. I really wanted to kind of, yeah I think especially for this movement just kind of being the opening movement having some sort of arc to it that is very, a very loose like ABA or even like ABA prime I think was definitely a conscious thought where I, you know that we could kind of maybe talk, there's like maybe some smaller subsections but it did feel very much like that return was necessary but I also didn't want to start in the same place that I began. It felt a little bit more like I needed to just sit and develop this material a little bit more rather than just kind of go back into this very loose aleatoric feeling that was kind of there to start out with. And so it's through a lot of these, kind of, metrical divisions that I felt like I was able to achieve this. The, yeah, if you're kind of looking at some of these like after rehearsal D those 16th note sextuplets I kind of just used that as kind of a starting point of where I wanted to break up my beat. And then it was, a lot of it was kind of wanting to make it feel a little bit disjointed even though there was a steady pulse going on. So just kind of looking at the way I kind of layered it based on different subdivisions you get you know there's kind of you know like a four against a four against three between the viola and the guitar and then you know the winds come in, they're pretty steadily in two, and then once it's, like, about measure 102 once the violin starts switching to those triplets grouped into twos is where I kind of started to disrupt, where it felt like I couldn't just do a polyrhythm. Like that, that has the you know I kind of already did that polyrhythm there and it you know it felt a little bit more interesting at least for what I wanted to do to start disrupting those and so where you know everything beamed in triplets but grouped into twos where one group might have something the opposite of that, it was kind of an effect that I noticed when I was doing a score study of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. It was kind of interesting where the way that Debussy does it is it's very clearly these kind of two contrasting textures where you have the twos grouped into threes and the threes grouped into twos so it's a little bit more complex than just a standard two against three polyrhythm. But I really love the way that it kind of messes with how the tempo feels because there still is the steady pulse but there's times where it makes it feel either faster or slower than what the tempo actually is and so I kind of wanted to, that was kind of my idea was just to disrupt the tempo a little bit without actually having to do any sort of adjustments to the tempo and you can kind of see I started doing that a little bit more when it starts getting into the 32nd notes in the viola part. 

[Aaron] And I would imagine that was also, I feel like starting in aleatory or starting in that kind of notation and going to strict metrical is a lot easier than starting in strict metrical and then going into aleatory so I feel like in a practical way too, for rehearsal and performance, finding a way to create that disruption without disrupting it notationally is also useful. 

[Mary] Yes, I, yeah, it was important to just especially the players that I had like we needed to have just like a steady beat there, and it was hard yeah workshopping that part was kind of hard just because it's like okay I'm in, I have to subdivide into threes but I'm technically in twos and so it was a lot of just kind of like listening to the reference track and just kind of feeling it and it was definitely one of those moments where it, I was a little bit, made, as a composer it made me a little bit nervous just with some of the, like, looking, overseeing these rehearsals and just like they're kind of not getting it, it's taking a really long time to just kind of develop it and it just was a kind of thing, again I think some of these players just hadn't seen, seen these things before and so it was also important to just kind of give them that grace and they got it eventually which I felt was important. I think, you know it was both, a learning process for the both of us of just kind of wanting to know how if what I'm writing is effective, and there's always kind of that moment of fear too that you've like failed as a composer when you hand something to a player and they're just like I don't know what to do with what to do with this.

[Aaron] And then you're like is it me, is it you, what, what happened. 

[Mary] Exactly, yeah and so it was one of those moments that is a little bit scary but I also had to just, we just kind of had to buckle down and figure it out and they ultimately did a really great job with that I think once I kind of explained more of this kind of like time disruption without actually having to settle without well keeping the pull settled I think helped a lot. 

[Aaron] Yeah yeah I would agree that's very successful. Moving on to the second movement which unfortunately was not premiered or performed but it is titled Eulogy for Red Prius and I think I would be doing a criminal disservice to everyone around if I did not, although we don't have a recording of it. Eulogy for Red Prius that just made me smile.

[Mary] Yeah and this is this is definitely one of the more comedic movement just because I was talking a lot about these very pivotal emotional experiences that I've had and a lot of those moments too were also moments of joy and happiness and just silliness at a time and so I was just kind of thinking back to I have a twin sister and we're very close and so this red Prius was her car and so we had a lot of really good memories in this car especially just listening to music so the whole without getting into it too deep the whole musical idea behind it was kind of the idea of when you're listening to music in the car and you turn on your turn signal and you hear it clicking and it almost lines up with the pulse of the song and maybe it does for like a split second and then it kind of un- and then it gets out of disalignment and so a lot of these metrical disruptions that are just kind of started here at the end of this first movement are kind of explored more in depth as this piece goes on where there's kind of this like idea of this like constant pulse that is kind of at odds with other things that are happening and interestingly enough this is the only movement that actually doesn't have any aleatoric elements to it where I kind of found that it was useful to just use different subdivisions. I use quintuplets quite a bit like a four against five quite a bit which I found kind of had that interesting, like, staggered feeling that you get you know with that kind of like turn signal like kind of interjecting and initially for the fixed electronics I had some recordings actual like recordings of the physical turn signal, signal sound the clicking sound that I was going to use to play along with it where it would actually kind of just naturally get off from the players themselves. Unfortunately for the sake of time you know I think as you might have seen, this is already a pretty substantial piece so it just was not with the time that we had we kind of just had to focus on getting certain things performed that this one just kind of ended up getting cut so I'm really hopeful that it will get performed eventually and I do think it could definitely work as a standalone piece as well. So I'm really, yeah, keeping my fingers crossed it'll get another opportunity to get it performed but the eulogy part of the title comes from the fact that this car that we had basically spent all of high school like in you know where we had you know had all like with all of our friends and just had all these really good memories like where all of these really important life events happened was, it got totaled. Very unfortunate catalytic converter incident it got totaled and my sister was telling me that after the car got totaled she had one of her friends, kind of snobbly entitled, told her just, well, just buy a new car and…

[Aaron] Why not? Just buy…

[Mary] Exactly, yeah. 

[Aaron] Just, you know, what I, drive around my 2004 neon Nissan Sentra just for the hell of it, you know, when I see a new car I'm like you know what not today not because I can't afford it for the next 10 years but…

[Mary] Right. And the first and she said, when my friend said that first of all like what, that's just such, right, like a really entitled thing to say to someone and she said the first thing that came to mind was just how many memories happened in that car and the first thing that came to mind was writing this piece was just the way that we had connected over music with me being a musician and her not being a musician there was kind of you know this weird like not necessarily that we didn't get along but we kind of were just different, we're just different people and that's really great but we kind of found a way to connect with people with ourselves with each other over music and so it was kind of that listening to music in the car of you know making playlists for each other of picking out, of showing each other new artists that we liked that felt really crucial to this piece and but also wanted to kind of capture that comedic element of just this piece is about a car because at the end of the day though it's not just a car it's a vehicle, so to speak, for all of this development and all these memories to take place and so I kind of also wanted to just explore a slightly more lighthearted side especially kind of considering that some of these movements come from a little place of a little bit more deeper meaning and, you know, even just taking some of these kind of like finding ways to orchestrate like different car noises is also really fun like how do you get like the horn honking or like what instrument sounds closest to a turn signal and yeah it was just, it's, yeah, I'm, I was a little disappointed that we weren't able to do it but I think hopefully it'll get a life of its own one day.

[Aaron] Yes, yes, the red Prius will not go, will not go down with the sun but I mean it happens with, you know, scheduling, time constraints, rehearsal it happens but, uh, rest in peace to your red Prius.

[Mary] Thank you. 

[Aaron] Or your sister's red Prius. 

[Mary] My sister's Prius I got, I drove it a couple times so it was a little bit.

[Aaron] So moving on to movement three, this might be hard to believe after I cried a little bit when we talked about the first movement, but I actually movement three is my favorite, I would say, Tearing a Hole Through Space and Time. The introduction to this one is one of the most ear grabbing things that I've heard in a little while. Uh, and, I would say that says something in that I have been studying and looking at new music very intensely the past couple months. It has an atmosphere to it that is full of stasis, but not stagnation, if that makes sense. It refuses to move, but it's developing. It's ghostly, it's ominous, and you don't really have melodic development. You keep teasing the ear with melodic development, but you don't do it. And you develop the movement through texture, which is something, that's just an effect that I really love. And I think the electronics, as we've talked, the fixed electronics as we've talked about is a very pivotal part of this overall ensemble, but I especially love here the oscillation of the sound waves. You can, especially with headphones, I don't know what it was like in a live concert setting, but especially with headphones, hearing on the same note or similar notes or notes that were close together, hearing the dissonance or like the sound waves pulsating when it's such a thin texture, hearing the closeness of those sound waves together, something really ethereal and a really cool effect. 

[Mary] Oh, well, I just love what you said about having it being static without being completely, like, stagnant. I think that was a big part of how I developed this material because I did want to come back to this aleatoric stuff. And I thought that, you know, with my writing style, the kind of best way to do something like this, of something feeling very static would have kind of been through aleatory. And I kind of, for some of the other material that will go on, I kind of had worked on, this kind of juxtaposition that happens later on between F and F sharp. So with this fixed electronic part, this is actually one that didn't use any pre recorded sound sample. This was the input from an oscillator on a Buchla 200E synthesizer that I had access to through my university. And the one that we have, I just kind of really, it's that, I think that kind of woo woo, that kind of wobbly oscillating sound is like really, like, textbook Buchla sound. And that was kind of, I think, what I felt worked. What, well kind of what I felt needed to, what I wanted for here was just this kind of ghostly sound of, you know, almost that almost like theremin-esque.

[Aaron] Yeah, it is. Yeah, like early-ish electronic music.

[Mary] Yeah, and so I think I kind of, that was also just kind of in the back of my mind. And so I used that. And so, and working with analog is such a different experience. And so I kind of just recorded a bunch of, like, things of just, kind of, like, twisting knobs and seeing how things turned out. And so again, I kind of took those recordings and then I threw them back into that spectral editor and just because the model that we have is a little tiny bit broken, some of the modules don't exactly do what they wanted to. So there's some weird, like, artifacts in the sound that I was able to just kind of chop out in the spectral editor. So it made that F sharp, which it was also kind of funny too, because same thing, working with analog, there's not really any sort of, like, quantization in terms of pitch or rhythm. So I kind of just had a tuner open on my phone and would just gradually twist the knob until I got to that F sharp in that octave that I wanted. And then I put it in that, like, spectral editor, took out some of those weird, like, artifacts that were in there. And then it kind of just turned into this, like, really pristine sound. And so it was kind of providing, doing the same thing as that modified wind chime sample in the first movement, where it kind of forms the basis for it where I did kind of want this steady sound where everything was happening kind of underneath it. So the F sharp, that held F sharp doesn't really go away until rehearsal A when it turns back into the metered music. And so I based this just kind of off of this F sharp where it stays in this F sharp and everything's happening underneath it. And just kind of having these, like, weird kind of like ethereal, like, half steps coming in and out in the strings that are just kind of, like, kind of resolving and then they go back to moments of tension and then kind of resolving and just kind of sitting underneath this like, this F sharp that was kind of just where everything started. 

[Aaron] What that read to me was like an acoustic imitation of the oscillation, which is really, that, that's what that felt like to me. And I have to say, I didn't write this in my notes to you. But this moment in particular that I'm about to mention is actually what convinced me to reach, or what told me, okay, I need to reach out, Mary, to ask you to be on the podcast was the moment at measure 18. I don't know why this just particularly hit my ears very well where you, you bring in the soprano vocalist, which we're going to talk a little bit more is a very pivotal part of this movement. But at measure 18, the way you just, the, the timbre of the recording, just her voice just slides straight into the sound of the electronics and the acoustic instruments. And even just for a second, it sounds like that is pre recorded or something else, but the glide down, that descending contour that's at that vocal moment in measure 18, it was a very convincing moment. So that is to say, I don't know, sometimes I just like to talk about moments I think are cool. I don't really have a question.

[Mary] Yeah, I think it's, it's good to point out to, just, because I knew that with that actual, like, synthesizer oscillator just saying so static that I wanted something to kind of imitate it just a little bit and imitate, kind of, that electronic music sound. And I found that I think other, the strings were kind of already occupied doing something else, especially with these, I kind of called them like harmonic flares, where they're kind of starting on a harmonic really soft and just kind of like pushing the bow across so that it kind of really creates this, like, sudden abrupt crescendo. And I needed something else to kind of mimic that sound. And I just felt that the human voice was so suited to that. 

[Aaron] Oh, it was, it was, I say this as a compliment. It was like peak horror movie music. I'm not talking like stock like a two star rated Netflix original horror movie. I'm talking, like, peak horror soundtrack. That moment was just perfect in doing that.

[Mary] Yeah. And I think I needed it to be kind of eerie as, yeah, eerie was a good part of it just because I think there's kind of something almost which, Philip Glass does this really well, like almost this kind of uncanny valley element to it, where when you hear human voices doing things that don't, aren't text, they don't sound like, they don't really sound like anything else that you've heard before. And it's like, your brain's like, I know this is a person. I know this is a real person, but there's not any other thing that I can latch it to so it feels foreign in some way. And so I found, like, especially before I kind of started moving on to text that I needed to include some sort of element of that in there where you just hear the voice as a raw instrument in and of itself and it's, it's its own texture. And yeah, it's its own texture. That's how I wanted it to be.

[Aaron] Yeah, I think, I think you put it better than I did about my reaction to it, that it is uncanny when it first comes in. And so let's talk about the voice. I suppose there is a moment where the voice transforms, but I would say there's not like a, in my impression, not a moment like, okay, now the movement is different. But of course, the introduction of the actual text is very important to this movement. I just want to, I'm leaving this very open-ended. Can you talk about that text a bit? What it means in the context of this movement? And, you know, we've been talking about the other titles. This one is called Tearing a Hole Through Space and Time, and that has to do with the text, of course. So can you just talk about that a bit?

[Mary] Yeah, so I wrote this text myself just because with, kind of, some of the things that I was exploring, I just could not find a text that was already written that I felt just worked the way that I wanted it to. And I just kind of- 

[Aaron] Oh, real quick, compliments to the chef, because I thought you were going to say it's a poem or something, but so good job.

[Mary] Thank you. Yeah, I wrote this text myself just because it kind of was, I needed something. And it's not a whole lot of text. It just kind of repeats this one phrase, if I could tear a hole through space and time, I would. If I could reach into the space beyond the stars, I would. And I kind of, you know, I've been talking a lot about memory and things. And there was a part of me that, well, I've been talking about really positive memories, kind of felt like there's, there is this kind of dark side to nostalgia that, and lingering in the past for too long, that I really wanted to address, just because I feel like memories are important. They make us who we are, but at the same time, we have to keep moving into the future. And there's a part of me that kind of started to feel like lingering in the past to a moment you physically cannot return to just kind of feels like you're breaking the laws of space and time, that you're, you know, we have to keep moving forward, no matter, no matter what. And nostalgia is not, and too much nostalgia, I guess, I mean to say, is that it can't really move you forward. And so it just kind of feels like you're trying to linger in this one space and like rip through, tear through space and time and travel through it and try to move back to that time, even though you can't do it. And it was hard to, because a lot of this kind of came from an experience with a family member dealing with dementia and the way that having, the way that it just changes the brain so much that it makes it very difficult to move, keep moving forward, that there's certain memories that stick and it's very strange, which ones stick and which ones don't. And so that was also a very personal and very emotional part of writing this piece as well, because it was kind of hard to write it at times, just because it came from such a deep personal experience of, you know, witnessing how this, how it plays out. And it was hard to write this movement at first. 

[Aaron] Oh, man. You know, Mary, this is not just for the point of flattery, but this exact thing is the reason why I was ever inspired to start this podcast doing these sort of things. Because, you know, I'm not saying that you should, it's totally up to your own license. But all of these details and such is not explicit in the program notes, right? But are they? Is it?

[Mary] No, not really. The program notes that I wrote for it were kind of vague. And so it's just there were, it was kind of especially, I did find it kind of hard to encapsulate so much of this piece. I spent almost a whole year just writing it. And it felt very hard to just kind of boil this whole thing down into a couple paragraphs. 

[Aaron] I’m sure. 

[Mary] And so it just is, like, everything that made me me and everything that I've experienced. And kind of like, it just, I'm like, I'm putting my whole self out there in front of the world. That it just seemed hard. It was very difficult to just just write a couple of paragraphs to describe what's actually happening. On top of you know, the interesting kind of musical things that are happening, that, it's just like, how do I even what do I even talk about first? Do I talk about the emotional resonance? Do I talk about the music theory aspect of it? Do I talk about the writing process? That, so I kind of went intentionally vague just because I knew that it was going to be hard, no matter what I wrote to actually accurately capture what this piece was, and what it actually meant to me.

[Aaron] Yeah, so I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't glossing over something in the program notes. But of course, the music spoke to me in some level, because I was encouraged enough to seek out your time, ask you to join on here. But I just think it's such a magical element to composition and analysis of modern music, with such a controversial thing for some people, the composers who are alive, and not in their upwards of 90 years old and so on, is what you're sharing about this movement, and what we you shared about the first movement as well, not completely, but it recontextualizes the effect of it. And it makes it a special, as you said, a snapshot of who you are. I love modern composition. I have introspection on these sort of things. And I love modern composition and talking to composers, and learning who people are through their music, because I just really enjoy people. And when that person, even if abstractly is reflected through the music, well then that's, that’s the special factor of art for people spiritually, mentally, emotionally elevates music and art into different levels of thinking. And it's just, what you were just saying about this movement, and I'm sure people will connect to it when listening to it, that everything you said comes across so saliently. I love that part of this whole process. And the reason why I call this a collaboration, because those special elements are things that can only come from you. I can write about how the major seconds are transposed up and down until the sun goes down, but without your input into your own art, how would I know? And that's absolutely beautiful. And so-

[Mary] Yeah.

[Aaron] Oh, well, sorry, go ahead.

[Mary] Oh, I mean, you just, you make a great point there. And I mean, thank you for giving us the space to talk about it. That's the beauty of, I think, modern composition too, is just that the people who are writing it right now are alive. You have the opportunity to just talk to them about it.

[Aaron] What a novel idea.

[Mary] Exactly. And you know, it's like, we can play the Mozart and Beethoven as much as we want, but you know, what we know about how to play those pieces is just years of people going, trying to recreate what they think those composers actually wanted, or trying to recreate what they think those composers actually intended. And so you kind of get this weird like telephone effect with some of these older pieces in the, you know, so-called like classical canon, where it's just teachers upon teachers upon teachers just passing down to their students how, like, the correct way to play it. And it just- 

[Aaron] You want to talk about loaded topics right there.

[Mary] Yeah, if we're gonna get into it, because I will. And that's the thing is you kind of just lose that human element where it becomes mechanical at that point, where you're just teaching a technique. You're just teaching a specific fingering pattern or a specific fingering, you know, a specific fingering pattern or a specific way. Like, you know, piano teachers are so particular about this, where if you bring in any edition of Bach that has dynamic markings in it, they kind of freak out. They're like, you can't do that. You can't read off of this because Bach didn't intend it. He didn't write them in it. So we're not going to know. But at the end of the day, he's been dead for hundreds of years. Are we just going to go and like, you know, do I need to be like talk to him and to ask, you know, how loud should I get here? How much of a diminuendo should I play here? It's just, you know, we don't have that luxury with the classical canon to just ask the composers. And I think it's something that not enough people take advantage of. 

[Aaron] And also, I want to say, when you said specific fingerings and specific way of doing things, you triggered my strong dislike of performing Mozart. Mozart's fine, good music, whatever. I'm not trying to diss Mozart. I cannot stand practicing and performing Mozart because there is a dictatorial way to do everything in Mozart. 

[Mary] Yes, exactly. Or in things like turns or however it's like this one, you need to go up and then down or down and up. And it's just it's yeah, it's very mechanical. It kind of, I think there are points and especially, you know, coming from that classical piano background where, you know, playing it where I'm just kind of like, well, what's the point of this? I'm just playing it the way that 1000 other people have already played it. And I, so that's why I think this input from the composers and, you know, but also making it a collaboration, as you said, is what's so important, because we get to make it what we want it to be. We don't have centuries of teachers telling us how to play it, or how something should be performed. And it's just, it's really freeing, I think in the world of new music to not have to worry about those things. to you know, not have to worry about whether or not you played it with finger four or five. 

[Aaron] How dare you?

[Mary] Like, it's yeah, there's all of these things that where, I can just talk to the players one on one, or even you know, we have the benefit of technology now that we can email them I've had some of my friends who are you know, getting more and more and more into new music, who are just able to, you know, get in contact with these composers so much. And they learn so much about the music that they're playing through these, these contacts that they're having. The human element is coming back to it. It's no longer just trying to memorize. It's no longer just trying to get this into your muscle memory. It's actually about the connection that you're making with other people. And you know, if you kind of want to talk about, like, the state of modern composition right now…

[Aaron] Oh, hold on. Almost. No, no, no. You're, you're on the right, I was going to say we have very naturally segued into the last portion of this. But I want to. we're going to jump back a little bit just to wrap up. 

[Mary] Sorry, I was totally getting ahead of myself.

[Aaron] You were, no, you're doing a great podcast job. But that was a very natural flow. But I just want to wrap up with Voice Memories, and Tearing a Hole Through Space and Time. I have to ask, I'm going to add this question, given the emotional, real life context of this piece, then I question or ask, what are you speaking or saying by the way that you ended the movement? It dissipates, in a formal texture, it makes complete sense. Give it, you know, we were talking about this earlier about a return to the style of how you started a piece. But of course, it's a journey. So it's a little bit different. But you dissipate at the end. 

[Mary] Yeah. 

[Aaron] And so given, you know, you talked about struggles in family with dementia, memories, the dangers of nostalgia, along with its sweet memories. I'm really intrigued to hear what you have to say about the ending. 

[Mary] Yeah, so kind of what I wanted to do here was just orchestrate this explosion that really kind of like, where things just come alive and come together. The texture is super dense. And I just wanted, you know, everybody's kind of firing on full, like full power, everything, everybody's here. But I really wanted to feel like this explosion, like just the tension of, kind of, like almost this kind of moment of realization that there is, everything will come to an end eventually, but we're not there yet. We have time to keep moving on. And I think, you know, as someone especially like, in my experiences with things like anxiety and depression, it's been, in those experiences, it's really hard to feel like you can like, it's really hard to feel like you're moving on. It's really easy to just kind of sit in that place of just staying still. And I think it was important for me to write this piece, have a piece orchestrationally reflect that, even if it was a little bit, you know, subconscious, but just reflect that kind of moment of self actualization, where things can move forward, you are able to move forward with your life. And those sweet memories will always be there. And you still have time, but you also still have time to make new ones. And it's, I, it was, I hoped that it was meaningful just because I wanted to end it in a place where, of course, it got a little, the texture got dense, things started slowing down, getting less and less in frequency. But I also wanted it to feel like it ended on a hopeful note. 

[Aaron] Honestly, I don't think I have much more to add to that. That's, that's, that's beautiful. I mean, there's just, I've said it a lot before already. There's so much that I love there. That's the sort of music that I connect with the most. And I think I'm just gonna, I think I'm just gonna leave it at what you said with that. That's beautiful.

[Mary] That's perfect.

[Aaron] So, yes, the, the state of modern composition, you've talked a bit about it, but you were, you were about to go on a bit and let's, for the sake of it, let's throw in music theory, academia. What are, what are some of your thoughts on all that?

[Mary] I mean, I think music academia, it's just, I think things are getting better for sure, just in terms of people programming works by more diverse composers, making more of an effort to not just play music by old dead white guys. But, you know, I think there still are some kind of sticklers here. And I think for music academia to truly thrive, again, which maybe this is kind of a hot take, is that we just, and I'm not saying that people don't need to, people don't need to perform Mozart or Beethoven anymore. But I think what, what I was kind of getting at is the way that we've taught them is just gotten so technical that we're starting to lose some of the human elements of the art that they were creating, that I think schools just need to make more space for new music in their curriculums. They just need to make more space for the music of people who are actually alive. And I was lucky to go to a school that was pretty open to that. But, you know, even in my private lessons, a lot of my teachers would be, would be, you know, be giving me, you know, a lot of classical and romantic repertoire just because that was what they knew. And I think for us to actually start embracing the new music in a culture of collaboration is we just kind of, I think a lot of people just need to take that leap of faith and just kind of move on. This, I guess, kind of does tie into some of the themes that I've been talking about with my work about that past will always be there, but you can't go back to it. And we're just living in a time where we have so much good new music right now that it just kind of seems silly to relegate all of that music to just highly trained professionals who specialize in it. I think that- 

[Aaron] Oh, sorry. I apologize.

[Mary] I think that students can learn a lot by learning the music of their time. You know, there's so much of a diversity of style and that not every, I think there's a lot of stereotypes about new music being overly complicated and super hard and unlistenable. But that's really not the case. Like, I think you take composers who are like Viet Quang and Caroline Shaw, who are doing really wonderful things that are also really accessible. And so- 

[Aaron] Caroline Shaw is my dream guest. I hope one day, I love Caroline Shaw.

[Mary] Oh, for sure. Yeah, she's definitely an idol of mine, really. I'm just, I love everything that she does. But you have these composers, there's so many composers that are also being accessible and we're not all, you know, Elliot Carter writing all of these ridiculous things. Because we actually do want people to play our music, you know? And I think that there should just be more of a conscious effort to establishing that human connection between the performers and the composers because we're at a time where we have a bunch of really amazing composers writing a bunch of really amazing music. And it just feels like it's a missed opportunity for a lot of places in academia to kind of look over that and just kind of play, okay, we're going to do Beethoven three again, we're going to do Mahler one again, where you have just some composers that are writing, there's new symphonies being written all the time that are really amazing. And I think it needs to be more than just the technical aspect of it. We need to remember that there is a human connection to it. We wouldn't be making music otherwise. 

[Aaron] So many beautiful things you said in that, the human connection in music, establishing that and continuing that is something very personal to me, as well as I've probably said in different ways before. Now, okay, on the music theory side, I'm going to play a little bit Devil's Advocate or something that I've heard. One of the most common rebuttals to such things is, okay, in the performance aspect, fine. But, you know, music theory as an institution is something that everyone goes through. Everyone has to take a theory class. I would argue, and I hope other people do too, good. 

[Mary] Right.

[Aaron] You don't need to be a music theorist, but you need to understand it at a fundamental and hopefully advanced, at some point, level if you're going to be a professional musician, whatever that means to you. But here is the rebuttal I hear most often. And it's one that's based around practicality. One of the most comforting and easiest things in a curriculum of using a lot of classical canon, or even recent classical canon, like I don't know, what some people may deem as contemporary music, although it is almost 100 years old, of things from the 20s and 30s and so on, of how do you practically and systematically implement into a curriculum works that are not hundreds of years old, more modern works into a theory classroom? Because, you know, when you're teaching hard voice leading, chromatic chords, all those sorts of very fundamental ideas, how do you stop showing continuous examples of Brahms and throw in something by Jennifer Higdon? You know, something of that sort.

[Mary] Here's the thing, you don't need to throw out the Brahms. You know, I have friends who have done really great, you know, performances where they'll put Brahms and Jennifer Higdon on the same, the same program. And that's a really great way that we can do that, is we can make space, there's space for both. It's not like, we're just going to shove all of this aside. And I think the idea is that you don't have to get rid of the Brahms excerpts, just maybe not use so many of them. Because, you know, I think the students, I'm hoping, would at least be coming into contact with Jennifer Higdon's works, I think it might also be important for them to find something that they can connect to, seeing that this piece was only written a few years ago versus something that was written hundreds of years ago. And I think people just need to accept the fact that new music is being written, there's good new music being written, and there's space for it. There's space for both the old canon and the new canon. And I think it's not this, I'm not going to say that people aren't trying. I just don't think that there's as much, as much of an effort is being made as there could be to incorporate more of these new works into a curriculum. You know, there's, you could even say that, like, you know, I just mentioned Caroline Shaw, like Partita for Eight Voices is a really interesting piece. You could learn a lot about things like voice leading, even if she doesn't necessarily always do it correctly, from looking at this piece that's just a really well written piece for voices. And maybe you can use the traditional excerpts to teach the rules, but it also would be helpful to use these newer ones to teach students how to break them.

[Aaron] Partita for Eight Voices, please go out and listen to that if you have an audience. One of the most amazing contemporary pieces out there. Also one of the Pulitzer Prize in Music a little bit ago. So I completely agree with that. I just wanted to pose that question completely…

[Mary] oh, of course. 

[Aaron] With what you said. So Mary, we're coming to a close here. It's been a long one.

[Mary] It has been.

[Aaron] I apologize.

[Mary] Oh, don't apologize. This has been a wonderful conversation.

[Aaron] I'm glad. I'm glad. So we've talked about what's going on with you professionally and academically about what's next, which is University of Michigan in the fall. Congratulations. 

[Mary] Oh, thank you. Thank you.

[Aaron] I know you're in the process of moving, but I'm going to ask what are some big projects that are on your mind in the horizon? The start of grad school is a big time, but what other than the small things you're dealing with right now, what do you have on the docket? What's next for you?

[Mary] I'm definitely kind of in between pieces right now. I just finished some pieces. I'm going to be attending some different festivals this summer. So I'll be at Divergent Studio up in Boston and then I'll be at VIPA, which is in Valencia, Spain. So I have been kind of writing some smaller chamber pieces for those ensembles. I'm really excited. I'm going to have the opportunity to work with Loadbang. It's going to be awesome. So that's kind of my near future. You know, I also have played a lot of wind band music. A lot of my favorite composers are wind band composers. So I'm definitely kind of starting to think about maybe do it, maybe moving into the wind band scene, writing some more wind band music just to kind of break into that and get the experience of writing for that kind of ensemble. But I also have been, let's see, I have a good friend who is a bassoonist. I started doing a project with her where we wrote a piece for bassoon and we've been talking about maybe turning it into a suite. So there's a lot of little projects here and there that I've been talking about doing. So yeah, a lot of stuff on the horizon for sure. 

[Aaron] It certainly sounds like it. What would be the best way for the audience to contact you?

[Mary] Oh yeah, I'm pretty active on social media. So you can find my Instagram account. That is marymdenney_music on Instagram. You can feel free, anybody can feel free to shoot me a message. You could also email me if anybody has questions. And that email is going to be marymdenney@gmail.com.

[Aaron] Beautiful. And so I'm going to give the last word to you. If you were to say to the audience anything about music, life, composition, music theory, anything, what would it be?

[Mary] Oh gosh. I mean, so many people tell me that they think composition is hard. And then I always ask them what, have they've ever tried it before. And most of them say no. And so my word would be is that composition is just possibility. And I would just suggest to the audience, anyone can be a composer. Anybody can turn their feelings into music. And if you just try it, you never know because the world needs your music. The world needs to hear what you have to say. And so that would be my advice is to just go out there and try it.

[Aaron] Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, Mary, thank you for coming on to the Theorist Composer collaboration. This has been Mary Denney and her piece Voice Memories. Thank you very much for coming on.

[Mary] Thank you.

[Aaron] Hello, this is Aaron again, and I want to thank you for listening to this episode of the Theorist Composer collaboration. I also want to give another big thank you to Mary Denney for coming on to the podcast and for sharing her piece Voice Memories. Mary's contact info is listed both in the description of this episode, as well as on the corresponding contributor page on the TCC host website as well. I would appreciate it if you could show her some support. Now this, you know, typically at the end of every episode, I give a little reflective paragraph or so about the episode, some extra thoughts or insight from yours truly, but which I'm going to do. But as maybe you can tell with how informally I'm speaking, this is, this little portion is unscripted because it's just easier for me to talk about this before talking a bit about Mary's phenomenal work in herself as a composer. I want to talk a bit more about an emotional note that was brought up during the episode, which is the last major piece that I wrote many years ago, which was The Man at Sunset Drive. And I, you know, going, going through and listening to the recording again and editing it and cleaning it up in preparation for the public release of this episode, I felt compelled to talk a bit more about that in detail, maybe a bit selfishly, but it feels right to me to speak on it. So, you know, The Man at Sunset Drive is actually not the first iteration of that piece. So originally, many years ago, I, you know, I don't remember the exact timeline, so I'm going to just bear with me. Many years ago, my grandfather had some failing health. He lived alone in his house in Holley, New York, which, as I said in the episodes outside of Rochester, the house I visited many times as a kid, and he started developing some brutally difficult health issues, which needed to be resolved through a surgery, I believe removing his bladder or something of that sort. The last time I ever saw him, I remember having a feeling, for whatever reason, that it would be the last time that I saw him, I wrote him a piece of music, which at the time, I believe was only my second piece of music ever, for, I think I wrote it for full orchestra. It was called Morning at Sunset Drive, which, as I said in the episode about that, but I actually played it for him, or I played it on the MuseScore MIDI from my computer, and it was about those mornings and those memories, very similar to Mary Denney's first movement, A Great Big Garden, in Voice Memories, very similar to that, and that's why I connected to this piece and to this interview so strongly. And so I showed my grandfather that piece in the few couple of days that were the last time I saw him, many months before he passed away, and well, of course he loved it. He cried a bit, of course did I, and I gave him a signed score with a little paragraph note on it detailing how much I love him and what the piece means to me and what it means to give it to him. Many months later, at the end of the year, he passed away, and although I'm not going to give the details as to how or what that process was, because that's a bit too much personal information, and also let's not get too down into the dumps, but it was not a smooth passing to say the slightest. It was, let's just say he did not go easy. It was painful, and it was unpleasant. And I remember the day that I found out that he passed away. See, I lived in Florida, and at the time I was at my community college, State College of Florida, and I remember one morning I was going to play in the school string quartet at a fundraiser for the school. This was also the day of our school's holiday concert, and I remember parking at the place where I was going to play the gig. I put the car in park, I got a call from my mother saying that grandpa had passed away, and I remember sitting in the car, and I gave a good cry for a good couple minutes, and then I swelled up. I got my violin, and I went and played some nice happy Christmas music for about an hour, hour and a half, and then I went home, and I took a nap, and then I got up, and I went and played the holiday concert in the orchestra later that night. So that is to illustrate I did not really cope with it very much, or move on in very many ways. And then eventually, my mom was the executor of my grandfather's estate. She brought back, eventually, a whole bunch of his papers, and one of them was the score that I had signed for him. And, well, I mean, it's even difficult to talk about now. That was a very hard thing to see, the score, and what I said on it. And in my last semester at State College of Florida, I tried to write a different version of it. I wrote Morning at Sunset Drive, and originally it was for full orchestra. It was a bit amateurish, you know. It has a very significant emotional connection to me and significance, but it was not exactly fine art to just literal standards, so I wanted to give it another go. I had been in college at this point. I had some composition lessons on the side. I wanted to give it another go, but this time I did it for a piano trio. And it was okay. This, the second version of Morning at Sunset Drive, it was alright, technically better, but it was still not completely emotionally satisfying to me. It was very difficult to listen to them perform it, not because they did a poor job, but when it was performed it was just so overwhelmingly emotional. And then fast forward about two years later than that, in the orchestration class that I had at University of Florida, we had a large and end of semester assignment where we had to write a string orchestra, symphonic band, and brass band piece. And after going to a brass band concert and listening to the timbre, because I was never familiar with brass band, I decided on, well, I really want to give this another go. But I thought I need to, you know, at this point it had been what felt like, I, probably, maybe three years or so removed from my grandfather's passing, and I still had a lot of regret and grief from it because I never fully processed it. I wanted to give it a final go. And so I did. But I changed it a bit. It changed to The Man at Sunset Drive instead of Morning at Sunset Drive, in reference to my grandfather and all my experiences that I've referenced a couple times in, earlier in the episode. And that reading was one of the most emotional musical experiences I've ever had. Although I can't find the recording that we did of it, I'm just going to play just a little bit. Not too much, because, you know, again, technically speaking, especially when put up with someone like Mary, it's not necessarily the highest thing, but it's really special to me. So here's a little snippet of The Man at Sunset Drive by myself. So I'm not going to play too much of that because I just want to keep that to myself, but man, during the reading I was sobbing. I mean, quite frankly, it was like saying goodbye to my grandfather again, which I never had the chance to. But that is all to reflect and say that that piece and that connection was completely dedicated to my grandfather, Michael Wright. Oh, here I am tearing up again. Oh goodness. I'm sure he would have loved this piece. You know, really, you know, Mary and I talked about this a good deal in the episode, but this is really the magic of music. I mean, isn't this why we all do what we do, or at least a portion of it, you know, and enough about myself. This is not to be self-serving, but you know, the connection that voice memories brought to me, my life, and, hell, even my music is something incredibly, it's incredible. But as I said in the episode, and I'll say again, she’s an incredibly effective storyteller, incredibly effective composer. This is the sort of stuff in music that I value more than anything, and is really the reason why I dedicate so much of my life to music are these sort of moments and these sort of times. So I'll end my own unscripted personal rantings and diatribe and so on by just expressing my gratitude and my thanks to the composer Mary Denney for coming onto this podcast and for sharing her incredibly special piece, which in many ways is special, but you know, it happened to almost by chance be incredibly special to myself. So thank you again to Mary Denney for coming onto this podcast. For further updates and notifications on the Theorist Composer collaboration, make sure to subscribe to our email listing on the homepage of our host website and follow our Instagram and Facebook pages. Relevant links in the description. You can listen to future episodes through our host website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeart Radio, and YouTube. So make sure you subscribe to the platform of your choosing. Again, all relevant links are in the description. TCC episodes are posted weekly on Mondays, and don't miss our weekly blog posts, which go live a few days after a new episode is added. I'm also excited to promote that our next featured composer is Jake Jordan and his piece The Last of Sailing Ships, a masterclass in programmatic writing with a compelling story. There will be more information on this in the upcoming blog posts and, of course, in the next full episode. Make sure to follow our social media accounts and relevant streaming platforms because you won't want to miss it. But until then, this is Aaron, and thank you for joining the TCC.

Transcript edited and formatted by Justine de Saint Mars