Don’t Drop Anything! An interview with composer, pianist, and jazz singer Jennifer Griffith
Video features Carla Jablonski, vocalist and Mila Henry, pianist
The first time I met Jennifer Griffith, she was tearing through Chopin's Etude Opus 25 No. 11 ("Winter Wind) in one of Jill Timmons' masterclass lessons for professional pianists. Beyond her technical prowess, what impressed me most about her playing was the passion and integrity that came through every note she played. She believed in that music, and it showed.
Everything that I heard in that performance holds true to everything I know of Jennifer today. As a composer, a performer, and as one of my decades-long friends, she lives, says, writes, and performs what she believes. She's an uncompromising truth-teller, and that integrity is balanced by a playful sense of humor and deep compassion born from a life spent living in a world not always eager to embrace creative efforts. Whether working as a jazz vocalist, composing an opera, or playing classical piano music, Jennifer is guided by an inner compass that replaces "this or that" with "this AND that", allowing her to discard categories and man-made boundaries to follow her creative spirit wherever it wishes to take her. I featured her composition, Something Close to Tango on No Dead Guys a couple of years ago. It is an honor to share her words (and introduce more of her work) in this interview.
You’ve achieved success as a composer, a classical pianist, and a jazz vocalist. What inspired you to create this hybrid career?
I didn’t set out to do everything; In my 20s and 30s I struggled to choose among these “possible paths,” which were just so much murk or vague ideas. I thought “I have NO idea what I can or should do . . . I’m a lousy pianist, or a so-so jazz singer, or a non-entity composer.” I still doubt, but nothing like I did then. Our world is so specialized and only a few people in my life encouraged me not to pick one discipline––one was Jill Timmons, our piano teacher and mentor. She and Steve Myers, a best friend during several periods of doubt, both saw the strengths in pursuing everything I do musically, or do in music if we’re including scholarship and teaching. This would help me get an academic job, they said, and the disciplines inform each other––the latter advice became clear when I started composing more, where improvisation has led to some good ideas, or when researching led to finding pieces I would perform later.
After achieving a degree in piano performance, you were pursuing your Master’s in music history when you chose to switch your emphasis to composition. What prompted this decision?
I took a composition seminar with Don Wheelock at Smith College. He told me I was a composer and not to ignore that. I had graduated from Portland State University where I was discouraged from pursuing composition by my teacher, Tomás Svoboda, a really wonderful teacher, but he believed women had too hard a time in careers as composers. He explained that his wife couldn’t pursue her work as an artist because she had kids. I wasn’t interested in having a family, and basically told him “Look, this is sexist.” I continued to study with him for awhile, but the lack of encouragement fostered many doubts. To combat these, several years after college I looked for other women composers who had succeeded, and ended up doing original research in Paris on four French composers: Lili Boulanger, Cécile Chaminade, Germaine Tailleferre, and Betsy Jolas. The culmination was lecture recitals I gave on these composers and, after that, applying to Smith’s graduate program in music history/musicology to get the degree since I’d already done the research. I still wanted to compose and Wheelock’s encouragement did a lot to undo earlier doubts, so I switched my emphasis to composition.
Does the avenue of musical communication (piano, voice, or composition) change what you choose to communicate? If so, how?
It doesn’t need to but for me it does, primarily because as a jazz vocalist I know certain repertoire and idioms of jazz (like traditional jazz, bebop, modal, American Songbook standards.) Growing up with that music in our house and at school, I naturally came to revere it, feel at home with it. I play jazz piano to accompany my own and others’ singing, and played a little but awkwardly in jazz trios and such. There are several ways of chording and soloing in jazz, and I don’t play as comfortably without holding down the bassline. I had studied classical piano repertoire in my 20s and 30s, and playing over such a long period took over my hands, where they want to go, a tactile thing, really. But in composing, the two traditions came together and I heard the jazz harmonies and rhythms right next to the new concert music idioms and classical language.
You write that you create “vocal and instrumental works that are inspired by social issues, politics, and human relationships.” How have you been able to compose award-winning compositions that balance these ideals with beautifully-constructed musical phrases?
I care about social issues, the enviroment, and about people, whether individuals (beyond attachments to friends and family, the many wonderful types and quirks of personality) or collectively (what we’re doing here, how we work together or not, what qualities make us worse or better as a species), so I express my observations and experiences in music, but I’d write similarly of how I hear or feel things no matter the subject. For vocal music I start with the text and try to express its meaning in harmony or melody or gesture. As a discerning musician I know when I’ve written something that’s at least close to working musically for the text. I also have collaborated with various singers, who taught me through their own vocal strengths and techniques. Michael Zegarski, a baritone who sings music theater and opera in NYC, taught me to write for him based on how he gets around his voice, which idiom and whether for the conventional baritone or for higher notes he has, and what he enjoys doing vocally. The soprano Sudie Marcuse, who commissioned several art songs, sometimes has pointed out when a phrase set high might get caught up in a consonant or vowel sound if not prepared, or how it could be more satisfying to sing. I think I also intuit setting text by singing the phrases as I compose. In Dream President, I might have written a whole note tied to another whole note to stress an important emotion or an important word, but when I sang it through I would find myself holding the note longer, letting it really bloom, as they say, to give the moment its due. So these singer-friendly phrases often express more emotion or drama, and some singers have noted they like my phrases because they feel good singing them. That pleases me.
As a pianist, I’m most familiar with Five Pieces in A for solo piano, and a one-page gem, Something Close to Tango, which I've featured on No Dead Guys and is part of my repertoire. You also write for opera, musical theater, chamber music and even solo guitar. Is there one form that you feel best allows you to express your musical ideas?
I’m glad you like! There’s always the context of a piece to consider before I find a specific form; for instance, a venue, instrument, ensemble, or idiom. In compositions I’ve been fairly flexible as many composers are these days: as long as I’m exploring and challenged I’m motivated to find the right form or genre for the expression. In the last few years my focus has shifted and I’m singing jazz again, so now in Buenos Aires I’m enjoying the repertoire I grew up with, focusing more on vocal technique and improvisation, but also enjoy arranging, and putting songs together with others, that sort of thing. I wrote about Charles Mingus for my dissertation, who’s not what you’d call a singer’s composer; he wrote for big band, or jazz orchestra on occasion, and smaller jazz ensembles with several horns. I’ve enjoyed finding ways of vocalizing and interpreting his music, including bringing tango to one piece, since I work with jazz musicians who are also tangueros. Instrumental music interpreted by the voice has a rich history––from Louis, Ella, Jon Hendricks, Annie Ross, to Jay Clayton, Mark Murphy, Joni Mitchell, and beyond. I’m developing this idea a little more in a concert series called In Voice.
But just before we came to Buenos Aires I had a piece on the rack for amplified, speaking pianist (Recipes for Fury), no singing involved. It came out of an email I wrote to a younger woman whose cheating husband had left her––and she was blaming herself in trying not to be mad at him––Oy! I never sent the letter, instead turned it into a libretto, and only later into Recipes, using metaphors of cooking in advising her on ways to express anger in a culture that isn’t very comfortable with women’s anger. I hear it as fairly hard-nosed in tone, so the speaking-pianist genre came to mind, as my friend, the composer Jerome Kitzke, has written some really great works in it.
Of all your opera and musical theater works, I’m most fond of Dream President. Describe how you so creatively staged this story that we all know so well.
It’s called Dream President because most of the scenes are drawn from dreams I had about Clinton in the early 90s, just before and after he got elected. Later when he left office I had another dream. And one scene is imagined, the dominatrix (Andromeda is my domme persona; I was encouraged to develop a domme persona because of my height and personality, a fluctuation between soft and harsh, apparently an ideal for some subs). So I was exploring Andromeda in role-playing with male friends, and I realized she could give Clinton a few lessons, and that the teacher/student role play fit the two of them well.
Tell me about your awards from the Macdowell Colony and the American Music Center.
Dream President was chosen for New York City Opera’s Vox Opera, and I had to get a copyist for the orchestral parts. I applied to the AMC for a grant and got it. I was accepted for a month at MacDowell a few years later. It was a great experience, and I met two really important people there: Jerome Kitzke and Dominic Orlando. Dominic wrote the libretto for the music theater piece/opera, Beautiful Creatures. I was working on an electroacoustic piece, and making sounds inside the piano with mallets and washers, which grew into Who is Miranda?. While I was there I realized I’m not much good in an artist colony because I work best at night, and all the socializing goes on at night. I could avoid that, but I’m a bit of a social butterfly and that choice between working and hanging out was way too hard. I only got a little work done.
Has your work as a jazz vocalist influenced your compositions? If so, how?
Definitely. I studied classical voice for a year or so in high school, but didn’t enjoy the sounds I made. I was also singing jazz and popular music, both better for projecting my personality. Singing in choirs, which I did through middle, high school, and college, and in a jazz vocal quartet, taught me a great deal about writing for vocal groups. Much later I was commissioned by the Grace Chorale of Brooklyn and composed an oratorio (based on a Rumi text, The Reed). It was a joy exploring and applying what I’d learned through singing with others.
What future projects are you most excited about?
I’m still hoping to find a performer for Recipes, and must finish up, working out proportions and nailing down some of the notation for parts I’ve liked improvising. Right now I want to do more with the JennG Quartet, my group here in Buenos Aires. The audiences and venues here are geared to jazz as a concert music; what “gigs” are in the States here are billed as concerts or shows. Audiences pay close attention to the music in jazz venues and, consequently, groups rehearse more for performances, including centering the concert around a theme, working out arrangements for everything, even a narrative for the patter for some singers. This format really appeals to me as a composer-arranger, and I’m also studying voice with a wonderful teacher here, Adriana Mastrángelo, a mezzo soloist with the Buenos Aires Opera and an Alexander Technique specialist. So for now I’m completely engaged in lessons and projects that challenge me.
What advice would you offer to young people seeking a career in music?
I have had a few opportunities to talk to composers who struggle with the multiple-discipline issue and I pass on Jill’s advice: Don’t drop anything; think of yourself as involved in the discipline where you have something to do right now and merely postponing projects in the other(s). Opinions have changed, and now so many more great musicians to compete with since I was making this choice, but I think the predominate voice in our cultural still says a music career is hard so don’t do it unless you’re willing to sacrifice making a decent living, and focus focus focus. It’s not that I disagree with this, but in talking to young artists, I prefer to focus on what music means to them right now, how they can pursue their objectives and find their place in the community, whether or not in time they receive good money or recognition. I read somewhere that Cecil Taylor said he never received the kind of recognition or money he wanted, but he didn’t stop pursuing his ideas. Of course, he did get recognition later, and some money, but it shows the importance of understanding our commitment, or how that commitment might develop. Can our commitment to making music survive when we can’t earn enough? Can we envision being satisfied pursuing music as an avocation? We don’t get to know the answers to these questions in advance, so can we also live with that?
Just thinking more here, but let’s say there are three factors that influence the artist’s path: 1) the process of artistic development, 2) the way career is viewed in terms of age and a series of steps, and 3) in some cases a split or dyad between specialization and doing a few different things as a generalist. It takes most of us decades to develop into integrated artists, who can then realize the rewards of artistry, no matter the outside recognition we receive. Usually, we don’t experience these personal or artistic rewards until our 50s and 60s, sometimes even later––or not at all if we’re unlucky. But this kind of personal reward might be the best of a lifetime: artistic integrity, personal integrity, in the sense of integrating the whole. It also informs many parts of our life, perhaps allowing us to let go of other dreams, ideals, pain, or bitterness. A young artist might remember that many artistic rewards come later in life and that taking this path can conflict with how society tells us to construct or pursue a career. Men have more pressure, generally, to make money, or to pursue more financially stable careers, and have always been judged more harshly than women if they’re not earning much. It’s changing a little now, but both men and women still feel the pressure to become specialists in their careers. I mean, we’re not living in the Renaissance, we’re not middle-class or upper-middle-class artists living in the Hapsburg Empire or something––like Schumann, Liszt, or Wagner, who could pursue writing, performance, philosophy, AND composition, with no flak for not having specialized––of course those guys WERE brilliant at so many things, weren’t they? But even without societal pressure, in our 20s and 30s it’s seems urgent that we know who we are and what we’re doing exactly, even if just to answer internal questions about our identity. Often we have little or no guidance on how to choose, and for what happens if we don’t succeed in a chosen area of specialization. Or we might be told it’s fine to be a generalist and to follow our instincts that way, but the pressure and the risk remain, because we see our colleagues and friends specializing or on tracks that lead to relative financial stability, or maybe a specialized performance career as an orchestra member or something. So it’s important that young artists are informed of all these factors and consider that they might change it up as they move in the world. They may start in one direction then go another, taking risks when in doubt, but if they anticipate such possibilities they’ll be more prepared and ready for the career obstacles most musicians wrestle with.
Jennifer Griffith composes vocal and instrumental works inspired by social issues, politics, and human relationships. Her works for opera and music theater probe and parody social norms. Her pocket opera about Bill Clinton, Dream President, was presented at New York City Opera’s VOX 2004, and staged by Christopher Alden in 2008 for Opera After Hours. Do You Like My Boots? (2014) focuses on power dynamics veering off typical S/M role-playing.
Griffith's chamber works have been performed by American Opera Projects, the new music ensembles Cygnus, Glass Farm, Newspeak!, and Vox Novus 60x60 Dance, among others. In collaboration with writer/artist/filmmaker Zahra Partovi, she wrote an oratorio setting of Rumi's The Reed, a commission from the Grace Chorale of Brooklyn.
With playwright and screenwriter Dominic Orlando, Griffith composed Beautiful Creatures, an opera/music theater piece about the politics and people in environmental activism. Since then, she has shifted back to singing jazz, which she did as a teenager and in her 20s. Since 2019 she's been in Buenos Aires working on In Voice, a jazz vocals series of music by Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, among others.
For more information, visit Jennifer Griffith.