All my published liner/booklet notes

2015
Albert Ayler: Bells/Prophecy Expanded Edition (ESP-Disk')

2014

Alan Sondheim: Cutting Board (ESP-Disk')
Bud Powell: Live at the Blue Note Café, Paris 1961 (ESP-Disk')

Albert Ayler: Spiritual Unity 50th Anniversary Expanded Edition (ESP-Disk')

Various: The Albert Ayler Story (ESP-Disk') 

Christopher Atzinger: American Lyricism: Piano Music by American Composers (MSR Classics)

Azure Carter & Alan Sondheim: Avatar Woman (Public Eyesore)

2013

Oscar Brown, Jr. & Maggie Brown: We're Live (ESP-Disk')

2009

Roberto Magris Europlane: Current Views (Soul Note)

2007

Guido Manusardi: Folk Tales (Soul Note)

Carla Marciano: Change of Mood (Soul Note)

2006

Jenny Lin: The Eleventh Finger (Koch International Classics)

2005

Giorgio Gaslini: Gaslin iPlays Sun Ra (Soul Note)

Carla Marciano: A Strange Day (Soul Note)

2004

Gebhard Ullmann: Big Band Project (Soul Note)

1998

Matthew Shipp: Multiplication Table (Hat Art)

Charles Gayle: Daily Bread (Black Saint)

Various Artists: Critics Picks, vol. 3 (Black Saint)

Jazz Composers Alliance Saxophone Quartet: I’m Me & You’re Not (Brownstone)

1997

Richie Beirach: Snow Leopard (Evidence)

Ed Blackwell Trio: Walls-Bridges (Black Saint)

Steve Lacy & Mal Waldron: Communique (Soul Note)

Hamiet Bluiett: Live at the Village Vanguard (Soul Note)

1996

Guido Manusardi: Within (Soul Note)

Bob Moses: Devotion (Soul Note)

1993

Billy Bang: Tribute to Stuff Smith (Soul Note)

My booklet notes for a new album of piano music

Last year, I was commissioned by pianist Christopher Atzinger to write the booklet notes for his then-yet-to-be-titled album, now available and named American Lyricism. Below are my notes. (I adjusted the first paragraph to reflect changes made since I submitted these notes, but did not go through the rest of the paragraphs to see if there were further alterations.)

Although this recital has no thematic conceit binding its works together, they have much in common: All five composers are American, all are living, and all work within tonality. Within those parameters, there is plenty of variety from the generations of composers whose music is heard here.

Christopher Theofanidis (1967- ) has not only received Charles Ives, Tanglewood, Fulbright, and Guggenheim fellowships and the Barlow and Rome Prizes along with six ASCAP Morton Gould Prizes, he even earned a Grammy nomination. He is currently Professor of Composition at Yale. Mr. Theofanidis is another composer who started out as a pianist, and his four-movement work All Dreams Begin with the Horizon – "written as a birthday present to be performed at a salon-like party," he notes – is inspired by the character miniatures of Robert Schumann's ultra-Romantic cycles. Hence, it is no surprise that it is dramatic, colorful, melodic, and displays a wide range of moods. The finale, "menacing," is a finger-buster of the first degree.

Richard Danielpour (1956- ) studied with Vincent Persichetti and Peter Mennin; after early serial experimentation, he arrived at a style continuing their school of colorful tonality. Recipient of MacDowell, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller fellowships, Mr. Danielpour is currently on the faculties of the Curtis Institute and the Manhattan School of Music. His first Preludes were inspired by dreams, whereas in The Enchanted Garden (Preludes, Book II) he drew on memories of actual events. Where Impressionist moods and sounds dominate the first book, there is a more tangible air to the later and longer set, though the harmonies are occasionally still Impressionistic and both books feature explosive, vernacular-tinged changes of pace – "Mardi Gras" earlier, the scherzo-esque "Surrounded by Idiots" and jazzy "Lean Kat Stride" here. "Persepolis" recalls a childhood trip to Iran and references his half-Persian heritage. The beautiful "Elegy," written for a friend who lost a companion, suggests happy times fondly if sadly recalled. "A Community of Silence" alternates perfumed passages with violent outbursts; similarly eluding titular expectations, "There's a Ghost in My Room!" is not the eerie sort of spooky, but constantly startling, though with menace lurking. The lengthy "Winter Solstice" closes the set with lyrical yearning shadowed by a slightly foreboding tread.

Monica Houghton (1954- ), a Harvard graduate and later a student of Margaret Brouwer, began composing in 1993 and received her M.M. in Composition a decade later. After teaching and receiving awards in Ohio, notably including an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council in 2007, she returned to Reno, Nevada, where she grew up. Her sparkling Sonata (1998) won the 2000 Lyman Prize, and deserves to become a standard of the modern repertoire. Full of emotive gestures and mercurial mood changes, it is positively Beethovenesque in its brooding, searching, striving, and ultimately triumphant character.

Justin Merritt (1975- ) was the youngest-ever winner of the ASCAP Foundation/Rudolph Nissim Award and has received an ample host of additional awards. Taught by Samuel Adler among others, he is also the youngest composer on this program. He writes that Chaconne: Mercy Endures, commissioned by and written for Mr. Atzinger, "is based on the chorale tune Danket dem Herren, den er ist freundlich [Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good]. The constantly repeated refrain in that text is 'Mercy Endures.' The tune functions as both a recurring melodic fragment and as the basis for the chaconne formula." This is the moodiest and most dissonant piece on the program, its theme splitting into granular motifs that chase their own tails, dissonantly rubbing against each other to generate a clangorous rumination on travail and endurance.

Pierre Jalbert (1967- ), who studied with George Crumb, is a prolific composer of mostly instrumental works. Now Professor of Composition and Theory at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music in Houston, Mr. Jalbert is also an excellent pianist, and his Toccata is a showpiece. It is also, even beyond its flashy technical appeal, a crowd-pleaser. Bluesy harmonies, Minimalist rhythmic drive, and a combination of complex weight with absolute clarity come together in a streamlined juggernaut of a work that whirls and glints with thrilling intensity. It certainly provides the program with a pulse-quickening conclusion, effectively the encore of Mr. Atzinger's CD recital.

Hilary Hahn Interview 2001

Having just recently enjoyed violinist Hilary Hahn's concert at The Stone, and her CD of Charles Ives's four sonatas, I was reminded of this interview from almost exactly a decade ago.

Ran: 11/20/01 on CDNOW.com
Head: The Provocative Pairings of Hilary Hahn

There have been such marketing abuses in recent years of the prodigy phenomenon that the prospect of hearing another young, female violinist might have connoisseurs blanching. Hilary Hahn, who released a CD of Bach at age 17, was the antidote to that. And it's not just that Sony hasn't plopped her into the ocean wearing a gauzy white shift for any album covers. Hahn is one of the finest violinists around, regardless of age; she's self-assured without the least hint of arrogance; she's constantly putting together intriguing discs pairing warhorses of the concerto repertoire with more modern works; and she's articulate and thoughtful.

The Baltimore native began playing violin at age three in the Suzuki program of the Peabody Conservatory, and from the age of five taught by Klara Berkovich. Upon entering the Curtis Institute, at age 10, Hahn was taken under the tutelage of the late Jascha Brodsky, an Ysaÿe pupil, and continued studying with him until his death; later teachers included Jamie Laredo and, for chamber music, the late Felix Galimir and Gary Graffman. Sony signed Hahn to an exclusive contract that has so far yielded four CDs: the aforementioned Bach disc; a pairing of the Beethoven Violin Concerto and Leonard Bernstein's Serenade; the Violin Concertos of Samuel Barber and -- commissioned for and premiered by Hahn -- Edgar Meyer; and now the Concertos of Brahms and Stravinsky. All have been not only much praised, but successful on the classical sales charts as well.

Now 21 years old, Hahn is perhaps past the prodigy stage, but her playing continues to thrill and please.

CDNOW: Once again, you've made a concerto disc with an unusual pairing. How do you decide what to record?

Hilary Hahn: Sometimes I propose an idea to Sony and sometimes they propose an idea to me, and we work out something that works for everyone. The Brahms/Stravinsky was actually my idea, because I've wanted to record [the] Brahms for a long time. It's such a great piece, and the chance to work closely on such a masterpiece like that in the recording experience is really something that brings the piece a lot closer to you and you clarify a lot of things about it in your mind, at least for me. So I wanted to record the Brahms, and I was trying to think what would go well with it. It's a little tricky with a piece like the Brahms, because it's such a full-scale work, it stands completely on its own. I was looking for something that could hold its own next to the Brahms but not take anything away from the Brahms, and vice versa. I wanted to have something in which both pieces would reflect the strengths of the other.

One thing I find that's fascinating about the Brahms and Stravinsky combination is, both composers worked very closely with violinists, Brahms with [Joseph] Joachim and Stravinsky with Samuel Dushkin, in the course of writing the pieces, and you can hear that the composers themselves were not violinists, because there are some ideas that seem to come from other instruments, or the familiarity with playing another instrument, certain sequences or patterns or whatever. But they still work for violin, because they worked with violinists on it and got the ideas to come across well for the players too.

So I liked that aspect of it. I love both pieces, and I had wanted to record the Stravinsky as well. I thought about putting them together and it seemed to work very well. The Brahms, as I said, is very full-scale. The Brahms has three substantial movements, plus the cadenza. The Stravinsky has four shorter movements that add together into a very memorable concerto, for me. I've never played any piece besides the Stravinsky that starts with the same chord in all movements and diverts from there into its own individual movement. So I thought the Stravinsky was a fascinating piece, and I like the unusual structure of it and the form. I had some ideas that I want to bring across in it, and same with the Brahms. I feel lucky we were able to work it out.

Was one of the ideas in the Stravinsky that it's very similar to chamber music?

That it is; it certainly is very much like chamber music. The Brahms in its own way is as well. Brahms wrote so much chamber music, I've played some of it. The Stravinsky has a lot of things going on at once and at different times. The Brahms is a more -- I don't want to say it's more unified, because the Stravinsky is unified too -- but the Brahms, it's more consistent throughout the piece. There's sort of a long line from the very first note to the end of the third movement, to the last chord in the whole concerto. Stravinsky is more segmented, yet when you put all the segments together, it makes for a very complete picture. So the pieces feel very different to me playing them. The Stravinsky is very much like chamber music in that there are a lot of instruments that have their own individual parts, and there are a lot of different things that happen. Stravinsky is a great orchestrator, and the Brahms is the Romantic masterwork.

I'm sure Stravinsky would play his own music very differently than I play it. But for me, I love the concerto 'cause it has so many different things within it. It has a huge range of emotion. There are parts that are very dry, parts that are very witty, other sections that are extremely lyrical, and some melismatic lines in the third movement especially, some things that are very driven rhythmically and others that are quite free. One thing I like about the Stravinsky is, I can hear where he bases certain sections on Bach. There's a part that reminds me of one of the Orchestral Suites, and then he used part of the Bach Double [Concerto] as inspiration for part of the fourth movement of the concerto, you can hear where that all comes into play. And Brahms, as well, admired Bach, so that's another connecting factor between the two.

Your Brahms is not slow, bucking the trend of the past couple of decades epitomized by Perlman and Mutter. To a degree, your recording recalls Heifetz and Milstein.

Those are the recordings I've heard the most, as well, and maybe just having that in my ear, and also, Jascha Brodsky, my teacher, was 83 and good friends with, or at least very well acquainted with, those musicians, so I feel a real connection to the past, and that's the group of players that I grew up on and grew up listening to and feeling a connection to through my teacher.

So you do listen to recordings of other players.

They're mostly dead, actually.

Do you take them into account when you're forming your interpretations?

I try not to copy anything, but often there's a lot to be learned from any recording, because the person who's recording it has played it a lot and is very familiar with the piece and has developed their own ideas over time. Everyone develops separate ideas. There are certain basic traditions in some pieces that some people follow, some people break. But in the end, everyone comes up with their own take on something. With something like the Brahms, there's so many recordings. I don't know what-all I've listened to; I've listened to a lot. But as far as using recordings, I tend to listen to a lot of recordings when I'm first learning a piece, to get the feel of the whole piece, hear how it all fits together and get different ideas of where to start from, and then once I've figured out what I want to do with it, I just go from there, and I don't tend to listen to tons of recordings after a certain point. And I always try to learn the orchestral part to every concerto that I play. I get the conductor's score and I get a recording that has a clear orchestra texture to it. So then I listen to the recording and play along with it, just playing the orchestral part, so I know what-all is going on.

Have you decided what you're going to record next?

I'm going to be recording Mendelssohn [E-minor Concerto] and Shostakovich 1 in Oslo with the Oslo Philharmonic and Marek Janowski. Another combination! We're going to be recording that this coming Spring and releasing it in the Fall.

How many concertos do you have in your repertoire at this point?

Forty-something, I think 42 or 43. I try to add on about three or four concerti every year, or two to four. It depends. This year it's four, some years it's two. I play Beethoven and Brahms every year, and try to cycle through the other stuff as much as possible.

Yo-Yo Ma Interview 2000

Ran: 12/1/00 on CDNOW.com
Head: Yo-Yo Ma Bridges Musical Worlds

Yo-Yo Ma is a supremely talented cellist who has achieved crossover popularity without compromising his music principles or even standards of good taste. Fluent in the warhorses of the standard repertoire (concertos, chamber music, and solo), contemporary composers both challenging and ingratiating, and Baroque music, he's even successfully tackled such far-flung genres as tango, bluegrass, and various Asian styles. Ma's discography is approaching 50 albums, and he's won 13 Grammy awards. His popularity is such that even in this current profit-driven corporate period, Sony allows him considerable leeway.

Ma's ability to bring great music to the masses is epitomized by his upcoming appearance on the December 13 episode of the TV series The West Wing -- more than a cameo, as he'll be in several scenes -- that will find him playing Bach's Suite in G major for solo cello to probably its largest single audience ever.

The friendly, thoughtful, soft-spoken Ma spoke with CDNOW as part of the promotional effort for the latest release to feature him, Tan Dun's soundtrack to the acclaimed Ang Lee film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, discussing not only recent projects but more philosophical issues.

CDNOW: You are involved in such a wide variety of music, yet you always seem comfortable in any context.

Yo-Yo Ma: For me, the genesis of any sort of organic artistic experience is, you have to start from the inside. It doesn't matter what part of the inside, but just from the inside, because only from there can you then grow organically and perceive something. And we all know people who are always looking at something from the outside, who can't get in there. You can surround the thing that you're looking at with so many things on the outside, you never find your way in -- it's always a foreign experience. The only way to make it part of you is to actually jump in.

How about music that's more abstract? Say, 12-tone music.

Twelve-tone music is a methodology that people compose in. In one of Schoenberg's piano concertos, it's a waltz, a 12-tone waltz, so he went into it in that way. I mean, there's always a way to do it. And you always know that there're things that you don't understand, but also know that as time marches on, there's the possibility that one day you might understand. And only when I start to understand can I actually advocate for something.

When I was 15 I had just given a recital, spent a year working on it, and just the next lesson Leonard Rose says, "Here's this late Beethoven sonata, and I'm not going to tell you anything about it. You just go and work on it and play it." So I did. I thought it was beautiful, but I couldn't find my way in. It wasn't until three or four years later in college that somehow I figured out one thing about that piece, which was that there was no sort of actual tonic cadence for the longest time. And just that one thing got me into sort of, this is, "Oh so that's what he's fooling around with, that's what he's dealing with." 'Cause it's sort of like swimming around tonic-dominant, but you don't know what to grab for. So that's an abstract concept, it's the denial of something.

You studied with Leonard Rose for quite a while, starting when you were around seven?

Age of nine.

Is there anything in particular, beyond just specific techniques of playing, that you took away from that experience?

Love and patience. He was a great cellist, of course, a master, a great musician, all of that. He was so kind, he was so gentle, he was so loving. And that's what stays with you. And specific things such as, after this recital, he would say -- and later on, when we did some mentor-and-protégé talks and stuff like that -- where he would articulate and say, one of the most important parts of being a teacher is to say to a student when you have to learn to teach yourself, you've got to fly on your own. And he stayed a friend and mentor all the rest of his life, for which I'm very grateful -- but I think [of] the patience and love, and saying, "I know you can do it." I tell you, that kind of positive --you know, with high standards -- nurturing was so important. Because if he had said to me, "I think you stink. You'll never make it," I know that it would be totally devastating to me, and I probably would not have had the courage to go do a lot of things that I went and did later on because I felt supported. Someone believed in me.

Emanuel Ax went to Columbia, you went to Harvard. Did the Ivy League connection have anything to do with you guys hooking up, or perhaps on a different level, the fact that you have relate so well?

That has something to do with it. I think there are a number of factors that made us friends and made us want to work together over such a long period of time. One of them is that we were born in another country other than the United States. He was born in Lwow, which was part of the Soviet Union, Poland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire at various times, so he understands what it's like to be on the inside and on the outside of cultures. [He] then went to Winnipeg, then went to New York. I was born in Paris, my parents are Chinese, I lived in New York, now I live in Boston. So we have that kind of immigrant, newly arrived kind of background.

Manny's one of the most loyal people I've ever met, a loyal friend, and that's very important. And I think rather than the goal, the process is very important to us, how we get there is extremely important. And that probably is the most important thing to us. And the fact that we both have families, and that we've talked so much about the struggle of, you know, just touring while trying to keep some semblance of regular life, and what we do without children and all that, similar goals for family, emphasis on nurturing and education, but not kind of sitting down on our kids so much that it stifles their growth, but then a sense of humor. You know, all of those things I think help, and I think the schooling, yes. Manny actually writes very well. I don't, but I admire the fact that he was able to do that, study French at Columbia, and yeah, these things do keep us going strong.

Your involvement in the soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon presumably came about through Tan Dun. Was there any different approach because it's a soundtrack?

Well, I love Tan Dun. I love what he does and have great sympathy for it, for his music. We had worked together once before on a piece called Symphony 1997 and recorded somewhat the same ways. This was done in the studio, cello/voice alone and then afterwards he went and put it all together. Because I have sympathy for his music -- I think this only could have worked under those circumstances, I knew he's a great melodist, he's a very evocative, a very theatrical composer, and I said, "Look, you've gotta tell me, even though it's not quite written yet, what you're thinking of so that at least I can go there with you in an imaginative way."

And Ang Lee was also there, and so he was able to give his input after years of shooting, sometimes under incredibly difficult circumstances. I hadn't seen the film, saw little snippets of it, but he could give a sense of what he needed. And so in that studio on that evening, we were able to put together, hopefully, what was a form of expression that matched with what I knew of Tan Dun's work and what he was still to imagine, what was gonna be done later on, with what Ang Lee and James Schamus had been thinking of for years and what that was gonna be like. It was actually a fascinating meeting. I treasure that moment, those late hours in the night [laughs] when we were recording. And of course when I saw the film, I saw what a magnificent job they did.

Are there any particular qualities in John Corigliano's music that prompted you to commission Phantasmagoria?

I've known John forever, and the pieces he's written -- his Symphony, Violin Concerto -- and this is before Red Violin -- and also of his Dad and, you know, the New York Philharmonic. All of that stuff was always percolating. I was thinking it would be really neat to get him to write a piece. And the occasion came when there was a new auditorium that was opening at the Freer-Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian. And somehow the person who dedicated the auditorium was very much involved in music and wanted to commission a piece, and that's how it came about. I was very happy that he took that music from his opera, The Ghosts of Versailles, and kind of made an instrumental short version of that piece.

Do you think that one of the reasons that it works is that the cello is so close to the human voice and it's operatic music?

That could be one reason, but I think John is so knowledgeable on all kinds of instrumentation that it's, that, you know, he could've made anything work. I of course would like to think that it's because of the cello that it works! [laughs]

The Obscure Composer, Part 1: Enigmatic Preludes and my settings of James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach

Starting last year, I began spending more time at my piano. Often this meant playing Bach Inventions, Mendelssohn Songs Without Words, Debussy Preludes, and Mompou's Musica Callada. Sometimes it took the form of noodling, which occasionally turned into a composition. Under the spell of Mompou in particular, I began writing shorter and simpler music, entertaining myself rather than trying to be impressive to an imagined academic audience. Eventually I'd written eleven of these, which I dubbed Enigmatic Preludes and dedicated to a piano-loving (and playing) friend who was leaving NYC to teach down South.

Enigmatic_Preludes

Later in the year two friends, one half Japanese, got married and I picked a couple of translated tanka from The Tale of Genji and set them to music (voice and piano) as a small wedding gift. Most traditional Japanese poetry is very short; the tanka form consists of five lines. The emphasis, or goal, is to say something profound while using the simplest and most concise materials, and the stripped-down style I'd developed while imitating Mompou seemed a good fit.

I liked the result of my little wedding gift project so much that it inspired a lot more translated Japanese poem settings, but that's grist for another post, dedicated to that project. The reason I mention the Japanese settings is that the piano accompaniments I was writing were so simple that in many cases, though they were written for piano, they were monophonic - a single line of notes that could be played by almost any other instrument.

So when I started my next project (one night at the end of April when my wife's snoring was keeping me up), I decided to go all the way in this direction and write the accompaniment for cello instead of piano.

In the middle of last decade I'd helped a friend of a friend sort out her late father's apartment, in return for which I got to pick out many books and LPs for myself, one of which was the Faber and Faber edition of James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach, a collection of 13 poems from 1904-24. I'd started setting the last and latest-written poem, "A Prayer," in my old knotty, dissonant, thick style, but abandoned it; while going through some papers recently I found it and pondered revising it, but just plain decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

So that night when I was hiding from the snores, I picked out three of the darkest, least sentimental poems - "Bahnhofstrasse," "Alone," and "Watching the Needleboats at Saba" - noodled on the piano (basically, found some nice chord progressions and arpeggiated them), and by the following morning I had three new songs.

Alone
Bahnhofstrasse
Needle Boats

Yes, I'm so old-fashioned that I still use staff paper and ink!

A couple days later another one popped out: "She Weeps over Rahoon."

Rahoon

I thought those were all I'd set, but then one night in the middle of May I added the last and most difficult one, "Nightpiece." Getting the speech rhythms, structure, and flow right took a fair amount of revision; if you look at the sheet music you will see some evidence of meter changes, etc. because I made changes using white-out and haven't bothered making a clean copy. Hearing it in rehearsal provided important feedback for the revision.

Night Piece 1
Night Piece 2
Night Piece 3

The original idea was to have these sung by a male voice, partly because the author, Joyce, is male, partly because I thought I might give them a shot myself. But I'm very happy and fortunate to have a soprano friend, Kate Leahy (with whom I used to sing in the choir New Amsterdam Singers), who's willing to come out to Brooklyn and rehearse my songs. Earlier this year we had started out by learning my massive (and still uncompleted) cycle of Rilke's Orpheus Sonnets (in the original German), which I've been working on sporadically since 1984, but then I started revising a lot of them. So we switched over to these new pieces. They look simple, yes, but they're not easy to sing. I still like dissonance! We premiered all five Joyce songs at a party at my apartment a month ago (playing the cello part on piano). They went well, and now I'm going to record them, which I'll cover in my next post on this topic.

Philip Glass Interview 2002

Ran: 10/8/02 on CDNOW.com
Head: Philip Glass Teams with Godfrey Reggio and Yo-Yo Ma for Naqoyqatsi

Philip Glass, the most famous Minimalist, has long excelled at scoring films, most memorably Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi. Now the series becomes a trilogy with Naqoyqatsi, featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Glass discusses the unusual path to the album's creation and how he's allowing more emotion into his music in recent years.

CDNOW: Has your method of collaborating with Godfrey Reggio changed over the course of the three Qatsi films?

Philip Glass: It's changed in that the films have changed somewhat. As they've become more technical, the process of making the film, of finalizing the images, has become more complicated. Even if we start working together, which is what we do, I start writing and he starts filming or making pictures, but I'm now working faster than him, so I'm working way ahead of the picture now. Originally it was shooting in 35 and editing the old way with strips of film on the walls, stuff like that. He made this movie on an AVIT. Eighty percent of it is computerized images. So while I was writing the music, I was rarely writing to finished film. That meant that the music began to take a forward position in the sense of determining how the outcome of the combination of image and music would be in the end. In the end, they were cutting pictures to music.

One of the hallmarks of these films is the rhythm, visual and musical. So now he's doing that to your music, rather than vice versa?

It's pretty much become that, though I still work with Godfrey in terms of the whole dramaturgical treatment we work on. Our studio is here, his studio was down on White Street and Broadway, eight blocks from here, so I was there numerous times in the course of a week watching the editor, John Kane, looking at what the pictures were. Let's say we had a scene, which we call "masked man" or something like that, and I would be looking at the images he was working with, so I knew what the pictures would be and I could get a certain sense of what the flow could be. But I actually didn't see a final version of it until a few days ago when I went to the opening in Telluride when I went to the film festival. That process is a very laborious one, of creating images that way.

How did Yo-Yo Ma come to be involved?

It was a surprise that came towards the end. Sony got interested in the soundtrack, and I was speaking with Peter Gelb, who's the head of Sony Classics. I worked with Sony Classics in the '80s, I had a contract with them for about 10 years. That was with CBS, and when it became Sony, then I went over to Nonesuch and spent 10 years with them. So I have already 11 or 12 CDs with [Sony]. Peter Gelb liked the idea of doing it and suggested it would be really wonderful if Yo-Yo could play on it, which I of course immediately agreed with, it would be wonderful. A few weeks later, Yo-Yo was in town and we met and I showed him the music and he was very interested. Oddly enough, I had written a lot of solo music already for the piece. That was one of the ideas of the piece, there's a whole section at the end. That whole solo cello piece at the end was written before I met him. After that, there were some uncompleted sections that were mostly transitions, and I decided to wrote solo pieces for Yo-Yo to tie the sections together. Then I went back, and Michael Reisman, who's the conductor, we went back to the score and identified places where the solo cello could take over certain sections, so it appears now as a piece that's kind of through-composed with the cello. In fact, it came rather late, and because of the direction the music had already taken, it was easy to make that happen. At this point, the cello seems almost like a subtext of the music, it seems like almost the voice of the music.

Voice is exactly the word, because he has such a vocal quality in his tone.

That's right. There's one section towards the end where there's a woman singing, and he plays along with her and it sounds like a man and a woman. You get that feeling especially when you hear him playing two octaves apart from the woman's voice. That was a very fortunate outcome of working with Sony, which we hadn't thought about. I knew he recorded with Sony, of course, but it never occurred to me that he would be interested. But this is a man who's interested in all kinds of things, he has his Silk Road projects. He's pretty much covered the concert literature, so he's very much moving into new things to do.

One of the interesting things about him playing this work it that it makes whatever emotions there are in the work much more overt than has been the case with your other Qatsi soundtracks.

All the movies have a certain look to them, and so the music is influenced by that. In a certain way, for me, there's a very traditional relationship of the instrument to melodic writing and rhythms in this piece more than in the other pieces. The film itself is very high-tech, and I felt that the music needed to supply a bridge, or kind of a door, for people to enter into it. I was afraid that the film could be seen as rather cold and distant, the way a fabricated image might be, so my desire was to balance what could have been the coolness of the image with a very warm sound, and it's for that reason I picked a large orchestra and, eventually, Yo-Yo. So in that sense it would remind us of more traditional kinds of writing than you would hear in Powaqqatsi or Koyaanisqatsi, and that was a strategy that had to do with film. Besides that, in recent years I have been allowing a very melodic dimension and emotional dimension, I've allowed that much more than in the early music.

It's very prominent in the Fifth Symphony.

Yes, that's true, it was, and that's a recent piece. This piece and the Fifth Symphony are only two or three years apart. I think partly it's just the way people develop. If a painter starts painting on one side of the room, he ends up painting on the other side of the room. I began [with] a very abstract music, the early reductive pieces, and I ended up doing very emotional music. If I'd done that the other way, I may have gone to the more abstract music. You have to go down the line one way or another; whether you move from left to right or right to left, it really doesn't matter very much, you're going to have to move somewhere. In my case, I had begun with a very abstract music; a lot of its emotional impact came from the dynamic of the music and the instrumentation and the rhythmic power of the music. Having done that, I found at a certain point I had to try new materials to kind of keep a musical vision that would remain fresh for me.

I play the early pieces quite a lot now; I'm playing a piano concert this weekend. I'm playing the pieces I wrote 20 years ago much better now than I played them then, because I really understand them now. I didn't understand them when I wrote them. I mean, there's a part of them I didn't get, and now 20 years later I can go back to pieces like the Metamorphoses and I play them very differently than when I wrote them. You can only really start addressing these kind of questions when there's a body of work that's substantial enough and that has come into the world over a length of time that's long enough so that you can actually become aware of your own process, which is also difficult to do. In my thirties and forties I had very little idea what I was doing, though in fact it included all the kind of writing that led to Satyagraha and Koyaanisqatsi. So when I say I didn't know what I was doing, what I meant to say is what the implications of the music might have been in terms of performance and in terms of audience and in terms of development. Like everybody else, usually I'm where I am, I'm not really able to envision things beyond that very much. Of course, the thing is, once you know where it's going, you tend to go there, and then you're in that moment, and that's how it works. It's very hard not to do that.