relácie
James Helgeson is a composer and scholar whose career bridges two worlds: after decades of teaching Renaissance literature at leading universities, he returned to contemporary composition with a fresh and unconventional perspective. He has taught literature and music at Columbia University in the USA and literature at Cambridge University and the University of Nottingham in the UK. As Dean of the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin, he belongs among today’s most erudite composers, with a unique voice that deepens historical awareness through the contemporary sonic prism of new music. In this interview, he reflects on his formative musical experiences in the United States and Europe, the interplay between literature and music, and his skepticism toward the idea of music as a 'universal language.' This interview took place during the project Reconnecting Europe with Guitar in July 2021.
James, could you tell us about your musical background and early years growing up in the US?
I grew up in a university city in the US, not far from Chicago and I was very lucky, in a way, because there was a lot of very good music going on. I sang in a choir and that was a huge influence on me. I think singing the Mahler’s Third Symphony, also the Britten’s War Requiem when I was nine or ten, I think, was very formative in getting me interested in composing.
I was also lucky that my parents were academics. We were able to travel a lot, so, as a teenager,
I spent time abroad as well, especially in Paris. And later, I went to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, I also studied at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio in the US, and
I also studied abroad later. I did a PhD at Princeton in Renaissance literature and studied in Paris as well during that time.
James Helgeson in Venice (photo by Joseph Pearson)
Your dual identity as both a scholar of Renaissance literature and a contemporary composer is particularly intriguing. After two decades of lecturing on Renaissance literature at world-renowned universities, you returned to composing contemporary music. Does your other career provide you with a particular perspective on music in general?
I think I am not the best person to judge whether literature influences my music. I think it does,
I hope it does. Certainly, I am interested in things because of literature that might not have immediately come to mind if I simply had a very traditional musical background: namely, the combination of music and poetry, for example in late medieval and early Renaissance music, which is been very important to me in both sides of my career. I think it can't hurt to have a very different perspective coming from having two different fields on artistic production. It's not entirely unusual, I am just thinking about American composers like Christian Wolff, who was for
a long time a classics professor, and even Elliott Carter, for example, taught ancient Greek at some point in his career, I believe. So, I think that I would say that a circuitous route to getting where you are artistically is probably, or at least I hope, a better way of doing interesting work. There are of course other composers who have taken a much more direct path, but I think the circuitousness is probably fruitful and useful.
How do you view the often-heard claim that music and language share common ground?
I was always suspicious of the statement that one hears a lot that music is a language or even a universal language. Certainly, there are things about music that can be described linguistically, even semantically, but I think music is a medium that is very different in more important ways from language.
I was involved in a project in Oxford sponsored by the Balzan Foundation about literature and cognition. One of the very interesting aspects of this was the involvement of Deirdre Wilson, who is
a linguist at University College London, who is very famous for developing, with Dan Sperber, a theory of linguistic relevance. So, at the time I was very interested in following up thinking about this question of whether one could use linguistic relevance theory as a way of thinking about expectation in music. Since the project was relatively short-term, I did not do that at that time, although I suspect that I will eventually investigate this question of expectation and what it means for defining something like musical meaning.
In your view, what role does communication play in music?
Communication is maybe the wrong word. Music, I think, is a way of being together, creating ephemeral, short-term communities between listeners, composers, performers, and audiences. Communication implies, in some sense, semantic content, among other things. I find it difficult to understand what that might be (in music). But I do think that music is a way of bringing people together and having them share a certain kind of aesthetic experience.
Returning to composition in your forties might come with a certain distance from trends and a more mature focus. How do you see the relationship between tradition and innovation in today’s contemporary music scene?
I have the advantage and disadvantage of no longer being twenty. One would like to be twenty sometimes, but I think the advantage of not being so young allows me – you are right – to have certain circumspection regarding trends. I have also always been fascinated, also as a literature professor, by people who come from the outside. Like Beckett, for example, coming from the outside in France and then writing in French. I think that coming back to composition after a long time, it's a bit like coming to a slightly foreign country and I think that perspective of not taking for granted or not valuing, quickly, the kinds of things I might value when I was twenty, is very useful.
Did COVID-19, isolation, and the loss of real human contact have an impact on your composing?
I think composers are relatively solitary people, although, I have a partner, so I wasn't entirely solitary. It was a time when this kind of coming together, this kind of communication that I associate with music was impossible. A lot of people have suffered for that both emotionally, but also financially. I think lots of performing musicians had been in very difficult straits in the last year.
I wrote a huge amount of music in the first lockdown. My way of dealing with being locked in was to write a lot. In the second and third lockdown, especially the long one we just recently emerged from, I found it very difficult to write anything at all. In the first lockdown, I did write a string quartet and a set of canons which I called Seven Canons for the Plague-Spring, hoping that the last spring would be the end of the story. Now I think COVID will be with us for a long time,
but I am back to composing.
Many composers create music that responds to their cultural, political, or religious environment. Do you see your music as shaped by such external forces, or do you consider it more autonomous?
We may be using the word ‘reactionary’ in different senses. I would hope that I'm an autonomous composer, I do not think of myself as a reactionary. I think that there's a lot of reactionary music that is being written that sounds bland as if it could have been written seventy years ago. I don't think that my music is that way. Although I'm not trying to be revolutionary in any way, nor do
I find that particularly interesting a priori to need to revolutionary. I want to write the music that
I want to write. If some people like it, then that's great. And that, I suppose, makes me autonomous.