Composing Life: an interview with composer Mary Ellen Childs
There are many composers who think outside the box. Mary Ellen Childs is one who doesn’t seem to think that the box exists at all. In compositions that are both multi-disciplinary and multi-sensory, Childs challenges her listeners to experience music with the vitality and curiosity of a child. Perhaps this is because under all the multi-layered sophistication and complexity of her works she’s found a bedrock of common ground shared by people everywhere. She finds simplicity in complexity and complexity in simplicity, all the while never losing touch with joy, humor, and curiosity.
I first encountered Childs’ music through Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim From the Piano, a collection of 37 piano compositions commissioned by pianist Anthony de Mare. The playful exuberance of “Now”, Childs’ solo piano contribution to the collection, led me to investigate her other compositions. From the mesmerizing beauty of Kilter, a work for two pianos, to the stunning creativity and intricacy of the works she created for CRASH, her percussion ensemble, I found myself in a sound world that opened my ears and my mind to the sheer, bubbling energy of real life, captured in sound and movement. I’m immensely honored that Childs agreed to be interviewed for No Dead Guys and am thrilled to feature her and her music on this site.
You’ve been quoted as saying that you didn’t consider composition as a career path when you were young, although you were a multi-instrument musician, a dancer, and a choreographer. At what point did you change your mind, and what prompted you to do so?
I think my remark was not just about composing as a career choice, but that I didn’t consider composing something I could do at all. I grew up learning music in the classical music tradition, which seemed to carry with it the idea that composers were born geniuses and composing was a mysterious endeavor. I was curious about it, but didn’t think it was available to me. I didn’t start composing until I was about 22 years old, in my last year of my music degree, and I was very lucky to find a composition teacher who was tremendously supportive and encouraging. He told me “you can do this!” and the rest is history.
I’m enormously fond of the pieces you’ve created for CRASH, your percussion ensemble, “Click” and “Sight of Hand” in particular. Both pieces are visually and aurally impressive and just plain fun. How did you conceive of combining clapping games, hamboning, and baseball signals in “Sight of Hand”?
Well, I created that piece quite a long time ago! I’m not sure I remember exactly how I got the idea. I do remember planning to create a body-percussion piece and wanting to combine several forms as inspiration. Clapping games and hamboning occurred to me quickly and then I was casting around for another style, something unexpected and a little outside the box. Eventually I hit upon the idea of baseball coaching signals, which are soundless, but turning them into body percussion.
One of the things I most enjoy about your compositions is that so many aren’t just multi-disciplinary, they’re multi-sensory. What inspired you to think beyond the boundaries of traditional concert music to create pieces that are both theatrical and employ other senses such as sight and (most recently) scent?
It was a natural progression for me. I grew up playing flute and piano, but also dancing, working in the theater, cooking, sewing, imagining. To include other elements in some of my musical compositions wasn’t so much a conscious decision as a natural progression into who I am. As for scent, in 2010 or so I heard that the Museum of Art and Design in New York City was opening a department of olfactory arts. In other words, they were regarding fragrance design as an art form. It struck me immediately: since some of my pieces combine music with other art forms (dance, movement, staging, projections, etc), why not scent?
You’re known for immersing yourself physically and creatively in your projects, i.e., renting a cabin on Lake Superior to watch the moods of the water while writing a dance piece about that lake, piloting a small plane and hang gliding when working on an opera about the human urge to fly, and (my favorite), studying perfume-making while working on a project involving music and scent. Why do you feel it’s important for you to experience these things in your body (rather than just your imagination) when you’re creating your projects?
The short answer is simply that’s where my gravitational pull lies. It makes sense to me to bring our whole selves - our bodies, our senses - to whatever we do. Writing music, for me anyway, is not just about our ears and hearing, but encompasses our kinesthetic sense, our sense of space and time, our emotional life. So to prepare, I go beyond sound to ideas, sensory experience, connections, even tangents. That guides my research. So it might take the form of working with musical notes, but it also might take the form of reading and thinking, or it might take the form of experiencing. When it comes to the scent work, I knew from the outset that in order for music-scent combinations to go beyond being a gimmick, I had to deeply understand smells and how our noses work. My research in this area has taken years and is ongoing.
I discovered your piano music through “Now,” a beautiful solo piece you wrote for Anthony de Mare’s Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim From the Piano collection. This piece (like all your other works for piano) captures the resonance and range of the instrument without ever losing clarity of texture. Tell me about your choice to employ shifting meters in “Now” and how that relates to the original Sondheim song.
As I’m sure you know - since you research your interviews so thoroughly - Now was commissioned as part of a project in which a group of composers were each asked to chose a Sondheim song and create a solo piano piece using material from the song. We were asked not to make an arrangement, but rather bring our own compositional style to the material and create a new work. The hardest thing about this commission was choosing just one song from the dozens and dozens of wonderful Sondheim works. I chose Now Later Soon, because I loved the theme of the song - the intertwining of moments in time - past, present, and future. I sat with the piece for a long time and thought about what part of my musical personality I wanted to bring to the existing song. My work is often rhythmic and deals with time… and time is a theme of the song, so I played with time through changing meters. After the premiere I had a lovely conversation with Sondheim about my piece. He told me he only writes in two and three, and he was delighted that I’d used fives and sevens, irregular and changing meters. What a memorable moment, to hear that from him.
My favorite of your piano pieces (other than “Now”) is “Kilter,” a piece you wrote for two pianos. It’s mesmerizing, as is another solo piano favorite, “The Capacity of Calm Endurance.” Tell me about how you were able to create such a powerful sense of suspended time within movement?
I wrote Capacity in a short period of time, about two weeks, which, given my schedule and the impeding deadline, was all I had. I was also going through a difficult time in my life. Whenever I sat down to compose, the idea of “patience, patience” went over and over in my mind like a mantra. I was eager to get the piece done, eager to move on, but something was telling me that patience, rather than impatience, was the key. So I paid attention. I slowed down in the face of pressure, rather than the opposite response. And that’s what the piece became for me, an experience of, an expression of, patience. The title “The Capacity of Calm Endurance” is the dictionary definition of the word patience. You can look it up.
As for Kilter, the idea there is one that threads its way through much of my work: paradox. “Kilter” is a word that you only find in the phrase that means its opposite. Out of kilter. Off kilter. Musically I was working with balance and imbalance. You can only find balance if you’re not off balance. It exists only relative to its opposite. And the reverse: off balance can happen only relative to the possibility of a state of balance. It was quite fun to play around with balance and imbalance in music, especially through texture and rhythm and the ensemble work between the two pianos.
Given your focus on movement and choreography in so many of your works, how do you interpret that when composing for the piano?
For most of my concert instrumental works - for piano or anything else - I’m not thinking about movement and choreography. Certainly you need to think about what fits under the fingers, what the performer can reach, and I suppose there’s a kind of choreography there, but that’s really more about understanding the instrument itself - it’s instrumentation and writing idiomatically. The exception is Eye to Ivory, a solo piano piece written for Kathleen Supové. The impetus for this piece was to compose music that would create specific movements for the pianist, say standing up to reach inside the piano then sitting to reach particular notes or patterns, then standing again. In the end, the movement component of the piece is minimal, but that was the entry point for me. Hence the title, Eye to Ivory.
You’ve received a staggering number of commissions and grants, as well as residencies that take you all over the world. When did you first begin applying for residencies and grants, and what prompted you to do so?
I wanted to work! When I started out as a young composer I was eager to learn the craft, of course, but also eager to know about the scene. Where were composers getting performances, opportunities, commissions? Who were the ensembles specializing in new work? Who could I collaborate with? Where would I find like-minded artists and musicians? I was curious and energetic. I think I applied for just about everything I could find. By doing it a lot - just like composing a lot - I got better at it, more knowledgeable and more savvy. I made a choice early on not to go into academia, which has its own composing connections and paths, so I knew I had to really work hard to make my way, find my place, and ways of finding work. I saw that as a creative endeavor too. I had to compose my life.
I understand that you offer grant workshops. Would you be willing to share more about those?
I’m always happy to talk to other artists about seeking out resources to support their work. Since I put so much effort into honing my ability to write clearly about my work and my projects, I like passing that on to others. For many years I also ran a fellowship program for mid-career artists, so I got to see the grant and panel processes from the inside. In a grant workshop I emphasize clarity and painting a vivid picture of yourself and your project, making sure all your materials work together like puzzle pieces, and finding the sweet spot between your intentions and the grant criteria.
You work from a broader “palate” than any other composer I’ve ever interviewed. How do you keep your imagination, creativity, and senses so wide open in a world that encourages us to shut down and tune out?
Hmmm. I have to think about how to answer that. Well, I’m happiest when I’m in a creative mindset. Whether it’s composing or cooking or any of the myriad ways one can be creative. There’s a hum between my mind and my soul that is deeply satisfying. It’s a state that has an expansiveness to it, a broadening, a softening of edges. Perhaps that’s where the wide-openness that you mention comes from. And I’m naturally curious, eager to find more, to push at the edges of where we usually live. What more can be done with a set of claves? What more can I do with that musical phrase? What other senses can we expand? Creativity often happen when you push at limits and try to go beyond the usual.
When people listen to your immersive, multi-disciplinary works, what do you hope they will gain from the experience?
I’m sure different people will get different things from an experience and I like that. In fact that is my hope. Overall, in my multi-disciplinary work I’m curious about how our senses interact. How does what you’re seeing (or smelling or sensing) affect what you’re hearing? And the reverse. I find that these works elicit responses based on experience and preferences, so those responses can be very personal and often also cultural, especially with something like smells. One favorite moment after a concert was when one person told me they found the work (which was an instrumental concert piece) to be very funny, and another person told me they felt it was sad and mournful. I loved that. Another time, after a multi-room sound-scent installation, someone came up to me with eyes lit up, saying “I get it!!! I felt my breathing change as I entered each space!” That was especially gratifying, that someone so clearly experienced a bodily shift in response to the environments. That’s very much what I hope people might experience.
What current or upcoming projects are you most excited about?
Ah, there are a number of projects coming up that I’m excited about. I’m just finishing work on an installation version of DrumRoll. The original version is a concert percussion piece with four performers on wheeled stools, who move from drum to drum in stage choreography as they play. For the installation version, we filmed it using GoPro cameras on each player’s forehead so that you’ll see the work from the players’ points of view. A fifth camera, mounted overhead, captured the bird’s eye view. I call it the June Taylor Dancers camera. In the gallery the four players’ videos will be projected one onto each wall and the overhead video will be projected onto the floor. The sound is immersive. The experience will be like walking into the interior of the performance.
A second project, NORTH, will also be an installation and it will be on exhibit at the Anderson Center for the Arts in Red Wing, MN, next January-February (2023). NORTH is based on my residency in the Arctic and has projections, paintings, and melting ice, and an hour’s worth of music, with 4-channel sound. The music will be recorded by St. Paul ensemble Zeitgeist and will at times include sounds captured in the far northern reaches of our planet, interwoven with the instrumental fabric.
Then I’m writing a new percussion piece based on rounds - round instruments, rounded gestures, and musical canons. Other projects include contributing some music to an opera about Pauline Schindler and performed at the Schindler House in Los Angeles, a new work for piano (you might be happy to hear), and a new work titled There is a Humming for the duo OboeBass! - their name tells you the instrumentation - which is also related to my Arctic experience. Farther ahead in the future are pieces for launeddas, a Sardinian instrument, because I met a wonderfully creative launeddas player while on a residency there. And of course more scent-music projects. Next spring I’ll be in Fes, Morocco for two months continuing my scent research.
What advice do you have for young composers hoping to make a career in music?
The best way to get better at composing is to do it. Say yes to projects, make your own opportunities, figure out a way to hear your pieces played. To my way of thinking a work isn’t complete when you’ve finished the score - that’s just marks on a page. And the computer version of music (if you’re writing for real people) isn’t it either. Music isn’t finished until it’s been heard. Working closely with performers teaches you so much. Hearing your work teaches you so much. Absorbing audience responses teaches you so much. Struggling with the blank page - over and over again - teaches you so much. I often tell my students the best way to learn to compose is to do it for 20 years. Then you begin to understand it.
Mary Ellen Childs is a composer interested in all the senses: she is known for works that speak not only to the ears, but to the eyes, and even the nose. Early in her career she created numerous "visual percussion" pieces that embody the concept of music in motion, for her percussion ensemble CRASH. Her repertoire includes Click, a fast-paced, game-like work for three stick-wielding performers and DrumRoll, for four drummers on wheels. The Village Voice deemed Click “a newly born classic, like Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, only a thousand times more virtuosic.”
Her work is influenced by place, sensory experience, architecture, and passages of time. She creates distinctive sound worlds, and often writes for specific architecture or environments. Stone Steel Wood Glass Light, commissioned for the Chicago Architectural Biennial, drew inspiration from the Farnsworth House, a glass house designed by Mies van der Rohe, where it was premiered to a series of small audience. Other full-length works include Dream House for string quartet (written for ETHEL) based on destruction and construction, accompanied by multi-image video of construction sites; and Wreck was created for dance (Black Label Movement), about a shipwreck on Lake Superior, for which she won a Sage Award.
Childs has held artist residencies at the Bellagio Center in Italy, Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), Yaddo, Djerassi Foundation, Millay Colony, Ucross (Alpert residency), Emily Harvey Foundation (Venice, Italy), and the Arctic Circle Expedition in Svalbard. She has received grants and commissions from Opera America, the Kronos Quartet, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, The Kitchen, Walker Art Center, Other Minds, MAP Fund, and Creative Capital. She was named a United States Artist Fellow, awarded by nomination only to “America's “most innovative and influential artists in their fields.”