Creative Collaboration:
The Making of Steve Mackey’s It
Is Time
Part II
Time sits
Time stands Time is time… from Isaac Maliya’s, Time is Time |
Several years
ago So Percussion had the honor of commissioning Steven Mackey for a new
percussion quartet. Steve –
Professor of Composition and Chair of the Music Department at Princeton
University – is one of the most omnivorous and brilliant composers in America
today.
During
the course of a year and a half, we worked closely with Steve to craft a new
piece that highlights each of us as performers and interpreters. We found the end result to be
astonishing in its innovation and conceptual power.
Over
this series of four articles, we’ll dissect each movement through the eyes of
the individual members of the group: Eric, Josh, Adam, and Jason. We’ll also talk about working with Steve
to unlock the potential in each of these instruments.
Here is a link to watch the video of the piece.
This
article focuses on Josh Quillen and several different ways of looking at the
steel drums:
It
is Time: New Ground for the Steel
Drum
Our collaboration with Steve Mackey on the 2nd
movement (Steel Drums) of “It is Time” began with BBQ. This is fitting, given that most things
in the steel drum world happen over some sort of communal food experience in
Trinidad and Tobago. What struck
me the most about Steve’s way of learning the instrument was his desire to hear
me play the way I naturally wanted to play. He was curious about my idiosyncrasies as a player because
this was an instrument he had never written for. I often wonder: if he had written this for another steel
drummer, would it have turned out completely differently? Maybe it wouldn’t be different at all,
but once the music starting arriving via email bit by bit, I found that it challenged
me like no other music written for the steel drum, while at the same time,
somehow, showing obviously how I should make it my own. Steve strove to push me as a player to
interpret his music the way I would Calypso music, and it meant a lot to me
that he was being so thoughtful about tradition while writing incredibly
difficult music.
It’s not to say that I didn’t have to practice or
could just sight-read it all--quite the contrary! His writing for double seconds, for the most part, kept to
some version of a whole-tone scale, which allowed me to keep one hand inside
each steel drum almost the entire time.
There were exceptions of course, but it allowed for easy flow while
playing.
The most difficult part of the double-second music
is a passage that I really feel is a duet for drums and steel drums that
alternates between running 16ths and dotted 16ths. The passage often has the
feeling of going “over the bar,” even though the entire thing is basically in
5/8 time. On steel drums, it’s
incredibly difficult to play due to running lines passing rapidly from low to
high in the range punctuated by high accented “melodic” notes. Steve described to me that this music
was his way of notating out the method of harmonic/melodic “comping” that I
employ when playing solo steel drums. (I played an arrangement of “What a
Wonderful World” for him early on in the collaboration that uses this technique
of arpeggiating chords and plucking out the melody at the same time).
Along the way, I expected to have to tell Steve that
things needed to be re-written so they would flow better, but his thoughtful
obsession about what he was writing kept me from having to do that. He had diagrams of my instruments at
home so he could slowly “play” every note he was writing. If he could play it slow, then in his
mind, I could play it fast. Well,
it worked! It kicked me in
the pants, but it worked.
Writing for the steel drums is a difficult beast to
tackle, but the two of us broke new ground together, coming across something
that I am sure doesn’t exist yet elsewhere in the steel drum world. I have a new “Invader-style” lead pan
that I had been using to extend the high range of my double seconds. Steve started asking me if I could re-tune
metal bowls to have a few of the higher lead pan pitches “detuned” a bit by a
quarter tone (ie. microtonally detuned). I did mess around with a few of the bowls, but the setup
started to get a little unwieldy to deal with, and they just didn’t sound as
good as the steel drum. It
occurred to me that I had an older “Invader” style lead pan made by Cliff
Alexis that was given to me by my high school steel drum teacher, Joan
Wenzel. It was really out of tune
and beat up, but on a whim I called the tuner I was using, Darren Dyke, to ask
him if he could tune the entire pan back into shape, but just leave the whole
thing a quarter tone sharp of A440.
His response was, “well, I’ll just set the strobe tuner a quarter tone
sharp and roll with it.” When I
got the pan back, it sounded in tune with itself, but as soon as I put it with
the newer lead pan (tuned to A440), a whole new world opened up. It doubled the amount of notes Steve
could write for between middle C and the F above the treble clef staff.
After talking with Steve and playing it a bit for
him, he decided to treat the two lead pans in a similar fashion as the double
seconds. Since the layouts of the
leads were exactly the same, I could play them with one hand in each drum and
linear scalar passages would be a mirror image of each other. Steve described the microtonal section
of the piece as needing to sound “nasally.” It’s a completely unique sound in the steel drum world that
I’m sure will take time to catch on, but not because it’s a bad sound: It’s a beautiful sound, but once you
tune a lead pan a quarter-tone sharp, you can’t use it with any other piece!
(Unless the players on the gig you are playing for someone’s cocktail party at a
wedding are cool with microtonal stylings on calypso tunes!)
As a player, collaborating with Steve Mackey on “It
is Time” pushed me to augment my already existing skills as a steel drummer in
ways I would have never dreamed.
He is an endless reservoir of wild ideas that seem to have no filter at
first glance, but on second look are masterfully crafted innovations and a
thoughtful flushing out of brilliant ideas.
I hope other groups play this piece a million more
times than we do. Every time I
open it up, I find new things.
Thanks Steve!
--Josh
Quillen
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