Do you think there are infrastructural barriers to entry for young people interested in opera or more classically-minded original composition?

Yes and no. I think it operates not on the national level, but on the local level. You’ll find that in random places there’s this one great teacher and that all it takes. It has to do with… I don’t want to say the education system or the neglect of classical music in schools, although obviously that’s happening. It’s about the person-to-person interaction that you might happen upon with a crazy choir master or an amazing piano teacher. So I’m not sure if it’s infrastructural in that broad a sense, but obviously there’s a lot of room for local orchestras, say, to be scheming to get young people, i.e. children, involved and exposed to opera and classical music.

It seems like there’s a bit of a tension between how steeped in tradition that realm of art is and how little interest young people have shown in that specific, historical form of it.

Let me interrogate the word form, because there are three different things: there’s the piece of music, there’s the performance of the piece of music, and there’s the environment in which that piece is performed. So sometimes the environment is a recording, and sometimes it’s a concert hall. In terms of things loosening up a bit, I think people are starting to think ok, it’s ok to experience Mozart in this super-super-traditional environment or, because the music is good, we can do that anywhere and it will still be good. So my job as a composer is to make the first thing, the piece, really great such that it can exist in a lot of different contexts. For example, the piece that you’re going to hear tomorrow night is called Keep in Touch and was written basically for studio performance, as a kind of album piece. Whenever we tour it, we do it in clubs, in the context of a lot of the Bedroom Community things – it can be in a rock club in Switzerland, it can be here, or it can be at Carnegie Hall. There’s a million different weird contexts for the same piece, all of which make sense because I think the piece is really strong. It’s existed in as buttoned-up a way as is possible, and as chaotic and hazy a way as is possible.

As a composer, do you think that kind of performative or environmental room for interpretation is a desirable element of a piece?

Not to say that if your music isn’t multi-contextual that it’s bad, it’s just one other possible delivery system for it. I wrote this big fuck-up opera that can’t really happen anywhere because of the ordeal, so it’s been performed maybe twice. You can’t excerpt one bit from it, it’s all just chaos. What are you gonna do? So then the next thing that you write can be this hyper-mobile sort of piece that you can do with different combinations of instruments, amplified, un-amplified. We did a version of Keep in Touch basically acoustically yesterday. That’s an example of joyful re-contextualization.

Thinking about the tripartite piece, I suppose that a live recording of a piece would freeze those three elements in time but then open up a new world of possibilities for where the recording itself is heard. At four steps removed from the formal, written expression of a piece, do you experience any consternation about where it goes once out of your hands?

I think it’s fine. That’s like the last of my problems. I love it really, that’s part of what I signed up for. Basically the only way to make music in a totally sealed environment would be to write music, entirely electronically, for instruments that you’ve built yourself. That’s one way. You let more and more air in, and it gets further from that control, but part of what’s great about what I do is the relinquishing of control. You’re right that the document is the piece – in the case of a commission, what I’m paid to deliver is just a piece of paper. Then the minute other people see it and try it out, it’s getting farther away from me – I welcome this. The reason I’m so chill with it is that I still have things that are very controlled: pieces that I write just for me to play, little sketches. I’m happy with working in a bunch of different ways. This goes back to what we were saying before: if the notes and the rhythms are really good, it can survive a lot of different environments.

What’s different, process-wise, between a commission and an entirely original piece? What sorts of inputs are you given for the former, and how do you arrive at them for the latter?

Commissions can vary. The simplest iteration is, like – the piece you just heard. The Philadelphia Orchestra was like We would like you to write this piece. We would like it to be between 10 and 15 minutes. We would like it to use this number of players because we’re going to tour it, so we would like it to fit within these other two pieces that we’ll be touring, and we would like it on this date. That’s a pretty standard orchestral commission. There’s other things that are really crazy, like We’re commissioning a series of compositions to celebrate the 500th birthday of this Italian composer, and so we’d like your piece to somehow relate to his music… and be performable by a choir of Belgian lesbians. There’s that version too. Right now, for instance, I’m writing a piece that’s 20 minutes of whatever the hell I want for mezzo-soprano and piano, due whenever. Not whenever, probably this week actually. I just did a piece for this choir that’s doing, like, texts by Shakespeare concerning sleeping.

Does it ever become overbearing? Is there a minimum amount of creative input that you require?

No, I like it. This applies to my sort of general philosophy of how much can and should function. It’s kind of like architecture, like the brief for this building [gesturing at Harpa] was probably insane. First of all, it has to be on this site. It has to have capacity for this many people, it has to have three halls of whatever size. There’s probably a million requirements totally external to the art of the thing, and yet somehow it’s still successful because of the architect. A lot of the really complicated commissions are like that: here’s this weird little space, do whatever. Another example is film scores, where you’re hired to be this dramatic guide to the process. Those have the craziest parameters. It’s really fun, because you’re under a lot of pressure and working really fast – it can feel athletic, almost, in a good way. Mostly I feel like Jabba the Hutt, whereas with a film score you get immediate feedback. With a commission, there’s still this really glacial process of actually hearing what people think about it. In that way, it’s not like architecture where people want to see the model, they want to see the renderings, they want a walkthrough. Film is much more like that, where every day you get a different set of comments back. Some are totally insane, some are really illuminating… and then for this weird Shakespeare thing they just sent me a check and said fax us the score when you’re done.

With regards to movie scores, it seems like classical music is in an odd state where it’s not entirely unpopular, per se, but that people are overwhelmingly familiar with it via the very specific vessel of action films.

If you went and asked people, you know, name five film scores, it would be super generational. If you took people maybe ten years older than me and asked them then you’d have Jaws, Star Wars, and then people a little older than that might do the big, epic ones like Lawrence of Arabia. Then you’d into Hitchcock and Psycho, probably North by Northwest, all of which would fall outside of the sort of canon that you were describing. There are other entire categories, like what I’d call thought montage, A Beautiful Mind or whatever. You know that something has resonance when you’re asked to score a film and it’s in the temp music – have you ever tried to watch a film without music, by the way? It’s the worst. So the sound editors always use the same couple of things for the temps – that thing from A Beautiful Mind, never anything with a theme so much as… gestures. You couldn’t just put, like, the Harry Potter theme over your movie, you know? It’s iconic for a reason. I think that’s a good example, by the way, of something outside of the really bombastic or maudlin action stuff. But it’s definitely true that when most people listen to traditional, classical instrumentation it’s coming by way of a film score. I think that’s ok. We’re at a bit of a weird moment with it, like take the Boston Symphony Orchestra: those people play a lot of modernist music, and the contemporary music that they do play has a reputation for being a bit thorny and weird. But because John Williams was there for so long, they also play a ton of John Williams. It’s actually pretty amazing, because at their music festival it’ll be film night and then a wacky new piece and then, like, Scheherazade the next night. And the people playing those things can just do it all. In New York especially you see people who play really freaky string quartet whatever all day and then at night they’re in the pit for Phantom. And they don’t feel weird about that, because mama’s gotta eat.

Is there something inherent to classical music that has brought about the commission model as opposed to doing trade in recordings?

The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive – it’s mostly just how you’re paying for it. If money weren’t the question, it would be fine to start things as recordings. I sort of do that, but it’s confusingly expensive. It’s nice to do a bit of both – Bedroom Community does a fair amount of that, or a lot of composers have close relationships with particular ensembles. There’s an Irish composer, Donnacha Dennehy who does a lot of commissions that are recorded very quickly after being made so that it’s closer to delivery as a single package. So he’s got a foot on either side of that commissioning landscape. One piece of advice that I give to young people is to always write for your friends, and to do so while you’re young. As soon as you get old, either your friends are gonna get too fancy to want to fuck with you or you’re gonna be too busy. I still write pieces for my friend Nadia all the time where no money changes hands. Also for composers, there’s no way to guarantee that the thing that you want to have happen is gonna get commissioned. Opera is a great example – there’s no real way to write an opera if you don’t know where it’s going to happen. That’s a lot of work potentially going into a void. But if you happen to know an oboe player, take a month and write fifty pieces for oboe.

I imagine that a lot of works like that, even if they go unheard for the time being, can be useful later on.

That’s actually what happened to me – out of Juilliard, I entered every competition that I could find and lost them all. At that same time, I was writing a ton of stuff for Nadia, a ton of stuff for other friends who believed in the work. I started working with Valgeir, and it was as a result of the prior stuff being acceptable that I suddenly had a portfolio people cared about. Interestingly, the biggest commission that I had, from the Metropolitan Opera, was a result of them coming to a concert of almost entirely un-commissioned music that a friend of mine had just assembled from his friends.

After your initial breaking-through period, how did you end up involved with Bedroom Community?

That was around the same time, actually. This is maybe 2006 – I graduated in 2005. Bedroom Community happened very organically, since Valgeir was in New York working with Bjork. We were in the same studio space and just chatting, and he asked me what my music sounded like. I gave him the shittiest recording, which at that time was the best thing I had – at Juilliard, when you had a piece played, they handed you a fucking cassette tape. By that time maybe it was a CD, but it was like one microphone dead center on the stage. So it was horrible, and he said that we needed to get to Iceland to record these like actual songs. At the same time, he had all this music that didn’t really have a home at any particular label, while Ben Frost had mostly been self-releasing and just moved from Australia. It just made sense to make it happen, with Valgeir being the brilliant driving force. We had this core group, and now it’s metastasized into this whole living organism.

Assuming that you feel relatively capable of composing from anywhere, what keeps you in New York?

My boyfriend and my dog [laughs]. I love New York. New York chills me out. I like the whole energy of the place, I like being able to eat at all times. I like that people are from everywhere there. I like the concert hall and the opera, all of that stuff. It has become the case in recent years that I spend more time out of the country than I do in. For many years it was here that I was the most, but now it’s London a lot. It’s interesting that you say you can write from anywhere – it’s kind of true. I built this whole system for myself involving little tiny keyboards and all this shit that I can basically do from a plane, but it doesn’t really work for large orchestral music or anything complicated. I still do this crazy thing where if I’m anywhere for a long time I bring this custom, like, sarcophagus in which a desktop Mac can go. It’s like a tombstone, and then wherever you end up you can rent a MIDI keyboard and have an instant office. That makes me happy enough, but by week three I’m absolutely desperate for someone to send me some Chinese food.

Do you find meaningful differences in your output based on where you are?

Not really, at least because the pieces tend to span more time than I spend in any one place. I’m writing a piece now that I started a year ago, so the environment doesn’t really change it that much. I do find that being in one of the places that I feel most comfortable – here, London, or New York – makes me feel more comfortable, and that I write more fluently and quickly than, say, in some hotel room in Krakow. A lot of it has to do with your mental hygiene. For me, orchestrating something after writing calls for an Airbnb somewhere really extreme. I don’t think it would change what you do, it just changes your ability to do it. It’s like training for cross country at altitude, so you just have to work a little bit harder. When I was orchestrating my first opera, I went to Cambodia for a couple weeks, which was so fabulous – mainly because that was like the only thing I had to do. I set it up so it was a couple weeks of really extreme country, and then another week of completely outrageous luxury. When I’m orchestrating this next opera, which will be in February sometime, I want a slightly fascistic concrete hut somewhere northern – I just look at brutalist architecture porn on Twitter like are you for rent? You know how people have a sweet tooth, or want to go to the beach? That sounds like ass-crack sweat 24/7. There’s a scheme afoot by which I’ll go to actual Antarctica in like two years’ time, which I’m really excited for. It sounds so cold.