Four Places in Queensland: an interview with composer and pianist Erik Griswold
Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring will forever be associated with the wide-open places in America. George Gershwin’s “American in Paris” evokes the busy excitement of that vibrant city, and “Country Gardens” by Percy Grainger never fails to evoke an English garden. It is a testament to Erik Griswold that his collection of piano solos, Four Places in Queensland, makes me visualize and yearn to visit a part of Australia I’ve never seen.
How does one capture the power of place in musical notes? In Four Places in Queensland, Griswold blends literal, tangible things such as “Rain” and “Spring” and “Bell Birds” with a palpable, intuitive love of the landscapes that inspired this music. Yet, as with other well-written pieces about place, this music transcends its settings and succeeds in tapping into things universal to all of us, regardless of our knowledge of or connection to Queensland.
Born in San Diego, California and now living in Brisbane, Australia, composer and pianist Erik Griswold draws from global influences in his music. From the rhythms and folk melodies of Sichuan music, to compositions as diverse as “84 Pianos” and projects written for the Piano Mill, Griswold writes for “adventurous musicians.” But for all the far-reaching influences and sounds, Griswold’s music finds a balance between being adventuresome and listenable. It’s music that reaches both head and heart. I’m honored to feature him and his music on No Dead Guys
When did you know you wanted to be a composer and who or what drew you to this career choice?
I was playing the piano from 5 years old, writing tunes and improvising from the age of 10 or 12, I remember. After that I picked up drums, guitar, & synthesizer. I had an old reel to reel tape recorder with the erase head disconnected, so I could overdub as many layers as I wanted, and I loved to experiment with that. I started playing in bands, jazz combos, and orchestras, and sometimes even made a bit of money. I’m not sure if there was a particular point that I decided to become a composer-musician, I think I was always heading in that direction, and I’m lucky that I had some great teachers and a very supportive family.
Being originally from San Diego, CA, when did you immigrate to Australia and what compelled you to do so?
Like many of my ex-pat friends here, I moved to Australia for love! I met my partner, Australian percussionist & composer Vanessa Tomlinson, in San Diego where we were both students, and when we completed our degrees we decided to come to Australia for an adventure. We had heard that Melbourne was the place to be, and it was. The early 2000s were an incredibly creative period for us in which we started many ongoing collaborations. In those days there were some nights you could walk up one small stretch of Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, and catch four or five avant-garde groups all playing in different venues.
Tell me about your collaboration with other musicians, artists, dancers, and poets. How do you feel that the blending of two or more art forms enhances the listening experience for your audiences?
Composing can be a very solitary affair, with lots of hours spent alone at the piano, desk, or laptop. Collaboration is a fantastic antidote to that isolation, creating opportunities to invigorate your practice and explore new perspectives. In particular, working with artists in other forms can reveal which aspects of your ideas are really communicating, and perhaps help you get closer to the essence of the ideas. Cross-art form collaboration opens up opportunities for audience cross-pollination. There’s really nothing better than playing your music for diverse audiences to test your ideas and find out what is really communicating (and what’s not).
You write that your compositional style is greatly influenced by the music of the Sichuan province. What characterizes that music and how is that reflected in your own pieces?
There’s a great diversity in Sichuan music, from colourful folk and opera traditions to contemporary classical and underground rock.
I was fortunate to have the chance to live and study in Chengdu in the early 2000s and I became really captivated by Sichuan Opera – particularly the brash and colourful percussion – as well as some of the folk music traditions – like the “Jinqian Ban” or Money sticks. Just like the distinctive spicy foods of Sichuan, the music has a unique twang, due to the strong local dialect and also the incredible, “ear-cleaning” sound spectrum of their cymbals and gongs. While studying the percussion I learned about the intricate system of rhythmic cues used in opera, which have a modular structure. And through the folk music, mostly using the pentatonic system, I started to absorb some of the unique Sichuan melody and phrasing.
With the help of my Chinese teachers, I translated some of those rhythms and folk melodies onto the prepared piano, trying to capture the sounds in my own medium. Later this developed into collaborations directly with Sichuan musicians that would combine improvisation, contemporary Western and traditional Chinese music into a collage. Eventually the collaborations and friendships grew into a Chinese-Australian “big band” in the project Water Pushes Sand. In that piece I was trying to create a space for several cultural and musical layers to blend together, so, for example, we could have a horn section riffing while bamboo flute plays a soaring improvisation, or a 12-bar blues played in a traditional Sichuan opera rhythm!
Tell me about Clocked Out, the duo you co-direct with Vanessa Tomlinson that creates original music for prepared piano, percussion, found objects, and toys. Where do you stage your projects, and how does your duo interact with the community?
Clocked Out is a vehicle for Vanessa and I to pursue our shared musical passions and interests, and from the beginning that has included performing as a duo as well as collaborating and producing interarts events. We are equally happy to perform in big venues like Sydney Opera House or Queensland Music Festival (when we have the chance), as we are playing in small improvisation clubs like Roulette or Make It Up Club. Over the years we’ve had partnerships with multi-arts venues and music conservatoriums, and also have developed site-specific performances in places like working factories or the banks of the Condamine river. Currently we are ensemble in residence at Harrigans Lane (an artist retreat and performance complex in regional New South Wales). Our work is always experimental and exploratory, but we try to find a balance between catering to a specialist music audience (who know a lot about experimental music), and a general audience that may be experiencing this type of work for the first time. There’s a spirit of adventure and discovery, I think, in all of our projects, for us and the audience.
In addition to your pieces for solo piano, you write quite a bit for prepared piano, toy piano, and multiple pianos—most notably your composition “84 Pianos.” What can you tell me about how you conceived of and performed this mammoth composition?
Credit for the “84 Pianos” concept goes to Vanessa. We had been working with the idea of intersections of music and architecture, in projects like the 16-piano powered “Piano Mill,” and she had the inspiration to “sound” the architecture of the Queensland Conservatorium by playing all of the pianos at the same time. The idea was that the pianos stayed where they were, in offices, practice rooms, and concert halls, with all of the doors wide open. The audience would wander through the corridors from one end of the building to the other, experiencing the sounds reverberating throughout.
With that fantastic starting point, I created a composition designed to test the acoustics of the building, moving through a variety of musical textures from sustained and meditative, to spiky and syncopated. It starts with all 84 pianists playing a massive tone cluster together. While we had an amazing cohort of very skilled pianists to draw from at the Conservatorium, we also opened it up to pianists from the local community.
With such a huge group, of course everything had to be pretty carefully planned. We used stopwatches to coordinate the sections of the piece, and I made the score as concise as possible, trying to get more out of less. I made an instruction video and held information sessions to make sure everyone understood the logistics and interpretation. The premiere performance was held as part of World Science Festival, and it really was like being inside a crazy science experiment, or maybe being inside Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. It was hard to believe what you were hearing.
I discovered your music through Four Places in Queensland, an album of solo piano music that celebrates locations in Queensland, Australia. As most of No Dead Guys’ readers aren’t from Australia, what can you tell us about Queensland and why did you choose to compose these pieces about it?
The first thing I would say about Queensland is that it’s huge – apparently 2 ½ times bigger than Texas! So, it encompasses a huge range of environments and ecosystems. Queensland is my adopted home, and I have enjoyed discovering it over the past 20 years…going bush, as they say…from the remote deserts in the west and rainforests of the north to the beautiful sand islands off the coast of Brisbane. To be honest, the “four places” of my piece only represent a tiny fraction of the state, so maybe there is still room for more movements? The Australian landscape is an extremely popular subject in Australian music, with composers like Peter Sculthorpe, Anne Boyd, and William Barton setting the example. Four Places in Queensland is my humble contribution to the tradition. The fact that the traditional, Aboriginal owners of the land have had a continuous connection for more than 60,000 years is awe-inspiring.
Four Places in Queensland features Mt. Nebo, Cunningham’s Gap, Condamine, and Girraween. What can you tell us about the characteristics of these four regions, and how are they reflected in these pieces?
Mt. Nebo is a small town set in the dappled light of a dense rainforest, surrounded by beautiful bush tracks. My experiences of Mt. Nebo include listening to the gentle pinging rhythms of the bell birds, hiking in the forest, and a kids’ birthday party near a small creek. I think those carefree feelings come through in the music. Cunninghams Gap is a steep rise separating coast from Great Dividing Range that boasts panoramic views across ancient volcanic plugs. It’s the drama of that steep ascent up to the gap, and the floating feeling you have coming back down, that shape the music here. The tiny, rural town of Condamine, whose namesake river is memorialized in bush poetry and song, is also home to the rustic Condamine Cowbell. I was literally floating on the Condamine river when I came up with the motifs in this section of the “Four Places.” I try to capture this feeling in my performance. Girraween, or “place of many flowers,” is a national park known for its dramatic granite boulders. The image of these majestic boulders informs the heavier, more monumental material towards the end of this section.
Three of the Four Places are represented in a mini suites of three or four movements (the single-movement Condamine is the exception). I hope that each Place is a balanced whole by itself, however, I’ve also made a web of connections across the sections, from one Place to another: there are “Spring” 1, 2 and 3, “Leapfrog” 1 & 2, and “Rain” 1 & 2. In this way, we revisit similar thematic or textural material, but shifted into new colours, atmospheres, or harmonies. Spring 1 is “relaxed and carefree,” while Spring 2 is “vigorous, but not hurried” whereas Spring 3 is “Tentatively energetic.” By recalling the same musical ideas, differently inflected, I hope to create a sense of both similarities and subtle differences in the physical environments, and also to create labyrinth of relationships to uncover as you move through the piece.
I greatly enjoyed your playing on “Condamine”, one of my favorite tracks on this album. Why did you choose to include three other fine pianists to record the other tracks?
Thank you! The Condamine section is a little bit different format to the other sections, in that it’s really a structured improvisation. The score consists of three pages of material, through which I cycle freely. Anna Grinberg, Stephen Emmerson, and Liam Viney are three of my favorite pianists (and people) in Queensland. I love each of their playing styles and I wanted to tailor each one of the sections to their personalities. The original idea behind the piece, in fact, was to write specifically for those pianists, about places that were significant for them, and was part of a Queensland 150th anniversary year celebration. So, in a sense it is a portrait of the state through those four different perspectives.
In addition to “Condamine,” I most enjoyed the Leapfrog and Rain pieces. Given that “Leapfrog 1” is part of the Mt. Nebo set and “Leapfrog 2” is part of Girraween, how do you feel these pieces reflect the differences in these two regions?
The idea of those pieces is that the music “leapfrogs” from one idea to the next, in a free and through-composed flow. They tend to feature lots of contrasts, sudden changes, overlapping ideas, and building layers, and they are some of the trickiest music in the piece! In Leapfrog 1, I feel there’s playful quality, as if we are hearing hidden processes of nature unfolding. Leapfrog 2 is a bit grander, ranging across the whole piano, which I think reflects the grandness and scale of the Girraween landscape.
How did you go about discerning the nature of these four places and translating this into piano pieces?
I spent time in each location, listening to and sometimes recording the soundscapes. I experienced them by hiking, picnicking, and quietly contemplating. In some cases, I had particular memories of the places (like the kids’ party I mentioned above, or floating in the Condamine river). When I composed the music, I worked very much at the piano, improvising and trying to capture features of each location in an intuitive way. In some sections, I was thinking of particular images, sounds, or feelings. For example, at certain times of year Cunninghams Gap can be shrouded in clouds, and this was the sound image I tried to create in Bliss.
Is the score of “For Places in Queensland” available for purchase? If so, where might we purchase it?
Yes, folks can order a hardcopy via Australian Music Centre or contact me through my website, Eric Griswold.
How would you recommend that non-Australian pianists (who have never seen Queensland) approach these pieces?
While pianists are welcome to come to Queensland and see for themselves, I think they can alco draw upon their own experience of places that are meaningful to them in order to create meaningful connections with the music. We don’t have to be too literal. After all, when Copland wrote “Appalachian Spring” he wasn’t actually thinking about Appalachia (the title was given by Martha Graham after he finished it), but still the music has grown to have meaning to that place.
What current or future projects are you most excited about?
I’m excited to go to Singapore in a couple of months to hear Margaret Leng Tan play her one woman show (which I composed for her) Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep at the Esplanade Theatre. This will be my first overseas trip in quite a while, as things really shut down here during Covid. And in the meantime, I’ve been working on bit of a new side project, combining drum machines with acoustic instruments: kind of a post-classical dance music? Not sure where it’s headed yet but I’m having fun working on it.
What advice can you offer young musicians seeking to build careers as composers?
Reach out to the community or communities around you. Join together with other like-minded musicians, artists and creative people. Put on events. Don’t wait until you’re ready, just get involved however you can, and hopefully good things will flow your way.
Erik Griswold is a composer and pianist working in contemporary classical, improvised, and experimental forms. Particular interests include prepared piano, percussion, environmental music, and music of Sichuan province. Originally from San Diego, and now living in Brisbane, he composes for adventurous musicians, performs as a soloist and in Clocked Out, and collaborates with musicians, artists, and scientists.
His music has been performed in Carnegie Hall, Sydney Opera House, Melbourne Festival, OzAsia Festival, and Brisbane Festival, among others. He is a recipient of an Australia Council Fellowship in Music, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, and numerous individual grants. He has worked with musicians Steven Schick, Lisa Moore, George Lewis, Soundstream Collective, Decibel Ensemble, Zephyr String Quartet, Ensemble Offspring, Speak Percussion and many others. His music can be heard on Mode Records, Innova, Room40, Neuma, Move, Clocked Out and Immediata. His work Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep, for pianist Margaret Leng Tan, received the APRA AMCOS Art Music Award “Work of the year: Dramatic,” and his piece Water Pushes Sand, for the Australian Art Orchestra, was nominated for an Aria Award.
Together with Vanessa Tomlinson, Griswold directs Clocked Out, creating original music for prepared piano, percussion, found objects, and toys. Their albums include Time Crystals, Foreign Objects, Water Pushes Sand, and Every night the same dream. Clocked Out also produces innovative concert series, events and tours, for which they received two APRA-AMCOS Awards and two Green Room Awards (2000).