Composer to Composer
Interview with Paul Steenhuisen
Whole Note Magazine, November 2003


STEENHUISEN:  One consistent factor in your pieces is that they constantly look outside of themselves.

PALMER:  Absolutely.  For me to sit down and play a chord on the piano, starting at the beginning, and to go from there plucking pitches from some beautiful pure soundworld hovering around me...I don’t work like that.  There will be something that strikes me in my everyday life.  Take the sound in Mother Hubbard.  The computer part all comes from one little audio clip of the Quebec Summit protesters that I found on CNN's website.  The other sound is a burst of digital distortion which my computer added somewhere along the line.  What pulled my ear to that particular clip was the incredible emotional depth in such a flattened sound.  The sound quality is really wretched, but there's this amazing sense of so many people gathered together to fight this huge machine of corporate globalization.  Just the sounds of their voices and their drumming were incredibly moving.  More recently I wrote a piece for l'Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal, and was inspired by being sandwiched between Stravinsky’s Firebird and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.  I ended writing a piece called Buzzard, which is a hideous-looking bird that doesn’t even sing.  The music is completely scavenged from those two pieces.

STEENHUISEN:  So, in looking outside of the pieces, you’re wanting to tap into signification?

PALMER:  Yes, I’m not interested in a pure music.  I’m very engaged in the world around me.  I don’t know if it’s a political music.  That’s a very slippery term.  I'm not sure whether political music even exists.  But, I certainly can’t separate my political concerns from the way I would approach music or what would motivate me to write a piece.  You don’t want to beat people about the head on an issue, but I also don’t want to put my time and energy into something that is simply entertaining or decorative.

STEENHUISEN:  Each of the pieces you’ve mentioned also deals with juxtaposition?

PALMER:  That’s true.  That’s an essential condition of how we live.  Particularly now.  We’re not living in a holistic, agrarian culture where I grow a tree, make it into the beautiful chair, sit on it and eat a bowl of barley that I grew in my garden.  We live in an age of juxtapositions where geographic and temporal realities are constantly colliding.  Those kinds of juxtapositions permeate my music...to me, it seems inevitable.

STEENHUISEN:  Can you talk a bit more about that, specifically in relation to Secret Arnold?




This text is an excerpt from a longer interview which will be published shortly by University of Alberta Press. The other composers interviewed by Paul Steenhuisen in the volume are:

R. Murray Schafer
Robert Normandeau
Chris Paul Harman
Linda C. Smith
Alexina Louie
Omar Daniel
Michael Finnissy
John Weinzweig
Udo Kasemets
Pierre Boulez
Barbara Croall
James Rolfe
John Beckwith
Yannick Plamondon+Marc Couroux
George Crumb
Peter Hatch
John Oswald
Francis Dhomont
Martin Arnold
Paul Steenhuisen
Helmut Lachenmann
Christian Wolff
Mauricio Kagel
John Rea
Gary Kulesha
Howard Bashaw
Christopher Butterfield
Keith Hamel
Jean PichéŽ
James Harley
Hildegard Westerkamp


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