Music Lit Interview: Brian Robison

Music Lit Interview: Brian Robison

By Emilie Hongosh, Carlie Lyster and Lizzi Hampton

Do people usually compose pieces for the Theremin?

Most players are amateurs, and most are just using it to play soprano arias like I just did, or to play violin pieces. Some people do write for it, but there are very few people writing for it because it’s one of those instruments that you really need to know how to play to write for it well. And it’s very limited in what it can do. It was invented originally in the 1920’s, and when it was first introduced to the world, audiences went crazy over the technology. But almost immediately musically savvy listeners were like, “Wait a minute, everything’s slow”. It’s can’t play rapid articulations. So almost immediately it became obsolete. There’s been a renaissance since the 1990’s partly because by the turn of the century you had tremendous computing power in laptops and you could have all this great real time manipulations of sound, but it’s really boring to watch. And this is really fascinating to watch. And it’s also an incredibly sensitive interface, so part of why I’m playing it so badly is because I’m out of practice. It really takes these carefully controlled, small motions, and it’s not only that my motions aren’t quite carefully controlled enough, but I’m also being a little sloppy with my stance and my breathing. And this responds to your every move whether you want it to or not, so it is very tricky to write for and to use it in interesting ways.

Can you briefly explain how the Theremin works?

It’s actually a science experiment gone wrong. It was an attempt to create a device that would measure the electrical capacitance of gases, like air. And they were using a tone indicator. It was something that should have worked very well in theory, except as they were conducting experiments, one of the experimenters noticed that the proximity of his body was affecting the readings, so they weren’t getting neutral readings. But he had some training as a cellist, so he figured out that it could be adapted as an instrument. So the circuitry is all in here [the middle box], and then there are these two pieces of metal sticking out, and each one is generating an electromagnetic field, so each one senses how close the player’s hand is, or actually any conductive object. It doesn’t have to be the hand; it could be the elbow, it could be the feet, the hip, it could be your cell phone or anything that could hold an electric charge. So this one [rounded metal tube] controls the volume and that’s why it kind of looked like I was conducting an imaginary orchestra. That’s partly just to separate the notes. If I just played the melody without doing that, it would just be sliding all over the place. And then that [the other metal tube] is the pitch controller, so it’s all about how much mass of my hand or fingers are close or far away. So treble is close and farther away is down into the bass.

What got you into Theremin?

At the time I was teaching over at MIT and it was a freshman seminar. I cannot even remember what the conversation was where it came up. Somehow, it got into a conversation about electronic music and somebody mentioned the Theremin. At that time I had only ever once encountered one in person in a music store, and I didn’t understand how it worked. I couldn’t make any sense of it; I couldn’t do anything musical with it. I had read about it, and had some idea that it took a lot of training and practice to learn these very small finger motions to play it in a controlled way. Of course without that kind of control, you can do all sorts of fun sound effects. So it came up as a topic of conversation, and I just made an offhand remark to my students about how it was a nifty instrument, but I tried one out and now I know that I’m too old to learn how to play it. And one of students said, “Really? Do you really think you are?” And I thought about it, and I thought, “Yeah, I’m too old but on the other hand it would be so fun to have one just to make the silly noises with it.” So I decided to get one. Ones like this aren’t actually that expensive, especially compared to getting a good electric guitar. So I bought one just for fun, and it turned out it came with an instructional video that explained the basics of the techniques so I started learning. And it’s a fantastic time now to start learning to play Theremin, because there are now a couple of method books out on the market, where people have detailed photographs showing what you need to do. There are instructional videos up on YouTube and you have so many more opportunities now to just see people playing it and get a sense of what’s involved. And because there’s no one official historically developed way to play it, part of figuring out what you’re going to do is watching people and finding the people whose style you like and study what they do. If you’re really lucky, then you get to meet them and actually ask them in person. So I started playing in 2005, and this past summer I finally got the opportunity to work with someone who’s a world-class player. She helped point out a lot of things that I needed to work on, so now I’m particularly aware of how limited my skills are, but there’s hope! There’s still time.

Aside from playing the Theremin, you compose. When did you start doing that?

I don’t remember when I started exactly, because I would be writing pop songs as a teenager, but I just thought I’d become serious about it when I was about 17, and I spent a summer at an arts camp. It was a summer program for high schools that were talented in the arts. I was actually there in creative writing. I though I was going to be a visual artist, I thought I was going to be some sort of graphic designer or something. But I had been active with music and theater and so on, and I was at this summer program as a writer because that was the easiest way to get in. And I had a friend there who was there as a composer, and toward the end of the summer and I invited him to join some of us for a volleyball game. He said, “Oh, I can’t. I have to make my electronic music project.” I was a really interested, so he invited me to come along and watch. While I was watching him slap together his final project, I just kept thinking, “Oh wait, no! It could be so much more interesting if you did that, and if you changed that like this.” And I realized that even though I didn’t know how to use the equipment, I had these very clear ideas about how to make the music better, so that’s when I thought, “I think this is what I want to do”.

What kind of piece do you compose? Do you have a specific style?

That’s tricky. It’s usually for classically trained players, and it’s usually for acoustic instruments, rather than electronic, or if there are electronics it’s just one additional instrument, like electric guitar or Theremin. It tends to be atonal, rather than tonal, and I like to play with polyrhythm and polymeter, and having a sense of different streams of pulses that are going on at the same time, and some kind of fading in and out or pursuing independent agendas. There are some people who write music where there are very complicated parts that are presented in very straightforward ways, and I tend to do the opposite, of creating very simple motives and very simple elements and then piling them up and combining them in complex ways.

How do you take harmony into consideration?

I tend to start with the harmony. There are some times when I take melodic licks and play with how to distort them, but often it’s about saying, “Okay, how can I achieve a sense of inevitability?” Even though the music I write is atonal, part of what I love about tonal music is the way that a composer like Bach or Beethoven or Schumann can create a sense of motion and then there’s a partial resolution, but we’re not really done yet, and there’s more that needs to happen and how do you create that sense of ongoing ebb and flow that keeps going right through to the end. So and important stage for me is figuring out what’s going on in the piece. It’s figuring out, “Okay, what is the goal? Where is it going to end up?” And then how is it going to get there? Then that determines what kinds of harmonies happen, because if it’s the same harmony for eleven or twelve minutes that gets boring. So I’ll usually figure out a way to mix it up so that some portions will be very dissonant atonal cluster harmonies, but then other things will have a much more open maybe jazzy, or even in some places more traditional chords. Like maybe they’re traditional chords but they don’t follow each other in a traditional way.

Do you play many instruments?

Yes, a lot, but none well. I think that part of how I wound up as a composer is that I was just sort of drifting. When I was young it started on clarinet, and then I had some piano lessons but lost interest, and then switched from clarinet to saxophone, then started learning guitar, and then by the time I got to college I figured out that I wanted to be a composer and felt that I needed to have some sense of how every instrument works in order to write for them well, so that only added fuel to the fire. So I’ve never really sat down and pursued one instrument for ten years in a row to get really good at it. It’s always been kind of bouncing around. So like the Theremin, I don’t think I’ll ever be a world-class soloist, but it’s made me a more expressive guitarist because you have such limited articulation and you have such little control over the timbre. It’s all about timing and especially vibrato. So now I listen to vibrato and I think about vibrato much more carefully when I’m playing guitar. And it’s ruined me for keyboard synthesizers. I used to have a nice little analog synthesizer that I would use for gigging and it would drive me crazy because I would be playing and while you’re playing with your right hand, your left hand has these two modulation wheels – one that you can use to control the depth of the vibrato and one for the amount of the vibrato, but then you need a third one for the speed. There are at least three dimensions to it that you want to be able to control independently and they’re not there on most instruments and even if they are it’s a horrendously difficult thing to control in a meaningful way, whereas with your hand it’s just all about how much you’re moving back and forth. And the fact is it’s just instantly responsive.

Would you say your knowledge of many different instruments helps you with your composing?

Absolutely. Traditionally a lot of composers start off as pianists and that’s really good training in terms of being able to have all of the music in front of you. If you’re playing in a band or orchestra you’ve just got one component. If you’re singing in a choir, you do have the rest of it in front of you but with piano music they typically get to do more complex things than even the choirs do. The catch is that the ones who are really good sometimes have trouble imagining in ways other than pianistic terms, so they end up writing piano music and then trying to transcribe it or arrange it for other instruments. Sometimes they learn the hard way that if they start with an idea that sounds really cool on the piano, they discover that when you translate it into something like a brass quintet it’s really muddy or it doesn’t have the same clarity, or they don’t have the same rhythmic attacks. So I feel like that definitely helps.

Do you ever use computers to compose?

I do often exploit the playback feature in the notation software just to get a sense of how things are going. You always have to filter that, because it’s not a perfect rendition. So another part of the training is getting a sense of recognizing when the computer playback sounds bad but the real thing will sound good. It’s like, in the hands of a real oboist that note will sound beautiful. And the reverse. Sometimes, the computer is playing it perfectly in a way that human beings never will, and does that matter? Sometimes it’s okay because I want it to be a little blurry anyway, I don’t want it to be that clean. But sometimes you do something that sound great but then you realize humans can’t do that. And then for some of those large-scale polyrhythm effects I was talking about, I often wind up using a spreadsheet to calculate. There might be a chromatic line that is just kind of a chromatic scale going up. But instead of going up at a steady rate it starts off slowly and then gradually accelerates. If you’re doing that for a very short time, you can just take a piece of graph paper and sketch a logarithmic curve by hand and then just interpret that. But to do something that’s going to take place over seven minutes or something, then to get it right you really have to use a spreadsheet. It’s a really awkward way to work, but the results are so cool that it’s worth it. So that’s probably the most interesting way that I use computers to help me write.

How long does it typically take you to compose a piece?

Too long! I keep trying to work more quickly. There will be a kind of gestation period of several months while I’m playing with ideas and trying some things out. But then once I know what I’m doing, then I can bash it out fairly quickly. And this is an important thing for me, because as I’ve taught students in composition classes, if you have good players, if you give them a jazz standard, and say, “Here’s the overall structure, just work out the details yourselves” they can do that beautifully on the fly. The hard part is if you say, “Okay, here are some details, now improvise a really interesting structure”. So for me that’s the more important task as a composer, figuring out the overall shape. What’s going to make this hold together so that it’s actually interesting to listen to for twelve or thirteen or seventeen minutes and people aren’t just going to zone out? I still take a little longer than I’d like to to figure those things out, but then once I do, once you have the overall shape the individual details aren’t as important. There are lots of plausible solutions.

Reflection and Analysis

We started the interview by having Professor Robison play a piece on the theremin. We then interviewed him, asking about the theremin, his composing process, and influences. The interview ended with Professor Robison encouraging each of us to try the theremin, giving us a real appreciation for how hard the theremin really is to play.

Animal Psychology Unlike Ours is an atonal piece lasting about 2 minutes. The version we were given was a live recording featuring a flute, and alto flute, clarinet in Eb, clarinet in Bb, and two bassoons. The score says that it is in the key of C major; however, when listening the piece sounds very atonal. The meter is 2/4 and the tempo is quarter note=72. The piece was composed with the intent of sounding like monkeys, which is clear by the instructions to sound like the "distant echo of a pant-hoot" and "quiet grunts" and "squeals and shrieks." Harmonically, there are no solid chords thought the duration of the piece. Melodically, there's no distinct melody, though we would classify the piece as being polyphonic, as none of the instruments have a more important part than the other. It is also polyrhythmic, as the various voices are almost always doing something different rhythmically.

We learned a lot about how the theremin works and how it is used. For example, Prof. Robison spoke about how pieces typically aren't written for theremin, rather theremin players often play along to already written pieces (usually those featuring arias).

The way Prof Robison composes is extremely interesting. He takes a very mathematical approach, which is not something people often consider when thinking about the composition of music. The type of pieces he usually composes can be difficult for some people to digest as they do not follow typical chord progressions our ears are used to; however, we think everyone can agree that his imitation of monkey sounds is extremely interesting and innovative and can be regarded as a unique piece of music.

Video: http://youtu.be/YEs5OpV-yPg