Amy Williams
Program Notes by Tim Munro
Miller Theatre commissioned the acclaimed writer (and musician) Tim Munro to write profiles of the creators featured onstage this season, with the goal of connecting listeners to both the creator and their music.
First muse
“My grandmother’s Steinway was moved into my house the year I was born,” says Amy Williams. For her, the piano has literally always been there. Three of her grandparents were pianists, and one taught piano at the collegiate level in the 1930s. Amy grew up playing duets with her.
“My whole compositional language comes from the piano,” she says. Amy is aware of the strength of this influence. “I try to counteract it,” she says. “I'm at the piano to check harmonies. But if I’m writing a string quartet then I move away from the piano. I don't want to write a piano piece for quartet!”
Amy’s childhood was soaked in strange and beautiful sounds. In the 1970s, Buffalo was a hotbed of experimental activity. Amy’s mother played in the Philharmonic and her father taught percussion at the university. And the family living room would come alive with music and personalities.
“These composers were eccentric and dynamic and engaging,” she says. “I was drawn to the music and also to the people. I saw a life that was possible, a really interesting life. I thought, ‘These are the kind of people I want to be around.’”
Piano and strings
In chamber music, the piano can be friend or foe. “My instrument has this tendency to overpower string instruments,” says Amy. “I mean, it’s nine feet long.” For the works on this program, Amy turned balance problems into creative opportunities. “I wanted to find a new way to incorporate the piano.”
Her piano trio, Bells and Whistles, puts the piano front and center, musically speaking. “It’s all about the piano.” Amy sees this as more “Classical,” in a sense—early piano trios, like Haydn’s 45-odd contributions, are essentially piano works with accompaniment. “The piano is the source, and the strings interact with that.”
Her piano quintet, Cineshape 2 represents the polar opposite. The piano is mostly in the background, playing the role of binding agent when the strings come apart. “It might burst into the light occasionally,” says Amy, “but it is not a constant presence.
Cineshape 2
In Mike Figgis’s 2000 experimental film Timecode, the screen is split into four quadrants. Each quadrant follows characters in real time. These people go about their jobs at a production company, preparing to shoot a movie.
Amy’s musical response, Cineshape 2, splinters the string quartet. There are “aggressive multiple stops in the viola; a texture evocative of Renaissance music played by the muted viola and cello; a syncopated, choppy line divided among the two violins; impulsive and expressive cello solos; static, repeated chords that immediately die away.”
The piano acts as a unifying force. For Amy, the original soundtrack of Timecode “bound the conflicting perspectives of the four screens together. In my piece, it is the piano which mimics the actual grid of the film.”
The varied materials in the piece become like characters on a screen, “continually transformed, varied, moving forward—after all, in real time, one can never repeat oneself exactly.”
Bells and Whistles
A machine cranks itself to wheezing life. Hands sweeping across instruments. Bow wood striking strings. Nails tapping piano. Sonic images of bygone industrial mechanisms. Bells and Whistles runs like an odd perpetual motion contraption, run entirely on human power.
Seeking inspiration, Amy considered the origins of the idiom “bells and whistles.” Her curiosity took the music of this piano trio to strange places. We find ourselves inside a fairground organ, or a century-old clock. Trains whizz past at a rate of knots. Then bells ring—fire alarms, cuckoo clocks, anvils—and the sound accumulates, clangorous.
“I love the non-verbal way of communicating with people through sound...The way you read someone by a physical gesture or a way of listening—it feels like connecting to other people without having to speak.”
In the moment
In her heart, Amy is a chamber musician. “I love the non-verbal way of communicating with people through sound,” she says. “The way you read someone by a physical gesture or a way of listening—it feels like connecting to other people without having to speak.”
Her piano duo with Helena Bugallo has toured, commissioned, and recorded across the globe. “When things are really tight in performance it feels great. And as a pianist that's hard—the attack is so unforgiving. It’s very alive, very in the moment.”
Amy loves playing alongside the JACK Quartet. “When a group is so in sync it's like stepping into another world. Playing with musicians of that caliber is inspiring. They continue to push me.”
At Miller, chamber musician Amy Williams has to spend time with composer Amy Williams. “Right now I am cursing composer Amy,” she laughs. “The piano trio was written for pianist Conrad Tao. And pianist Amy now has to learn all of these notes!”
“Composers start from different points. Some might begin with sound, with a gesture. Some might begin with an image or a poem. Some lock down a musical form. Some dance in a darkened room until inspiration strikes. Amy begins with questions.”
Questions
Composers start from different points. Some might begin with sound, with a gesture. Some might begin with an image or a poem. Some lock down a musical form. Some dance in a darkened room until inspiration strikes.
Amy begins with questions. “I ask myself, ‘What do the performers want? What would they like to play? What's the concept? What's the big picture? What information do I need to know in order to be able to write that piece?’”
Curiosity flows naturally into research. “The process could involve a lot of listening,” she says. “It could involve a lot of reading. It could be sort of improvising in my head. It’s such an open-ended process.”
Richter Textures
With Richter Textures, Amy’s questions circled around a particular visual artist. “I realized that I needed to learn more about Richter’s paintings,” she says. “I read about Richter, read about his process, read about his work. Then what can I pull from that?”
The string quartet can never rest. Furious scrambling loses steam, replaced instead by glassy, ethereal textures. A ghostly melody sings across many octaves. Short, sharp shocks are interrupted by groans and giggles.
Each short movement of Richter Textures was inspired by a painting by German artist Gerhard Richter. “The paintings,” says Amy, “all have complex and strikingly beautiful textures.” Likewise, each movement of her quartet “possesses a distinct sound world.”
Second muse
Amy vividly recalls their first musical date. It was 2010. JACK was in their first flush of success. Amy needed to find a replacement group—pronto!—to premiere a new string quartet that she was planning to write for a commission from the Fromm Foundation.
The result was Richter Textures. Amy visited a small New York apartment to hear the quartet read the new work. “I was shocked. It was immediately so easy for them—they were able to get so much of my piece right away. I had not experienced that before.”
Later, Amy became involved with New Music On The Point, an idyllic teaching festival in Vermont. JACK Quartet was an integral part of that festival. “To know them on a human level has been wonderful. Each is an extraordinary person. They're flexible, they negotiate, they compromise.”
And they bring absolute commitment into all of their work. “They are ready to find a solution to something that’s not quite working. And they do that with all composers, including students. For a one-off student reading, they still will go deep. It’s really amazing to watch.”
Tangled Madrigal
JACK is fascinated by the connections between old and new music. They asked Amy to consider writing a piece that was influenced by early music.
The quartet sent Amy a long list of early music. She found herself particularly drawn to Nicola Vicentino’s madrigal, Musica prisca caput. Vicentino (1511-1576) was a composer and theorist who dealt with the messy questions of instrument tuning. He invented a keyboard where each octave is divided into many more divisions than the piano.
"This guy was pretty wildly experimental,” says Amy. “He called his invention an ‘enharmonic’ keyboard. But it is what we would now call ‘microtonal.’” And this matched JACK’s own interests. “JACK can do anything in the world with tuning.”
Like Vicentino’s madrigal, Amy's new piece uses three different approaches to tuning. In Musica prisca caput the voices begin in consonance, turn towards dissonance, then bend into strange tuning. “I kind of borrowed Vicentino’s structure.”
Hiccup!
Amy wanted to push JACK in a new way. “We know they can play together. But I wondered what it would be like to have a whole piece where they don’t!” says Amy.
The word “hocket” comes from an old French word meaning “hiccup.” Today, it refers to the rapid tossing of gestures across an ensemble, often with such virtuosity that it can seem like they are hiccupping.
“One of my first ideas was to write a piece where they never play together,” says Amy. This idea was a love letter to the quartet. In order to hocket well, she says, “you have to be deeply connected, in tune with the other person.”
The individual members of JACK are baked into the details of the score. “I was thinking about each of them as musicians in the four solos I threaded through the piece.”
The ensemble hockets material until the end of the piece. When the music circles closer to the music of the original madrigal, the quartet plays together. But the madrigal itself is never quoted. “It's more of a hidden compositional strategy,” she says, “filtering this madrigal in different ways.”
Resonances
Amy knew that Tangled Madrigal would be premiered alongside three earlier pieces. “I was listening to the earlier pieces and thinking, ‘What is it about the piano quintet that works? What still resonates with me? How have I evolved as a musician?’”
This notion of evolution is important for Amy. “Some composers try to constantly reinvent themselves. But I see my compositions as trying to build and evolve. There should still be a connection between something written fifteen years ago and myself today.”
Tim Munro is a Brisbane-based, triple-Grammy-winning musician. He is currently Associate Professor of Music at the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University