John Kennedy
John Kennedy is a composer/conductor who is originally from Minnesota and now resides in the Bay Area in California. His parents supported the arts so John had no problem seeing acts like the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra or the Minnesota Orchestra in his youth. He began his musical career as a percussionist but soon after seeing John Cage at a local Art cinema and then reading his book "Silence", he realized he could do many things in music and still do other arts as well. John took his musical aspirations to Oberlin Conservatory where he really enjoyed working hand in hand with composers, conductors and musicians, and eventually achieved a Masters degree at Northwestern in Chicago. With a solid education foundation behind him, John relocated to New York, to be in the heart of the new music scene. There, he formed the ensemble Essential Music and they concentrated on great music pieces that may have been neglected or had not received the attention that they deserve. While in New York, John wrote a letter to John Cage about a certain piece of music and Mr. Cage was more than happy to help this new ensemble by providing them support with the piece... that didn't get proper attention. His relationship with John Cage flourished and even share the stage with him on a European tour. John eventually took over the conducting portion of Essential Music and this was the transformational start of his new place in music, in this role. He currently plays a major part of the Spoleto Festival USA as Resident Conductor and Director of Orchestral Activities. This is an event that John has been associated with for many years. I recently spoke to John about his career and his work at the Spoleto Festival.
R.V.B. - Hello John. Robert von Bernewitz from Long Island... how are you?
J.K. - I'm good. How are you?
R.V.B. - I'm doing pretty good. I understand you guys getting a lot of rain over on the west coast.
J.K. - A lot of rain... yes indeed. It has eased up for now but it was incredibly steady for three to four weeks.
R.V.B. - You guys go from one extreme to the other.
J.K. - Yes. It has been really dry for several years and now it has been really wet. (Hahaha)
R.V.B. - So Minnesota... you grew up there. What was it like there for you as a child?
J.K. - It was fantastic. It was a very rich artistic environment in the Twin Cities. We had the Minnesota Orchestra and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. The Walker Arts Center was always at the vanguard of presenting contemporary music. I fell in love with music as an adolescent. My parents were teachers and involved with the arts. They took me to anything I wanted to see and really supported everything I wanted to be exposed to. Between going to concerts and getting training, I was very fortunate. I was able to study conducting with Henry Charles Smith, took a master class with Leonard Slatkin.
R.V.B. - You started off with percussion instruments?
J.K. – Yes, I was originally a percussionist. That was my first involvement with music. I was always studying percussion, but I had ambitions to be a composer and a conductor as well. I was first exposed to John Cage when I was 15 or 16 years old. I saw him in concert at The Walker Art Center. I went and got a copy of his book "Silence"... which I read. It was really influential for me because at that point, I was just a kid and I thought "What am I going to do in life? Am I going to be a musician? Am I going to go to college and study poetry, or English?" I think after reading Cage, I realized I could do all of those things. I could be a percussionist and a composer, and I could still read poetry. I didn't have to put myself in a box and go to a conservatory. That directed my interest in going to Oberlin which was a liberal arts college and a conservatory. I could balance all of my interests with my study of music.
R.V.B. - Where you always involved in the classical side of music? Where you aware of the popular music of the day?
J.K. - Yes, to some extent. I was never that involved in it until I was around 25 years old, when I moved to New York. There I dabbled into pretending that I could get involved in pop music. It didn't last very long. (Haha) I was trained classically, but even in my early years - in high school and Oberlin - I was drawn to the experimental side of classical music. I was always focusing on contemporary music and the sub-genre of American experimentalism. That's really where my roots were.
R.V.B. - During your years at Oberlin, was there anything that your instructors may have shown you that may have remained with you through today?
J.K. - I think what really stuck with me was the primacy of doing new work... the commissioning of new work... collaborating with composers and developing new work. It was going on at Oberlin and it felt incredibly vital to me. Bringing new works to life wasn't just something that composers did in their own studios, they needed the participation of performers. Throughout my own trajectory and career - as a performer, a conductor and a composer - I tried to sustain that, with new music ensembles and my music as a conductor. That's really what I took from Oberlin - in that laboratory that existed there when I was a student. I went to Northwestern after that to get a Masters degree. That was a great experience, being immersed in the classical scene in Chicago. I was Principal Timpanist and Principal Percussionist with the civic orchestra in Chicago - which is Chicago Symphony's training orchestra. It was great to have the experience of playing in a great orchestra, but it also showed me that it wasn't the career path that I wanted. I didn't really want to pursue the orchestra audition circuit. That's when I made the decision to go to New York and try to have a multi-faceted musical life where my focus was not to be an orchestral percussionist.
R.V.B. - So you packed up and moved to New York. That had to be exciting for you.
J.K. - It was amazing. I had been to New York before but I hadn't lived there. It was like living in a foreign country - It was like living in Paris.
R.V.B. - What section of New York did you go to?
J.K. - I lived briefly in Brooklyn but settled in Inwood... in the upper stretch of Manhattan. People used to call it "The musicians ghetto." (Haha)
R.V.B. - I'm sure it was relatively inexpensive compared to the rest of the city.
J.K. - Yes, and we had a nice amount of space. There were nice parks nearby... Fort Tryon.
R.V.B. - Just a 1-2-or 3 train away from anywhere. When you settled, how did you start networking yourself into the music scene?
J.K. - I had a dear friend form Oberlin named Charles Wood-who was another percussionist/composer - and he was the person that I ended up co-founding "Essential Music" with. That was my first music ensemble. We wanted to do both our own music - music from other young composers - and also focus on neglected classics of contemporary music. There was so much great music, that had only been performed once or twice. At that time, there was a real tradition in American composition - at least the best we could perceive - that hadn't been performed much in New York. Some of the work of various mid-western and west coast composers, that hadn't been done a lot in New York. With Essential Music, we saw that as being a flexible ensemble that could do some of those things. In terms of starting my networking, starting that group was a launching point. I had many other friends in the music world, that became contacts of meeting musicians. I was doing a little gigging as a percussionist back then to earn a living. I had played for the first time at the Spoleto Festival way back in 1983, as a percussionist in the orchestra. There were a lot of musicians in New York who had been there with me. They had helped provide me with an entree in New York.
R.V.B. - You mentioned that you were doing some obscure pieces. I saw that you did a Cage piece that wasn't performed very much. I also saw you did a piece from Henry Cowell' s assistant, that also wasn't performed very much.
J.K. - That was Johanna Beyer. I went to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts - to their music division of special collections - at Lincoln Center. I was researching the music and manuscripts of John J. Becker. There were a few pieces that intrigued me- he was a composer that had spent some time in Minnesota. He was a member of the so-called "American Five" from the 30's... but not a lot was known about him. I was looking up his manuscripts at the library and right after him in the alphabet, was the composer Johanna Beyer. It had rang a bell because I had read something about her in an essay by Charles Amirkhanian, who is out here on the west coast with me... the legendary founder of "Other Minds". Back then, Charles had also done something with Johanna Beyer's music and I was very intrigued by it. Here were all of her scores, sitting there in the New York Public Library... the original manuscripts. They were stunning to me. They were absolutely amazing. They became more interesting to me than John J. Becker’s music. I discovered that Cage had performed some of these pieces in the 1940's, when he started his percussion ensemble on the west coast, and then toured from Seattle to Chicago. I contacted Cage to find out what I could about Beyer. He was so generous. I wrote him a letter and then two days later, here's John Cage calling me on the phone. To a young person, this was just incredible to me. That started a relationship to where he was very loyal to Essential Music. He was attending our concerts, supporting our work financially and providing us information on some of this lost music from his early years. His publisher was C.F. Peters, and at that time the musicologist there was Don Gillespie. He had passed along some works of John Cage that Peters had not yet published. At this point, Cage was in his late 70's... this was in the late 1980's. He wanted to get these works back into the repertoire. Don passed these works on to us. We performed the final edition of his "Radio Play" - which he did with Kenneth Patchen - called "The City Wears a Slouch Hat". There were several other works that we also did.
R.V.B. - What a great way to get yourself known. Essential Music covered a variety of styles of music.
J.K. - We really did... in addition to doing new works and collaborating with composers in the New York area.I felt in my own aesthetic point of view, was that in the New York scene, there was this so-called dichotomy between uptown music and downtown music. The stylistic difference between the uptown composers centered around Columbia and the downtown experimentalists - which were exemplified by Cage in that era - and popularized by the minimalists that had come of age…Philip Glass, Steve Reich and others. They were doing amplified music for their own ensembles, in lofts down in Soho. They were finally getting the recognition that they deserved.The new music scene had this bifurcation between the composers in the academy –and those who were doing their own thing. One of the things that we tried to do with Essential Music was to bring uptown musical values to downtown. Because I was connected to the classical music scene myself, I knew a lot of really good musicians. With Essential Music, I was always very proud that we were playing some of these pieces by Cage and others, with musicians who were very fine. Prior to these years, a lot of these Juilliard musicians hadn't played a lot of experimental music.
R.V.B. - Did you change or add any musicians for the different pieces.
J.K. - We constantly mixed it up. We were never a set instrumentation ensemble. We were flexible, project by project. Over the years we would do chamber music with very small ensembles. We were percussion based in principle and philosophy. We grew to a full orchestra for certain projects. We did one project where we had a 112-musician orchestra - for Cage's "Ocean" - with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. The idea of being percussion based was also a "Cageian'" philosophy because from Cage's perspective, percussion is anything. He once said that "Percussion = X". The X factor can be anything. While I was originally a percussionist, I looked at my instrument as being the ensemble itself. That's why I became a conductor. This very expansive notion of percussion is almost metaphoric - within the concept of Cage - where your instrument becomes culture... it becomes music itself... it becomes anything. In thinking of myself as a percussionist in my roots, I thought of myself as using other means to play what needed to be played.
R.V.B. - As far as conducting, how did the transition happen from percussionist to conductor? Was it a smooth transition going from a musician, to working with and directing musicians?
J.K. - It's a long path for anyone to become a conductor without going through the conducting academy. For me, it was a natural outgrowth of having my own ensemble. We had originally invited some new music specialist conductors to work with us. After a couple of experiences I thought "Why are we doing that... I could conduct." I felt I could bring us perspective and point of view. Even if my technique was still primitive, I could improve on it. That was the beginning of my path. I had studied it in high school and college, but I hadn't really focused on it as much as I had on composition and percussion. So I started conducting my own ensemble. Then through Spoleto, I had a lot of exposure to opera. I became an assistant conductor for opera productions. It's the old school recipe to learn how to conduct. Any kind of technical problem in music, you're going to encounter in opera. Opera is essentially about singing and breath, so you really learn how to conduct fluidly, with this idea of music as something that breathes. That was something I could apply to contemporary music as well. Having that apprenticeship around opera became a subversive path for me.
R.V.B. - In your New York years, you went on tour with John Cage, right before he passed away. What did that tour consist of?
J.L. - It took us to a couple of festivals in Salzburg and Zurich. They were focused on both Cage's music and new American music. It was a wonderful experience to be with him in his last years and get a sense of his generosity and to his approach to life in music.
R.V.B. - He seemed very approachable. All you had to do was ask.
J.K. - He was incredible that way... very magnanimous. He never played favorites. He gave access to a lot of people. He was very enthusiastic about young people who demonstrated that they understood his work.
R.V.B. - Were there any wonderful moments that stand out in your New York days?
J.K. - Essential Music participated in the very first Lincoln Center Festival in 1996. It is now one of the most interesting festivals in New York. John Rockwell was the director of it back then. He was a well-known writer for the New York Times and had written the book called "All American Music". The featured composer at the first festival was Morton Feldman, and I conducted his "For Samuel Beckett" at that festival. To me, that's one of Feldman's most incredible works. The other highlight would be my relationship with Cage... working with him in person. We did a retrospective concert of some of his lost works, combined with some of his most recent works... like the late number pieces in 1991. He passed away unexpectedly in 1992. I was one of the organizers of his musical memorial. We called it a "Cage Musicircus". Originally there wasn't going to be a musical event - Cage and Merce didn't want one - but everyone really wanted to do something, and Merce relented. Andrew Culver - Cage's compositional assistant - Chuck Wood and I, organized this "Musicircus", which involved a lot of musicians. They performed simultaneously over 3 1/2 hours. There was everyone from Yoko Ono... to Laurie Anderson... to the Arditti String Quartet. There were many other performers involved who had worked with Cage. That was really an incredible event.
R.V.B. - That sounds like a wonderful time. What brought you to the west coast?
J.K. - I got stuck in Santa Fe for 12 years. (Haha) I had been in New York for quite a while... around 15 years. I was starting to feel a little burned out on New York itself - as a place to make music. I perceived at the time that the city was the capital of capitalism - and would never change. (Haha) Everything was so transactional... even trying to put a concert on. I needed a break. I had gotten married. My wife was a native New Yorker and she wanted to live somewhere else. We had a baby. We thought "Let's just see where we go." We put our faith in the universe and threw ourselves out there. We ended up moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, out of the blue. We had some friends in the area who were artists. I had this fantasy notion of being a Bohemian artist in New Mexico... (Haha) from Georgia O'Keefe on. Even D.H. Lawrence lived in Taos for a while. I thought this would be great, after all of those years in New York. It was a change of pace and a great place to raise a family. In many ways it was a great time. I started a group there called Santa Fe New Music. It was fantastic that we were not presenting music for a sub-culture of people who loved contemporary music but it was for people of all walks of life. I could tell my dental hygienist that I was doing a concert on Saturday and she would come and love it. That sort of thing never happened in New York. (Haha) In New York, people generally know what shows they are going to. In Santa Fe, it was very gratifying that this little organization we started, ended up reaching thousands of people. It was almost if we were creating a generalist audience for contemporary music. That was very rewarding. In the long run, we certainly discovered that Santa Fe was a tourist town. Eventually, the call for a larger, metropolitan place returned,and we moved to the Bay scupresents.org/performances/faculty-recital-john-kennedy-musical-mavericks
R.V.B. - Once you got to the Bay Area, I presumed you made a new circle of musician friends?
J.K. - I feel like my community is everywhere. I've had this longstanding relationship with the Spoleto Festival - and it's an international arts festival. It pops up every spring. With my 15 years in New York, many of the people from New York, I brought to Santa Fe concerts. I feel like I know so many people everywhere. My community isn't just necessarily where I live. When I moved to the Bay Area, I already knew many of the people involved in the contemporary music scene here. People like Charles Amirkhanian, Sarah Cahill, Paul Dresher and others. Here in the Bay Area, the music community is very rich and very diverse. There are an awful lot of people doing incredibly interesting things - with an independent spirit, even when the sense of community may not be as intense as it is in New York. One of the great things about New York is how dense it is. There's this incredible density of human capital. There is so much talent there. When you go to a concert in New York - which I still love doing - you can run into 50 people that you know. It's a little bit more diffuse in the Bay Area because we're spread out geographically. But there's an awful lot going on and I like that independent spirit. I feel very at home here because of my own musical roots. Having been so heavily influenced by Cage, in a way I sort of feel like a west coast composer. I sometimes write “pretty” music also…I've always loved Lou Harrison’s music. For me to live here now, it feels like home. I think in some respects you could categorize me as a west coast composer, even though I've only lived here several years now.
R.V.B. - As a composer, you've done your new music and you've done - as you said "pretty things". When you first started out your work as a composer, did you concentrate in any particular area?
J.K. - I composed for what I knew... and that started with percussion. I started in working in experimental formats... open form music. I was very influenced by Morton Feldman in writing music of quietude - in contrast to the noise of the world. I was always interested in devising temporal structures, that gave musicians freedom within a set structure. Those were my guiding principles in my early work. As I expanded my aesthetic palette - it took me a while - but it almost felt like an act of courage, to write a piece of music that was diatonically pretty. I had Lou Harrison for inspiration but also a composer like Peter Garland, who described his own work as “radical consonance". Giving what was happening in the world of minimalism - with Philip Glass and Steve Reich, making the world safe for tonal music - that definitely opened up my own way of thinking.
R.V.B. - The Spoleto Festival is something that takes place in the spring. What kind of preparation do you do for the festival?
J.K. - I'm the chief conductor there. It's an artistic role and part of the leadership team for the festival. The Spoleto Festival has really been my artistic home. I've been very fortunate to have that relationship with them. Originally, I did play in the orchestra, but then I was asked to start a contemporary music series. It was originally called "20th Century Perspectives", and eventually turned into what is now known as "Music in Time". Through the years, I became the number two conductor and my title was the Artistic Associate. I helped plan the festival’s musical offerings, which waspartly an administrative role. Since 2011, I have been the director of the orchestra program...in the role of conductor. It's really a year round job, even though the festival only happens in the springtime. I'm there for a 6-week period with rehearsal... prepare an opera and put it on. It's an ongoing position - in a sense that most everyday there is something to do. We're planning festivals two to three years ahead. It has allowed me to have an aesthetic platform in the work that I want to do.
R.V.B. - The festival is held in Charleston, correct?
J.K. - Yes. I've seen Charleston transformed through the years, in large, by the influence of the arts. The diversity and sense of openness that it brings to a city. It's a wonderful legacy that started originally with the Spoleto Festival in Italy... which was started originally by Gian Carlo Menotti. He was a composer who had a real populist streak. He started the American festival in 1977. I worked with him in my early years there - he split with the American festival in the early 90's. That story is well known. Nevertheless, he started a festival that was artist centric. It focused on discovering new talent, and was international in perspective. It has endured, and is the kind of thing that I try to help push forward. I have benefited by having a long and wonderful relationship with our general director Nigel Redden. He's an arts administrator that puts artists first. He is also the general director of the Lincoln Center Festival. To work in that environment, has just been a joy for me.
R.V.B. - That's a multi-venue event where there is something going on all day long.
J.K. - The wonderful thing about Charleston is that it is a walking city. Within a small downtown area, there are all kinds of venues. We have four theaters that we can present opera in. There are many other venues and outdoor settings. There are other smaller venues that are used for new music concerts or cabaret. It's very alive. Because it's a multi-arts festival, people will go to three to four events in one day. Charleston has fantastic food so they'll eat very well also. (Haha)
R.V.B. - I know that a major hurricane came through Charleston a while back. Did that destroy any of Charleston's venues?
J.K. - I believe it was in 1989, with Hurricane Hugo. It took the roof off of the municipal auditorium... The Gaillard Center. It caused some damage in other theaters, that were since renovated. The city became beautified after the hurricane - I believe the FEMA money helped. (Haha) Through the years, Charleston had an amazing Mayor named Joe Riley. He was the Mayor for 40 years. He didn't run for re-election about a year and a half ago. Though his years as Mayor, Joe Riley was a big advocate for the arts. He also had a philosophy for new urbanism in Charleston.
R.V.B. - Looking back on your accomplishments up to this point in... What are you proud of?
J.K. - I rarely look back. I'm always looking ahead. On a personal level I'm proud of my two wonderful daughters. They have been a big part of my life. I've loved being a parent. It has been very rewarding.I'm certainly proud of the work that I have done at Spoleto. I feel like I've been able to create a working environment that is very positive -where other artists can thrive and grow. That's a big part of how we do our work at Spoleto. For me as a conductor, that's a big part of what artistic leadership is. It's not what interpretation I want to turn on to a piece of music but provide a scenario where everyone can love what they do and do very well at it. That's what I have learned through the years - both in running my own organization and the chair I've had at Spoleto - and I try to carry this philosophy forward.
R.V.B. - Can you tell me a little bit about the Other Minds festival that you participated in?
J.K. - It's a legendary festival that was started by Charles Amirkhanian. For many years, it had this unique structure where they would invite 7 to 10 composers, and those composers would go into retreat to spend time together for a few days. At the end of that period, a series of concerts would be presented in San Francisco. It's a wonderful opportunity for composers of different persuasions to really talk in depth. I was very grateful when Charles invited me to participate in 2011. I was there with some amazing composers who I had admired through the years - and some I didn't know as well. There was a great aesthetic variety. I also got to know Charles better. Charles is an incredible mind – with an incredible knowledge of the history of music - especially modern contemporary music, and the post modern music of the last 50 years. Anyone that has participated in Other Minds knows that it's something very special.
R.V.B. - You were involved with the American Music Center. There's another old time historic organization.
J.K. - It was started by Aaron Copland and others, to be a composers’ membership and advocacy organization. It was based in New York, and was a resource center. They stored scores that then were transferred to the New York Public Library, and which were in the early 2000s turned into an online collection called "NewMusicJukebox". During those years, it was always a tradition where the President of the Board was a composer. It was a volunteer position. I was invited to join the board in 2001. Very shortly after I joined the board, I became the President. (Haha) We had a very dynamic executive director... Richard Kessler. Richard, along with Frank Oteri, helped create "NewMusicBox". It's an online magazine for American composers and keeps readers up on what's happening in American contemporary music. When I was President, I was very involved in activities of the organization... during Richard's leadership of it. It was a great experience as well as a complicated experience because the organization went through some identity struggles, as well as funding struggles. It was merged into "New Music USA" and "Meet the Composer" – and ironically, "Meet the Composer"was originally a program of the American Music Center. Their affiliation is very natural. I'm a little sad that The American Music Center doesn't stand on its own anymore... I miss it.
R.V.B. - It sounds like your career is thriving. I appreciate you taking this time with me. I appreciate it.
J.K. - Thank you.
Interview conducted by Robert von Bernewitz
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For more information on John Kennedy, visit his website www.johnkennedymusic.com
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