Finding a Rhythm, in Body and Mind | Maria Schneider | Big Think

Finding a Rhythm, in Body and Mind

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Since composing her first dance work (“Dissolution”), Maria Schneider has created all her music while dancing around her apartment. The neighbors may stare, but the results are exhilarating.

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Maria Schneider:

Maria Schneider is a Grammy Award-winning American composer. Born in Windom, Minnesota, she became widely known through the orchestra she founded in 1992. They appeared at Visiones in Greenwich Village every Monday night for a stretch of five years. The Maria Schneider Orchestra has since performed at festivals and concert halls worldwide, and she herself has received numerous commissions and guest-conducting invites, working with over 80 groups from over 20 countries.

Schneider's debut recording, Evanescence, was nominated for two 1995 Grammy Awards. Her most recent recordings have brought two Grammy Awards, the first for 'Concert in the Garden' (Best Large Ensemble Album; the first record to win a Grammy with Internet-only sales) and the second for 'Cerulean Skies' (Best Instrumental Composition). Schneider's most recent work, 'Carlos Drummond de Andrade Stories,' was commissioned by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra for soprano Dawn Upshaw. She is currently working on a piece commissioned by the Kronos Quartet for a 2010 premier.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How did composing for dancers differ from your usual method?

Maria Schneider: That really kind of was a turning point for me. That piece of music, I’m not sure it’s my most successful piece of music because it was a little tough because we had three choreographers working on the dance and so they were all working on a different piece of, to me that piece sort of feels like three different pieces.

But what was wonderful is, we were in a studio working and the dancers, I would play a sound and normally I don’t play for people. You know, I don’t perform, I’m very self-conscious about playing. But in this situation I had to and so I came in without having really written anything, a couple little ideas. And I ran a tape recorder and I would just play a couple of things and the dancers would start moving and I love dance, I mean, I was a very bad, but, you know, a figure skater when I grew up, I danced, and to me, music is motion. And I largely now figure out my music by dancing. Because what would happen is, I’d play something and these incredibly bodies, it was **** they’d start moving and it would be like, “Oh, my gosh, I played this note and I just made you do that!” You know, so, then I’d watch them and I’d play something else and then they’d move and suddenly I was playing way beyond myself, improving way beyond myself. Later when I listened to the recording I was like, “Wow, that was me? That’s really good!” But it’s because I was so playing to them. So I realized that, and that piece that I wrote, it ended up being called Disillusion, that piece brought textures and ideas out of me and out of the band that were far less typically jazz than what I’d written, because I was writing for motion. I wasn’t writing with a historic template of an idiom coming at me from behind, but I was purely writing to the abstraction of movement, you know? It’s maybe like almost I went to this Kandinsky show at, you know, at the Guggenheim that’s so amazing, and he was looking to music to find abstraction in his painting and maybe the movement helped me really find something, something else in my sound.

So, yeah, and now, like I say, I really, I can’t almost write a piece without dancing. It helps me figure out, when I was talking about timing, it helps me figure out the timing of the piece, because your body tells you. It’s hard for my mind to tell me what’s too long or what’s too short, but if I start dancing and moving around my piano or, you know, I’ll play it into a recorder and put on headphones and then I start moving, I say, “Oh, no, I need more time to do what I want to do!” or “No, that’s hanging on too long, I can’t come up with anything else.” So, my neighbors must think I’m nuts, they see me, you know, it’s New York, you see a lot of apartments looking right in my window, or whatever.

Question: In “Carlos Drummond de Andrade Stories,” how did you represent literature through music?

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