MM: I knew you were going to say that! You tell people you’re a composer and they have no idea what you’re talking about; they don’t have a sense of what you do every day or what your place is in the world. He says, “I have a thousand tongues, and nine and ninety-nine lie, though I try to use the one, it will make no melody at my will. Not necessarily. And Matthew Zapruder was amazing. I don’t know. A new edition had just been published in English, and I was immediately struck by what I read when I opened it up. All of a sudden, the harmonica feels like this lone person lost in space instead of this warm familiar sound. My goal is not to make people look bad. FJO: But by subtitling it “for a New Dark Age” it has a kind of ominous undercurrent to it. 1. “The thing that I can say consistently inspires me is human beings. Once again the source of it is literary inspiration, although this time from somebody who’s an exact contemporary of yours. It’s a weird, abstract play that’s being enacted by these performers. And I remember having this thought: I can write a melody. I wish we still had the video camera running, but at least Molly took a photo of it! Sometimes they come from a couple of different poems, or a couple different books. They’re very different pieces. The thing that we have been most excited about, however, is that a piece of her choral music, Vesper Sparrow has been chosen to be performed during the 2016 ISCM World Music Days in Tongyeong, South Korea. She fronts Victoire, something of a cross between an indie rock band and a chamber ensemble, which is about to record its sophomore album. Certainly it is with the dramatic work that I’m doing, even in an abstract opera like Song from the Uproar, which does not have a conventional narrative. FJO: I didn’t realize back then that you had been in a band in Amsterdam. That message gets immediately across in the music. The nest is an open cup on the ground under a clump of grass. String Quartet No. This was going to be my life. “When I wrote it I never imagined anyone else singing it, because it had to be written so quickly and it was so particular for this group,” Mazzoli claimed. (2006). FJO: Curiously, the biggest project that has involved Victoire is Vespers for a New Dark Age. So I wonder what you think about those sentences. I know that we are kind of in a dark age to some extent. MM: No. FJO: It was fascinating to hear you say that there was music you wrote for someone else that you wanted to perform yourself, and so you reworked it and made it into something else. FJO: But the reason I brought it up is I wonder if you think of the recording rather than a live performance of it to be the definitive way to experience the piece. Once again, these pieces come out of your love of literature and, in the case of the most recent one which we’ll get to a little later, film. It’s not nature as much as it is just me being inspired by human beings trying to live their lives. It seems to be a conscious aesthetic decision for you, so I thought it would be interesting to talk about that as well as what your view of beauty is. That’s where that came from. Certainly not everything you’ve written is so decidedly and so intentionally pretty, but beauty has definitely been part of your compositional arsenal. Go directly to shout page. It was sort of an exercise, a workshop kind of thing I did in my first year as composer-in-residence with Opera Philadelphia. It’s like Project Runway without the snarky competition, where you have to create something very fast and then present it. Vickery PD, Zuckerberg B, Jones AL, Shriver WG & Weik AP. And, in the case of my operas, human beings trying to live their lives under insane, impossible circumstances. In the case of These Worlds In Us, it was both: a wonderful poem, which is where the title came from, but also you thinking about your father and his experience being a Vietnam War vet. And all that translates on the page. And that’s where the theme for the piece came from. My goal is to try to draw the listener in with something that is familiar, even just a tiny bit, whether it’s a little repeated melodic fragment or the sound of the harmonica, which is a sound that everybody knows. Harmonicas are really like the ether in which everything exists. But writing for orchestra forms only a small part of her compositional output. These Worlds In Us was the first orchestra piece that I’d ever written, and it was really daunting. Great. Inevitably. There are five acoustic movements, but then there are these three electronic remixes stuck in there.