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Eric Sawyer Interview
Posted on Saturday, July 26, 2008. © Copyright 2004-2008 David Bruce
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C:T talks to composer Eric Sawyer, whose piece Our American Cousin - about the fateful day of Abraham Lincoln’s death - is released on the BMOP/sound label released this month.
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Our American Cousin by Eric Sawyer, recorded by BMOP
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Tell us something about your background.
I grew up in Southern California and lived much of my adult life in Boston, settling eventually in Amherst, Massachusetts. I remain a loyal Californian in my attachment to nature and resistance to breaking the world down too much into categories.
How did you start composing?
From my early studies of piano I tried to emulate the music I heard and played. Though I heard all types of music, classical music grabbed me first. My tastes moved forward in time, with Bach the origin and foundation, the classical forms an important way station, and the sounds of the twentieth century, both classical and popular, taking hold during my teenage years. I wouldn’t say I have left any of these stages behind, rather built on top of them.
What drives your work, what are you passions?
Contradictory as it sounds, my passion is for a balance of structure and expression. Why should one have to choose? All the music I am crazy about has both, with the expression probably being primary but always being supported by a logic that can be investigated and connected with the character in utterly fascinating ways.
I am passionate about clarity, and about finding the best choices.
Tell us about Our American Cousin and the new recording that's out.
Our American Cousin is an opera that tells the story of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination from the viewpoint of those who were there: the actors and audience of Ford’s Theater. The opera has a double narrative, a slapstick comedy within a serious historical drama, and the music draws on a wide vocabulary of American music in an overall style of lyrical extended tonality. After a long period of workshops and a complete concert performance, the opera received its stage premiere in June 2008 and was released in recording at the same time by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project on the orchestra’s new label, BMOP/sound.
Tell us something about your working method as a composer. Give us something that might be or might have been a starting point for a piece.
Things seem to go best if I’m working right on the edge of my understanding. Order does not have to be willed; it just has to be noticed and then begets more order. The sensitivity to the evolving order of a work builds a kind of scaffolding from which the intuition can reach.
Works with words are quite different from ‘abstract’ pieces, in that they impose an outside structure and sensibility that has to be adjusted to. This adjustment is often the catalyst to the whole piece. Lacking an exterior text, I find myself looking for or waiting for problems that require similar adjustments that will catalyze my work. There always has to be something new, as far as challenging my own familiar territory.
Which non-musical influences have affected your music most?
I have been drawn into a number of projects involving American myth, the treatment of the Lincoln assassination in Our American Cousin being the largest. I enjoy material that resonates from the past to the present with potential both for civic relevance and historical distance. Among contemporary art forms, I am drawn especially to modern novels for their refreshed sense of narrative, access to the language of everyday life, and simultaneous sense of distance and strangeness of the everyday they can provide.
Interview by David Bruce © Copyright 2004-2008
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