eMusic interview: Magnus Lindberg

By Jayson Greene

The esteemed Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg has traveled a long, itinerant path to his current post as composer-in-residence for the New York Philharmonic. After finishing his classical studies in the early 1980s, he found his attentions snagged by Japanese drumming and punk rock. He dabbled in musique concréte, added scrap-metal percussion and spoken-word to his orchestral works, and generally followed his wayward muse wherever it led him. If these disparate influences weren’t always immediately detectable in his craggy, immense orchestral music, there was no mistaking Lindberg’s questing, inquisitive spirit.

Though his music has softened subtly over the years, he clearly hasn’t lost his curiosity or forgotten how to find inspiration in unlikely sources. His latest piece, Graffiti, recently recorded for Ondine Records, is a massive work for chorus and orchestra that takes 2,000-year-old Pompeiian graffiti — in all its profane, quasi-philosophical, often-misspelled glory — as its text. In between rehearsals of his Clarinet Concerto with the NY Phil, Lindberg spoke at length to eMusic about the work, touching on the challenges of writing for voice for (almost) the first time ever, the thematic universality of graffiti, and having his first orchestral piece with an explicit-language warning.

I wanted to start by asking you about your role as the co-curator of the NY Phil’s brand-new contemporary music series, CONTACT. What’s your role within the CONTACT Series? What sorts of things you are responsible for?

Well, the CONTACT series was a major statement from the orchestra to engage in new music — they have a lot of contemporary music in their regular concert series, but having music from younger composers who haven’t yet worked with the orchestra is extremely important. It was important to Alan to have something like this early in his tenure.

As for my role in it, I chose the composers and conducted for the series’ first two concerts in December. The set-up for this first season was to invite some friends and colleagues of mine from Europe, so we brought in Marc-André Dalbavie and Matthias Pintscher, and that first concert had four world premieres. But the other exciting part of the series is bringing in works by new, younger composers, so, together with Alan Gilbert, we chose pieces by Arlene Sierra, byArthur Campela, by Lei Liang.

So is that explicitly a part of the Contact series’ mission, to specifically engage composers who haven’t had much exposure with large orchestras?

Not necessarily. This was the agenda for this year; but for next year, we’ll do different things. The whole concept is to get the orchestra playing the kind of repertoire it wouldn’t normally do.

So let’s move on to Graffiti. In your long career, you’ve rarely, if ever, written for the human voice. And now, not only is this work your first piece for choir with orchestra, it’s also one of your longest works. That’s an interesting combination: what inspired you to go so deep into the unknown?

Well, I have always said it was a pity that in my new-music ensemble Toimii, we didn’t have a singer, because what I know about instrumental writing is so much linked to the work we did together in those days. [Cellist] Anssi Karttunen is my knowledge of string playing; [Toimii clarinetist] Kari Kriikku is my entryway into the world of woodwinds. But of course it’s more complicated than that; one reason for why I haven’t been touching vocal music so much is perhaps a question about interest. I have had a very instrumental approach, a very virtuoso approach, and that approach in vocal music — I just didn’t find my voice in that world, so to speak. I was just waiting for the right moment, the inspiration.

The seed was planted for this piece was planted in 2001; it had an eight-year gestation period! I wanted to do something substantial, and I spent ages looking for what kind of texts I would go for. I wanted to get some quasi-dramatic aspect to the work, yet not making it an opera or an oratorio. I wanted it to be more than a neutral text; it had to form the background and the skeleton of the work.

One of the very first thresholds I faced was the choice of language, because I definitely didn’t want to do it in my Finnish native tongue. That felt a little too “close.” I was looking at a text in English that I might come back to one day, but it just didn’t work for this project. I briefly considered French texts, German texts. But then I thought about the choral music that has meant the most to me, and it was the things Stravinsky did with the Latin texts. What fascinated me with that approach is that you have a certain distance, a concrete distance, both because I don’t speak the language, but also the role of Latin in our society today is different than other languages.

At the same time, I didn’t want to do any religious texts, with all of those connections and connotations. The moment I found this Pompeiian material, I just felt that all the bits and bolts fell in the right place. The distance of the text’s world, combined with the agelessness of the graffiti — graffiti in every century has certain similarities, and they all reflect that society’s idea of “now.”

I love the contrast of choosing Latin, which is this monumental Ur-Language that carries all this weight, but then choosing graffiti as the text — basically, what people write in bathroom stalls now, except in Pompeii. Were you trying to make some pointed high/low contrast there?

Well, I would definitely say I was going for contrast. But, I mean, I am making no overt political statement with the choice of texts. What fascinated me was that, in a way, wall inscriptions in those days had an even more important role in society than today, because a lot of messages were passed on this way — all the market business, the gladiatorial announcements — they used walls like the Internet would be used today, or flyers on the street. And along with these texts, you got a sort of snapshot of a society.

What is doubly interesting to me was that this prosperous, active society in that part of the Roman world, one afternoon, just ceased to exist. It just stopped, and it was left like that for 1800 years. And then gradually they started to dig them out. In archaeology, there is no equivalent to Pompeii. All the routine elements of other societies were demolished, but this one just stopped one afternoon. So it’s an amazingly complete picture of a society that no longer exists.

It’s fascinating to see just how much of what was written in the streets is similar to what people feel today. The particularity of graffiti is that often you can be anonymous behind it — the lower-level stuff especially. I haven’t read the sociology behind it, but it’s a strange human impulse, the idea that you can secretly write some dirty things on a wall. Why do you do it?

From a certain point of view, one could say that these messages are the least timeless things you could have taken, because they are essentially detritus. What spoke to you about these messages?

Well, I tried to take everything they had to offer: the gladiatorial announcements, the poetic stuff, philosophical thoughts, things like “I’m amazed, wall, that you haven’t fallen into ruins, you hold up so many writers’ burdens.” Or the very opening one, someone has stolen this bronze pot, and the owner is anxious to get it back and posts a notice. So I tried to have many categories of expressions. The purpose was to make the music rich with big contrasts. It was a huge world; I could have spent the rest of my life in it.

The other peculiar thing with these texts is that it’s ancient Latin — it’s not even the medieval Latin of our familiarity. And on top of that, there are all these spelling mistakes; people were not always necessarily that well-informed in writing, and I’ve kept them very faithful to the originals.

It’s hard for me to imagine a modern-day equivalent. Imagine you were to go around New York City today and copy down everything that you saw on the subway, whether it was reprehensible or not, and set it to music for large orchestra and choir.

I should do a piece with just graffiti tags! [Laughs]. If I could read what half of them were saying, maybe I would.

I mean, some of these texts you did choose make Carmina Burana look saintly by comparison. What if they weren’t in Latin? Does the Latin cleanse them?

Well, the Latin doesn’t cleanse them, because the meaning is there, but the distance to them is important. I didn’t choose any of the texts from a provocative point of view. I didn’t want to exclude anything, because the vulgar stuff was a big part of the whole, but then all the vulgar things in society then were not necessarily as vulgar as they are today. I mean, I could tell you, there were some amazing ones. I had to draw a line for myself at a certain point. There was rough stuff; pedophilia, very explicit homosexual references, things that would become political and distracting if I used them. I’m secretly proud of what I have managed to include already, because when this piece was played in London last autumn and then was broadcast on the BBC, it came with a warning about explicit language!

It’s funny, how afraid people are of certain things; certain words remain taboos no matter what. It depends on the context; if somebody says “fuck” in the street, well, it’s not a nice thing to say, but no one finds it necessarily revolting. But the very moment you use them in a context like a serious attempt to write a piece for indoor use using an orchestra and all that, then there is a sort of unwritten taboo in it, which is interesting.

On another note completely: what have you seen digital music do both to and for contemporary classical music?

I find it positive in many ways. Say you are just looking for a recording of Bartok “Contrasts“. You can just look it up online and you can find all the historical recordings; you can find the new ones; you can have access to material you wouldn’t have access to easily. From a very professional point of view, I find it very useful. You can get to extremely rare material with very little effort. At the same time, I do regret — and I think this is something we have to get out of the habit of — but I do miss the feeling of walking into Tower Records without knowing what you wanted, hoping for serendipity.

Magnus Lindberg’s Graffiti can be downloaded here.