This is probably the most influential record I ever bought, following up on a hint on some early Zappa records.

The music was like nothing I could have imagined. Sounds that banged and sirened and screamed across the sky.

Of special interest to the 15 year old me was Poème Electronique. You could make music out of noises in the world? You could make music with tape recorders? Well, my parents had a tape recorder so I started to experiment and compose tape music like my hero, Varèse.

I played one of those early pieces for Vladimir Ussachevsky, the great dean of American electronic music. Immediately, Professor Ussachevsky arranged for me to study at Columbia University and gave me nearly unlimited access to the well-equipped (at the time) Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center on 125th st. in NYC. I would later write and record my first film score there.

So, to say this record was influential in my life is an understatement.

Composers Michael Small and Suzanne Ciani took me to hear Philip Glass for the first time at Town Hall, where I’d seen the Mothers a few years before and where I would also hear the world premiere of Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians a few years later. The piece was Another Look at Harmony Parts I and II and to say the least, I hated it. But something intrigued me and a few days later, I bought this record at an art gallery in Soho. I listened to it once, twice, and then the third time, I finally got it. Slow learner.

I don’t need to rehearse how important Philip’s music is. He’s now world-famous and rightly so. But back then, the mid-70’s, his music was vilified. There were only a few of us, notably Tim Page and Meredith Monk, who really understood what he was up to.

I know that Similar Motion is considered the greater piece, but I’ve always loved Music in Fifths. Philip would move on from this style a year or so after Einstein and he’s written a lot of great music. But those early pieces are haunting and point to, yes, another look not only at harmony, but at the entire Western musical tradition.

When I was at CBS Masterworks, I was part of the team that signed Philip Glass to his first major label contract. I may have been the first to suggest they do so, back in ‘77, but I was laughed it. It wasn’t until 1980 or ‘81 that it happened. I also worked for Philip for a little bit and recently ran into him at a preview for King Lear. A great guy and a great composer.

My path to this album begins with Stravinsky’s Les Noces., a masterpiece that’s not part of this list but really should be because it blew my mind when I first heard it, even more than The Rite of Spring. I loved the recordings I had of it, but something was missing, something off. Then I heard this record and it was obvious — Stravinsky’s Russian peasant wedding music required folk voices — and years later, the Petrovsky Ensemble recorded a version of Les Noces with precisely the vocal idiom it demanded.

But that does a disservice to the craft behind Le Mystere. These are folk singers the way a Lamborghini is a car. These are excellent musicians who can wring every last drop of wrenching pathos from a perfectly tuned and timed suspension. The arrangements — sometimes tender, sometimes harsh, filled with major seconds, whoops, screams, and noises — are carefully made works of art. It sounds like folk music, and it is. And it’s also not folk music, it’s an elite art, flipping back and forth like one of those optical illusions.

For The Origin, I wanted a special, unique sound for Darwin’s autobiographical words. I contacted Shira Cion of Kitka, an American female vocal group that specializes in Balkan music. In fact, Kitka members studied with the women of Le Mystere. I used similar techniques for the main theme of Tulennielijä (Fire-Eater), Pirjo Honkasalo’s film about two sisters in a circus. And as much I love opera singing, chant, and many other vocal styles, it is my hope that I get a chance soon to write more for this amazing sound.

Really I can’t imagine a world without Trout Mask Replica in it. It would be so incredibly boring. Gritty, mad, and chaotic: it was love at first hearing. The harsh guitars, the amazing drumming, the polymeters and that unbelievable voice derived from Howlin’ Wolf at his growliest.

Recently, I listened to Trout Mask several times again and it has aged unbelievably well. Music that is much more traditionally “beautiful“ from this time - 1969 — sounds sappy, corny, cheesy, inauthentic. This record remains as knotty and fascinating as a string quartet by Schoenberg or the Grosse Fuge. And after I listen to it, the next piece of music I listen to, including my own music, sounds thin and incomplete.

I know the stories about how the band members were abused in the cult-like atmosphere that Don Vliet (Beefheart) created during the Trout Mask period. But despite that abuse, which was inexcusable on Vliet’s part, these guys, along with Don, pulled together one of the most extraordinary recordings, ever.

I should mention that I met Don and some of the band members in 1971 and participated in an interview with them. The recording is one of my most cherished possessions. I also heard every single show they did at Ungano’s in NYC. Two of the high points of my life were watching Don wail away and Bill Harkleroad nail, absolutely nail, One Red Rose That I Mean.

When I was 15, I went to the Mothers’ Christmas show at Town Hall and my life changed. My friends and I sat in the front row, dead center. This was the original Mothers, with Billy Mundi and Jimmy Carl Black on drums, Motorhead Sherwood, Ian Underwood, the Gardners, and a truly deranged-looking Don Preston. Zappa was an overwhelming presence and I still remember him announcing a medley that included My Boyrfriend’s Back and Petrouchka. Soon afterwards — this was also the period I heard In C for the first time, and a lot of other records in this list — we formed our mulit-media ensemble and I started composing tape pieces.

I think the only albums out at the time of the show were Freak Out! and Absolutely Free but I chose this one as it gave all of us the first glimpse of how truly wide-ranging a composer Zappa was. He could write anything — and he did. He could also play anything he wanted on guitar — and he did that, too (listen to the outtakes on the Hot Rats Sessions compilation; the jams he didn’t release literally stopped me in my tracks and took my breath away when I first heard them).

I believe that Frank Zappa was one of the greatest 20th Century composers and musicians, up there with — just to limit it to Americans — Charles Ives, Elliott Carter, Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and a tiny handful of other great masters.

He described himself on his first record as “repellent.” I wouldn’t know because I never met him and I never listen to lyrics so they never bothered me. But just listen to the music — and not just from this period. Listen to the last few recordings before his death and the first posthumous ones. And of course, listen to Lumpy Gravy. The level of musicality is absolutely breathtaking.

One of the most extraordinary recordings I know. Beautiful, heartbreakingly beautiful, virtuosic beyond what most of us might think these instruments are incapable of. And then that masterpiece of deconstruction, My Favorite Things, with so many of the intervals changed but the tune still fully recognizable, a flight into a musical world of limitless possibility.

And there they were, in the Vanguard, playing this incredible music and, as you can hear at the end of My Favorites Things, very, very few people were lucky enough to hear it live. I’ve always thought that that was a sad commentary on Trane’s audience, that they couldn/wouldn’t follow him.

It is hard to believe that a year later, Coltrane would be dead. Even harder to believe that he was only 40 years old. He apparently was not a natural musical genius; he had to work at it, constantly practicing and studying, but a genius he certainly was, long before this performance, long before even Miles’s Kind of Blue. But Trane was clearly always a profoundly spiritual man; clear even in his earliest recordings.

Sadly, I never saw Coltrane live, but I did see Alice Coltrane, Rashied Ali, and Pharaoh Sanders, at the infamous Slug’s and elsewhere.. I also saw other Trane veterans — Elvin Bishop many times, and McCoy Tyner at least once. They were all amazing musicians.

I was 15 when I heard the Columbia Recording of Terry Riley’s In C for the first time. It was at a gathering of my gang — Willard, Liz, Dennis, Neil, Laura, Pam, Alan, Robert — and it was riveting — the only movement I recall for its entire duration was when one of us flipped the record over to hear the second part. None of us had ever heard anything like it. We could barely understand the liner notes that described how he put the piece together but the combination of energy and stillness was something new for us. A few months later, we formed a multi-media group, Alfonzo, and started to plan shows. And I started composing my first pieces using tape recorders and found sounds. Behind it all was this record.

I first heard this in high school and it was the first opera I heard that I loved. I was in an opera appreciation class and my recollection is that the teacher did nothing but hand out vocal scores and play the records. He never told us about any of the operas, never explained the plots. We just listened. I learned more from this non-teaching than I ever could have learned from explanations because I was given the tools to appreciate the music (the score and a time to listen to a recording) but was left to find out what I loved and hated.

And Die Zauberflöte was love at first sight. I went home and told my parents how much I loved this piece. A few days later, my mother bought me the Bohm recording which I believe is the same one I listened to in class.

This opera, with its combination of soaring melodies, humor, and woo-woo mysticism tempered by an affectionate skepticism, is, for me, the pinnacle of Mozart (I’d add also Figaro, Giovanni, the G minor Quintet, and K. 466). And this recording is terrific.

This was arguably the best recording of medieval music that was available when I was in college and first encountered music before Bach. When I was in my late teens, I had an encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary music (Stravinsky and beyond), an obsession with Zappa and Beefheart, knew some avant-garde jazz (Coltrane, Roland Kirk, Ornette), had a working knowledge of classical and baroque, and barely knew (or was interested in) Romantic music.

Munrow’s recording, especially of Perotin, was a giant treasure box of new sounds. I fell in love with this music, with its contradictions — it was both still and intense,, emotional and transcendent, complicated and direct — and have never fallen out of love. It holds all the power and visceral thrill of rock and roll, but happily, it lasts so much longer.

Aside from some modal procedures, I don’t use too many of the techniques of early music. I’m not sure why I don’t, to be honest. In any event, the best of these composers — and Perotin is as great as it gets, up there with Monterverdi, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Bach — write music that is tough, angular, dramatically intense and simulatneously lyrical and beautiful. There is so much to learn from them.

I was interviewed by Keith Simon of radio station KCME in Colorado Springs, CO. Most interviews focus on one piece, for example Voices of Light, but Keith was interested in all my music and provides generous excerpts of many different pieces from my first film score through Maxwell’s Demon and beyond. It was a real pleasure to speak with Keith about so many different pieces! If you only know my music through VOL or Red Angels, here’s a way to quickly get a sense of the many different projects and pieces I’ve written.

The first film I ever composed music for — back in 1976 — was called Shock Waves and starred Peter Cushing, John Carradine, and Brook Adams. It was one of the first all-electronic scores for any feature film. And it turns out, Shock Waves was just screened at Lincoln Center! They wrote (scroll down): 

"The same year he appeared as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars, Peter Cushing also played another grand villain in Shock Waves: a former SS commander involved in the creation of aquatic Nazi zombies as secret weapons. The “Death Corps” project was a failed endeavor to say the least, and now, after their boat begins to sink, a group of tourists find themselves on the island where the commander and the water-based menaces still reside. With a cast that also includes Brooke Adams as one of the shipwrecked and John Carradine as the captain, this odd, atmospheric little shocker by Ken Wiederhorn (who dabbled again with the walking dead for Return of the Living Dead II), started a long tradition of Nazi zombie flicks, and it still remains the finest."

Just finished packing up over 100 choral and vocal scores plus orchestral parts for a December performance at Colgate University later this year. I'll be attending the performance and giving masterclasses to the students. I'll keep you posted!

This interview with me was published ahead of the performance of Voices of Light at the S8 Festival in A Coruña, Spain

I'm thrilled to hear that the Spanish premiere of Voices of Light in La Coruña, Spain was a spectacular success! Reports from Spain say the audience was deeply moved and there was a standing ovation. Reviews to follow, but here's the beautiful poster they made for the performance!