As we were setting up, the subject of new music came up, so that is where we began . . . . . . .
Bruce Duffie: Do you enjoy performing 20th century music?
David Gordon: Yes, very much. I'm very committed to it, actually, for a lot of reasons.
BD: Even when it's all over the staff?
DG: I can't do everything that I'm offered, so I try to pick and choose. It's a question of idiomatic writing for the voice more than anything. The first half of this century brought a lot of experimentation for a lot of reasons both musical and non-musical. Now, in the second half of the century, there seems to be a movement, first of all, a return to a traditional concept of beauty, which is very welcome. Along with that comes an idea of writing for the beauty of the voice. I remember seeing Charles Reiner, the well-known Canadian pianist, play a contemporary concert ten years ago. He was there in white tie and tails, and he did nothing during one piece but roll tennis balls around on the strings of the piano. This is useless. It ignores the potential of the piano and certainly ignores the potential of Charles Reiner. I feel the same way about singing.
BD: Is that just an effect?
DG: Yes. It's really just an effect. I don't mind the effect, but I mind the fact that you've got to hire a first-rate pianist to do it, when anybody could do it. Literally anyone could do it, even a tone-deaf person. There's a lot of vocal music that a lot of tone-deaf people could actually sing better than people with relative pitch because there is less to confuse them. Nobody would know the difference. I remember Peter Pears saying in an interview that he went on a tour with Britten doing songs of Berg and Webern, and he said he never got more than 60% of the notes right, and it was a different 60% each evening. He described them as "frantically difficult."
BD: But those composers wrote actual notes. A lot of modern composers just give indications and approximations.
DG: Sure. I remember Pears saying that one night someone came up to him after a concert and said he had never heard the songs sung this way and Pears replied that he probably hadn't! First of all, great composers have always created turmoil in their lifetimes because they're forward thinking, and very often they're very far ahead of their time. It's only because of committed performers that the music gets performed and gets heard and becomes part of the mainstream.
BD: Do you think some of the things today will become mainstream, or is it too far out in left field?
DG: Who knows? Who knows what people will be writing fifty years from now. They may look back on us the way we look back on Elgar and Vaughan Williams and say how reactionary and neo-romantic. It's really hard to say.
BD: We wonder if people will be writing 50 years from now . . .
DG: Well, that's a non-musical question.
BD: Do you prefer singing a melody?
DG: Of course. Very much so. The voice does certain things best and that's what I try to do, not only for aesthetic considerations, but to protect myself. I got into some really deadly things when I was a McGill University ten years ago. We had a very active composition school and I started doing the kind of screaming, yelling, sliding, scooping, squawking thinks that can really damage the voice, especially in an operatic situation where you have to produce a lot of volume. In chamber music you can hold back a little bit.
BD: These were operas you were asked to scream in?
DG: Well, both. In Europe I did a bit of contemporary opera that was difficult, but singable. I do about 14 or 15 concerts a year with this contemporary chamber group which is more or less supported by the Smithsonian. We do concerts at the museum and have made a couple of recordings. It's a great challenge.
BD: Are these all world-premieres?
DG: Mostly, yes.
BD: Apparently it's not terribly difficult to get a first performance, but the trick is to get that second and third.
DG: Right. One piece I've done several times is for tenor, percussion and synthesized tape, and it's great! People really dig it. [This is Cantata for Tenor Voice, Percussion, and Electronic Sounds by Maurice Wright. It was recorded as part of a two-LP set on Smithsonian Collection Records by the 20th Century Consort, as seen in the photo at left. Gordon was also featured with the same group on their recording of Into Eclipse by Stephen Albert which was later issued on Nonesuch Records.] It's something that audiences can enjoy on first hearing. The greatest compliment I can get is when someone has been dragged to the concert and then really enjoys the piece! So I think it's up to me as a performer to do more of this kind of music so people will hear it and like it and come to know and have a better outlook for it. I'm very committed to this music and it's a wonderful change from opera. It disciplines you in a very good way.
BD: So you always want to do both.
DG: I'm trying very hard to keep one foot on the dock and one foot in the boat. It's not easy. I was in Austria for four years singing lots of opera.
BD: Is that still a good thing to do?
DG: Yes, but it's not easy to do any more because there are many more fine European singers coming along. In the 50s and 60s, a whole generation had been wiped out so it was pretty easy to get a job. But now it's much more competitive. In four ten-month seasons, I did about 330 performances of about 10 or 20 operas. I did lots of roles, big ones and smaller ones. It was a repertory house, and that's where I learned my craft. But I got tired of doing nothing but opera. It was an ensemble theater, and they owned you for those ten months. You literally had to get written permission to go out of town. When my contract was up there, I had offers from two other houses to do roles on the same kind of contract and I decided to come back here and I haven't regretted it at all. Now that I'm home again, I do these contemporary concerts, plus I sing in a couple of early music groups as well as operas. But this is precisely the reason I came back, to be able to do troubadour songs and renaissance stuff plus the new things.
BD: Are you to the point where you can write your own ticket?
DG: Almost. I am to the point now that I have a few too many engagements to accept, and that makes me real happy.
BD: Then, a question I ask all singers. How hard is it to say no?
DG: For me, it's pretty easy. It depends how attractive the engagement is. If it's something that you really want to do, it's pretty easy to over-extend yourself. I find it easy to say no because I simply cannot have a constant switching of centuries. Also, as a singer with a light, lyric voice, I have to watch out for my own health, the physical health as well as the vocal health. I must have time to rest and I must have time to study new roles. So far, only a few things have been repeated; all others have been a one-shot production.
BD: How do you decide what to study? Are they things you've been asked for or things you feel you ought to know?
DG: Both.
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4