Known and Unknown: an interview with composer Rodney Sharman
Rodney Sharman is fascinated with what he refers to as the “afterimage” of sounds. Never is that more apparent than in this collection of his solo piano works, expertly and lovingly played by the talented Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa. Known and Unknown isn’t an album for light listening. These tracks challenge the listener to follow the composer and the pianist to the outer edges of the sound universe. Whether it be a complete reimagining of a section of a beloved opera or compositions for speaking pianist that tell stories through notes and words, each turn and twist invites the listener to follow Sharman into his world.
Queer experience runs through these pieces—whether, in the words of Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, because they “repurpose mainstream materials toward pleasures quite deviant from the original intent” or because they tell a direct story. In this way, the silences around “the love that dare not speak its name,” as well as the pleasures and the pain are presented with a directness that wouldn’t be possible through words alone. It is an honor to feature Rodney Sharman and this album on No Dead Guys.
At what age did you begin making music and what was your first instrument?
I was a choirboy in the Anglican church before I could read words or numbers well. My sister would put the ribbons in the hymn book for me. I had early piano lessons, but was poor piano student. I took to the recorder immediately in music classes, taught myself clarinet at age 12, later flute and oboe, also self-taught. I learned the flute because the only flute player in town graduated high school and left. I thought flute a rare, unusual instrument, and learned it. Then my family moved to Victoria, and I discovered that flute was the most popular of all woodwind instruments in Victoria at that time, especially because of flutist Paul Horn’s enormous popularity. His meditation music, his album playing with the whales… I still play flute, recorder, and sing.
When did you discover that you were a composer and what was your first composition?
I started composing around age 10. In retrospect I was and remain a sound-freak (as a Dutch student once called me). My parents had a cassette tape recorder; I would take the front bottom panel off our big old upright piano, strum and scrape the strings, place books on the keys of the Electrohome organ to sustain clusters, sometimes recording these, then improvising over the recorded layers. These would have been among my first pieces. My first notated music used the staff paper in those little books music teachers still use for lesson notes. I had never seen an ensemble score, so my first written piece was written from beginning to end not lining up the bar lines, so if the 1st clarinet had more notes, it ended later in the score than the 2nd clarinet, etc. I tried to purchase score paper to write my first orchestra piece around age 13-14, there was nothing to be found in my hometown of Biggar or in neighbouring Saskatoon. I ended up drawing staff paper myself, mimeographing it at school. I didn’t start composition lessons until age 15 in Victoria with Murray Adaskin.
What composers do you feel have had the most influence on you and why?
Claudio Monteverdi for vocal writing and sense of pacing. Mozart for sensitivity to symmetry and asymmetry. Beethoven for focus. John Cage for work ethic, the idea of aggregates: distinct sound objects used to create patterns. And I had great teachers: Murray Adaskin, Rudolf Komorous, Brian Ferneyhough, Morton Feldman, Frederic Rzewski, Louis Andriessen. My close friendships with composers Kaija Saariaho, Linda Catlin Smith, and Joël Bons have also left their mark on my writing and creative process.
Your catalogue of compositions is vast, encompassing everything from solo instrument to choral works, chamber music, orchestral pieces, chamber operas, and more. What were some of the joys and challenges of writing opera-inspired pieces for solo piano?
There is great joy in taking another composer’s work as a point of departure for a new composition, whether in drawing musical graffiti over the original, or distilling its essence to create something new. I play the piano poorly, which is in some ways an advantage, in that my hands don’t automatically fall into familiar patterns.
Congratulations on the recent release of Known and Unknown. Given that the pieces recorded on this album span much of your career, how do you feel these selections reflect your evolution as a composer?
There is a preoccupation with piano sonority, resonance, and decay from my earliest piano pieces. All the tracks on the album exhibit some part of my artistic personality. In terms of evolution, my collaboration with Rachel took me to places I would not otherwise have gone: bigger themes of love and loss, death and transfiguration. Her theatrical gifts and sensitive pianism are an ongoing source of inspiration. My next two piano pieces for her (incomplete at the time of this interview) incorporate greater use of spoken and sung text.
One of the things that impressed me the most about your piano compositions is how masterfully you work with tone color and silence. Can you tell me a bit about the importance of these things in your music?
The distance between two notes is often best determined by the piano’s resonance with or without pedal or using half pedal. I am fascinated with the afterimage of sounds, very comfortable with silence, and especially savour what I call coloured silence. I like to think I am sensitive to piano timbre. The piano changes colour from register to register, making a natural crescendo as it descends, the opposite of the human voice or flute, which open and get louder as they go higher.
Your pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa is a sensitive, virtuosic performer who also happens to be a gifted voice actor. How did you two meet and why do you feel she possesses so much insight into your music?
Rachel and I met first at the Banff Centre at breakfast, conversing before we knew we were both musicians. Rachel had a natural and deep understanding of my work from the beginning. My understanding of her gifts grows with each piece I write for her; my work deepens and expands as I write music expressly for her talents and abilities.
Given that the majority of the tracks on Known and Unknown were inspired by opera do you feel listeners need to have an understanding of these operas in order to truly experience these pieces?
I believe there is an added layer of enjoyment when a listener knows the original opera excerpt, but I don’t believe it necessary to know the opera to appreciate the piano piece.
In the album’s liner notes, Rachel writes that your Opera Transcriptions are “quintessentially queer in the ways they repurpose mainstream materials toward pleasures quite deviant from the original intent, and read significance into the gaps most people dismiss as silence.” Would you be willing to expand on this idea?
It's complex, and I'm not sure I can offer deeper insight than Rachel has. So much of queer identity until recently is about silence, even for those who live in liberal communities and grow up in supportive families. "The love that dare not speak its name" is often expressed as silence. Much of queer history is suppressed, distorted, erased. My work, "Wounded", for speaking pianist, relates to my conversations with composer Claude Vivier. I needed to make an artistic record of this part of queer history before there is no one who knows or remembers. Regarding repurposing mainstream materials, opera gives voice to the aspirations and desires of many in the queer minority. To take iconic material from the operatic canon and make it my own through what I call transcription is perhaps both celebratory and transgressive. The transformations and reimaginings I create are sometimes clear, sometimes buried or distorted, but always an expression of the love I have for the originals.
My favorite track on the album is “The Garden”, written for a speaking pianist. It is a perfect combination of lust, innocence, tenderness, and yearning. Given that it is a story narrated by a gay man about a visit to a notorious gay sex club, how do think pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa was able to transcend gender and perform it so effectively?
Thank you for your kind words. In addition to her theatrical gifts, Rachel is a performer with the humility and curiosity to seek out the best vocal coach, director, dramaturg, and gender-transformation artists in Vancouver and eagerly learns from them.
Two other favorites on this album are “La Rondine” and “Little Venice.” Given that so many of your other tracks roam far outside the traditional tonal box, what inspired you to write sweet melodies for both of these pieces?
"Little Venice” is a musical idea that has taken several forms in my work: a solo harp piece for beginners, a song for voice and piano I later arranged for voice and string orchestra. I believe it originated as a little piece for flute and piano written for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary for my sister and me to play together for our parents.
“La Rondine” is an opera transcription: a reimagining of “La Canzona di Doretta” from Puccini’s “La Rondine”, especially influenced by soprano Montserrat Caballé's interpretation of the aria.
Do you offer sheet music for these pieces? If so, where might we purchase it?
Yes. Most of the music is available through the Canadian Music Centre, some published by the Associated Board of Royal Music Schools, some by Les Productions d’Oz, and Hal Leonard. (Check my list of works on my website, which lists which is published by whom: www.rodneysharman.com )
What current and future projects are you most excited about?
I recently finished pieces for the Bachfest in Leipzig, companion pieces for the viola da gamba sonatas of JS Bach. I had more courage writing these pieces given that I had already transformed Rachel's mother Inger's favourite Bach "Ich habe genug" (trans: I have enough) in the title track, "Known and Unknown".
I am currently working on two new monodramas for Rachel, one on Romeo and Juliet at the request of choreographer Idan Cohen, another a text-based piece on themes of consent and the performer-composer relationship (Rachel’s impetus).
What advice can you offer to young composers wishing to establish a career for themselves in music?
Choose your teachers wisely, go to concerts, study music of the past and know that of your contemporaries. Learn from your colleagues as well as your teachers. Sing in choirs. Always pursue truth in art. The most important this is to find and express your own voice as an artist.
RODNEY SHARMAN (b. 1958) lives on traditional Musqueam territory in Vancouver, Canada. His music has been performed in more than forty countries and at festivals of new music including the Bourges Festival (France), Ars Musica (Belgium), International Gaudeamus Music Week, Festival Confrontaties, Holland Festival (Netherlands), Wien Modern (Austria), Nyyd Festival (Estonia) the Almeida and Huddersfield Festivals (UK), ISCM World Music Days (Canada, Mexico, Germany, Switzerland), North American New Music Festival, New Music Across America, Sub-Tropic Music Festival, Bang On A Can (USA) and Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music (Germany), at which he was awarded the 1990 Kranichsteiner Music Prize.
His music has been performed by orchestras in Canada, US, and Europe under conductors Kazuyoshi Akiyama, Mario Bernardi, Andrey Boreyko, Sergiu Comissiona, Charles Dutoit, Hans Graf, Eri Klas, Pavel Kogan, Tania Miller, Ed Spanjaard, Bramwell Tovey, and Bruno Weil. Others interpreters include the Aventa Ensemble, Vancouver New Music Society, ARRAYMUSIC, Ensemble SMCQ, Ensemble Exposé, CIKADA Ensemble, het Nieuw Ensemble, Ives Ensemble, Netherlands Wind Ensemble, Arditti, Bozzini and St. Lawrence String Quartets, pianists Rachel Iwaasa, Anthony de Mare, Michael Finnissy, Louise Bessette, Yvar Mikhashoff and John Snijders, organist Hans Ola Ericsson, violinist Jonathan Crow, doublebassists Stephano Scodanibbio and Robert Black, flutists Camilla Hoitenga and Mark McGregor, harpsichordist Colin Tilney, harpists Rita Costanzi, Erica Goodman, Ernestine Stoop and Sharlene Wallace, the Hilliard Ensemble, musica intima, and The Esoterics, singers Valdine Anderson, Romain Bischoff, Andrea Ludwig, Brett Polegato, and Krisztina Szabó.
His music has been choreographed by Marie-Josée Chartier, David Earle, Christopher House ,and James Kudelka for Chartier Danse, Toronto Dance Theatre, Oregon Ballet Theatre, San Francisco Ballet, Citadel & Co. and the National Ballet of Canada. Elsewhereless, a chamber opera with Atom Egoyan, was staged thirty-five times since its 1998 premiere in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver and in concert excerpts in Amsterdam, Rome, Montreal, and Victoria. His dance-opera with Alex Poch-Goldin and James Kudelka, From the House of Mirth, won the 2013 Dora Award for outstanding sound design/composition for dance.
Dr. Sharman is a graduate of the University of Victoria School of Music (Victoria, B.C.), the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik (Freiburg, Germany) and the State University of New York at Buffalo, from which he received a Ph.D. in May, 1991. His former teachers include Murray Adaskin, Rudolf Komorous, Brian Ferneyhough, Morton Feldman, David Felder, Frederic Rzewski, Louis Andriessen and Lucas Foss.
Rodney Sharman is the Victoria Symphony’s Composer-Mentor (2021-), Composer-in-Residence of New Music for Old Instruments, Early Music Vancouver (2017-19), the Victoria Symphony (2008-2010), the National Youth Orchestra of Canada (2004), the Vancouver Symphony (1997-2000) VSO Composer/Music Advisor (2000-2001), and Composer-Host of the Calgary Philharmonic’s New Music Festival “Hear and Now” (2009-2010). During 1983-84 he was guest composer at the Institute of Sonology (Utrecht, Netherlands). He taught at Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of British Columbia School of Music, the School for the Contemporary Arts and Faculty of Graduate Liberal Studies, Simon Fraser University, and has given guest lectures and masterclasses in Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, UK, and USA.
He was President of the Canadian League of Composers (CLC) from 1993-98 and was President of the Canadian Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) from 1991-95. He served on the CLC Council from 1988 to 1999, returning in 2016 as Vice-President of the Canadian Section of the ISCM to assist the World New Music Days in Vancouver, and President of the section since 2019.
Dr. Sharman is recipient of the Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts (2017), Djerassi Artist-in-Residence Woodside, California (2014, 2020), Paul Fleck Fellow, Banff Centre (2003), the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (2001) Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, (1990), Commission Prize (1988) and Tuition Prize (1986) from the Darmstadt Summer Music Course, Germany, the Woodburn Fellowship, State University of New York at Buffalo (1986-90), the Mikhashoff Award (June in Buffalo, 1986), 1st Prize CBC National Radio Competition for Young Composers (1984), CAPAC Awards (1982, 84) scholarships from Stiftung Kuenstlerhaus Boswil, Switzerland (1983, 84, 86) and several student prizes.