Tone Glow 015.5: Carman Moore

An interview with composer Carman Moore for a special midweek issue

Carman Moore

Carman Moore is an Ohio-born, New York-based composer who has been called “the greatest composer, not just in New York, but in the whole world” by Ornette Coleman. He founded the Society of Black Composers, has been a music critic for the Village Voice and the New York Times, is a conductor for the Skymusic Ensemble, and was this year’s recipient of the Composers Now “Visionary Composer” award. His soundtrack for Personal Problems, the “experimental soap opera” directed by Bill Gunn and written by Ishamel Reed was released this year by Reading Group. Joshua Minsoo Kim and Moore talked in the phone on February 22nd to discuss his life and works, Personal Problems, Black intelligentsia in the ’80s, and more.

Carman Moore, photo by Mikkel Arnfred.

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Today is Ishmael Reed’s Birthday!

Carman Moore: Oh that’s right! Thank you. Oh God, I’ve gotta make some noise! I forgot all about that.

Can you talk to me about your relationship with him?

Back in the day a mutual friend said, “There’s this guy you gotta meet!” Ishmael was living in New York at the time, so she arranged for him to be at her apartment. I showed up and we chatted, and I found out who he was bit-by-bit over time. I found out that he was active in the Downtown scene.

The writers, the painters, the poets and other Downtown characters were hanging out. We became good friends, he started sending me words to set. His daughter would also send things along—she sent me something called Old Parents Blues. There was Oakland Blues, too, and I just did one about Bonnie and Clyde called Rolling Along. Some of them actually got recorded. I set a bunch of Ishmael’s poems, and those of Colleen McElroy, another very fine poet. I made an evening’s work for four singers that we called Wild Gardens of the Loup Garou that was performed at Judson Church for a stretch. People seemed to really love it. That was a musical. Later, he sent me a libretto for a gospel opera. He just trusted me, he would send me stuff saying, “Please set this, if you will.” When I had a minute—I write fast—I would just knock them all out.

Personal Problems came about in 1980, early on into our relationship. He said he was going to do the first Black soap opera. I didn’t know whether that was true or not—it didn’t matter. I said yes, as usual. I ended up with this monster project. I just started writing, then the waters closed over it, and all of a sudden—three years ago—the thing woke up. People seemed to be getting very excited about the music, and I hardly remembered having done it. It felt good to hear it again.

What was the process like in terms of soundtracking the film? Were you working with Bill and Ishmael together in the same space?

I went to several of the sessions they were shooting and got a flavor of it. They were both really nice about not saying, “We’d like this here, we’d like this there.” I could tell when there was a love scene, or when there was trouble. Once I watched the rushes, the music just popped into my head and off I’d go. They seemed to love whatever came out. I liked the people, [producer, co-screenwriter, and actor] Walter Cotton, especially Vertamae Grosvenor. The actors were all really nice people. Ish was, by then, a close friend of mine, Steve Cannon was involved on some level, and Bill Gunn was really open to stuff. He was so creative himself. It was nice being around those people.

The B-side to the LP has new improvisations that you made last year. What was it like revisiting the original compositions and reworking them?

It was a pleasure because, as I said, the waters had closed over it. I write music, finish it and then try to forget it so I can have a new tool shop open up for the next project. So it was a pleasure, and since those days, I had started becoming someone who enjoyed improvising at the keyboard, and had gotten fairly good at it. Some people think I’m better than fairly good (laughs) but at any rate I could trust it. [Reading Group co-owner] Derek Baron said, “We need some more time on this recording. What can we do? Why don’t you improvise something based on the themes that you wrote in 1980?”

So let’s see, that’s 20… 30… almost 40 years ago! So it was really a pleasure to go into the psychic world of that score, and those pieces, and just react to them. That was a pleasure. We did it on the Steinway of a friend’s up the way, the marvelous pianist Marianna Rosett. She wanted to be there and hear it but was out of town, so Derek and I just went in and did it.

I find it interesting how you say you work quickly, and that you try to forget what you’ve done. Do you usually not revisit old works or compositions—not only in terms of doing reinterpretations, but even relistening?

I do go back and listen. But I encourage myself to be like an audience member. I try not to rewrite; I don’t rewrite much because it’s a chronicle of who I was. I have to honor that. If it sounded awful to me, I’d rewrite it. Generally, if I like what the music sounds like, and like the person who wrote it back in the day, I realize that it was different from what my musical thinking had been at the time.

You said it's a chronicle of who you are. What do you mean by that?

The music comes out of my experiences as a person at any given time. There’s a lot of training behind the compositions that I do. When I start composing a new piece, I realize that there’s an important part of it that’s about what I’m thinking at that time as a person. There are times that I pick up new ideas compositionally, about how music can be. For example, I can bring in more noise into a piece. Or at that time, I would call upon my history as a listener of jazz. I was never a jazz musician, but I know intimately what it sounds like, or can sound like, so I open up that part of my brain.

Yeah, you want the music you make to reflect the truth of who you are as a person. What was the truth of who you were in the ’80s, that informed the Bill Gunn score? Revisiting it last year, did you feel like there were any new truths to who you were?

The special value of writing a film score is that there are specific behavior patterns of the actors to characterize in sound. For example, there was a funeral in this film, so I went into my funeral brain, but a good deal of what I was writing in the ’80s came out of Black culture—the aftermath of the most intense parts of the ’60s and ’70s—and what it meant for African-American culture and African-American cultural leaders. I don’t mean MLK or anything, I mean the various communities.

There was a New York, African-American intelligentsia, which included Ishmael, Steve Cannon and Bill Gunn—all these characters—who located themselves anywhere between Harlem and the Lower East Side. Manhattan was typical. There would be these parties—and by the way, I love the party scene in Personal Problems—that would have a very specific sound. Bill Gunn let it sit there, let it cook. The sound of those people at that time can never be reproduced authentically anymore. It sounds that certain way because of that certain group, and there were few white people in it too. I picked that up in some of the cuts on the album.

Improvising uptown on a friend’s Steinway two months ago, I was bringing a whole other attitude towards the music I was making. Some of it was just more daring, a little more out there, just because that’s how I was improvising at that time. If I would have sat down in 1981 to improvise on the themes I had in 1980, what would have come out would have been very different.

Can you describe what the sound was like at these different parties?

There was a certain kind of buzz to it—the sound of people discussing. They might be discussing civil rights, and there would be those trying to talk people into things. Every now and then, someone would bark out what they thought the right way you should be thinking about something was. Meanwhile, everyone would be buzzed, everyone would be drinking wine. I think of it as a buzz, a murmur, a cocktail party sound with these other interruptions—someone would shout now and then. The murmur of men trying to make out with women, or women trying to make out with some guys, the clink of glasses—that sort of thing. It was the sound of the Black intelligentsia who had just arrived at themselves and were self-consciously in New York City. 

I think that by ear, if I heard a bunch of New York intellectuals from this year I’d be able to tell the difference. First of all they’d be more mixed. I mean, who knows. There are certainly still all-Black parties—I’m not saying there aren’t—but the intelligentsia would tend to have other races mixed in, and it would have a different sound.

You’ve made the score for this film, but I know that you also composed for choreographed dances. Can you speak about the differences that come with composing for different mediums of art?

Very often the choreographer would ask me for a score and then get out of the way and choreograph to it. Alvin Ailey set a score of mine that I had already written, so it can happen like that too. But my feeling is that the composer is more in charge of a dance score than one for film. 

Why do you think that is?

The filmmaker would tell you if something was not working in a certain scene. So you try to—or at least I try to—understand the psychic web that a certain scene is taking place in. Somebody is doing something on the screen that you have to match. Basically, the composer has less control over the score in the film than the dance.

That makes sense. Let’s talk about when you have the most control. You are also a composer, you work with the Skymusic Ensemble. What are your goals now when you compose music? What do you want to achieve when you write music and have it performed?

It all depends on the ensemble. I have a new piece that I’ve written that is going to be performed some time soon by a group called Cygnus that has two guitars, some woodwinds, a violin and a cello. I was told Cygnus means swans, so I wrote a piece called Swans Across the Milky Way. I had already set myself up for something that would have the feel of outer space, that would have the feel of a journey. I was thinking about other planets and all of that. Almost like with a film, I set myself up with some challenges that I could solve. I’m always trying to take the listener on a journey with me through some feelings—this goes to that and that leads to this.

Now I feel I can write almost everything. I even have a rock and roll album about to come out called Dan and Bea, which is about Dante and Beatrice in outer space. She leaves him, and he’s heartbroken and he sings about it, and then she sings from a distance and they get together and they go out in a black hole. So it’s just something to do. I like to go places that I’ve never been and try to return successfully (laughter).

Back in the day, I wrote Wild Fires and Field Songs. Field Songs was a precursor to the blues, and that was a commission from Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic. Most people would not get much blues out of it because it was more about what feeling the blues invokes, not so much what it sounds like. The Philharmonic certainly doesn’t sound like a blues band, but I went somewhere where someone would recognize the feeling that the orchestra calls for. That kind of thinking happens.

Carman Moore, photo by Pearl Perkins.

What would you consider to be a challenge that you either gave yourself, or that someone else had commissioned you to do, that took a lot of time and thought?

Let’s see… this was in the ’70s. I started off fast. I had my Master’s from Juilliard and some lucky things were happening, I was composing and being heard. I was also a music critic for the Village Voice, so my name was getting around. Lincoln Kirstein found out about me, but at first I met W.H. Auden. He was a friend of Kirstein, and Kirstein commissioned me to do something for the New York City ballet which he and George Balanchine started. I did a score for them called Catwalk. It was very out there.

Balanchine heard it and said it was quite nice. It was going to be choreographed by Jacques d'Amboise, who was their lead dancer in those days. The director of the orchestra didn’t want to see me come in, he wanted to be the composer. He wasn’t a composer, he was someone who just went across the street and got drunk after a performance. But he found a way to shoot the project down before it got performed, so it has yet to be heard by anyone except for those who were at the session, which included Balanchine, I’m happy to say. He liked it, but he didn’t go to the mat for it. It didn’t get that far. That was a big disappointment. I have pieces that haven’t been performed that need to be performed, but I suspect that they will at some point.

Which of your pieces would you most like to see performed and why?

Besides Swans Across the Milky Way, which is supposedly going to be performed this year by Cygnus, a year and a half late (laughs) but whatever—it’s always about money. There’s Requiem for La Lupe, which involves a little Spanish group with a chamber music group wrapped around it, and some singers too. I think it's really nice. It was commissioned by a Hispanic concert group from uptown. The director, Eva de La O, ran out of money. That was five years ago, and the thing is still sitting there. It really needs to be performed, it’s going to be great. Then, of course Catwalk (laughs) some day! You need a small orchestra for that.

But stuff does get performed. I just received an award for the Visionary Composer of 2020. That really feels like a really wonderful career booster rocket.

I was just going to ask about that. First off, congratulations!

Thank you! It was from the composers’ group called Composers Now. They’re my colleagues! I didn’t even know they were paying attention. So that has been one of the pleasures of early 2020.

I’d love for you to reflect on how you feel your music is visionary. What do you personally feel is visionary about your work?

The main thing I do is that I work in a lot of different forms. When people hear the music, it’s not necessarily what the latest buzz is from Europe, or what people are all doing now. At times, when people are composing with emphasis on dissonance, I might be doing something that is a lot more old-fashioned. It wouldn’t sound like an old score, it will maybe sound like it borrows from an old score, showing something that other people haven’t shown in the past. My music is a time traveler, or a style traveler. It goes from here to there depending on what’s up when I’m composing.

My composition teacher at Juilliard, Hall Overton, really instilled in me the value of trusting your intuition. I have done wildly dissonant scores and wildly not-dissonant scores. The only rule is to keep it fresh. I was taught to learn everything I can and compose from intuition. My teachers Vincent Persichetti and Luciano Berio also gave me some real good insight and advice, and encouraged me in my music.

Is there any advice you would like to give younger composers?

Learn everything you can and get as good at that as you can. Meanwhile, just keep taking chances. It’s all about taking chances and trusting yourself at the same time, which are not mutually exclusive. 

Is there anything else that you’d like to say that we didn’t talk about?

I give great honor to my mother for having surrounded me with good music. She was an excellent pianist herself, but also for playing soap operas—Stella Dallas, As The World Turns. Some of the things in the Personal Problems score definitely have been helped by my having heard that stuff. I didn’t know what the hell was going on in the soap operas (laughter)—all I heard was the score! I just found myself dipping into those memories while doing the score for Ishmael.

Was that when you were still in Lorain, Ohio?

I was born in Lorain, Ohio—in the same town as Toni Morrison by the way. My mother even knew her family. I grew up in the town of Elyria, five miles away. That’s where all that took place, yeah. The other thing I should mention is that I’ve been going back and forth between New York and Denmark, working with my creative partner, the singer of a work concerned with child sexual abuse, and the recovery from it. Her name is Lotte Arnsbjerg. I play the keyboard, we wrote a bunch of songs together about this.

I’m off to Denmark in two weeks to perform over there with her singing and with me playing the keyboard. We have a very fine cellist that has joined us, but she and I created this thing. My symphonic score Madiba is about the life of Nelson Mandela, this thing is certainly an anti-child abuse contribution, it’s not just the music, its what the music says about how we live.

What sort of music was your mother playing when you were young?

We had an upright piano in the living room. I have seven brothers and sisters, I’m the oldest of them. On the radio from Cleveland nearby, a classical station would start with a little bit of Haydn, she would make sure that would happen. She herself played everything from boogie woogie to Liszt and Mozart on the piano. She had to do it fast because she had to chase all these kids around the house and make them behave (laughter). Every night she would rush to the piano and play something. It seemed very natural to have classical music in my ear. The mix of jazz and classical in my own work was from me listening to all that from on my mother’s knee.

Personal Problems is available from Kino Lorber. The soundtrack to Personal Problems is available from Reading Group. Crossover, a biography about Carman Moore, is out now.

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Still from Personal Problems (Bill Gunn, 1980)

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