The Muse That Sings: Composers Speak about the Creative Process

These interviews with 25 composers are distilled to short, informal yet highly focused discussions in which almost all of the composers refer in some way to the academic serialist movement that has been scaring off audiences for 50 years. McCutchan (Marcel Moyse: Voice of the Flute), who conducted the interviews between 1995 and 1998, allows the voices of the composers--most of whom live and work in the U.S. and were born between 1930 and 1960--to come through with candor. John Corigliano explains that he composed his opera Ghosts of Versailles in colored crayons because he ""wanted the color of the sound to change as a single line moved."" On the relative importance of self-doubt, Bruce Adolphe, education adviser to New York's Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, says, ""Doubt is a waste of energy when you're trying to be creative, but it's useful when you're editing the piece."" About his work habits, Steve Reich says, ""What happens in 95 percent of the pieces is that I work a lot, I trash a lot, I revise a lot""; and John Zorn, who has influenced the downtown avant-garde music scene, explains, ""The sensibility of the generation that I belong to, which is interested in world music, jazz, funk, hard-core punk, classical music... is the same one Mozart had. He made use of everything around him."" Rounding out each interview is a selected list of the composer's work. These intimate snapshots of creative artists contemplating their role and function at the end of the 20th century succeed not only in shedding light on the creative process, but in dispelling many of the negative stereotypes attached to contemporary music. (Oct.)