A
residential master plan for the College, proposing that eight houses be created
on campus, has been prepared by Sasaki Associates, a nationally-known planning
firm.
The
plan, which was presented at campus meetings in late October, calls for the
renovation of Sigma Phi, Psi Upsilon, Chi Psi, and North and South Colleges,
and the construction of a new house adjacent to Richmond House (North and South
would have two houses each). All students would be assigned randomly to
membership in one of the houses, and between 285 and 316 students would
actually live in the eight houses.
Creation
of a house system is a key part of The Plan for Union, a strategic plan that
was approved by the Board of Trustees last spring. The plan envisions a house
system designed to give every student access to a social group and to good social and residential space. All
houses will be expected to contribute intellectual, cultural, and social events to the campus; participate in orienting new
students; sponsor community service
projects; and field teams for intramural competition.
The
Sasaki proposal recommends that Greek and theme groups remain in their current
locations except those displaced by the house system, which would move to Fox, Davidson,
Webster, and College Park.
The
Sasaki firm analyzed all existing residential space and based its house system
recommendation on four criteria – architecturally-embracing character, large
enough to accommodate a “critical mass” membership, small enough to allow the
house membership to function as a recognizable entity, and appropriate
co-curricular space to enhance the living/learning environment.
The
firm looked at options for improving the College's existing residence halls and
concluded that Fox, Davidson, West, and Richmond should be renovated to create
more singles and more social space. The improvements would reduce the capacity
of those buildings, however, and the firm recommended that a new residence hall
be built to continue to meet the College's goal of providing on-campus housing
for 1,700 students (the new residence hall also would be located near
Richmond).
The
Sasaki firm compared Union's residential capacity to seven other colleges
(Amherst, Bowdoin, Colgate, Hamilton, St. Lawrence, Trinity, and Williams) and
concluded that, other than the new residential hall to replace beds lost to
renovations, no additional capacity is needed for Union to be considered “fully
residential.”
The
consultant recommended that work on the house
system, including renovations and the construction of a new house,
should begin this summer. The house
system is scheduled to take effect in
the fall of 2004.
For
five days last fall, seven Tibetan Buddhist monks presented a program of
traditional music, art, dance, philosophy, and religion at the College.
The
highlight of their visit was the construction of a colorful sand mandala of
compassion in the Nott Memorial, a meticulous process that took three days and
ended in traditional fashion with the dismantling of the mandala.
The
monks were from the Gaden Jangtse monastery in India, and their visit to the
United States combined teaching about the culture and religion of Tibet with
raising money to build a new prayer hall for their overcrowded monastery. The
original monastery was established in 1409 but was destroyed by the invading
Chinese army. The monastery-in-exile was built in India in 1969 for 300 monks;
it now houses 3,000 monks.
The
monks spent about ten months in the United States, visiting colleges and
temples, and their visit to Union attracted hundreds of students – from the
College as well as local schools – and residents of the area. Clearly, all were
enthralled with the mandala.
The
monks, dressed in maroon and saffron robes, worked on a board placed in the
center of the Nott. Sitting on cushions, they leaned over so their faces were
only inches from the mandala. They poured colored sand using metal funnels
called chak phu, scooping up sand in one funnel and then rubbing the other
against its grated surface so the sand would flow onto the board. As visitors
crowded around to watch, the only sound was the clicking of the chak phu. Finally,
in keeping with the belief that in life there is a beginning, a middle, and an
end to everything, they dismantled the mandala in a ceremony that featured lama
dances. Grains of sand were given to each person watching the ceremony, with
the remainder released into the nearby Mohawk River.
Peter
Heinegg, longtime professor of English, says he can't think of a time when
there has been more interest in religious studies.
“Everyone
has an opinion about the fundamental human phenomenon known as religion – regardless
of whether they're alienated, passionate, or vaguely curious,” he says. “So why
not study it?”
Why
not, indeed. This year the College created an interdisciplinary Religious
Studies minor concentration, under Heinegg's direction.
He
credits Linda Patrik, of the philosophy department, as “the guiding spirit”
behind the program. Says she, “It is meant to open students up to world
religions and different ways of
thinking.”
Adds
Heinegg, “We're interested in exploring why people do the things they do. Religious
studies seem to cover every human behavior.”
One
impetus for the new program is a growing cultural diversity at the College,
which has brought more Muslims and Hindus to campus – and with that, an
awareness of how little most Westerners know about these cultures.
Heinegg
had his own eyes opened when he traveled to India last summer to teach Western
literature and classics, through a Union faculty exchange program. He suddenly
realized “how gigantic my ignorance of Hinduism was.”
“Most Hindus,” he explains, “don't study their religion – it's
part of their lives. This is a totally religious culture about which we know
almost nothing. Much religion is informally transmitted – through the family
rather than through studies. In the West, by contrast, we're more intellectual,
and religion is put out there and studied; often it's not something we get from
our parents.”
The
experience has spurred him to “hit the books hard.” Although he says he'll
never teach Hinduism, he is finding how much “it feeds into other things.
Hinduism is the matrix from which Buddhism arises.”
Union's
Religious Studies program was long in getting started. The program was approved
about fifteen years ago, but was never funded. “A minority were afraid it would
be proselytizing and propaganda, and would compromise the secular tradition of
Union College,” says Heinegg.
The
flame was rekindled when Patrik brought together a cluster of like-minded
friends and colleagues. “We began meeting at the turn of the millennium, and
the program began to take shape,” says Patrik. The group included Professors
Sigrid Kellenter (German), Steve Sargent (history), Diane McMullen (music),
Scott Scullion (classics), Peter Heinegg, Brad Lewis (economics), Mohammed Mafi
(civil engineering), and Seth Greenberg (psychology). Two of the college
chaplains – Viki Brooks-McDonald and George Forshey – also came. And a number
of other people expressed interest.”
The
group looked at courses already in the catalog to see if the raw materials for
a concentration existed and found close to twenty courses that fit. The
six-course minor is designed to enable students to gather insights from
philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and literature. The
minor consists of three core courses and any three other courses carrying
religious studies credit, one of which may be an independent study. Core
courses are Eastern philosophy (taught by Patrik), Religion in the Pagan World
(Scullion), Early History of the Jews (Steve Berk of history), The World of the
Bible (Heinegg), and Anthropology of Religion (Steve Leavitt of anthropology).
Other courses with Religious Studies credit are offered through the departments
of anthropology, English, history, performing arts, philosophy, and sociology.
A new
course has just been approved for the
spring term. Called “Seminar in the Psychology of Religion,” the course covers
such topics as theories of why people become religious and the question of
whether science and religion are compatible.
“We
have a solid background in Jewish and Christian history and culture, and a
modest opportunity to do Asian religion,” says Patrik. “Unfortunately, we have
no one on the faculty who is trained to teach Islam. We hope to fill in this
gap. We are also considering linking up with another small college, perhaps
making use of distance learning technology.”
Independent
study is the one truly new part of the program – the core faculty are willing
to create individual studies to suit the needs of the students. A number of
students have done their theses on relevant topics all along, such as the
student who wrote about the figure of Mary from a feminist perspective.
“We see
this as a start – a very limited attempt to meet a very large need,” Heinegg
says. “Although there's no special building, there's no sign on the door, no
champagne celebration, we are open for business.”
“With
all that has happened since the recent terrorist tragedies, it's clear that we
understand very little about Islam and the worldviews of people who criticize
us,” says Patrik. “My hope is that Union will continue to be a union of all
religions, and that this generation of students will know something about newer
religions that have been coming to these shores.”
It's
still early to determine how much interest there is among the students, but Heinegg
is optimistic. “Students are very curious about religion's role in their lives
and their parents lives – many would like to learn more. English literature is
unintelligible without the Bible.”
I sat
down to write this column just as the first snow of the season covered the
campus, putting an end to a fall where the warmth and the sun were daily
sources of comfort at a time when our country – and our college – were shaken
by world events.
Yet, as
I reflected on the fall term, I quickly saw that we had more – far more – to
celebrate than the weather. The vitality of our college is remarkable, and
events both large and small contributed to its continuing strength.
There
was, for example, the gift of more than
$3 million from an old and cherished friend, Gordon Gould '41, the
inventor of the laser.
More of
you than ever before returned to campus for Homecoming and Family Weekend – 2,000
alumni, parents, family, and friends – and more than 5,000 members of the Union
family participated during the year in nearly seventy alumni events.
We
added a second honors program, and sophomores who qualify can submit a proposal
for an organizing theme minor, carry an extra course, and receive $1,000 to
support a research project.
Both
our admissions and fundraising numbers are running ahead of last year – admissions
reports a twenty percent increase in applications at year's end, and our annual
fund is up sixteen percent in dollars and nearly twenty-three percent in the
number of donors.
Two
faculty members – Tom Werner of chemistry and Ed Pavlic of English – received
national recognition, we learned that our geology department was
ranked fourth in geoscience research at national liberal arts colleges, and we
selected three students for our pioneering term abroad in Vietnam.
We
improved our advising program, with more than ninety percent of first-year
undeclared majors being advised by their first-term instructors, while all first-year declared majors are being
advised by a member of the department of the major or by one of their fall term teachers.
We
received national attention for our exhibition
in the Mandeville Gallery about William Henry Seward of the Class of
1820. His distinguished political
career, his unwavering fight against slavery, and his counsel to President
Lincoln reveal a man who should be
remembered for more than simply the
purchase of Alaska. We received the largest federal legislative grant for any
organization in New York State, with the funds earmarked for our continuing
efforts in the Seward area.
We
completed the fundraising for stands to replace those on Bailey Field (those of
you who have “received” splinters over the years will be particularly
appreciative).
The MVP
headquarters in downtown Schenectady opened for business, and ground was broken
for the new regional headquarters of the state Department of Transportation – two encouraging signs
for the revival of the city. With our shuttle now taking students downtown – and
with several local businesses agreeing to recognize our student ID cards for
purchases in their shops – we continue to increase the links between campus and
community.
We
welcomed an array of speakers and presenters, from Tibetan monks to NASA astronaut
Bonnie Dunbar.
We saw
a young alumna and a student – Loralynne Krobetzky '00 and Mike Welch '02 – run
for local political office. They may have been unsuccessful as far as votes
were concerned, but they were a great success at raising issues too often ignored
by politicians.
We have
hired Tom McEvoy, director of housing at Williams, to implement the House
System.
We
created a website, called “AboutU,” that lets every alumnus receive biweekly
e-mail with news from Union. In the aftermath of September 11,
we also created a website bulletin board where thousands of alumni and friends
checked in to indicate that they were okay with messages of reassurance and
hope.
And, as
I have visited alumni groups across the country, I have talked with hundreds of
men and women of differing ages and representing a great variety of professional and business
interests – all gathering to renew their ties to a common college memory. We
are a college on the move, and the
efforts of you and your fellow alums will continue that forward movement.
“Composing certainly isn't a matter of dictation,” says Hilary Tann. “Stravinsky said he was the vessel through which The Rite of Spring passed, but I haven't had the experience of having a piece come to me that directly.”
Tann looks off into the distance. “In fact, my metaphor is more like walking along a moor and seeing far away something like a will-o'-the-wisp, turning to look at it, and finding that it has disappeared. And then being very still, listening hard, and then seeing it gradually take form. Wittgenstein said the quality of a philosophical thought is like a melody that one recalls but cannot yet whistle. For me, composition, at first, is like that thought which is not
whistleable, yet it has enough memorable shape that it becomes the growth idea for the piece.”
She
elaborates: “Musical ideas appear to me at that distant region, and then have
to be reeled in. Once the idea is shaped – once it's close enough that it can
bear my company – it becomes more like a character in a mystery play. That
character will speak with some degree of eloquence, and another character will
be able to interact with it, will sometimes create friction with it, sometimes
be in harmony with it. Then I really know the piece is under way. That's when I
have to keep working – I don't want to teach, or even bathe! Because the characters
are so loud and so present, and when I have to be away from them, I'm troubled,
and I assume that they are, too.”
Tann,
professor of music and chair of the Performing Arts Department, composes in a
quiet room at the back of her solar house, which sits on three acres of land in
apple orchard country. “I do not have a computer there, and I do not even mark
papers there. It is the place where I write. I notice that when I leave my
house, Anna [her collie] goes in there to lie down, because obviously the room
has a very good sense about it,” she laughs.
She
speaks of the process of composing Fanfare for a River, a millennium commission
for the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra: “They asked me to write a four-minute
piece for full orchestra, for their first concert of the 2001 season. Although
I wasn't that keen on celebrating January 1, 2001, I saw a quotation on the
walkway by the Tennessee River, where it flows past Knoxville, from Tennessee
historian Wilma Dykeman, which says, 'Like a river flowing, past merges with
present to become our future.' It seemed to me that the passage from one
millennium to another was like people standing on the bank of a river, watching
the river flow. The piece has fanfare calls – the brass call to each other
across the banks (in the balcony and on the sides of the stage); the strings
and woodwinds have flowing, river-like figures; and there's a kind of upbeat
sense-of-expectation theme.”
That
was enough imagery to work with, to go from seeing to hearing it. “I seem to
have some sort of synaesthetic sense, so that the images suggest sounds, and
then I bounce back and forth from the image to the sound.”
How can
she hear a sequence that doesn't exist in the real world? As she points out,
“Well, the Beethoven symphony you remember doesn't exist in the real world. The
symphony in your mind is a series of brain synapses that gives you the sense of
the flow of that symphony. Even when you sing the melody, essentially you're
singing what's in the foreground, in a landscape that is the Beethoven
symphony. You hear more deeply than the melody you're singing – you hear the
landscape – the chords, the embellishments, the textures, and the different
sound qualities. When I'm composing an orchestral piece, I hear the foreground,
but I also have a pretty clear sense of what kind of landscape – how much air,
how much earth, how much rock – is behind the image I'm working with.”
Her
music has titles that evoke this nature imagery: Water's Edge; Adirondack
Light; With the Heather and Small Birds; Of Erthe and Air; Here, the Cliffs;
Fanfare for a River.
Any
additional sources of inspiration? “My
Welsh heritage and an interest in the music of Japan.” Tann was born in South
Wales, and she says she can't help but be influenced by the qualities of the
Welsh landscape, although she's lived in the U.S. since 1980.
How did
the Japanese influence come about? “On a term abroad to Japan, I attended a
concert of Japanese music, without knowing much about it, and I heard one piece
for shakuhachi [Japanese vertical bamboo flute]. It was unlike any music I'd
ever heard. Its lines were clear, the textures were amazingly different. It
seemed to speak directly to me.” Tann then learned to play the shakuhachi
herself. And she got interested in Japanese culture “through the musical
literature (Honkyoku) of the mendicant monks who walked the length and breadth
of Japan, looking for the single sound that would enlighten the world.” In a
way, perhaps, she is like these monks, “except that the one sound that would
enlighten the world might in fact be the absence of sound at a certain moment
in a piece. And that's fascinating to me.”
Gamelan
music and the music of India also have an impact on her work: “I'm a little
uncomfortable with the concepts 'theirs' and 'ours' when we speak of music of
other cultures. In the same way that I prefer to think of myself as a world citizen, I hope that increasingly,
the world's listeners will become listeners of world music – and that
theirs/ours distinctions will gradually break down.”
Tann works
with images familiar to her and encourages her composition students to do the
same. Last year, one of her students, Sophia Mazo, wrote a piece called
Memories of Europe. Comments Tann, “Her recollection of the clip-clopping of
horses in Belgium, her sense of a Viennese waltz, pro- pelled the piece. She
drew from her inspiration, and she wrote a very good piece. Incidentally, when
she was asked why she decided to go on to study medicine and not music, she
said, 'Music is more difficult!'
“Some
students think if they just do the right things, inspiration will hit fully
fledged, and all they will have to do is receive dictation from the Muse. I can
see how it would be attractive to people to believe that composing might come
easily. But in talking with composers, and looking at manuscripts, it's very
clear to me that composition is a long process, with a great deal of craft
involved, and that sensing the musical content of a given idea takes the best
part of a lifetime.”
What is
she working on now? “Because I've never done a piece suitable for
college/community/youth orchestra, and three orchestras had asked me for a
piece, I decided to make it the same piece. So the Saratoga Springs Youth
Orchestra, the University of Wisconsin at River Falls college orchestra, and
the community orchestra in Cedar Springs, Utah, are combining for the
commission. It's been a challenge, because I usually change tempos frequently
and use extended registers, and I like
writing a lot of notes! It's a three-movement piece called Sarsen – a sarsen is
a rock that stands alone, like a Roman standing stone or menhir. The first rock
(I'm writing rock music, obviously!) is an erratic from the Adirondacks; the
second is the so-called Bat Stone from the garden of the master of the nets in Suzhou,
China. This stone, which is hollowed-out lava, is the slow movement, which I
just finished. The third is one of the Avebury standing stones in England.
Although I have yet to do this movement, I'm looking for something that
suggests a ritual, a chantlike opening, and this large object erected on a
windswept plain. The idea of coming into a huge mass of sound is very exciting.
I can't wait to get to it!
“Once I
get those first ideas down, get the shape of the piece, I'll write out in
pencil the four-stave partial score. By this time, I'll know the journey, and
then I'll do a full pencil score. Then I'll go to the computer, and since I
can't see the full page at once, at that point I'm pretty much transcribing.
The press takes over from there [Oxford
University Press, for which Tann is one of four U.S. house composers].
If the commission is big enough, someone helps me with these steps, because I
still have to do parts as well.”
How
does Tann know when a piece is finished? “Stravinsky said that pieces are never
completed; they're only abandoned. I think that's true. I usually abandon
pieces shortly before or on deadline,” she admits. “I occasionally change tempo
markings after a performance. I notice that my internal time is different from
external time. I am apparently quite happy to hear things relatively slowly, but I think it's quite
difficult these days for people to listen in the abstract, and I suspect things
need to be livelier in general.”
Is her
composing process scheduled along with everything else? In a sense, says Tann:
“Usually I do a chamber piece in the winter break and then, in the summer, a
big orchestra piece. But,” she adds, “you can't turn the process on and off at
will once you're cooking.”
Tann
really felt at home in the U.S. when she was commissioned to write a piece for
the centennial of Adirondack State Park. “The lives of the men in the logging
community paralleled the lives of the men in the coal mines in Wales; another
parallel is the way the land was desecrated and then renewed. For this piece,
called Adirondack Light, I found some reasonably indigenous songs from the
Adirondacks, and I incorporated these.”
Inspiration
also came from a stone containing labradorite: “When you turn it,” she
explains, “it has an opalescence; its gray side resembles the surface of an
ice-covered river, and its blue side looks like the summer river with the sun
reflecting on the water. The gray light draws you in, suggesting an intimate
world, and the iridescent light suggets brighter colors. This small stone
resulted in a twenty-minute piece.”
Tann
began composing at the age of six and today composes only on commission. She
holds degrees in composition from the University of Wales at Cardiff and
Princeton University, where she earned her Ph.D. On the Union faculty since
1980, her compositions for chorus, chamber ensemble, and full orchestra have
received multiple performances, especially in the U.S. and U.K. She also
founded and conducted (for fifteen years) the Union College Chamber Orchestra.
How
does she teach composition? “I try to teach lack of fear when confronted with
an idea, and then let the idea teach the student composer.” But how can lack of
fear be taught? “By cracking a lot of jokes! By showing I'm not fearful, by
explaining that surely, the most pernicious myth is that writing music is easy.
“Jim
Randall, my adviser at Princeton,
talked of the art of composing as 'taking the obvious and making it
incandescent.' My shakuhachi teacher spoke of 'giving each sound its dignity.'
And from the grafitti in the hallway of Bard College, where I once taught:
'Music is a language, so speak the truth!' It's easier to compose when one
keeps these sorts of ideas in mind.”
Tim Olsen
There
doesn't seem to be music that turns him off.
“I
enjoy all music if it's performed well,
whatever each music's job,” says Tim Olsen. “The great blues can make me sad or
happy or make me want to tap my foot; great classical music can inspire me. I
love good country music and bluegrass, too.
“I
listen with an ear to how I can talk
about it in my class, or how I can arrange it for Jazz Ensemble or church
choir. I always have a piece of paper with me, and I'm always writing things
down.”
Like
Jerry Seinfeld, Olsen's whole life is material. “I would say that everything I
hear will eventually be digested and spat out in some format. I use whatever
I'm listening to – even talk radio – to bring up some point about popular
culture, or the history of the recording industry, or why people hate rap
music, or why so much music is three
minutes long (the 78 rpm record lasted only three minutes). And since my
classes are designed mainly for nonmusicians, I'm happy to talk in nontechnical
terms.”
He says
he gets involved “in a lot of strange projects, a lot of arranging (taking
previously written music and fitting it to a particular circumstance and a
particular ensemble). I do work for the Union College Jazz Ensemble. I also
direct a church choir, where I extract music from larger works or do
arrangements of pieces that I want to do in my own style or suit a particular
church season.”
Olsen
writes jazz “and what you'd call contemporary classical” – original works, some
for jazz groups, some for choral groups, some for larger ensembles. A piece
that was premiered at the November 4 “Mysterious Mountains” concert at Union
was commissioned by the Association for Preservation of the Adirondacks as a
kind of fanfare – “a four-minute piece for brass ensemble plus percussion –
something to open the program that reflects the spirit of the Adirondacks.”
How did
this piece come about? “First, I had some really abstract ideas, but those
didn't fly. Then, I happened to hear a radio concert from Tanglewood of
Copland's Appalachian Spring, and I thought, maybe I'll go with a more populist
theme, a bright sound. So I took a few ideas, came up with a main theme that
sounds like a song a logging man might have sung 100 years ago, and stuck it
among the brass players.
“I knew
I was writing for four trumpets, four French horns, two trombones, and a tuba,
and I wanted some brilliant-sounding chords and some dark-sounding chords, so I
experimented, seeing how the chords would fit, and I experimented with musical
textures, distributing them among the instruments.”
Pianist,
trumpet player, composer, and teacher, Olsen is nothing if not eclectic. He
studied music composition at Yale, arrived at Union as a visiting faculty
member in 1994, and is now assistant professor and director of the Jazz
Ensemble, which has performed at venues such as the Van Dyck in Schenectady's
Stockade and the Discover Jazz Festival in Burlington, Vermont. On a recent
sabbatical, he studied folk music and dance in Cuba to get new perspectives on
rhythm. He has also composed music for electronic works, and sound and music
design for film, video, and theater soundtracks.
Olsen
says music is what he does all day long. “Fortunately, it's my vocation, and
it's also my avocation. It's really hard to separate what I do recreationally
from what I do academically.”
Asked
to describe his composing process, Olsen says,
“I typically let things incubate in my head for a long time. I may fiddle around with the piano, or
nowadays, sometimes I bypass the pencil and paper and go right to the computer.
One advantage is it will play back what I input into it, and I can get a sense
of what it will sound like, although
the computer can't simulate certain
things.
“When
Hilary is writing music, she doesn't want to hear any other music – she wants
to focus on the music in her head. I'm the complete opposite; I like having all
these other musical thoughts around, because I read through and discard them
and hopefully think about what's going on, so that when I finally sit down
quietly and shut everything out, I can put it all together. I'm a last-minute
kind of guy, anyway. I tend to do things when there's a deadline, and then, at
4:59 at the post office, there I am.
“A
couple of years ago, when Hilary was on a term abroad in China, I got to run
the orchestra. That was the best. At two or three in the afternoon, I'd be
frantically cranking out music for their practice four hours later. So I could
hear it played the same day, and I could see if I liked it or if I needed to go
back to the drawing board.”
For
Olsen, being on the Union faculty is an unparalleled opportunity for someone
with his broad interests. “If I were at
a large music conservatory, I might be fifteenth on the list. Here, it seemed natural for me to take over the
orchestra. I ended up doing arrangements of Duke Ellington music that featured
soloists from the Jazz Ensemble, so it was a way to merge the two ensembles.
That was fun. In the jazz world, you don't often get the opportunity to write
for strings, so it was great to have this captive audience of forty string
players on stage and be able to experiment with some musical ideas for them.”
He gets
to teach some varied coursework as well. “Hilary, as department chair, is very
flexible in letting me put together classes like the 'History of Jazz,' 'Music
of Latin America,' and 'Music of Black America,' which takes a wide view of rap
and gospel and spirituals and rhythm and blues.”
He
finds his arranging skills come in handy on campus. “In the Jazz Ensemble, if
we have a violin and vibes, three flutes, and five percussionists, I can't go
to the store and order music for such an ensemble. And for the Halloween
concert, someone asked to do Edgar Winter's 'Frankenstein' – something you
can't find in any catalog, so I put together an arrangement.” Olsen isn't
interested in playing the standards that everybody else plays. “We also did
some Bach and 'Oye Como Va' and some jazz classics, like 'In the Mood'. The
students love the music, they have the vocabulary, they know how it goes, and
they never got to play it before.”
This
winter, Olsen is in charge of the faculty concert series. “We're having a jazz
festival the last weekend in January, and I'm praying it doesn't snow. Since I
hang out with a lot of musicians, and since I can't always have them as guests
in my class, I decided I'd drag them all in here. Lee Shaw [a top pianist in
the area] will play, and a Boston band called Dead Cat Bounce [featuring Matt
Steckler, son of faculty member Charles Steckler], and James Chirillo, a great
swing guitarist from New York City. I want a lot of jazz listeners to have this
weekend in a place that's very reasonable.” Not surprisingly, he is also
writing some arrangements for the event.
Olsen,
who improvises extensively, doesn't see it as a mysterious process. “People
think that improvising is coming up with something based on nothing but what's
right there, but secretly, it's everything you've ever heard. Like when you're
stuck in a situation that you've never been in before – say, you get kidnapped
and you find yourself in the bus station in Chicago and you've never been there
before – you can improvise your way out of that. You'll use the words you know,
but you'll use new combinations and contexts, improvising in whatever language
you think is appropriate to the situation.”
He
thinks of working with his church choir and creating new music for them “my
research.” For the jazz Sunday there, he brings in people from the Jazz
Ensemble. “We pick different hymns; sometimes we do Duke Ellington and gospel
music. So my Union work and my jazz work overlap.” He has now been commissioned
to write a cantata for the choir.
The source of his musical inspiration? “Often
it's music I want to reflect on or put my own twist on. For example, from the
'When I Am Laid' aria from Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, I took the bass
line and melody and turned it into a piece for string orchestra. The
passacaglia theme was the raw material, but the variations I put on top were
different. Because we're used to music in terms of fours, five-measure phrases
don't fit and things kind of overlap. I
thought that was an interesting thing to exploit. I also had to pitch the music to the Danish amateur
orchestra I was writing for.”
Composers
or musicians who've influenced him? “Gil Evans, a famous arranger who worked
with Miles Davis back in the forties and fifties – he did 'Porgy and Bess' and
'Sketches of Spain' with Miles Davis – his sounds are very interesting. And I
had a chance to study a bit with Louis Andriessen, who writes classical music
in a very interesting way.”
How
does Olsen know when a composition is finished? “Well, it just feels done.
Oftentimes, I'll sketch out the form, and there's a climax and then it kinds of
fades away, or it ends with a bang. ”
When
Olsen's eighteen-year-old twin sons come home, that's another source of
material. “They bring along a binder full of CDs and I get to hear all kinds of
stuff. They tell me I've got to listen to Doctor Dre or Eminem, or whatever.”
Going
to concerts – classical or pop – isn't Olsen's thing, although he does look at
MTV and the other cable channels to see what's going on. “I'm reluctant to buy
a lot of pop music for my classes because what I teach today in American music
is different from what I taught in 1994, when I first came here. A lot of music
has dropped off the map. A few artists, like Madonna, are still vibrant, but I
tend to sit back and wait for history to tell me whether something is worth
listening to over and over. I'm not certain what year I'm up to,” he jokes, “I
know I'm beyond the Beatles – probably
somewhere in the eighties!”
Olsen
began composing early. “When I was a kid, I used to take notebook paper and
draw in staff lines.” He grew up in the school band tradition: “I played
trumpet, and in junior high school, I started playing in the jazz ensemble. The
band director gave us music paper one day and said, 'Now you're going to write
a twelve-bar blues!' When I was sixteen, I got to direct my high school band in
a clarinet concerto I wrote for a friend. Since then, I've loved standing in
front of a group and directing music whether it's my own or someone else's.”
How is
music different from other art forms? “When you paint a painting, it's there to
see, but when you write music, it doesn't happen until someone plays it. So
when I put the music out on the music stands and it gets played, most of the
time I'm happily surprised. And I'm happy that a lot of what I do touches a lot
of everyday, average people. I love to write music that does everything I want
it to, but at the same time, I want to move the audience somehow.”
