þÿ<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"><html><head><title>Juliet Palmer and Paul Steenhuisen Interview</title><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"><meta name="author" content="Juliet Palmer"></head><body text="#b00000" bgcolor="#330000" link="#993399" alink="#666600" vlink="#333399"><font face="Arial"><font color="#7845e1"><font size="+3">Composer to Composer </font></font><b><font color="#b00000"><font size="+2"><br> <small>Interview with <a href="http://members.shaw.ca/steenhuisen/">Paul Steenhuisen</a></small></font></font></b></font> <br> <font face="Arial" color="#cc9933"><font size="+1"><b>Whole Note Magazine, November 2003</b></font></font><small><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><br> <br> <br> <b>STEENHUISEN</b>:&nbsp; One consistent factor in your pieces is that they constantly look outside of themselves.<br> <br> <b>PALMER</b>:&nbsp; Absolutely.&nbsp; 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&#8217;t work like that.&nbsp; There will be something that strikes me in my everyday life.&nbsp; Take the sound in Mother Hubbard.&nbsp; The computer part all comes from one little audio clip of the Quebec Summit protesters that I found on CNN's website.&nbsp; The other sound is a burst of digital distortion which my computer added somewhere along the line.&nbsp; What pulled my ear to that particular clip was the incredible emotional depth in such a flattened sound.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Just the sounds of their voices and their drumming were incredibly moving.&nbsp; More recently I wrote a piece for l'Orchestre M&eacute;tropolitain du Grand Montr&eacute;al, and was inspired by being sandwiched between Stravinsky&#8217;s Firebird and Tchaikovsky&#8217;s Swan Lake.&nbsp; I ended writing a piece called <a href="works.html#Buzzard">Buzzard</a>, which is a hideous-looking bird that doesn&#8217;t even sing.&nbsp; The music is completely scavenged from those two pieces.<br> <br> <b>STEENHUISEN</b>:&nbsp; So, in looking outside of the pieces, you&#8217;re wanting to tap into signification?<br> <br> <b>PALMER</b>:&nbsp; Yes, I&#8217;m not interested in a pure music.&nbsp; I&#8217;m very engaged in the world around me.&nbsp; I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s a political music.&nbsp; That&#8217;s a very slippery term.&nbsp; I'm not sure whether political music even exists.&nbsp; But, I certainly can&#8217;t separate my political concerns from the way I would approach music or what would motivate me to write a piece.&nbsp; You don&#8217;t want to beat people about the head on an issue, but I also don&#8217;t want to put my time and energy into something that is simply entertaining or decorative.<br> <br> </font></small><small><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><b>STEENHUISEN</b>:</font></small><small><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">&nbsp; Each of the pieces you&#8217;ve mentioned also deals with juxtaposition?<br> <br> </font></small><small><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><b>PALMER</b>:</font></small><small><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">&nbsp; That&#8217;s true.&nbsp; That&#8217;s an essential condition of how we live.&nbsp; Particularly now.&nbsp; We&#8217;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.&nbsp; We live in an age of juxtapositions where geographic and temporal realities are constantly colliding.&nbsp; Those kinds of juxtapositions permeate my music...to me, it seems inevitable.<br> <br> </font></small><small><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><b>STEENHUISEN</b>:</font></small><small><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">&nbsp; Can you talk a bit more about that, specifically in relation to <a href="works.html#Secret_Arnold">Secret Arnold</a>?<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <small><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">This text is an excerpt from a longer interview which will be published shortly by <a href="http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=4">University of Alberta Press</a>. The other composers interviewed by Paul Steenhuisen in the volume are:</small><br><br> <font color="#7845e1">R. Murray Schafer<br> Robert Normandeau<br> Chris Paul Harman <br> Linda C. Smith <br> Alexina Louie <br> Omar Daniel <br> Michael Finnissy <br> John Weinzweig <br> Udo Kasemets <br> Pierre Boulez <br> Barbara Croall <br> James Rolfe <br> John Beckwith <br> Yannick Plamondon+Marc Couroux <br> George Crumb <br> Peter Hatch <br> John Oswald <br> Francis Dhomont <br> Martin Arnold <br> Paul Steenhuisen <br> Helmut Lachenmann <br> Christian Wolff <br> Mauricio Kagel <br> John Rea <br> Gary Kulesha <br> Howard Bashaw <br> Christopher Butterfield <br> Keith Hamel <br> Jean PichéŽ <br> James Harley <br> Hildegard Westerkamp <br> </font color="#7845e1"><br> <br> </font></small> <font face="Verdana"><font color="#000000"><font size="+0"> </font></font></font><font face="Arial"><font color="#000a05"><font size="+1"><a href="http://www.music.princeton.edu/%7Ejuliet/bio.html">bio</a> | <a href="http://www.music.princeton.edu/%7Ejuliet/works.html">selected works</a> | <a href="http://www.music.princeton.edu/%7Ejuliet/reviews.html">reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.music.princeton.edu/%7Ejuliet/recordings.html">recordings</a> | <a href="http://www.music.princeton.edu/%7Ejuliet/main.html">home</a></font></font></font> <br> <small><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><br> </font></small><br> <br> </body></html>