This November, Stuart Saunders Smith is  being posthumously inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame, survived and accompanied by his wife Sylvia Smith. The Smith’s collective contribution to the percussive arts through pedagogy, composition, publishing, and a myriad of other avenues is unmatched.

In honor of this, I am at last doing the work to share a conversation I had with Stuart in 2017 after he graciously agreed to a very young William’s request for an interview. The occasion was a “Stuart at 70” celebration series of concerts at the University of South Florida. Robert McCormick is a prolific collaborator and champion of the Smith’s work, and that weekend we were premiering Mercy, Stuart’s newest work for large ensemble. We also recorded it for At 70: The Percussion Music of Stuart Saunders Smith, published by Chen Li Recordings in 2020.

With my vibraphone part for Mercy serving as a meager point of departure, Stuart dignified my awkward questions with generous and insightful responses, along with unprompted forays across philosophy and art.

I largely left my questions out of the edit in order to highlight Stuart’s organic stream of consciousness, for indeed my saving grace in this interview as a clueless undergraduate was that I let him speak at length. I’ve grouped series of responses into general topics, all played over the audio from the following night’s premiere of Mercy with the McCormick Percussion Group.

As a performer I don’t really have some large connection to Stuart, my only contact being through Robert McCormick’s close relationship with him. Indeed my understanding of his work is almost entirely through listening, he is so ubiquitous in the percussion community that to digest his work is wonderfully inescapable. The cover photo reflects this, a blurry picture of Stuart Saunders Smith himself, with the sliver of color across the portrait representing my own heavily limited perspective on his artistry in the form of a few pixels of a recent trip my wife and I took to Vermont, the Smith’s long time home state.

Upon digging through my files to find this interview and subsequently annotate and edit it, I was shocked by the insights therein that likely flew over my head as a teenager. I feel lucky to have such an interview with a legend, and am delighted to share it with you.

Please watch on YouTube, timestamps can guide you through the topics, and find a rough full transcript below.

Transcript

The transcript below was auto-generated through Adobe Premiere, then edited by me, and for the most part maintains the punctuation used for the video captioning, so reads awkwardly in this format. Any extraction or editing should reference the audio to maintain accuracy.

Teachers

I learned,  notation skills from Ed Diemente I learned to trust my intuition from Sal Martirano  I learned,  that my ideas about noncommercial music,  were, shared by Herbert Brün.  And, Ben Johnston, we talked about spiritual matters  in composition.

Influences and Form

One is  I try to, listen to a new piece  every day that I’m totally unaware of.  So that I continue over  time to educate myself.  And for,  But I, I’m…  there’s a few composers that are kind of a touchstone.  One is John Cage, and the other is Bill Evans. And then John Coltrane.  And, increasingly I like Debussy.  You know, Mahler is very interesting in that  he has a kind of,  Stream of consciousness  in his work that I find very attractive.  You’ll find in some of my work that,  it’s clear I’ve.  I’m not thinking about form.  I’m allowing,  form to emerge out of details.  I do that because I,  That’s how I perceive life.  I don’t perceive life as…or time  as, these kind of logical sequences.  What I,  am attracted to  is, a kind of, this is happening now.  Oh! It just changed. If you think about your life.  It doesn’t,  It’s not an ABA form  It’s not a rondo.  In all of those forms I respect and some, and often people  like Brian Fernyhough and,  the late Milton Babbitt worked great with form.  I mean, they’re geniuses when it comes to form  but for me, I’m attracted to jazz in practice to,  The music that  comes out of detail, like when you hear Mahler,  I just don’t hear him being all that conscious  or caring about obvious forms.  Yeah.  So that’s how I work.

Composition and Repetition

The way I ended up composing it is each part,  is its own solo.  And then how they come together,  was more or less by chance.  Given that, that the horizontal ideas  were totally worked out, the vertical ideas happen.  That is how I perceive a lot of Renaissance music,  that the, like the motets and things like that.  But, the, the individual lines of where it’s all happening in the counterpoint.  So I learn from that, and I also learn from free jazz,  because what those great musicians did in the free jazz movement,  to a certain  extent, Bill Evans, to a larger extent, John Coltrane,  Albert Ayler.  Pharoah Sanders  all those great players because what they accomplished  was having many, many players, each soloing,  in, in this in most of these guys,  they were highly expressionistic.  Much like the expressionistic movement  of Germany, actually, my music is gentle.  Almost all of it’s more or less gentle music from nineteen seventy on.  That’s been I don’t really write harsh pieces,  I don’t think, but I did learn that simultaneous soloing from them.  Then I,  had been very pleased  to get to know Brian Fernyhough’s music more  Because he, he also does that, but from a wholly different way.  As I mentioned, he’s a master engineer.  And it’s really beautiful how his forms  are pre-planned.

Repetition and Reason

But I prefer a more improvizational approach  to music in general and certainly in Mercy,  specifically.  The first thing I think you perceive as a listener,  or I perceive as a listener, is the texture.  And then over repeated listenings,  the texture fades away into,  more rigorous specificity  of interrelationships.   Which creates its own form  but it doesn’t establish one form.  It establishes many forms at the same time.  I find that if I, that music  that uses pre engineering,  plans around to me too simple where,  a more ragtag approach to form,  is suitably,  musically emergent.  As I said last night, repetition  helps us get to a timeless state.  It’s a it’s an irony that you repeat something enough  then people get into a meditative state.  I find that  amusing and meaningful at the same time  The repetition doesn’t come out of minimalism.  It comes out of classical music.  Because, you know, you’ll have a theme, a little something contrasted.  Then back to that theme in the contrast again.  And you’re absolutely very perceptive.  It is it helps anchor the listener  in a particular area if their mind drifts a little bit.  Well they’ll hear it again  And can follow the musical discourse.  There’s the idea that there is a big bang  and then the universe is evolving.   Then there’s another idea that the big bang is something out of nothing.  And it just happened.  That’s what I think went on.  That it just happened.  So one day I’m composing and  all of a sudden I say gee I kind of like that.  Maybe I should just do it again.  And then from there got to my whole repetitive language.  It was something out of nothing.  I think that, you know, you’re going along and working  and then all of a sudden you get a phone call and your brother-in-law just died  It’s something out of nothing.  No one knows why he passed away.  Why my mother is gradually losing her mind  Science tries to offer us reason  when there is no reason.

Identity and Artistry

Right. I always try to achieve that.  But that balance between our  deeper, intuitive selves  and our social selves.  We have the unconscious, which we all share.  And it’s a Jungian consciousness, a consciousness  that is, transcends any individual personality.  We all have  ideas about dying.  We all have ideas about birth.  We all have ideas about right living  that I think people worldwide share  how we deal with those unconscious realities,  are different from culture to culture.  But the fact is there are ceremonies about death  There are ceremonies about becoming a man, becoming a woman.  I mean, all of that is part of the world culture. But we have those things in common.  Our personalities are quite different. That’s, personality is life experience,  Plus some genetic input.  And, the more you become an artist  and self-actualized,  the more that you compose or play music  which only you could do.  That’s the job of a composer  and a creative artist in that as far as you know,  you’re the only one that can do what you’re doing right now.  And that is personality.  And we always have dancing between unconscious and conscious.  And we need  there is a violent part of the unconscious that we need to deal with forthrightly.  And religion helps  us deal with that on all the world religions.  It seems to me centered around a kind of meditative,  kindliness,  between people.  And that needs to be,  underscored and valued.

That’s the job of a composer  and a creative artist in that as far as you know, you’re the only one that can do what you’re doing right now.

Collections of Works, Links

And, I try to,  emphasize these values in sound in the piece, Mercy.  There’s a piece Honesty  for vibraphone and flute.  piece History for  ringing metal.  There’s a whole family of pieces.  And that’s one of the things I try to do, is to have families of pieces  like Honesty and Dignity and,  and those kinds of pieces,  using good human virtue.  Then there are the Christian pieces, which  try to give universal truths that are based on the kind of feeling of goodness.  And then there are pieces for any performer, the trans-media and scores  And then there are,  pieces centered around improvization.  like Notebook  So just over the years I’ve, I’ve got these families, sometimes  they interact, you know, they’re hybrids and sometimes they’re not.  If you’re open to noticing  your place in the world, you realize that each moment is unique  and allows one to  again, if you focus on it, allows one to,  Change.  And over the years, if you live long enough  as a composer, there will be this radical evolution.  And with the Links I had all that’s  what I had to say for that kind of material.  Now I’m using a kind of  chromatic modalism.  in my music and in more repetitions.  Because as I said last night, repetition  helps us get to a timeless state.  It’s a, it’s an irony.  If you repeat something enough, then people get into a meditative state…

The Spoken Word

I see,  the spoken word in two ways.  I use, traditional poetic  ways of making things coming from intuition and sort of  heat of the intuitive self.  Then I, work with,  various techniques to bring up the body,  wholly different ways of using language.  So there is,  Family Portraits: Delbert,  which uses traditional, text.  And then there is,  By Language Embellished, I  Which what I did is I wrote, the original prologue  and then did a kind of linguistic research  on each word of the prologue.  Coming up with a unique way of  dealing with language from,  an investigation of,  what the prologue had to say.

John Cage and Taste

What we basically are  is vibrating light, the whole universe  is vibrating light and the human is,  a very bright light in the world.  When you’re really seeing without language,  this becomes very, very clear that everything is luminescent.  And, so we’re connected in a dance  with our unconscious luminescence,  and then we pull away from each other  with our personality.  John Cage always loved it  when someone’s personality was very, very strong.  Like, he loved Conlon Nancarrow’s music, for instance.  And it was totally different than,  Harry Partch  I mean, he had great respect for them.  I do too.  I say I’m a student of his(Cage) because I still  I’m reading all of his books again  I read, just finished his,  collected letters  Huge amount of letters  I went through.  So I feel like I’ve been always studying with John Cage,  and I think that John represents an incredibly important  exploration of music that deemphasizes taste  and emphasizes invention.  Schoenberg’s said of Cage:  “He’s not a composer, but he’s an inventor of genius.”  John used to love to say that.  He would say that was his diploma from school.  My work is about,  taste  the development of a personal taste over time.  we(Cage and Smith) are opposites in that.  I don’t know if he ever really knew my music enough to,  comment on it, but I would think he would be rather negative.  Because he saw all the worst of taste music, as he called it.  Beethoven.  Yeah.  And he liked Satie  That was his great mentor.  And Schoenberg, and it makes sense  his melodic music,  Pre 1952,  is modal  but highly rigorous.  And he learned the rigor from Arnold Schoenberg his teacher So he, he combines a kind of,  modal music with chance  in, you know, from 50 to on.  And he, he really,  didn’t trust taste.  Neither did my other teacher Herbert Brün  Trust taste  And Herbert  always would get mad at me about that.  But, I learned a lot from all my teachers