An Interview with Ralf Yusuf Gawlick
Meredeth Barzen
"You have to start with an idea. And I really mean an idea. Now, that idea can actually be something very musical: a motive, a harmony, a note; or, a more abstract idea: something I want to explore, some kind of aesthetic approach, some kind of reflection on something. And that, for me, is the most important thing to start with."Composer and educator Ralf Yusuf Gawlick has a consistently elegant way of stating the obvious. Born in Germany, Gawlick earned compositional degrees at the University of California Santa Barbara and the New England Conservatory and is currently a professor at Boston College. The composer recently sat down with Epicenters in a psychology classroom that had been magically transformed into a music room with the addition of a digital piano, a smattering of staff lines across the blackboard and Gawlick's passionate opinions on the state of contemporary classical music. The father of two speaks of his genre almost as a proud parent might, desperately hoping his charge will thrive, but ever so slightly worried that it might run off in the wrong direction at any moment. Though he acknowledges dwindling audiences and competition among composers, Gawlick prizes honesty above accessibility:
"I am not going to write what I think people are going to enjoy, or what they're not going to enjoy; I don't think that's the function of art. Is it about enjoyment anyways? It may be, it may be a byproduct, but that's definitely not the reason why I am doing this. Accessibility does not mean, to me, that I need to tailor to a certain sound that I think people may like. It depends upon what the piece demands."
That tension is clearly displayed in the two pieces exhibited here. The first, Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano, has a very listenable quality to it, with its memorable melodies and themes, whereas the second, At the Still Point of the Turning World, is much more tonally abstract and intellectual. Gawlick has a soft spot for the Trio, however, as the Arietta was written in celebration of his daughter's birth, taking the form of an emotionally complex and worldly lullaby.
"A lullaby is very much so something that you sing which brings your past together with your present with that of your child. And so there's this sense of reflection that comes, there's a sense of wistfulness, even. Perhaps even a sense of melancholy. But melancholy's not necessarily negative ... It's not just a lullaby as such, or what people understand to be a lullaby."
Gawlick also takes great care to remind his audience that the composition is not programmatic in nature: "There's no story, there's no narration here. There's no narrator. That's very important; there's no story element in any of it. And so I encourage people, if they kindly want to listen to the piece, not to try to follow a story, but I think the program notes will help you set the context. And, aside from that, if you want to paint pictures for yourself, that's absolutely wonderful, but it's not something which is prescribed in the music, or set forth by the music. In that sense, it is absolute music. I don't try to express an emotion here. It's almost the illusion of emotion that I'm trying to perhaps bring across to my audience."
Like the Trio, At the Still Point of the Turning World requires both focus and engagement from the listener, but this solo cello work is a entirely different creature from its brother. Using a line from "Buirnt Norton", a T.S. Eliot poem, At the Still Point... is as much an experiment in geometry as it is a musical choose-your-own-adventure. (See program notes for full explanation.) Gawlick feels that “At the Still Point... is much more avant-garde, much more out there. But the reason why I wrote one [composition] or the other has nothing to do with 'okay, what do I feel the audience would like to hear?' It has to do with what kind of piece I want to write. And that's why I've sort of pulled from everything in between. There's an old dictum: if you don't write music that you, yourself, want to hear, no one else is going to want to hear it either. So I have to write music that I want to hear, personally, first and foremost, otherwise I wouldn't be writing it. And then hope that the craft or the quality of the music is something that other people are interested in. But that's not my responsibility."
Gawlick's musings on his work contain a suspicious amount of both professorial and fatherly advice. His musical principles echo some very basic life lessons that we could all benefit from following: Don't sell out, don't tell people what they want to hear if it's untrue, don't water yourself down. Concerning his art, however, he wants to discourage hasty judgment of any kind.
"This is not a show. It is a piece of art that you critically engage with. And why do people use the terms 'enjoy', or 'like', or 'dislike'? In many ways, I would say that's secondary. I think that's actually very narcissistic, when, at the beginning, people say 'Oh, I like this!' or 'I don't like this!' In a way, who are you, actually, to make a decision after hearing something once? To make a qualitative response? Your responsibility should be critically engaging with it. And then your personal taste, that should come after repeated interaction with a work of art. That doesn't go with just music, it goes with everything. That's with people. Right?"