A Conversation with Paul Haas

Classical Domain:   How did your interest in New Music start?

Paul Haas:   It started because I was a composer myself. In high school, I composed in, and played, all different styles: rock, jazz, classical and vocal... I didn't know that I wanted to be a conductor until I went to college [Yale University 1989 — 1993], where I took a conducting class. It turned out that everything I could do was what you needed to do to be a conductor.

So while in college, I decided to start my own orchestra, which I led for about three years. To pursue conducting after college, I went to Dresden and studied orchestral conducting for two years, after which I entered Juilliard's Masters program in orchestral conducting. I “lucked” into my current position at the New York Youth Symphony (NYYS), which has this amazing program, First Music, through which they commission a new work of music for every single concert they give.

They've been commissioning new music for over twenty years. In the four years I've been with the NYYS, I've met some fantastic composers. In fact, two of the composers whose pieces I premiered through NYYS, Judd Greenstein and Joshua Penman (and one composer whose work I knew but who I'd never worked with before, Joel Morales), have provided their compositional talents for REWIND.

I'd been coming up with concert ideas for years, and when the plans for REWIND started coming together, Judd, Josh and Joel were my natural first choices.

CD:   What sort of concert ideas did you have, what was the impetus for finding a context, like REWIND, for new and established music?

PH:   Too often when I go to a concert I feel that I'm not as engaged as I could have been. So instead of simply complaining about it, I asked myself, what would make this experience better? I've got this list of hundreds and hundreds of ideas that I'd like to try out, and I took the most salient features of that list and decided to try them out.

At one of the NYYS concerts this past season, we played Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. But before starting the Stravinsky, we did a little two-minute snippet of Monteverdi's Vespers of the Virgin Mary, a section taken from his Magnificat. The most unusual aspect of this, though, was that I turned off all of the house lights in Carnegie Hall. I then took down the musician's lights to about one quarter, so that they could barely read the music. I positioned two violin and two oboe soloists at the foot of the stage. In the back of the hall we had an eight member tenor chorus. We also had, in the back of the hall on upper levels, violin and oboe soloists to echo the soloists on stage.

CD:   Purely for the wonderful effect of sound, an aesthetic effect.

PH:   Absolutely. I mean the orchestra played the Stravinsky unbelievably well, but everyone was blown away by the Monteverdi.

CD:   What are some of the aspects of the traditional concert that you would like to deal with?

PH:   At a traditional concert, it might take ten minutes to get from the end of one piece to the next piece, and what are you supposed to do with that time in between? If there is an actual narrative or theme to the concert, if there is any momentem or goodwill built up during the playing, all that is lost during those ten minutes. “Totally lost” may be hyperbole, but let's just say the program is not as coherent as it might be if you were led by momentum into the next work.

CD:   In a traditional symphony in the pre-recorded era, the composer assumed that the breaks between movements would interrupt the flow. Our idea off a work flowing is a modern concept, is this something you're bringing into the concert hall through ideas like REWIND?

PH:   I deliberately chose pieces that don't have breaks (i.e. movements), and there are a couple of instances where we are doing movements of works instead of whole pieces. If we were doing multi-movement works than we might have to figure something else out. For instance, do you need “connective tissue” between those movements? But that's an idea for another day.

Concerts have too much dead time. The idea of an intermission has its place, but I don't think it's always necessary. When's the last time you went to a movie with an intermission? One of the first questions I asked as I started out was, how long can you sustain the attention of an audience member, given that we are presenting constant stimuli?

Another idea that goes along with this theme of continuity came to me when I was thinking about medieval tropes — pieces that were composed to be performed between sections of the Catholic Mass. Tropes were designed to comment on the part of the Mass you had just heard and, in some cases, lead you into the next part of the Mass. I figured, why not try something like that again?

CD:   Is that the way you presented the idea to the composers, let's do it like they did in the 10th century?

PH:   It was very easy approaching them. They were very interested in the idea, which is basically an entire evening as once piece of music. We have a vast expanse of music history, from the present, going back centuries; we are including works, for instance, by Purcell, Mozart and Schnittke, but we are looking at that expanse through a modern lens. Josh, Judd and Joel have composed connective tissue between the works that also incorporate and simultaneously comment, in much the same way that medieval tropes do, on the pieces they connect.

CD:   You seem to be creating a context for “pure listening” in a sense.

PH:   The evening is about music, it is about sound, and it is about the way sound makes you feel, makes you think. But we are not stopping there. We have also brought in lighting, theatrical positioning of performers and visual art, which we commissioned from Kate Raudenbush that fits into the concept of the evening.

We have all of these different “perks“ thrown in there, but in the end it really is about some great music; a large array of different kinds of music guided by the REWIND commissioned works that represent our perspective today.

CD:   It's a case where people can register an impression without necessarily knowing how the works fit outside of the context of the flow of the concert, the connections presented are enough.

PH:   It's interesting: for the non-initiated concert-goer, there is a built-in problem with the traditional concert situation. He walks in thinking of himself as an underdog, thinking that he doesn't know enough about what is being performed, and what we know about the human mind is that what you tell your mind becomes the truth. If you feel that you don't know enough, or that all the people around you know more, then you are going to feel alienated. The whole point of REWIND is to let you know there is nothing you need to know. From the moment you enter the performance space, you'll be wholly engrossed in a situation that you will relate to.

CD:   You've talked about the connections between pieces — can you give me some thoughts?

PH:   As I mentioned, Josh, Judd and Joel will be composing pieces that connect the pre-existing works. So, for example, I needed a connecting piece to get from Mozart to Marini, and wanted to get something in the Concerto Grosso style — to mirror the Schnittke work in the first half. Judd Greenstein and I sat down, and we chose Corelli's Concerto Grosso Op.6, No.3.

What he did was take the listener from the Mozart, with a little meditation on the Mozart, directly into the Corelli, verbatim from the score. Then all of a sudden it's Greenstein, but he does it in such a way so that the listener doesn't know it's happening All of a sudden, there are these shifting rhythmic patterns, and the soloists are going twice as fast as the orchestra — so something is obviously going on. This builds, and — at the climactic point — all the woodwinds (who are off in a different section of the performance space) enter the work with cascading “belltones”. The capper is this: at that exact moment there is a reprise of the Schnittke, totally transformed.

CD:   Are all the REWIND works are being performed live, I want to make the distinction because there are events where there is music all the time, where one is encouraged to go in and out of paying attention. A sort of “take what ever you want” approach.

PH:   Right, all the works are live. All of the works are related, with the contemporary “REWIND” pieces connecting and commenting on the surrounding works in the concert. It's not a case of some new music filling the time between the more well-known, older pieces of music — the whole evening is one extended piece of music.

CD:   I hope you let people know...

PH:   That we should make an announcement: go to the bathroom and turn off your cell phones. Maybe when they get the tickets at the door?

CD:   On the more traditional side, you have soloists and chamber orchestra

We have some really phenomenal artists working with us on this. Anne Akiko Meyers, of course, is an amazing violinist and musician who's worked with every orchestra and conductor under the sun. I got a chance to play with her at Carnegie Hall about a year ago, and we've become great friends and collaborators in the meantime. Colin Jacobsen is a real musician's musician — everyone in the classical scene knows this guy and wants to perform with him. I was studying conducting at Juilliard when he was studying violin, so I guess that's how we met. Many people reading this might know him from his recent concert with the New York Philharmonic — he played the Brahms Double Concerto with Yo-Yo Ma.

Colin and his brother Eric have this chamber orchestra they started up called the Knights. I heard them about a year ago — and immediately I knew they were the band for REWIND.

Kate Raudenbush, a phenomenal talent, is creating visual artworks for the concert — she's someone who's great at everything: installations, photography, design, sculpture, painting — you name it, she incorporates it into her prodigious output. We've been friends for years — actually, it was at her wedding a year and half ago that I first saw the Angel Orensanz Center!

CD:    One morething, the composers are accepting a major challenge, it must be difficult to go and create a context with many of the works on the program, say, Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht?

PH:   Absolutely, but I wouldn't ask anyone who I did not think was really incredible. For instance, I take a work by Josh Penman —Songs that Plants Taught Us — wherever I go with orchestras, because it's such a phenomenal piece. These guys are hot. When you hear their music juxtaposed with five centuries of pre-existing pieces, it will definitely make you listen to the older stuff with new ears.

CD:   The first embedded classical music performance... thanks Paul.