Brian Field
Award-winning American composer Brian Field studied at Juilliard with Milton Babbitt and has gone on to enjoy an eclectic career. His lyrical three-movement environmental suite Three Passions for Our Tortured Planet has been recorded by pianist Kay Kyung Eun Kim and was released on the Steinway & Sons label earlier this year.
When I was 16, apart from playing the piano I also sang in the church choir. One of the choral instructors was a real polymath, a graduate student studying music, performance, composition and philosophy. I indicated that I was interested in learning to write music and he immediatelty wanted to help. So that was my first formal training in composition. His energy and passion were so infectious; that was really the push into my becoming a composer.
I found the ability to imagine something from nothing awesome – then to try to get it down on paper and have other people interpret it and make it real over and over again. The shades of difference in each performance, each one reimagining what the composer might have been thinking, have always fascinated me.
The Three Passions for Our Tortured Planet project has been going on for a couple of years. I had the topic of climate change awareness bouncing around my head for a while. It’s very close to home for me because most of my family lives in California and there have been, and continue to be, all sorts of forest fires raging around the state. So ‘Fire’ was the first of the three movements that I wrote.
In all three movements the message isn’t hopeless. They could all end in disaster – the fire could burn everything down; all the glacial ice could melt; hurricanes could destroy everything. But I made a point of concluding each movement in a vein of hopefulness.
Climate change as a theme isn’t unique, but the point of this work was to help support the policy programmes of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The performance and recording royalties are being donated in full to the union, and the score is free to anyone who wants to participate. There are dozens of participating artists and I think we’ve performed it on every continent except Antarctica, but we’ll see how that plays out!
Sometimes I start a piece at the piano, but sometimes it’s about imagination. The ‘Glaciers’ movement is a great example, because I could envision the shearing of the glacial ice and how I might represent that musically.
I’ve gravitated towards vocal works, but I’m comfortable writing for all types of ensemble; I’ve done television work and music for dance. Someone asked me the other day to write a piece for flute and tuba! I would never have imagined combining those two instruments.
I subscribe to the idea that all different types of art, music and composition are crafts. They’re something that you do every day, and if someone asks you to write a flute and tuba piece? Sure, you’ve got it! You want an orchestra piece? That’s fine. This notion of people calling other people geniuses is a late 19th-century invention. For hundreds of years, all artists were tradespeople.
Milton Babbitt was a big influence. My music is nothing like his, just to be clear! It wasn’t about writing in a serialist style for him. Instead he asked, ‘What’s the architecture of this piece, and how does it all fit together?’ The discussions we had were really fascinating.
My music is super-eclectic. It’s stylistically a pastiche of many things: post-romanticism, jazz, minimalism… it’s generally accessible music, as opposed to ‘I have to know a lot about music to enjoy this.’ I’ve written a couple of pieces that are Gospel-inspired, and I’ve written big band pieces, liturgical choral pieces, orchestral pieces. It depends on the occasion.