21. Ars Poetica - Professor Douglas Boyce

[Aaron] Welcome to the Theorist Composer Collaboration, a podcast interview series highlighting modern composers and their compositions. My name is Aaron D'Zurilla, I'm the host of this podcast and also a graduate music theory student at Florida State University. Today I will be talking with Professor Douglas Boyce, who, alongside his piece, Ars Poetica, is the featured guest for this episode. We discuss his background, modernism, collaboration with poet Marlanda Dekine, and so much more. So without further ado, this is an excerpt from Ars Poetica, and welcome to the TCC.

Again, the music that you were just listening to is an excerpt from the piece titled Ars Poetica by the composer Professor Douglas Boyce, who alongside his music is the featured guest for this episode. That leads me to welcome Professor Boyce himself to the program. How are you?

[Professor Boyce] I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. It's interesting. I'm sure at some point we're going to talk a little bit about changes and over the years and just how the medium is shared out into the wider world. And I was just thinking about this yesterday as I was driving home from some chores. I remember the first time I heard my music on the radio as I was driving in high school and my band was on the local radio station and I sort of practically drove off the road. I was enthralled and it was surprising. Right. It was a particular moment. And yeah, it was a show that I listened to, but it was sort of a sudden moment when it was there. And now everything's plotted and we can note the dates when things are going to be shared in advance. So it's beautiful, but it's also strange when you think about it in the broader context of life.

[Aaron] Yes, and Professor Boyce, we made mention of this in the preliminary meeting that we had, but let's not dance around the fact that you are a professor of composition. And that's a really big deal for me, at least personally, to have onto the show because you're going to give a much bigger and more experienced and well thought out perspective just naturally through that.

[Professor Boyce] Thanks for adding to the pressure of the moment.

[Aaron] No, no, no, no.

[Professor Boyce] But look, I think I'm very much in favor and I think this project struck me precisely because you're trying to have these conversations in the process of becoming a theorist. And you're interviewing a lot of people becoming composers. And there's something very special, but also very fraught about that moment. And I think some of the things that are going to come up with maybe sort of why it's fraught, maybe why it's more notably fraught than it has been historically for good and ill. I think there are opportunities that it presents now that it didn't present previously, but also not just challenges, but almost obligations that you have if you take on that toll. So, seeing what you're trying to do and listening to, I can't say all, but to many of the interviews that you've done with these young composers. Look, if I can help either by, you know, whatever limited reputational benefit I can bring or what limited experience I can bring to it, I'm happy to. I think it made me think about a conversation I had with my teacher, George Crumb, who I won't do the imitation, though we all, everyone who's studied with him, we have our George voice that we do. And I won't get the exact phrasing right, but I remember talking with him sort of about finding an individual voice, and it was something along the lines of how he felt for younger composers. It wasn't, it wasn't pity, it wasn't, you know, regret, it was, but just sort of a sort of camaraderie, sort of caring, which he gave so much, but precisely because he felt it took us longer to figure out what we were going to be doing. And in part, he said, and I do remember this moment of the phrase, he said, you have to have opinions about so many things that the breadth of what we're supposed to take positions on is much wider than it was when he was coming forward. And I think that was true thinking about myself in relationship to George. And I think it's only compounded between young composers entering into the field now and myself. And so maybe I can bring, maybe I can bring something of that.

[Aaron] I think you already have, and I really appreciate your recognition. That means a lot to me as someone, as you said, is developing the first steps of my professional life. The fact that you were able to quote your teacher, George Crumb, which is, you know, has been for quite a while, especially with my generation, we read and studies music and music history. Even that fact right there, you know, that's just, that's really cool. Anyway, so sorry, a very big fan of George Crumb myself, but let's get into about yourself. Can you tell the audience about yourself personally, professionally, academically, whatever you choose?

[Professor Boyce] Well, when you, when you sent it, I also appreciate your interest in proffering some of the questions in advance. But when that one arrived, I sort of couldn't keep myself from thinking about Wally Shawn's Designated Mourner when the sort of the primary character tries to describe himself. And he's like, I can do it in 10 words, like a former student of English literature who went downhill from there. And it's Wally Shawn, so it's hilarious, but it's the Designated Mourner, so it's tragic. But there's, I think there's, and this maybe this does reflect back to the thought from George that that put that came into my head the other day. There are multiple possible narratives to present in answering this question, you know, and so you could, I could frame myself as an academic who writes academic music for academics, right? And yes, I'm a professor and yes, I have one of those jobs. And I'm not really trying to operate in, you know, massified media. That's sort of not really my project. But at the same time, I could take something of that narrative and also say, well, I'm, you know, I was a kid with the punk rock band in New Jersey, who made good in the end.

[Aaron] Yeah, I was. I listened to some of your previous press interviews on your website and I had to bring up that point at some part.

[Professor Boyce] I figured. Yeah, I used to keep it very, very quiet. I'm a little bit more familiar with it. Now, all I will say I was, I was world famous in Japan for two weeks. I'll just leave it at that. The, and that's, I mean, I think it's relevant. I think there are aspects of that experience, you know, the learned life experience from there. I think it's not to be diminished, but one of the reasons I have, I don't actually talk about it that much is I don't want to, you know, ossify it and make it part of the brand because it was very special and very distinct, but also very, in many ways, very different from what I do now. And I, and I think it, I think it works better when it, when it, when it comes out organically from conversations and questions, because they could do the same thing that I, you know, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a convert from the hard sciences. I was a physics major as an undergraduate. That was sort of my, the path that I felt I should be on and that I was told I should be on. And I was very lucky that I had some, both some wonderful music teachers as an undergraduate, but also some wonderful physics teachers as an undergraduate who were interested in the entirety of the educational experience. And so as I bit by bit, shifting gears and transitioned over, you know, my, my, my professors, you know, Kevin Jones and Bill Wootters, they would show up at concerts and they would be present and they would endorse and I think we're also kind of kind as I was spending less time on my thermodynamics project sheet. Yeah, that other thing, I think they were also kind. I don't think anything, you know, inappropriate. I did, I did complete the degree, but I could have, you know, I could have put more into it at the end. And I'm still connected with them and I still sort of engage with them. And that's, that is absolutely something that I think it shapes my music in some ways. We'll talk, maybe talk a little bit about that when we talk about theory and training in theory and sort of how it can be. How does it, how can it affect my work, how can it affect future, future composers works.

[Aaron] Well, on that, on that note, well, sorry to interrupt.

[Professor Boyce] Well, no, no, I think it's there, but more than anything, I think the sense of community was my great takeaway from, from that experience. And I think another way that I can frame myself, you know, would be I'm either a medievalist in modernist clothing or a modernist in medievalist clothing, you know, depending on what piece of mind you hear, what kind of conversation you hit me with. And I think there's also, and again, this will absolutely show up, I think there's something about an amateur philosopher who, you know, you probably would be critiqued for taking Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach, you know, a bit too personally. And sort of saying, all right, if philosophy is supposed to, its aim is to change the world, then the converse is that we should take over philosophy, because if we're rooted in the real, which I think that music is, or perhaps I would be more careful and sort of say that the act of making music is rooted in the world. And apparently we have the right to sort of think about what are the philosophical implications of that, what's the language that we want to use. And again, as we'll dive back into this, given the theme of the larger project of your podcast, maybe we need things other than music theory to help us frame what we're doing, help us understand what we're doing in that broader reality.

[Aaron] Yeah. If you want to talk about things that have many different branching answers that you could go down, that's the kingpin of it right there for at least my field. Exactly. Yeah. And so you mentioned your own music or your current music goal profile as a composer a little bit in passing there. You described your, now you were just going through the different possible labels that you could put on yourself, you know, Renaissance, medieval, modernist, and earlier you said, you know, academic composer who you are a professor of composition, of course. And on your website, I found very intriguing because I love studying modal counterpoint. That is one of my favorite classes I took in undergrad and just learning pre-tonal music just was so much fun. And I found particular interest on your website and we just mentioned it right there that you take influence from that. And you mentioned modernism. So you're adapting it into newer ideas and idioms. So this is all leading to another question that could branch out into a hundred different ways. But right now, at least, how would you describe your music as a composer?

[Professor Boyce] Well, I think there are a couple of factors that recurred, a couple of tendencies that I manifest, that the music manifests repeatedly. And I think that in the most general sense, everything you describe is a sort of a variety of cases where my music is situated pretty broadly in either cultural context or historical context. And I think when I talk about my work overall, you know, I think of myself very much as part of a sort of broad humanistic tradition with, you know, trails back. I could get very excited and talk about the medieval philosophers that I think really sort of started this ball rolling. And so one of the impacts of that is seeing both medieval and Renaissance affect and mood. But for me, more importantly, I would say it is the techniques of those practices, the devices that we use in the making. And so for myself, that's a profoundly modernist project, because especially in music, but in many domains, the very clear music. In 1800, we didn't really have much of a theory of history of music, the project of saying, hey, how is this different from what was happening 100 years ago, 200 years ago? But actually, when you start thinking in that deep now that you have to, once you study medieval music, and I will also name, I'll name my teachers, Jennifer Bloxham, who has also remained a very dear friend, is, you know, as profound an influence on my creative work as any of my composition teachers. I mean, there's some more, but you know what I mean. She's sort of in there among the among the rest of those. But when you dive in to historical thinking, to do it well, you need to think of yourself as the person in the modern gazing backwards. And you know, I mentioned the Feuerbach, and that makes me think about Benjamin on the Feuerbach, on the marks, you know, with the angel of history, sort of looking backwards, flying forwards. That's what it feels like to me. So, for me, these, the, there is a tendency, I'm not saying it's the only tendency, but there is one of the tendencies that are out there, is to situate modernism as purely or perfectly futurist in its orientation. I think that's actually disempowering because you, as a, as a thinking entity, right, as does zine, right, we can't actually know enough about our situation to truly predict the future. And the only tools we have are actually the bits of history that we have access to at the moment.

[Aaron] Yes, yes.

[Professor Boyce] And so I think that both, and I've become a bit bolder in my rhetoric in talking about it of late, but I think it's also important because it's, I think, people listening on podcasts, I've already listened to some of my music. I don't, I tend not to do anything sort of, you know, revanchist or retro-grade stylistically, you know, I, look, I studied. I can sit down and I, and I can write my fake Bach for you again. I can, you know, I can, it's been a while, but I can, you know, do my mass movement, you know, and there's tremendous value in, in having engaged with that technicality, but at the same time, it's also, it can also be a terrible snare that you, that, that it is, it is of the past. And thus the conditions in which it is to manifest those specific technicalities in the present, it's completely different.

[Aaron] Yes. You know, what one of, to illustrate your point there, one of the first classes I took as a graduate student at Florida State University was with Dr., Professor, Dr. Clendinning.

[Professor Boyce] Oh, that's right. Wonderful.

[Aaron] Yes. And she was teaching counterpoint. And as I said before, I loved mole and tonal counterpoint in my undergrad, so I thought, I should take this class. I thought it was going to be a theory class, because Professor Clendinning is teaching it. It turned out it was actually primarily for composers. And so it was a, it was a great time. It was a great class. I composed a lot more music than I thought it was going to be, but as walking into the class, but talking to my peers after having taken that class, they said that not that they're writing fugues, not that they're writing vocal counterpoint in the style of Mozart day to day, but it informs most of what they do, even if it's very disconnected from that. So I have a lot of things that I want to ask you to pick your brain about the field of composition, how it's changed in those styles and those movements, because unlike the majority of the people on this podcast, you've either been a part of or been able to see things change over time. And, but-

[Professor Boyce] What a polite, what a polite way of saying that I'm old. It's very well done. Well played.

[Aaron] Hey, hey, hey, hey. You know, there's, there's a great deal of importance to that because, you know, when people my age, and I'm very guilty of this, get fiery about certain different things, we lose perspective about how things change over time, you know, or things come and go and so on. But, but, but, but we can go on for that for quite a bit, but I, we, for time's sake, we do need to talk about Ars Poetica, not to treat it as an annoyance in the conversation. But I want, so, you know, to give some context to the audience about Ars Poetica, there's a handful of things to unpack here, and then I'll, I'll prompt you with that. It's a piece for cello, guitar, violin, and spoken word, and it is a collaborative work with the poet Marlanda Dekine. As you list on the description of your website, quote, Ars Poetica consists of a long poem in five parts with four substantial, sometimes virtualistic intermezzo between each speech, music, and poetry from different traditions are braided together and endeavor to recusitate dormant artistic traditions predating modern musical or literary categories, reconstituting a multi-dimensional Ars Poetica for the now. So speaking of modernism and a perspective on history and, and music, that's a perfect lead into that. And so just generally, there's a little introduction of the piece for the audience, but can you talk a bit about the concept of this piece and how the collaboration with Marlanda came about?

[Professor Boyce] Well, I actually think this is one of those cases where the, the narrative of the how will probably help the narrative of its being, sort of what it is.

[Aaron] Sure.

[Professor Boyce] So I live as much as I can with my family up in the hills of North Carolina, right on the Blue Ridge. And one of the things you find up here on the ridge are sort of various retreat centers, and I, we were living near one, and I met Marlanda when they were here to sort of start a retreat session, a week of sort of deep thinking about their life and where they were headed and what was going on. And my little boy and I, we lived right nearby and we would sometimes get lunch at this, at the cafeteria of this retreat center. And my little boy was there with a plate full of lentils, and he looked over and saw Marlanda and said, we're having lunch with them. And marches over and introduces himself and sits down in the part of this cafeteria that it was sort of like roped off or like, these are the people beginning their quiet retreat, don't disturb them. And he plops the lentils down and starts talking and blah, blah, blah, the way, you know, the way four year olds do with people. And so I was very gently sort of like trying to get into Marlanda's space. And they're like, no, no, no. And we sort of had this lovely time and sort of saw them a couple of times before they left and then stayed in touch and they wrote a lovely little poem about Durnan. And we just sort of kept talking. And what we kept talking about was in the simplest form was this sort of like, how's it going? How's the work going? How's the, how is the craft for you today? And engaging with it that way over and over again, as we develop the idea of like, maybe we should do something together. Maybe that would be fun. The origin point was to sort of say, well, what is it? What is it to make? Right. And so that's sort of, you know, the title, Ars Poetica, sort of comes, comes from that trying to put, to frame primarily, what is it with two makers interacting while making. And so the idea was always poems about being a poet, music about being a musician.

[Aaron] A movie about being a director or something.

[Professor Boyce] A movie about being a director. Hopefully not one of those because they're so often so horrifically in budget. Maybe it's good that we don't have the budget that would require that. It keeps us, it keeps us honest. And yet at the same time, wanting them to be both in some ways distinct unto themselves, but also sort of interact. Now we had very expansive, the piece was originally going to be much closer to guided improvisation and just a lot more flexible. And then I don't know if you heard about it, there was this thing called COVID that happened. Yes. And as with everybody, a whole bunch of plans just changed gear. And it became more of a fixed piece. If anybody ever wants to dig more deeply into my, into the catalog, there's a lot more quasi-aleatoric, partially improvised music early on. I also studied a lot of jazz with the amazing Andy Jaffe. Hello Andy, if you're listening. And in some ways there's going to be more of that in the piece, but that was predicated on the idea of much longer sessions with all of the players, sort of building out that language. But I think that pause actually got us thinking in a good way because what Marlanda and I were, we've never been like terrible tension about, but we were pushed to greater clarity about the distinction between what the particular characteristics of the tradition of setting a text. Of which they were, Marlanda was kind of anxious about that language, about that frame. And I think also had some teachers and some mentors, ascended masters, where Marlanda felt their music had sort of been occupied by the composer. And so the language we came up with in our thinking about it was very much about framing. How can the music frame the poetry? And there actually have been other performances of these poems, with this poem, with improvised music around it, other people doing it, which is something of interest to me in the sort of ontological question of what constitutes the work. This is a particular framing of these poems. And so, again, in some ways I had something of the idea of these intermezzo from very early on, but it then became clear like, okay, that's actually a great way to clarify us on the fact that we're framing the poems. And so the score does have the text in it. And there are some guides as to, yes, this should happen before this happens. But in live performance, Marlanda has given a lot of space to sort of have it articulate as they want it to be articulated. One of the things that came up, I'm going to say this, maybe you can decide if you want to cut it later on, we thought and talked a bunch about the Lincoln Portrait and how we really wanted it to not be like the Lincoln Portrait. You know, the sort of stentorian rigid articulation. Marlanda has a way that they perform their poetry when they speak. We wanted to give the space for it. But then at the same time, the intermezzo that are pretty weighty for little intermezzo are there to be in that, to some extent, that pure musical space deals with a lot of the same harmonic structures, some of the same rhythmic characters, though they are generally a bit more intense than what's happening in the movements. You also might notice if you listen to the whole thing, the intermezzo get shorter and shorter. And the idea, and there is this in the first movement, even though it is a movement with the poetry, there's a large instrumental passage. And then in the final movement, in the end, the poet is primary. And again, that design was to some extent mine was to some extent ours. But I think it speaks to the puzzle of the two of us figuring out what we wanted this temporal structure to be like. And so while the music rarely, I mean, a couple of cases, but it's not mimicking the poetry. There's not a lot of sort of direct acrostics out of the poetry. There's some affective stuff. There's this one of the movements where the poem is about walking, there is sort of this shuffle that kind of happens over the course of the entire piece. I'm not saying that it's not there, but hopefully our aim was that we fill the space and we sort of sacralize the space of the reading so that that attention is pulled. And as with any sort of ritual space, there are these moments where, oh, we need, there's some time for the incense carrier to make it all around the space and get the smell back. And in my mind, those are sort of the intermezzo, right? Let's get back into it. And then the ritual proceeds and proceeds and proceeds. 

[Aaron] Yes. Oh, a beautiful story with that. And also you're, what an extroverted kid. That was quite cute. You know, I want to say a compliment to the chefs. The framing that you're saying about how both of you were approaching or attempting to approach the setting of text and the relationship with the accompanying instruments. I want to compliment very much that your rationalization comes through without much prompting at all, because as you saw in the notes that I sent to you, you know, an idea I was thinking about when, you know, of course, listening through the piece a couple of times, trying to understand how is the text and the speaker relating to the instruments, when the instruments play, when the speaker plays. And I said it in my notes to you, at least in undergrad or starting composers, when going through maybe slightly more difficult techniques than pure tonal music, you want a grounding element in your pieces, or that's a typical sort of tactic. If you're going to have very loose tonality, have firm rhythmic structures or phrasing, so on, vice versa. And in this piece, it felt like the poetry and the text was the grounding element. The diction that Marlanda uses is so firm, confident, consistent, and commanding. And then the way that the, as you're saying, it feels like I'm just throwing your words back at you, but it really did come across that the music wades like a pool around the words.

[Professor Boyce] Oh, that's nice. Yeah, that's nice. I'm gonna use that next time.

[Aaron] It's not necessarily reacting, but like you're saying making space like it goes back when it needs to it comes out when it needs to. And it is almost funny calling them intermezzo because as you said intermezzo is tiny. It's tiny little thing. Yeah, yeah, it's intermezzo gives like, like, oh, it's just a little transition. It's more like an operatic transition in a way with it. Well, you know, I was going to ask with that, you know, the grounding element, if that's how you were thinking about it and it essentially is for the most part.

[Professor Boyce] No, I think that's a great way of getting at it. And I think as a pedagogical tactic, I think it's great. I think it's important to remember that, you know, the figure ground thing is older than the Gestalt psych theory people that developed it. There is, and you know, I think frame is, you know, not the best, in some ways it's not the best metaphor, although I think it's probably the one that doesn't require too much work as a person reading and thinking about it. But I think you're absolutely right that there was a conscious choice to say, okay, this is how we're going to handle it. Now look, part of this also came from me getting recordings of Marlanda reading the poems and sort of saying, is this how we're going to read it? Is this going to? And that's very much how they read their poetry. They have a particular manner. And so there was sort of a given, there was a givenness there that this was going to work. And it's interesting to think about it. It's horrified for me a lot thinking about text and text setting. When I was studying, I wrote a mountain of art songs. And when I was even younger, you know, I wrote two musicals. You know, there's a whole bunch of this sort of, oh, you're not going to get those out of me. Burned all, burned all records. A little Brahmsian moment where you're like, you know, you burn the notebooks. And I wrote a couple of pieces, mostly for tenor, a dear friend, Robert Baker, a colleague of mine at GW, I've written a bunch of stuff for him. And, but then I kind of paused on it for a bit. I wouldn't say I really stepped away from it, but as I was working on projects, none of those projects had it. But then returning to it later on, the album has the latest album, The Bird is an Alphabet on New Focus Recordings has three settings, framings, three works that involve text and music. And the songs, the book of songs for that I wrote for Robert and Molly Baker, another longtime friend, their songs, they're big songs, but they're songs, right? And they definitely come out of that tradition. The scriptorium piece for the Byrne Kozar Duo is one of those intensely modern medieval pieces, because the poetry there is actually looking, the poet Melissa Range worked as a librarian in the collection of medieval manuscripts where she grew up. And so the poems are discussions of looking at medieval texts and how can we read them. So, you know, there's a nice arhythmic movement. There's also, you know, it's like, again, they sound, in some ways they're the most modern, quote unquote, properly modern pieces on the, aesthetically pieces on the album, but it's a pretty tight, the relationship, it's for soprano and trumpet. And the relationship between those two parts is like, you know, it's like a bikini. I mean, they're just sort of, they're always in and out and at one another in a certain way. So in the art songs, it is a sort of this piano doing these wonderful things. And then the articulation of the expressionism of the tenor. And then in the scriptorium, you have this really odd counterpoint that's happening and they sometimes support each other, frequently get in each other's way and they're sort of almost antagonistic. And then you have this concept of framing or is it arranging the stage, right? A certain kind of choreography, acoustic choreography for the poet to speak. And it's interesting. So I've sort of, I think my time away from thinking about text and music, I'm coming back with a greater clarity or maybe a greater interest in clarity in both articulating and the way that the consist, a consistency or maybe it's a dynamic relationship, but the clarity, cogency of the relationship between the text, the relationship of text to music over the course of a piece is itself part of the subject, if that makes sense.

[Aaron] Oh yes, it certainly does. It certainly does. And on the relationship of text and music, you know, we discussed this a bit in the preliminary and we were going back and forth about it, but you know, the text does have some deep meaning. Oh, of course it does. I'm not to say that it would in any way be surface level, but especially in the latter half of the piece, we have some sensitive subjects that are brought up. I'm going to play a clip of that here from Ars Poetica. Professor Boyce, in the process of collaboration with Marlanda, how are all of the different cultural, racial, generational, aesthetic differences, well we talked a bit about aesthetic difference, well I don't know, I suppose aesthetic differences would be influenced by those things I just listed. How was that dealt, explored and found between both of you in the process?

[Professor Boyce] Well I think, and I think you're right though, I think it's to some extent in all the poems, questions of identity, questions of hegemony, questions of racism, in lived experience, I think it's an important part of Marlanda's poetry and her mission. We talked and certainly had some awkward conversations as we sort of tried to get at that, tried to get at what it meant for us to be working together, what was the way that that could happen. And in the end, as I said about the title, the way I think we got somewhere in all of this, were always the results of conversations about the craft, about just what were the mechanics that we wanted the piece to have, how was it going to be structured. Now along the way, you're not going to set some of this poetry without engaging with and thinking and internally thinking and discussing the, you know, Marlanda's lived experience and its difference from my lived experience. And I think that the takeaway long before we had the idea of a piece was that we were talking and we're in different artistic domains. We don't live, I mean we don't live terribly far apart, but we don't bump into each other at the coffee shop. It is a project to say, hey, let's have a Zoom, let's have a phone call, let's talk. And I found that for me talking about my craft, and it might be especially to someone not from that domain of craftiness, makes you, forces you, requires you, obligates you to clarify, first at that very, very basic level, what am I doing? How am I going to handle this? What's going to make this happen in previous pieces, talking about things that they were working on. We talked a lot about my music and particular pieces, piece I was finishing when I first met them and shared later. Those became touchstones for us to talk about, oh, that was interesting because of blah, blah, blah. And that was interesting because of blah, blah, blah. Oh, and look, it's rhyme, a lot of your music isn't, a lot of your poetry isn't rhyme, but that one rhyme, that's sort of interesting, blah, blah, blah. It was, we felt, and we've done enough of these conversations that even, and I hear I feel kind of insane, that was talking about ground and figure. That was the ground that allowed for a lot of other things to be talked about, to be happened about. I think for me, the historicality in this piece is pretty subtle. I think it doesn't-

[Aaron] I would say so.

[Professor Boyce] It's a pretty hybridized collection of musical technicity that's in it. And I don't know, maybe that was conscious, maybe that was unconscious. I think my concern about the way we were talking about framing, it was more like, well, I should try to use every tool I have in the kit to frame this poetry that I like. And the poetry is much more rooted in a specific experience. It's a really complicated philosophical conversation. Can music ever be as rooted in a particular thing? We might get into that later on or not. I don't think there's a perfectly balanced take on the relationship of personal history to the technicity that's present in particular work in this single work. But neither one of us were terribly- we did not think that this piece was going to solve any great problems. It's not. And I think the hope though is that showing that this can happen, that might actually be a more enduring path towards how a wide variety of divisions, identity, culture, of the technicity of poetry and the technicity of music, if it's not rooted in the making and is rooted in something external to the making, I think it gets strapped over and over again.

[Aaron] Yes. I mean, you're illustrating very perfectly the beauty of collaboration in general, especially with people, individuals who you're not very familiar with their own background and so on. You're giving many great examples of that. And so thank you for sharing that and thank you for going through that. Now, for the sake of time, I do want to go to the last area that we talked about, so more philosophical and field- well, we've been talking about philosophical throughout, but that's talking about the field of composition and music theory. But I want to give you the opportunity. Is there anything else you want to say specifically about Ars Poetica?

[Professor Boyce] No, I think there's, you know, hopefully what's already out there to present it and frame it, I think does the work that we wanted it to do. And to be honest, for me, it kind of has relatively short program notes. I have a bad tendency to write vast program notes on small pieces. But again, there's the text. And in the same way that we don't want the music to set the text too strongly. I don't want the notes to set the piece too narrowly.

[Aaron] If anything, in this case, the words set the music in a way.

[Professor Boyce] Yeah, it does plenty of work. Just plenty of the work that we wanted to do.

[Aaron] Yes. So let's get into the field of composition. You know, I'm not just trying to call you old. I know earlier that that's-

[Professor Boyce] I'm used to it.

[Aaron] You know, I really appreciate and want to hear from someone who has seen things come and go and change and not change and so on and progression, regression, however you want to phrase it. How do you see the current field of composition as a professor, as a composer yourself?

[Professor Boyce] Well, I'd say that it's, you know, it's pretty fragmented. But I think it's not quite as factionalized as it has been in the past. I mean, there's certainly examples of it. I mean, I think about, you know, John Adams-

[Aaron] I was just thinking-

[Professor Boyce] Fourth of July, fourth of July moment. I think that many people felt that, you know, some picket action was necessary. I tend to agree with that. But I don't think you see that as much as you used to. I think unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily lead to real conversations between practitioners from sort of different, you know, different communities of practice. You know, there's- Oral music is choral music over there and band music is band music over there. And I think the degree to which electronic computer music is sort of suffusing into so many domains I think is intriguing and interesting and would be a strong counter-argument to my assessment. But I still think that we're a collection of pretty small camps. And when there are occasional moments where something seems kind of big, it's interesting that that's sort of when those picket actions happen. You can say, nope, that's not us. No, I'm not one of them. Or yes, they are our apex person. So, I mean, I think that, you know, this leads to- there are plenty of shifts that are happening. I think there's a lot of- I think this is going on before Saariaho passed, but, you know, is the spectral moment over? It's just kind of funny because it's a little hard to say when it began, but people are sort of want to say, oh yes, look, now there's some closure. I think there's a little- it's messy. It's messy. And this sort of goes back to what George said, you know, that there's such variety of things out there that it's hard to take a stance. It's hard to have a position simply because of the scale of what's out there. I mean, if I had to say that there's one prevailing thing that's sort of shaping how we're functioning, I think it's that the- and I am not just talking about music when I'm talking about this, but that the dominant position of market, the thinking and how it's even become in many places, part of the training. I think that that's of non-trivial concern for me. Again, this is- I could go and put on one of my punk t-shirts from back in the day, which is funny, right? Because I'm saying that as a professor in one of those rare perches, I'm concerned about how it's going to play out for us. Just because the extent to which you put in the idea that the figure in the ground, right, you know, is when the market itself becomes the ground. That's a dangerous moment.

[Aaron] Yes, yes. And so then, you know, when you were saying about factionalism and, you know, one thing that is the most clearly factional to me in my own limited experience, and especially over the past months when I've been exploring things for this program, if I were to stake two large factions in composition, if I were to prove if two existed, it would be the commercial, what's considered commercial versus the art slash concert music. And that question of market and the market becoming the ground or the post goes into that. So how is that distinction, that faction, do you see it that way? Is that overblown? How do you feel about that?

[Professor Boyce] I think there's something happening. I think we have a, this could get very philosophical fast, but I think there's, all right, I'll do it. There's a mereological problem in how we organize communities. There's a question of part to whole, right? Sort of ontological question of, and I see it a lot with genre and trying to get students to understand that genre is a problem. Genre is very helpful, but if we think about genre as a classical category, as an Aristotelian category, if something is A, then it is not B. We get very confused and that leads to picket action, right? Or it leads to an endless tree of sub-genre designations that doesn't really generate anything for a conversation. But if you look at like Wittgensteinian category theory, it's about family relationships. Features are shared and some features are not shared. And so I tend to think about these things as, yeah, there are genres that are sort of the buildup structures that are in the language and are in the training and the way we're used to thinking about things. But they themselves are, even though they're sort of sturdy, even in their formation, they were problematic. But while at the same time, there are sort of tendencies in what people do, both as makers and as sort of recipients, as audiences, and there are sort of topics. We could get fancy and talk about the Greek, the topo. And I think that one of the tendencies, and I think it has a mirror as a topic, is the position one takes in relationship to market thinking. Now there are some things that I have done to try to minimize or control my relationship to that market thinking. One of the things that happens in market thinking is growth as an important factor. The fundamental concepts of macro and microeconomic businesses. And I've done a bunch of work, both writing grants and reviewing grants, and I did work for New York State Council for the Arts, things like that over the years. And one of the things that really put me off of it was the extent to which a factor that would make it more likely that you would get a grant was if you were growing. Why do they have to grow? This lovely concert series, and it's going along and they want the same thing that they had before so that they can continue to do things like, oh yeah, but these other people or this other organization is growing. That the creep of those particular forms of sort of industrial capitalism really shape everything. And one of my concerns about that market thinking is that when you're then in a super saturated system the way we are, we have too many people getting degrees, we have too many, right? One of the early fixes of it in the 80s, 90s and 00s, very much in the 90s, was the narrative of entrepreneurship. But if you think historically about where entrepreneurship comes from and you look up Hayek and you see what the Chicago School of Economics was actually about, and then you think about its use as a solution to the precarity of artists, you realize that it is not a critique of the system. It is a shortcut within the system, right? And that we should take control of our own path through the system instead of saying there's something wrong with the system. That's slippery and very slippery. And at the same time, I think it's also, while I'm sort of saying I've tried some things to sort of step away from that, I am a creative commons person. I do not belong to ASCAP or BMI because I have moral, philosophical, effectively religious difficulties with the model of ownership, of enclosure that those systems are built from. Having said that, my ensemble, counter)induction, we are a BMI member and we pay the dues so that we don't get sued in violation of it. You can sort of dream a beautiful dream and at the same time, you have to move through the world.

[Aaron] That's a continual difficulty for a lot of people. As you're saying, at a point you have to survive within the system to be able to be in a position to do anything about it.

[Professor Boyce] Exactly. And it's a subtle question for everyone and where they are and where they're coming from. And one of the reasons I was interested in becoming an academic, it seemed like a relatively safe perch from which to try to weather some of this and see if there's a way out of it. Of course, it's all collapsing faster than people expect. From the beginning, I was like, oh, this is collapsing. And now it's like, wow, it's collapsing fast.

[Aaron] Do you want to come down to Florida? Yes, that's our lovely state government. Yes. So speaking of perches, this will be the last question before we close out: music theory. The industry, the institution. 

[Professor Boyce] It's good. You kept the longest one for last.

[Aaron] Yeah, I know. I didn't want to interrupt. You were saying such wonderful things. 

[Professor Boyce] I know there are times like that. I will say I'm talking a lot about my teachers, which is interesting. That was not particularly my plan. But I studied with Chris Hasty at Penn. One of the things to think about is how many of his students left music theory and like him in some ways stepped out in looking for other means of having meaningful discussions about, and for him very much continental philosophy. And I think there's something of that in my interest. I think that when I was coming through, there was this beautiful semiotic moment with coming and a ga-woo happening. But at the same time then, I think the linguistic turn, I think it sort of got trapped in the cognitive, in the neurocognitive space when I was coming up, which is when that's how we were going to learn about these things because everybody was going to be in the fast MRIs and we were going to learn what was really actually going on. And we learned wonderful things like musicians are better at maintaining slow tempos than untrained people. I was like, yeah. And I got in big trouble at an academic meeting that I won't go into details on, but I left the meeting early suggesting that whenever anyone had something to say that Proust hadn't already described beautifully, they should drop me an email. So there is an extent to which I've stepped away from an awful lot of what's happening. Look, I think there had been some really interesting things. I think Proust's decentering music, really profound and intriguing text. I think I find Parkhurst's critique of Adorno, recent work on Adorno helpful. I mean, really genuinely, this is intriguing and has some capacity. Now, having said all of that, I would say as someone who's been teaching for a quarter century for all of this folder all in my language and my philosophical terminology and my program notes, when I go into the classroom and I teach, I teach heavily modified but still clearly visible. I teach partimento to the kids. And in part, I do that because you can talk about Bach and Beethoven and then pretty quickly you can talk about James Jamerson and bebop baselines and James Taylor tunes because they all have the same. But we're back at your sort of ground figure thing. They have this baseline and they have this varieties of harmonizations above it. And again, maybe this also ties back to the conversations I'm trying to describe between me and Marlanda. Without engaging with that craft, the conversations just remain these abstract abstractions.

[Aaron] That's a beautiful thing that I've been trying to say for a long time. Yeah. I remember Dr. James Paul Sain at University of Florida. He said to me one day, he's a composition professor. He said, Aaron, if you're going to be a theorist, either continue to compose or play your instrument because if not, you become a coroner.

[Professor Boyce] That's not bad. I gotta say that's not bad. Because it, you know, the logos will stretch to cover everything it can. And it's not necessarily helpful. It's not necessarily generative. And so I think that, but at the same time, and I said something like that before, I remember that, you know, that sort of training itself can be a terrible snare and can keep you from ever sort of stepping back and looking at it critically. So, you know, for me as a teacher and I think as a practitioner, maybe this is me making good with Aristotle, you know, just after having said I like Wittgenstein more. That the, you know, in the intellectual virtues when you get, when you think about Thoreau and Praxis and Phronesis, like Phronesis is exactly what we're missing as a community because we have this idea that there's theory and it is abstract and it is over there and we have Praxis and we learn how to play our instruments and play them fabulously. And the degree of virtuosity in the world out there right now is insane. It's exquisite. But I think pedagogically and as a maker, that you know, that good judgment that is Phronesis, it's got to be informed by theory and it's got to be rooted in practice. And so even though I might sort of sound pretty pessimistic about my engagement and my thinking about the field of theory as a standalone, I remain deeply committed to it as part of the Praxis, part of the process by which something richly crafted and deeply imploded in the present, in the now, in the modern. It requires both if that makes sense.

[Aaron] It certainly requires both. Thank you for your perspective on that. And it's great to hear that from someone who is very much in the fields of metaphorically and literally in the field that the more I learn and more I develop as a student, the more I understand also that music theory cannot stand alone. It's impractical and impossible to in my opinion, but I will continue to see that.

[Professor Boyce] And at the same time, I don't simply mean music theory. I think there are many ways to think about music and what's typically categorized in music theory is not always necessary for all things, but that broader notion of Thoreau, of the fetish of intuition and sort of innate capacity, I think that's just as dangerous. I think it's just as risky. And I also think it's more likely to be caught up in market thinking in the modern, nocturnalism of the music industry.

[Aaron] Certainly. Certainly.

[Professor Boyce] But again, maybe that's for the next podcast. Possibly. Because it opens a big, big door.

[Aaron] Yes. Yes. Almost as big as the market itself, I suppose. So, we're a little bit over time here and I really appreciate the time that you've spent here, but just some closing questions. The semester is about to start very soon. So of course, you are already busy and soon will be even more so. But do you have any big projects coming up?

[Professor Boyce] I've got a couple of really nice things happening. I've got a big work with a pretty young ensemble, Black Box Ensemble in New York.

[Aaron] You know what's interesting is I interviewed someone just a bit ago and the recording is by the Black Box Ensemble, a fantastic group.

[Professor Boyce] Yeah. Yeah. I'm very excited about that. And it is, again, it sounds very me. It's a sort of Pierrot ensemble with soprano and it's setting Derek Mahon, a wonderful Irish poet, a long poem about Ovid's exile in Thomas after he was thrown out of the empire. So again, it sounds classical, old, new. I've got a new piece for counter)induction, which is a musical, again, returns to this text and music relationship stuff, but it's a piece with no, you don't actually engage with the poems, but it's a round, it's adjacent to a long poem by Guillaume de Machaut, D'il L'Aire, which is a long poetry, a long poem that's sort of about fin amor, courtly love, but it's also mostly about falcons and different kinds of falcons in that wonderful Machaut, I'm not talking about what you think I'm talking about, way. And so that'll happen in the fall, sorry, in the spring in New York. And I've got finishing up, the next album will be a collection of solo guitar partitas played by a variety of players. And I've got a couple of small things, a new guitar and violin duo premiere in October in New York. But as an excellent podcaster, I am sure that you will share the links to all of the sites with all of those little details.

[Aaron] Oh, you know it. And it sounds like you got a light schedule ahead of you. So that's, that's, yes, yes. And what would be the best way for the audience to contact you for any comments or questions? All the links will be in the description as you just said, but what would be best for you?

[Professor Boyce] It just, I'll be blunt, if you search my name and say music, there's not that many Boyce's and there are not that many Douglas Boyce's, so I will pop right up. There are links on my website. And any of the socials all work equally well. So again, at the start of the semester, I can't say I'm the, I will be the zippiest replyer, but it will be there. But douglasboyce.net is the sort of the hub for all of those other things.

[Aaron] Excellent. And to close this out, I'm going to give the final word to you. If you were to say something to the audience about music, life, composition, music theory, anything of that sort, what would you say?

[Professor Boyce] Yeah, I'll try to wear my typical professor's hat and sort of say something inscrutable and then scrutinize it. And for me as a maker, as an artist, as a teacher, as a person, especially in some of these crazy moments that we're in the culture, I go back again and again to Richard Bernstein, beautiful pragmatist philosopher, lived in New York for many, many years and he developed many, many places, a couple of particular essays where it comes up, the idea of an engaged, fallibilistic pluralism. And for him and for those who've sort of really engaged with his thinking, those three concepts are incredibly important. There is the pluralism that he holds from James to accept the fact that there are so many universes, there's so many humans, there are so many collections of experiences that we need to figure out how to not just sort of honor them, but also try to situate our own experience within this vast universe or universes of experiences. But at the same time, the mechanism by which we can do that, and this goes to our earlier discussions about craft, might be best expressed through engagement, engagement with others, that we can't just sit and think about that deep variety of experiences that humans have, we have to interact with them and share and puzzle over the same things. And then for me, the thing that Bernstein thinks that few others do is a really complicated question of fallibilism, or that in those engagements across the plural, you have to accept the fact that you might be wrong. You also have to handle with a really difficult fact that you might really, really come to the conclusion that the person you're talking to is wrong. And how do you balance that? And how do you have conversations and interactions with people that are both pluralistic in their honoring and engagement of this vast diversity, that are actually engagements that aren't just sort of watching, but that also are both strongly held in your own opinions, but also open to other people's opinions, that you can wrestle with the fact that either of you or maybe both of you are wrong in those interactions. And for me, that was really one of the big takeaways from my time with Marlanda to ponder further and further, and to reshape a lot of my teaching and reshape a lot of how I talk about my work and other people's work in the world.

[Aaron] Beautifully put, beautifully put. Engagement with others, certainly something I can get behind on the theorist-composer collaboration, which I want to, again, thank you for coming on to, Professor Douglas Boyce. This has been a great honor, and it has been an amazing time to talk to you and get your perspectives. Thank you for coming on to the podcast.

[Professor Boyce] Good luck in all things moving forward.

[Aaron] Hello, this is Aaron again. 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 Professor Douglas Boyce for coming on to the podcast and for sharing his piece, Ars Poetica. Professor Boyce's contact info is listed in the description of this episode, and I would appreciate it if you could show him some support. This is an incredibly special episode for a couple reasons, and one of the most obvious is that, I mean, Dr. Boyce, Professor Boyce, is, well, a professor, and someone who has significantly more perspective and understanding of my industry, his own industry, than essentially anyone else who has been on this show so far, just in the nature that he's been around the block. And no, it's not just a fancy way to call a Professor Boyce old, as we joked about during the episode, but seriously, I do really respect and appreciate the experience and perspective that Professor Boyce has brought to the Theorist Composer Collaboration through the nature of him being on here, so I really appreciate it. Ars Poetica is really a brilliant piece, and I hope in the future I have the opportunity to meet the poet themselves, Marlanda Dekine, because not only is the poetry absolutely beautiful, but her vocal performance of it as the speaker within the recording was absolutely phenomenal. As I said in the episode, the diction is so strong and assertive, it absolutely, not just from the nature of the timbre being different and the amplification, but her emotion or attitude brought to the reciting of it absolutely cuts through the texture in a beautiful and wonderfully purposeful way that really brings the whole piece together. So that is all to say, I want to again give an incredibly special thank you to Professor Douglas Boyce for coming on to the podcast and for sharing his piece, Ars Poetica. For further updates and notifications on the Theorist Composer Collaboration, make sure to follow our Instagram and Facebook pages. You can listen to future episodes through our host website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and YouTube, so make sure you subscribe to the platform of your choosing. If you want to monetarily support the work of the TCC, you can click the link to our Buy Me a Coffee page. All donations are highly appreciated. All of the relevant links to follow, listen to, and support the show are in the description. TCC episodes are posted weekly on Mondays. 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 feature guest is Professor Nadine Silverman and her piece Voix des Femme. There will be more information on this in the upcoming blog post 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.