Bernard Rands Headlines New Music Box

Live now on New Music Box, Bernard Rands is the subject of a wonderfully in–depth artist profile auteured by foremost new music polymath Frank J. Oteri. Including a video portrait of the composer, the profile is an enlightening dialogue with Rands that provides an unparalleled look into his processes and formative years. You can access the profile on www.newmusicbox.org. The following is an excerpt from Oteri's prologue to the interview:

Some of his European colleagues have claimed that coming to America might have somewhat softened his modernist rigor. But Rands will have none of that:

That acerbic rough-tough composer that I used to be in the ‘60s has gone to America and sold out. Not at all! I can write Canti d’Amor; why shouldn’t I? They’re for my wife. Why should I not make a love song for my wife of all people? I don’t think one has to feel obliged to the resonances of the Second Viennese School in order to be able to do that. These two [the non-tonal and the tonal] are interacting all the time, whether it’s a harmony or a rhythmic cell, a timbre or a gesture. Music has always been that way. Otherwise, we would have used up its resources a long time ago.

Despite such firm aesthetic convictions regarding his own music, Rands keeps an open ear when he listens to other’s music:

When people say, “I don’t care for that” or “I don’t want to waste my time on that,” it’s because they have a notion that somehow it should belong to them without any preconditions. And that’s not what the phenomenon of music is. […] I’ve been rewarded and surprised by being determined to be in the composer’s corner.

While the impetus for new work is never rooted in some notion of pleasing an audience (an audience isn’t monolithic after all), Rands is nonetheless constantly attuned to the listener:

Most things in human experience are accessible if you’re willing to access them. […] I believe that the person who’s going to come on that bitterly cold February night, pay above the odds for the ticket, to listen to my music, is coming toward me for some reason, which I don’t need to know about, and maybe they can’t define it. But when they come together with what I’ve made, I want them to hear another human being talking to them who’s not superior, not inferior, just another person who cares about beauty and expressivity, and spiritual things which, again, are hard to define.

Reach the complete interview at New Music Box.