This interview has been edited for style and clarity.

Nicholas Tran: Hi Dr. Brandt! How are you?

Anthony Brandt: Hello! Nice to meet you! I’m doing fine. How about yourself?

N: Great to hear that. I’m doing fine myself. Why don’t you introduce yourself! Tell me, are you doing okay during the Covid-19 Pandemic? How is teaching? And how are you dealing with the current times?

A: I’m Dr. Anthony Brandt, and I am a professor of composition at Rice University. I studied with Earl Kim at Harvard back in the early 90s. As far as Covid-19 goes—it’s been a very challenging time. My heart goes out to everyone.

Teaching has never been more demanding! I have to record the lectures for my classes now, and I feel like a small-time movie producer! It takes me a whole day to film just one lecture. You know, you want to try your absolute best for the students but it’s not the same talking to a computer. I really miss the interaction with the students.

You know, for composers, being locked down in your house is not all that different from what we normally try to do! [Laughter] Of course, it’s usually a choice… I’m definitely looking forward to this being over.

N: Teaching music online definitely is not the same. I can’t imagine going to music school online!

 A: It’s absolutely not the same! Usually when I teach, I move freely between the piano, blackboard, and the CD player. Recording a lecture online is a totally different beast.

N: I’m certainly glad that I graduated in December 2019, before the lockdowns! As a recent college graduate, thank you for all that you’re doing for your students.                                                                                                                                              

A: It’s a great creative challenge that all of humanity has had to take on. We’ve responded with amazing adaptability.

N: Could you tell me about why you wanted to go study at Harvard? Did you seek out Earl Kim specifically?

A: It was a long time ago, but Earl Kim was certainly a big figure at Harvard. During my first conversation with him, I had actually received an offer from another school with a better stipend… it’s the classic situation you’re told about: play one school against the other. So I called up Earl and said, “Professor Kim, Harvard is my first choice and I would be very excited to study with you but I got this better offer from another school.” Earl said, with an absolute straight poker face, “well, honestly, that’s a very good offer, and I would take it if I were you!” I thought to myself, “wait a minute! This is not how this is supposed to work!” Harvard did eventually improve their offer.

N: I love that story! Composers are human too!

A; Yes, eventually I did end up playing a lot of poker with Earl and his wife Martha. I learned right from the start to be careful with Earl as a poker player!

N: Well, you and Earl obviously got along pretty well then! I’m curious how he was as a teacher.

A: First of all, congratulations to Convergence Ensemble for recording Now and Then. When you first emailed me to have this conversation, a flood of memories came back to me! He was one of the most youthful people I have ever met—never seemed to age. As exacting and demanding as he was about his own work as a composer and his students, he had this incredible joy of life that he brought to everything he did. That was part of the thing he taught you—in addition to your note choices, he really tried to have you find your whole attitude as an artist. Yes, it’s a struggle to write, but life is glorious and it’s a precious thing to be able to make art in this world. Earl radiated that all the time.

He was an amazingly generous person with an incredible sense of humor. He was the only professor I’ve had that taught in a masterclass setting. We didn’t have private lessons. We would gather around the piano, and he would play through our scores and make comments while we all listened. He added something to my musicianship and compositional outlook that I had not had before studying with him. Earl’s famous saying was “reduce everything to the maximum.” I love that. Another way to describe Earl’s perspective was creating “the right sound at the right time.” His music is an incredible demonstration of this: the music is spare but 100% full. You get a complete picture of everything he is trying to say with very stark means. A lot of the feedback in our lessons would be him asking “why this note? What is this marking doing there?” Often, I would fumble trying to find an answer. The music would gradually be reduced to less and less but would become more and more. Sometimes when I really focus in on something I am trying to write, I will hear Earl’s voice saying, “Yes. That’s it. Good job!”

Earl would also say that a gesture was not complete until he had not just the notes and rhythms figured out but also all of the articulations and dynamics. For him, a sound was a complete thing. He needed to have absolutely every detail fixed to the nth degree.

Earl’s greatest role model was Franz Schubert—especially Schubert songs. I enjoyed my lessons with Earl at Harvard, but he would also rehearse Schubert lieder with my wife, and I would just sit in the next room listening—those were composition lessons too. I had never heard any pianist like Earl. In terms of touch, voice, balance, and rhythm, he was unique. What he could do with a seemingly innocuous Schubert accompaniment—to show how much can be transmitted in terms of balance or voicing—that was a composition lesson.

N: I remember reading in the bio you wrote about Earl Kim for New World Records where you said that he “strove to reduce a musical thought to a refined and precise essence.” That is absolutely true when I heard Now and Then for the first time. The music was so stark and austere but so commanding and complex. I had not known much about Earl Kim before this project, but just studying the score for Now and Then was almost like a complete masterclass with him. I could imagine how his lessons would be!

A: Earl was like a poet: Find the precise and choice sound for each particular spot. His juxtaposition of sound and texture is awe-inspiring in Now and Then—lyrical and lush in one moment and then almost pointillistic in the next and yet it all seems natural and consequential.

Earl’s music, in the classical sense, was not that contrapuntal. However, he turns doubling into a form of counterpoint. The way that the instruments are tracking the voice—whether they’re with her, ahead of her, slightly behind, different register, octave displaced—it’s constantly changing and constantly moving around and coloring different parts of the voice. He creates different allegiances with the instruments at different times. It’s so subtle and elegant, yet imbues the music with a wonderful 3D quality.

N: It’s so interesting to me that Schubert lieder was such a huge inspiration for him. Can you tell me more about his relationship with text? Am I correct in understanding that Earl had a huge affinity for literature and poetry?

A: If you had to pick the two closest artistic figures to Earl, it would be Schubert and Samuel Beckett. I think with Beckett, Earl found a theatrical correspondence to his musical vision of incredible sparsity but also depth and richness. You know, Earl was one of the few composers that Beckett allowed to set his work. Beckett is one of those famously restrictive poets that said no to 99% of composers who wanted to set his poems. Over and over again, Earl got permission.

N: When I was looking at the score, the Thither movement mirrors Beckett’s form so well. There is an obvious appreciation and respect for Beckett’s work.

A: Yes, even graphically the score is modeled after Beckett’s work.

N: Thither is such a haunting and sparse movement.

N: In the biography that you wrote for New World Records, you mention that Kim was an intelligence officer for the US Army Air Force during WWII and that he was actually led at gunpoint back to his base when he was mistaken for a Japanese spy. You talk about his experience as an Asian-American writing, “The all-too-American tension of both belonging, with great pride, to the fabric of the country where he was born, and yet of being separate because of his ethnicity, informed Kim’s spirit throughout his life.” As a Vietnamese-American composer myself, and son to refugees, your writing deeply resonated with me. Can you elaborate about how his ethnicity informed his spirit?

A: First of all, an artist of his level navigating a World War is a very interesting thing. He was both in [WWII] and thinking about humanity—you know, why is this happening? Multiple times, people assumed he was Japanese. He was actually jumped by longshoremen on a pier in NY who were shouting racial epithets. His colleague Leon Kirschner, who was 6’5”, jumped into the sprawl and shouted “No! No! He’s just a composer!”

Earl was pointedly aware of what it was like to be putting his life on the line for his country and to be 100% a tried and true American and yet still being viewed through the lens of prejudice. I don’t think he ever forgot it.

His whole life had the horror of war. He organized a whole group of musicians against nuclear weapons. The whole experience definitely made a mark on his spirit. He was also conscious that a certain musical language was associated with the east as opposed to the west and yet he was still his own person. He didn’t want to be misidentified as representing some other aesthetic. His artistic process was personal—just him and the music.

N: The lesson of just being yourself is so important. That’s a lesson that I have learned and continue to relearn throughout my own experiences.

A: That is a very important and special lesson that a teacher can pass onto their students.

N: So, in the 1980s, Kim co-founded Musicians Against Nuclear Arms, right?

A: Yes, that’s correct.

N: Did he ever talk about that work with you?

A: A little bit. That work was very important to him. I think right now in 2020, everyone in the arts sees all of the problems that the world is facing, from climate change to systemic racism, etc. We are very privileged to contribute to the world through our creativity. More and more artists are saying that it’s not enough to stand on the sidelines and write something beautiful. You want to make the world a better place. Sometimes that means being political in a certain way—whether indirectly through your art or directly through volunteering for different organizations. Martha and Earl were very generous with their time and put a lot of time into their activism. 

N: It seemed like Earl spent a lot of his time trying to be a socially conscious musician, using his art and his platform to make a difference. Did that philosophy permeate through his teaching? Did he encourage his students to be involved?

A: That’s a great question. When you get to be a graduate student, your relationship with your teacher changes. You’re not only learning about their critiques and their approach to their work, but you’re seeing what the whole picture of a human is who is trying to have music be a part of their livelihood.

I often tell my students that composers are a sole proprietor business. We don’t have anyone to keep us on deadline or to tell us to take care of ourselves. It’s not just enough to teach someone how to write good counterpoint. How do you stay healthy? Keep calm? Function when there are so many demands on your time? How much do you fight for larger causes? How much time do you find to write that next measure of music?

Earl was a wonderful role model in this regard: He was never willing to give up his own work. He was a wonderful dad. He always wanted to return to society and make sure he was contributing.

N: Being a good and varied person is so important. This actually touches on my next question: As a professor, what is your philosophy of teaching and what non-artistic responsibilities do you have as an educator? After students graduate, what tools do we all need to be effective and good community members?

A: A few things about my own teaching: One thing that separates contemporary concert music from every other practice is that we do not have a common musical language. It’s possible right now that pieces written adjacent to each other do not share the same musical language—even two pieces by the same composer might not share the same musical language. The musical language of Schubert, Mozart, and Brahms shared a common syntax. My job as a teacher is to bring out what the student wants to say and to help them be as articulate as possible. I am not an aesthetic policeman.

The second thing is that I feel like I am training two people: One is the creative composer; the other is the most dedicated, thoughtful, concentrated, and focused listener in the world—and that is the same person. You have to be able to separate yourself from the person writing and imagine yourself in the audience, taking in the music. You have to ask if it makes sense to you. It’s the hardest thing to do as a composer. Your teacher has to be the role model to be the caring, articulate listener. Your teacher doesn’t tell you whether they like something or not but rather tells you why they are responding to your music in the way that they are. Eventually you have to be able to do that for yourself.

You have to be ruthless. A string quartet will never come out and say, “the composer would like to send his apologies. The composer was upset, and the ending of the piece was not as good as he wanted it to be, but we’re going to perform it anyway.” I remember various situations where a teacher would say “this has to be longer,” and I would have to find the time to make the music what it needs to be.

I also encourage my students to take risks. All of our heroes are incredible risk takers. We are in a high-risk tolerant business. The best place to train that is in school. If you can’t take risks in school, are you all of a sudden going to take a risk when healthcare or tenure are on the line? You have to be adventurous. It might not succeed but you have to see how it will work out. I think a certain amount of nervousness and anxiety are healthy when a piece is being premiered. If you’re too sure of yourself, then that means you didn’t try hard enough.

In terms of contributing to society, I believe in that very strongly. It really pains me how many kids don’t have access to creativity in schooling. I wrote a book about creativity. My group Musiqa has an educational program that has served over 60,000 public school children in the Houston area. I love performing for adults but the concerts where kids hear modern music for the first time, where the kids are jumping up and down and singing along—I wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world.

N: Exposing kids to music is so incredibly important. Convergence Ensemble is doing our virtual salon on Dec 5, but we are also partnering with public schools to bring our recording and interviews into classrooms to expose them to new music, but also show them how to make a difference in their community. We need to show students that they can build a platform.

A: If you talk to enough musicians, you start to realize that it was that first trip to a school that got them really excited about the repertoire. That’s what lit the flame that led people to become professionals.

I feel our field’s great challenge is that we need more diversity in classical music. Part of the problem is that kids in public school don’t get music lessons. The NEA did a survey in 2011 that found that 75% of minorities had no access to musical education through high school. Part of it also is that we need to have a robust enough field where people who are coming to it from less privilege can even begin to think that they can sustain a livelihood by being a professional. Right now, you can have all the talent in the world but if you come from a certain zip code, you can’t possibly afford to think about taking a chance on having a career in the arts.

We understand that the performing arts are going to be among the last things to come back from the pandemic. When we do come back, it’s incumbent on us to come back stronger than before. We will need to lobby for our role and value in society. We cannot diversify if we shrink. People without means will not be able to afford to take a chance on the arts.

N: There’s a quote by Earl Kim where he says “our society is so anti-cultural, and that has a lot to do with the discouragement of music, especially contemporary music. So, we composers built our little cells and operated in our little, tiny spheres, for our little, tiny audiences.” I’m curious what kind of change you think the music community needs to make from the inside out to be more accessible.

A: A few things immediately jump to mind. The first one is something that I know Earl would agree with: More rehearsal. Somehow, we have gotten into a frame of mind where we have accepted that rehearsals are run by the clock. The irony is that the more musicians we have, the less rehearsal time we get. As a composer, I’m sure you’ve had a “3-and-out” experience where you get three rehearsals and, whatever state the piece is in at the end of it, the musicians will go out and perform it.

N: Oh yes, I am very aware of this!

A: It’s really not the way to do things properly. That’s not acceptable in other professions. Especially for new work, there needs to be an understanding that it will take more rehearsal time. Earl was all about rehearsal. That’s where he most came to life, socially, I think. That was his absolute joy spot—whether it was his music or Schubert or whatever.

Second, we need audiences with a greater sense of risk. It strikes me as perplexing that, as a lifelong NY Mets fan, I would happily go to see the Mets play not knowing if they will win… if fans only wanted to see their team win, then the greatest selling games would be the mismatches… but that’s not what happens. The games that attract the biggest crowds are the ones with intense rivalries where the teams are well matched. There will be suspense about the outcome. Somehow, we enjoy that about sports but for some reason in classical music, we have to go in knowing we will like everything on the program. It’s very hard to be adventurous if you have to know you’ll like everything coming out of it.

The third thing is redefining success. We’re familiar with blockbuster movies—the Avengers or Star Wars and they gross over a billion dollars are the box office. Our attitude is that success is close to unanimous praise and broad acclaim. The truth is that, in the arts, anything that is adventurous and has some originality is likely to elicit a broad range of reactions. That can be anything from one star to five stars. Of course, when we look out into the audience, we dream of everyone on their feet giving us a standing ovation. What we should really expect to see, and this might be the healthier thing to see, is to see part of the audience on their feet standing and some walking out the door. That means we have challenged people to stretch. For some people, that didn’t work. Almost every great piece we now consider a masterpiece had a mixed reception. I was recently reading about Wagner’s Tristan. Some people loved it, and other people were killing themselves from the boredom. When you go to a new music concert, if you like two pieces, then it’s an amazing night. If you like even one piece, it’s a good night. You experienced something that you wouldn’t have experienced if you weren’t there.

We need to recalibrate our expectations for our audiences. You’re not prepared to live with the art of our times if you’re not prepared to not like some of it—and who knows you might actually like a lot of it!

N: That is an incredible answer. Celebrating the broad spectrum of responses from audiences makes me feel better and more confident as a young composer.

A: I feel very strongly that if you can only accept a four- and five-star rating for what you’re doing, then only share your art with people you know and your family. Only if you can accept a one, two, and three-star review can you really call yourself a professional. If you’re going to be stimulating or risk-taking, then you need to be prepared for people not to like it. History has told us that almost all of the masterpieces we enjoy today had mixed reviews. I remember reading one review where it said that the piece sounded like a dragon swallowed the orchestra!

N: I think accepting all of those reviews, good or bad, creates a very healthy dynamic between the musician and the art. It allows for growth.

A: It took me many years to teach myself this. You can be resilient and be yourself.

N: I want to circle back to rehearsals. Earl Kim loved rehearsals. As a composer myself, I think I actually love rehearsals more than getting a performance.

A: Totally! You and me and most composers.

N: When I was at the Boston Conservatory, rehearsals were scary and daunting. You’re trying to get people to play your music for the first time. How much do you teach your students how to embrace the rehearsal process, and how do you teach students how to create a healthy environment?

A: I think training students to rehearse is really important. I think one of the joys that Earl had with teaching is that student performers were willing to stay an extra hour to rehearse to get things right. There was a famous story about Rosemary Clooney doing a set with the Boston Pops where she was having such a good time that she spoke to the audience extemporaneously and her set went a little longer than it was supposed to. Ten o’clock hit and half the orchestra walked off the stage because that was the union rule. If I was in the audience, I would never come back to another concert. Communicating with your audience is so much more important than the clock.

I’m a big believer in the sandwich method. When you’re working with performers, start with a compliment to make it clear to them that you’re on the same side with them. One of our students at Rice had a super difficult piece being workshopped by some incredible, hot-shot freelancers from New York. They did an amazing job—notes are flying everywhere. It’s fantastic. They finish and turn to the student and ask, “how did it go?” The student doesn’t say anything, spends about twenty seconds staring at the score, and then looks up and says, “In measure 32, clarinet, you were a little late.” I was ready to fall out of my chair. During the rest of the session, the performers were cutting the composer to pieces because he was so unacknowledging of what they had just done!

So, you need to start with a compliment. Say that you love the energy that they brought to the piece and thank you for playing so accurately and then say that you think a particular section can be tightened up. That’s good rehearsal manner.

N: You’re definitely not the first person to tell me this! I learned this lesson from a very young age—probably back in middle school!

A: Thinking back, one of Earl’s magical qualities in rehearsals is that he projected that everything would be great. It might take a lot of work and a lot of effort, but everyone was in it as a team, and it would be great.

N: The ability to make your musicians feel safe and supported is probably what made musicians want to keep playing Earl’s music.

N: Is there anything else you would like me to know?

A: Actually, if you’re interested, I can send you a recording of Illuminations, which is a piece by Earl that I reconstructed and orchestrated for him since he passed away before finishing.

N: I would absolutely love to hear that!

A: That was a very special experience, working with his manuscripts and trying to be as faithful as possible to his style. One of my favorite compliments was when people came up to me and said, “It sounds like you didn’t do anything to the piece,” and that’s exactly what I wanted to hear.

N: What was the process like reconstructing someone else’s piece?

A: The magical thing about Earl is that he had such a memorable personality. He could communicate his spirit and essence better than anyone I knew. Through the time that we spent together, I could understand what his approach would be.

N: That’s quite the creative and humbling experience to have.

A: It was very moving. Earl was diagnosed with lung cancer shortly after my wife and I moved from Cambridge. We never got a chance to see him again, and it was heartbreaking not be able to be by his side or Martha’s. So, when Martha asked me to do this, it was a very special thing. I obviously put my entire heart into it.

The piece mixes text by multiple people and adds up to a really dramatic story. The Beckett pieces are a continuous line of thought. This piece is, in a way, very personal to Earl since he put the text together.

N: I would love to hear this piece. Thank you so much! It was a pleasure speaking to you!

Nicholas Tran is a composer and Convergence Ensemble’s Administrative-Operations Manager. He earned his Bachelor’s of Music in Composition at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. His collaborators have included the JACK Quartet as part of the National Sawdust 2020 New Works Commission and the Mivos Quartet.