Customer Reviews

Trackings: Composers Speak With Richard Dufallo

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An enjoyable and thoroughly entertaining compendium of the author's informal conversations with contemporary composers, dating from the mid-1980's. Dufallo is extremely familiar with the works and lives of all those interviewed, endeavors to understand the composers on their own terms, and is keenly interested in their responses.

Unfortunately, the quality of the interviews is scattershot: many of the conversations took place in odd moments during festivals, an hour prior to world premieres, in hotel rooms, etc. etc. At times you sense that the interviewer and/or his subject were terribly jet-lagged.

Still, for anyone interested in hearing some of the most brilliant postwar composers speak about their lives, works, and contemporaries, TRACKINGS is certainly worthwhile. Boulez, Cage, Copland, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Stockhausen, Xenakis: more than two dozen extraordinary, dissonant voices in total. Enjoy!

I reread this after many years and it still has many useful insights,thought processes expounded,performative experiences, how to write music, and rehearse it,how to travel in some instances,all this on the primary composers of modernity and post-modernity.
Dufallo's hook into all these conversations stems from his conducting of their works, some situation where he was engaged, but he also studied with for example with Boulez in Basel, composition, relating how Pierre would first analyze a work before it was conceived for the problems of conducting.
The late Earle Brown expounds on the influence of Pollock and Calder in trying to create a similar situation in music, not improvisation so much as a looser conception through graphic notation and instruction. Having the right conductor helps as well someone willing to take the chances and not afraid of the performative "freedoms" and explaining this to musicians who mostly would simply rather just play.
I liked the conversation with Bernard Rands,and I've heard very little of his music, but I feel I know his work more; this dialogue was more the "workshop" how he worked, what he got out of whomever, Berio was his teacher mentor.
Darmstadt seminars seem to be an issue here who was there when and how, and it did produce more than enough premieres of the new. Dufallo's interesting question he places in the proceedings here is what is you DNA, your signature, where is it, and where is it found. The answer is that everyone seemed to have one as Stockhausen and Kagel but it was rather opaque on where it could have come from.We learn also who are have been good teachers, not all sorry to say,some are merely guidance counselors,finding places, venues for performance to occur. We also learn that composers really work together on the same pieces, conceptions, influenced by the "Other", another persona, but for example Schoenberg could not have written Boulez's "structure" for two pianos, nor could Berio have written "Aura" by Maderna. The crossings is perhaps interesting, to see where creative breaks, and another voice begins. There is much in terms of places and events, concerts, much documentary facts herein, and still better a "read" than a biography on the personas herein.