ICA Composer of the Month: April 2024 – Daniel Dorff

ICA: Tell us a bit about yourself [where you grew up, where you live now, who did you study with; any special stories from those days of study?DD: I grew up in Roslyn NY, which is a Long Island suburb of NYC. Roslyn had a strong environment for education and the arts, a train ride away from Manhattan, and literally over 90% of my graduating high school class went to college. About 25% went to Ivy League schools, and that reflects the emphasis on success that was part of Roslyn. Although my parents weren’t musicians, they were supportive of my following my passion, and within Roslyn I had saxophone lessons with NYC free-lancers, a Junior High band director who was a big band jazz player at night, and a High School music teacher who studied with Nadia Boulanger, wrote songs for Billie Holliday, and did TV & film scoring. I don’t take for granted how fortunate I was to have this foundation.

I was a freshman at Bennington College where I studied with Henry Brant, then transferred to Cornell where my understanding of music from all centuries was greatly nurtured, as well as studying with Karel Husa and playing lots of chamber music from the stacks of a great music library. In my one year at Bennington, I hitchhiked 4 hours each way to study sax with Sigurd Raschèr once a month, and at Cornell I studied sax privately with Steven Mauk who was the professor across town at Ithaca College.

Graduate school was at UPenn with Rochberg and Crumb, as well as Richard Wernick and Ralph Shapey. All modernists, but the complete faculty, musicologists and composers alike, were obsessed with Brahms. Once after delivering a paper on the E-flat clarinet sonata to Crumb’s analysis class, George said “would you like to play through it?” and on the fly we played the whole sonata for the class. Crumb had remarkable piano skills. I stayed in Philadelphia after graduating from Penn, mainly because I married a wood sculptor who said the supply and variety of trees to carve is better here than anywhere in the world; and once I became the Editor at Presser (near Philadelphia), I had a job that was a special fit and I’ve lived in the Philadelphia area ever since. For my first few years in Philadelphia, I studied clarinet and bass clarinet privately with Ron Reuben.

The hardest decision of my life had to be made three times, and I still question my judgment. I got into Juilliard when I applied as a freshman, when I decided to transfer to a different undergraduate program, and for graduate school. Each time, I applied both to Juilliard and to Liberal Arts schools where I could also study everything else; in those days Juilliard didn’t have relationships with other schools for non-music. Every time I chose the liberal arts setting, and so I completed my formal education having 6 years of friends who were brilliant theorists, historians, and composers, but none who were performers. Looking back, I often wish I’d made the opposite decisions, but I must have done what seemed to match my needs at those times.

ICA: How would you describe your music? I know!  An unanswerable question for many. How have others described your music. Do you agree with these descriptions? Do you find descriptions helpful or pigeon-holing exercises?

DD: I think it’s easier and truer to describe my motivations and values, rather than describing the music’s style with adjectives or comparisons to other music. Those kinds of descriptions are only approximated shortcuts, though I’ll be more helpful below.

I started composing in high school (1972) as I developed interest in classical saxophone performance, and there wasn’t much repertory back then. When I started to hear music with an American vernacular flavor over the classical structure, I wanted to do this too. It was always about creating repertoire to be performed, not about “being a composer” as an identity in itself. Even today, I’m more gratified when I read about performances than when I’m asked for an autograph.

So with that non-answer in mind, I’ve pretty much walked in a straight line since I was 18, writing for my own ears and soul, and not swayed by what teachers, classmates, or reviewers asserted was the only valid level of abstract expressionism for their taste. It’s remarkable how often I had to argue that I was dedicating my life to my own self-expression, not to anyone else’s self-expression. Copland and Barber were alive and thriving then, but they weren’t taken seriously by academia, and that set of values was greatly stigmatized. Anyone who liked John Williams film scores in the 1970’s up through at least the 1990’s would be scorned. I’m not kidding – the pendulum has swung back to a really heterogeneous acceptance of aesthetics.

There was one piece I composed at Aspen in 1973 (when I was 17) that Elliott Carter tore to shreds in a masterclass, angrily saying I had no business writing a diatonic melody 30 years after the horrors of World War 2; a few days later, the student composers had a session with Virgil Thomson who declared that I was the only talented young composer in the whole composition program. Even at 17, I knew that meant I was the only one who wrote like Thomson, and it was obvious that everyone’s opinion is subjective and only a reflection of their point of view.

I love telling that story because it isn’t about me or my music – it’s a great picture of how polarized the scene was. Neither Carter nor Thomson cared about whether I had successfully carried out my vision of what I set out to write, they only heard the language and not the story.

Sorry, I still haven’t answered your question! Describing my music in a nutshell, the underlying concepts tend to take a lot from German tradition regarding form, syntax, and the organic engineering of themes. To paraphrase Rochberg, “If your music was a bridge, could a truck drive across it?” That’s just the underlying syntax though. The melodic and harmonic styles tend to be very “American,” which in turn are greatly influenced both by French textures and chords, and by Black and Afro-Latin cultures’ rhythms, all of which are the guts and melting pot of the rock & roll I grew up listening to. And then there’s everything else I’ve ever heard or played. All this could still come out sounding like anything, and that’s perhaps why I can live with one overall language all my life and still keep writing pieces that are all different from each other, rather than lapsing into a kind of sameness.

A bit more about mainstream American (and British) pop music: the French composer Darius Milhaud learned about jazz from night clubs in Harlem, and he also went to clubs in Brazil. He later settled in California and taught Burt Bacharach composition at Mills College, and Bacharach’s rich harmonies and changing meters were a big influence on the growing sophistication of American pop music. But all rock music from the 1950s onward is strongly based (directly or indirectly) on Afro-Cuban rhythm, and it sounds to us now like mainstream American pop music because it’s all interblended and familiar; go back and listen to Cachao López and other Cuban jazz pioneers, and it’s a real ear opener.

One more thing about pigeon-holing: there’s a wise saying that “The Map Isn’t the Territory.” So for artistic genre labels that are generalizations about what some individuals have in partially common, these labels are abstractions, and nothing artistically strong fits the abstraction perfectly. Some theorists have demonstrated that Bach never wrote a fugue strictly according to the rules that we teach today, because he always varied from the generalized formulas that are our curriculum. I think that’s really profound.

On a similar note about generalizations distorting accurate understanding – Debussy and Ravel often sound quite similar on the surface because of the harmonic language and melodic style, so both are called French Impressionists, and paired as if both composers’ ideas spring from the same faucet. Over time however, they feel different because Ravel was very much a classicist, organizing time in formal structures like Mozart and Haydn, often with distinct sections and repetitions to have a disciplined beauty. Many use that ideal as a thumbnail of “classicism.” Using the same surface sounds as Ravel, Debussy’s structures over time were more toward the fluid, with sections flowing into each other like clouds, and themes returning transformed from previous iterations.

I mention all this because I’m often asked why my returning themes are usually shaped or paced differently from their expositions. I can’t imagine repeating them exactly, but I’m not a classicist or formalist. I love using formal design as a scaffold, just as in real life we often have the same overall patterns of sleep/wake, work/weekends, interacting with a regular group of people in daily life – but we don’t have identical conversations or actions every day. The most horrifying and upsetting movie I ever cringed through was Groundhog Day. I’m not exaggerating – imagine living exactly the same day over and over again, which is way different from living variations on similar days with anything at all possible ahead. I think this is why so many modern composers love Brahms, and Brahms in turn got it from Beethoven. I think Beethoven felt Classical Style was like “form jail,” and he liberated the prisoners.

ICA: With a long and distinguished career with so many pieces and so many performances of your music, has your music changed over the years or evolved?

DD: On the surface, the style hasn’t changed a lot because my motivation hasn’t changed. I’ve always wanted to write music that musicians wanted to play, and as a wind player there tends to be an inner idea generator that thinks about lines, phrases, and breaths. And lots of visceral rhythm; I grew up on the rhythms of Led Zeppelin and James Brown, and that’s a big part of my mother tongue, probably why sometimes my rhythms are counterintuitive to count, especially when they look easy.

One thing that has changed over time is the types of pieces – in school in the 1970s, we all wrote a lot of music for voice and chamber ensemble. Part of that was everyone’s awe for George Crumb, and I think using a text created a pre-set scaffold for form. Writing instrumental music means starting with a totally blank page, and I gradually came to prefer that.

There was a long stretch where I got many commissions to write narrated works for young listeners, which I loved. I could write humor for the kids, in-jokes for the musicians and grown-up listeners, and get lots of orchestral performances. (Yes, I was the class clown in elementary school who was constantly sent to the principal’s office for making everyone laugh.) There’s an album of these pieces  (The Tortoise and the Hare, and Other Tales)recorded by Symphony in C for Bridge Records, and available on the usual platforms. That period dovetailed into a long stretch full of flute commissions, which I also love since so many flutists are drawn to conquering unfamiliar repertoire, especially if it’s idiomatic. Part of this has been fueled by being Presser’s representative at NFA conventions and making so many flute friends…

… and with so many flute commissions, I’ve been eager for years to be more involved with the clarinet community which is the air that I breathe, and the instrument I know the best. Even though I was never a performance major and only marginally a professional clarinetist, I wrote Flowers of St. Francis with bass clarinet in hand, and I could play the whole thing in tempo when I was working on it. I’ve also performed Zoe & Xena for piccolo and bass clarinet, and there’s even a YouTube of me onstage. Aside from the visceral joy of living what I write, this also means the music doesn’t require technical wizardry to perform these pieces, just a commitment to learning the rhythms and planning the phrasing and breathing. If I can play it, so can any serious player.

Has the music changed? I’d like to think that my underlying skills and breadth keep growing, so even if the basic style is in a similar idiom, I’m more able to keep a lengthy piece fresh and compelling to play or listen to. We’ll see soon, since the piece I’m working on now, Cosmic Menagerie, is a 20-minute suite for Two Bass Clarinets.

ICA: What or who are some of the important influences on your work? [musical and/or extra-musical]

DD: Uh-oh, I literally could write a book on this one, and I’m not even sure where to begin, because every piece of music that ever affected me or stayed with me is in the mix. Every seductive chord progression or deceptive rhythm in all the rock and R&B I heard growing up, every “classical” piece that moved me, starting with the kindergarten teacher who played the opening of Beethoven’s 5th and the Troika from Lt. Kije at nap time, as if that would get us calmed down?

But to be less granular, there have been influential turning points. I grew up playing saxophone and loving what was then called rock & roll, including every kind of pop music. By 10th grade I was also getting interested in classical music and started playing clarinet so I could be in the school orchestra as well as band. That summer I went to Red Fox Music Camp near Tanglewood and was surrounded by kids my age who loved practicing 8 hours a day. I loved the immersion and the new friends, but I learned quickly that I didn’t have the patience or passion to be a performer at that caliber. One day I heard the orchestra rehearsing a piece that sounded very American and jazzy with its lush polychords, visceral with its rhythms, but it was a trombone concerto that had the searing lyricism of Tchaikovsky. I was enthralled and stunned. I wanted to write music like that, with that mixture of everything I love, and that moment has remained fresh even after 50 years. A few days later, a bunch of us hitchhiked to Tanglewood and heard the BSO play The Rite of Spring. I was a goner now. While I could never practice an instrument 8 hours a day, I can spend 16 hours a day between composing and doing other related work, and still feel like I’m squandering creative time if I actually go to sleep at night. Back when I was 17, about a year into this new composing obsession, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease which had gotten pretty severe by the time it could be diagnosed. I almost died, and recovering in the next few months while I was already being shot out of a cannon with a new career motivation helped make me even more galvanized.

But back to musical influences! Honestly everything I’ve savored playing in jazz ensemble or orchestra has stuck with me, and performing Ligeti and Schoenberg gave me an exhilaration for fresh timbres and pacing that’s part of me even though my language isn’t like theirs. When I was in 9th grade, my parents were given 3 tickets to hear Laura Nyro at the Fillmore East, so they took me along. The warm-up act was about 8 musicians, playing a combination of jazz and rock instruments, but they sounded like they were all improvising on their own, and there was an eccentric trumpet player facing into the corner and experimenting with some echo device. I carried that wild memory of free rhythm with me, and had forgotten about that concert when I soon learned about Charles Ives’s asynchronous music, and it was decades later that I realized I’d been at the premiere of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew before I was ready to appreciate the miracle that was.

ICA: Do you think it’s important for a performer to know the theory behind a piece to have a successful performance of your music?

DD: I’d say that depends on what you mean by “theory.” They don’t need to know Roman Numeral chord changes if it’s a tonal piece, or recognize if one theme or motive is actually a variant of a previously-used theme or motive. But much of my music involves traditional expressiveness, so having a good sense of where to swell or taper, or where to interpolate little nuances of ritard or accel – this depth of delivery is the difference between a memorable, moving performance, and a “perfect” but empty delivery. When I coach a masterclass, especially for unaccompanied solos, I sometimes ask the player to deliver a sentence or two of a weather forecast like the TV news (very dry and objective), and then deliver a line or two of Shakespeare’s “to be or not to be, that is the question” with appropriate drama. Then I ask them to swap which lines get which speaking style. Everyone gets the point of this juxtaposition, and has a good laugh. Then I ask them to play the musical passage in question like a weather forecast, and then like Hamlet’s soliloquy.

Most accomplished clarinetists play the expositions of the Brahms sonatas beautifully, and taper with exquisite pacing and grace. Yet most couldn’t tell you where the first Perfect Cadence is, or if Brahms suppresses that until the double bar. They do know how the phrasing structure works, so that’s why I say that “harmony class theory” isn’t as important as some of the other aspects of musical oration.

ICA: What is your composing process like? Do you have a regular routine/time of day you like to work? What tools do you use to compose? [i.e., pencil and manuscript paper, keyboard, notation software, music synthesis software, etc.]

DD: Overall, it’s haphazard, with ideas coming out raw whenever they come out; with a Monday-to-Friday 9-to-5 job, real creative time means nights and weekends for focused or extended work. But having a voice recorder app on my phone is a great tool for capturing rogue ideas whenever and wherever they pop up.

One thing I’ve learned about any kind of creativity, whether it’s artistic or even writing a persuasive email, is to recognize and nurture when I’m letting go and letting new ideas flow freely without refining anything, as distinct from when I’m reworking, developing, and tweaking. These are different brain functions and different kinds of working in the zone. There’s an expression “Write drunk, edit sober,” which is a great metaphor for getting the ideas gushing and flowing (and written down); then coming back another time to make it all go together well.

Generally speaking I work on pieces inefficiently because I want to really love the process, developing the piece from different angles like a painter looking at a work-in-progress from different distances. For me that often means sitting at the piano with staff paper, and also messing with a midi audio mock-up. Sometimes new ideas come either way, and sometimes tweaking comes from either way; I find this is a great way to build the life of a musical flow. I’d rather be proud of how solid a piece sounds when it’s done, rather than how quickly I wrote it. Or to paraphrase Stravinsky, I like writing at the piano and having midi playback to listen to separately, because I like hearing my music. And listening back increases my ability to find where there are weak spots to revise.

ICA: What would you consider the most challenging aspect of composing music?

DD: Getting started on a new piece. This is one of the only questions I can answer without hedging. When there are commission deadlines or other time-sensitive opportunities, getting the first concepts or compelling sketches is often the only frustrating part. Here’s another chance to paraphrase Stravinsky who famously described (in “The Poetics of Music”) the terror of a blank piece of staff paper and an expanding universe of infinite ideas to select from. Although I’m not Stravinsky, and I find this more like trying to order from a Cheesecake Factory menu with about 500 delicious entrees and 100 desserts in the showcase.

ICA: Have you incorporated new technology or techniques into your composition process?

DD: If you mean incorporating technology into the performance, not yet. But I’m really enticed by using efx on bass clarinet. Growing up around electric guitars, and then hearing what Chris Mothersole, Cheyenne Cruz, and many others do, I’ve been on the verge (a few times) of getting set up to learn how to do it myself, so I can write for efx with a real understanding of the hardware and software. I’m not as interested in looping relative to my own compositions, but the infinity of enhanced sounds feels like a new door to open. I’ve been hoping to hear bass clarinetists play In A Deep Funk with guitar distortion and more, since that’s an existing piece that would lend itself, and anyone who wants to explore new ways to present sonorities in my acoustically-written music should certainly feel encouraged to do so.

ICA: In what ways have you collaborated with other musicians in your compositions?

DD: I think of this as two separate questions – collaboration in creating a work, and collaboration in refining and tweaking; so here are two answers.

For collaborative writing, I haven’t done a lot. I’ve set pre-existing poetry to music, but the only real collaboration was a one-act opera that began with a libretto by an experienced theater writer when I was fresh out of school. His dramaturgy was strong in building characters and plot development, and thinking of strategies for what they’d sing about. It was a great starting point. However, he was adamant that his pre-music draft was invariable, and furious if I ever repeated a word, requested little changes for syllable count, or needed an extra stanza to build a scene. This was such a frustrating experience that I learned how to write story lines and scripts myself, and haven’t worked in tandem with another writer since then.

Fortunately the opposite is true with tweaking instrumental music. I love listening to performers’ interpretations and suggestions, especially with new pieces, and sometimes I hear tempo nuances and dynamics interpolations that become permanent changes. Particularly with harp and guitar, I’ve been fortunate to work with performers who show me how to change a clumsy passage or fingering to an idiomatic one. And in some cases performers of showy pieces have asked me to make some passages more difficult. John Yeh asked for this in Summer Solstice (my first clarinet concerto), and flutist Jasmine Choi did likewise in a Concertino that she premiered. I’m still the eager teenager trying to learn everything there is to learn, and it’s a wonderful treat to get the benefit of others’ expert suggestions.

I’ve also learned to weigh constructive feedback in the context of who’s giving it. Some performers may say something’s too hard, and almost always that’s followed by an email saying “never mind, I practiced and it’s fine.” Conversely, I once showed a nasty bassoon passage (in an orchestra piece I was writing) to an 11th-grader who sat near me in an orchestra, to see if it was playable. He sightread it perfectly at tempo and said it was fine, so I decided that since a high school student nailed it without blinking, then professionals can play it fine. The first orchestral performers to actually play this piece were woodshedding like crazy at the last minute to get through it, and within a few years this kid who had nailed it in 11th grade became Principal Bassoon of the Cleveland Orchestra.

ICA: Do you approach writing for clarinet differently than writing for other instruments?

DD: Subconsciously I probably do more than I realize, because I have a lifetime of being in that performer’s shoes. Even when writing for top performers, I can’t help but wince just thinking about slurring throat Bb to long B or making wide, fast jumps.

On the other hand, I wrote Flowers of St. Francis completely at the bass clarinet, no piano or midi, and in the nasty passages of wide tremolos depicting the angry wolf, and the rapid altissimo in the bird call sections, I wrote what sounded wild yet within my abilities to play, meaning idiomatic tremolos and overtone series that keep one fingering. Most of the time, and certainly for the new Concerto No. 2, a lot of the composing is solely based on the resulting sound and musical line, and then I later double-check that it’s playable. There are places in the new concerto as well as Slippery Slopes and Summer Solstice where the accompaniment vamps under what sounds like a solo improv section, and in places like that I wrote the extended solos over a midi while playing clarinet or scat singing what the clarinet might do.

The most significant answer about being a composer who started as a woodwind player is even more underlying. My “mother tongues” of musical thought are the songs I heard on WMCA as a child in the 1960’s (Beatles, Motown, that whole era), and concert music for alto saxophone when I was a more serious student, and the latter is mostly French conservatoire composers. I don’t “try” to be influenced by those concepts of lines and notes, that’s just what flows most naturally, like my New York or Philly accent when speaking spontaneously. One type of composer’s skill is knowing how to make the best of raw ideas in creating a full work; the other type is to know one’s self, to find our inner child in the sandbox, not to force a unique style but to trust our inner flow with impunity. That’s why Beethoven, Berlioz, and Scriabin were able to harness their volatile eccentricities into new concepts of music, and that’s why Poulenc, Copland, and Reich were able to forge their own unique voices despite the peer pressure of Modernism. So returning from that rabbit hole, I do my best to write idiomatically for every instrument, and for woodwinds that comes naturally. Everything I grew up playing has breaths between phrases, and I learned early that if main themes have little rests within, or start on an offbeat, then in-the-zone spilling out of developments will tend to have breath spots organically.

ICA: What was/were your major instrument(s)?

DD: Like many children, I started recorder in 2nd grade. Day 1 was bizarre because the first time I ever saw notated music, I could intuitively read the pitches and rhythms. Not bragging because I didn’t learn it quickly, it was like I knew it already even though my parents weren’t musicians and I hadn’t ever thought about printed music. OK now bragging, still in 2nd grade I was correcting typos in published sheet music, and I even have some of that saved at home. I didn’t grow up thinking about becoming a sheet music editor and proofreader one day, but that’s been my “day job” for over 40 years at Presser.

In 4th grade I switched to saxophone, loved it and practiced a lot, and in 5th grade played a solo in the Spring Concert which was my unplanned introduction to vibrato because I was shaking with nervousness. I did stay serious about saxophone through college and even had lessons with Sigurd Raschèr, for whom most of the early concertos and orchestral excerpts were composed for. I also played sax in the Aspen Jazz Ensemble for two summers, in a band that was mainly the UCLA jazz department conducted by Gary Gray. In some ways that was the most remarkable ensemble I ever played in, and I learned a lot of jazz with crazy meters. We did a lot of Hank Levy, and I think that got fast, syncopated 7/8 into my blood.

More important, once I was in high school, I started doubling flute to play in rock bands, and then started doubling clarinet to play in orchestra and become immersed in real classical music. Because I was strong on alto sax already, my teacher got me started on alto clarinet, then switched me over to B-flat. I’m not sure that was a great plan, and I think I’ve never gotten over the saxophone ideals of oral cavity shaping even when playing clarinet. Either that, or all my instruments are built to sound flat.

I did start playing bass clarinet in college and had the lifetime thrill of playing The Rite of Spring on a Bundy bass, as well as Ligeti’s Lontano on contra.  45 years later, I can picture being in the middle of those glorious sounds like it was yesterday, and somehow that must affect how I orchestrate even though my musical language isn’t similar to those works. At this point, and particularly after developing tinnitus in the 1990s that’s particularly triggered by intense sounds with high overtones (brass, percussion, piccolo) I don’t play much other than my own chamber music when needed. I really miss the ensembles, but with the full-time role at Presser and composing, performing has tapered off.

ICA: What other clarinet works by living composers do you especially like, or find interesting, or want to point out?

DD: Wow, I’ve got to think about this one! I usually listen to music as a whole, thinking how did this composer go about creating what I’m hearing, as if every experience is a potential composition lesson. But I’m glad to share a few inspirations along those lines.

One night in 1986 I turned on the radio, and the local NPR station was simulcasting the concert where Eddie Daniels and a chamber orchestra were performing the program which became his Breakthrough album. I hadn’t previously heard of him or the composers, and there was something about that liquid sailing around the instrument and the hybrid kind of orchestra music that captivated me. I started composing Summer Solstice soon after that, not by coincidence.

When I started getting focused on bass clarinet playing, studying with Ron Reuben, and buying a Selmer 33 to replace my Bundy, I also got Eric Dolphy’sOut To Lunch LP which I had heard once and enjoyed years earlier. Hearing it again in this new context was riveting. I must have listened to it every day around 1980. I was so fascinated by Dolphy’s playing, and the sound of that free post-bop jazz, that I didn’t even realize till a few years ago that there was no piano on the whole record. The performer credits are right there, but I guess that quartet was so fully satisfying that there was no lack of a piano to notice.

Most exciting for me now is multiple low clarinets. What could be better than 1 bass clarinet? 2… 8… 100 bass clarinets. I’ve written many short quartets (a few originals, most arrangements) for 3 B-flats and Bass, and sometimes I hear them played on 3 Basses and B-flat Contra. That sound is remarkably rich and visceral. Part of my love for B-flat Clarinet is how the open holes resonate magic through my fingertips; but with bass clarinet the low register vibrates my whole rib cage, and this makes longtones into a kind of yoga experience. I mean this seriously and literally – practicing low longtones in the dark with eyes closed is a wonderful way to monitor and develop tone, intonation, and awareness of upper partials, plus it can be exhilarating physiologically from the sympathetic vibrations. Low clarinet ensembles really are remarkable sonically, and low Fifths reinforce each other’s overtones. Last January’s Low Clarinet Fest in Arizona was practically a religious retreat for the 200+ of us who were there, and many have commented on the beautiful vibes and bonding between all the musicians. Giant kudos to the festival organizers for setting that tone, and my experience of being one of about 80 players in the low clarinet choir was one of many wonderful takeaways.

ICA: Can you tell us about your current or upcoming projects?

DD: The biggest excitement right now is Concerto No. 2 for B-flat Clarinet and Orchestra. Christopher Hill will be the soloist with Delta David Gier conducting the South Dakota Symphony in the premiere, and it will be livestreamed – which is the most wonderful surprise for any composer to learn about! This is happening April 13, 2024, and I don’t have the livestream details yet.

Chris Hill is an old friend from when we both played in Symphony in C (called the Haddonfield Symphony then), back when Chris was studying with Gigliotti and I was enjoying no longer being in school. We’ve stayed in touch, and Chris performed Summer Solstice (Concerto No. 1) with the SDSO in 2017. He’s about to retire after 37 years as Principal Clarinet there, and the orchestra offered to commission the composer of Chris’s choice for a concerto to premiere on his final concert. I am so fortunate and thrilled by this honor!

Given that I already have one clarinet concerto, Summer Solstice, which is with string orchestra and on the graceful side, I made sure this piece would be strong on winds, brass, and percussion, and rowdy. There are some big excerpts for the bass clarinet, English horn, and cello, and there’s lots of bongo in the first movement. I have a feeling the middle movement will be what stays with listeners most deeply, because it’s dramatic and emotional like a romantic slow movement. I promise there will be a playable piano reduction that can be used in regular recitals.

I’m currently writing another dream come true, this one for Two Bass Clarinets. Lindsey Hutchinson and Rick Ferrarelli (both former students of Christy Banks at Millersville) have formed The Morii Duo, and commissioned a few composers to create repertoire for them. I think they expected 5-8 minutes, but the opportunity to write for 2 terrific players with eager attitudes and all the potential sounds of Bass Clarinet Duo is too rich an opportunity for a short piece. I began it by thinking of how to present many sections to exploit lots of textures, while maintaining the coherence of one focused piece of music. Ever since a trip to the Taiwan Palace Museum, seeing the extraordinarily large collection of 2D and 3D art depicting the 12 animals of the Chinese Zodiac over a few millennia, I’ve wanted to join the celebration with a musical set that isn’t just a necklace of 12 short charms, or one excessively long saga of 12 individually-satisfying works.

Fortunately, this commission’s needs and the zodiac cycle have come together as Cosmic Menagerie, which will be 4 movements encompassing the 12 iconic animals with some artistic liberties. The whole suite will be about 20 minutes total, and each of the 4 movements can work as a stand-alone chamber piece.

ICA: Does working for a publishing company, and seeing the many different scores come across your desk, have any effect on your own composing: styles, deadlines, instrumentation, etc.?

DD: I began proofreading for Presser as a freelancer in 1980 and became their Editor in 1985, being responsible for all the editorial preparation, engraving, and proofreading. Suddenly I was making the red marks on music by my former professors (Rochberg, Shapey, Wernick).Most exciting in 1985 was talking through details with Robert Muczynski about his new sonata-like Time Pieces. Over the years I’ve become responsible for all the production work, covers, and many other logistic parts of the process, but deep down I mainly care about producing sheet music that’s most efficient to play from without ambiguities or miscommunications from composer to performer.

For a long time, I found it hard to be fully entrenched in Sousa marches, easy choral anthems, and serious music by composers including Sessions and Shapey by day, and think of my own ideas on nights and weekends. It was in some ways even harder to spend a day with music by Hailstork, Muczynski, or Schickele whose music was closer to my own ideas, and then to go home with a blank slate. But I got used to that mental transition, and of course got to know lots of music, and to learn from what I thought were strengths and weakness of thousands of works by hundreds of composers, and that’s a great education.

I’ve always been stubborn in the healthy sense of following my own inner gyroscope, and always enjoyed music that wasn’t at all like mine (after all, listening to Mozart and Monteverdi  is just like listening to Chen Yi and Shulamit Ran – wonderful music in a style that I don’t write in). I’ve learned a lot from our composers and my colleagues both at Presser and other publishing companies, as well as all the other musicians around me. Everything is a potential learning experience if you want it to be.

ICA: Any advice to the clarinetists and composers that are in college looking to go beyond college, whether as a professional musician or all the many different paths they could go down.

DD: Lots! The chair of my high school music department used to tell every music-intensive 12th grader not to go into music as a career. He stressed that talent and hard work are not the only ingredients for success, which also depended on self-propagating skills, and most of all, sheer luck for being in the right place at the right time with the right match for any opportunity. More important, he added that most conservatory graduates leave music within 10 years of graduating because they discover that there aren’t a lot of jobs no matter how good you are.

I later asked him why he said that discouraging rant to all of us, and he chuckled with a profound answer. Of the 4 “music jocks” in my grade, he did talk two of them out of trying for a music career, and he told me since they could be dissuaded by strong warnings from a high school teacher before they ever had to suffer the frustration, rejection, and futility he warned of, they were wise to realize that music should be a lifelong hobby for them. By contrast, he pointed out that one classmate and I were determined to go for broke, we weren’t born to do anything else, and we were going to take our chances with eyes wide open. I would give the same advice to every student today, and it’s even tougher today to make money with fewer performing jobs and fewer ways to earn royalties. The main point is not to dissuade everyone, but to disillusion those who aren’t being realistic about their commitment, so they can get a good start on a more practical future.

My parents “required” me to go to Aspen after 11th grade to see what it’s like to be surrounded by 2000 students who all were the best in their school, most of whom were already in conservatories, and in an environment with the cutthroat competitiveness of intense artists. Aside from how much I learned about music that summer, I also learned that I loved that environment, while some others learned they did not. I “required” my daughter to do the same thing after 11th grade to help in deciding whether to go to a specialized art school or a liberal arts college.

ICA: What are your thoughts about competitions, and calls for scores, fee vs. no fee, and the pros and cons of when they’re important in someone’s career.

DD: No fee if you want to help young composers, build your brand, and find the best works!!  I was fortunate that Alan Gilbert asked me to create the Haddonfield Symphony (now Symphony In C) Young Composers Competition with the orchestra’s support, and with Alan conducting the winning pieces. Seeing who applied to our competition, how many submissions we got, and comparing to other young composer competitions reinforced what I already knew from experience with my own composer friends.

We tend to think the orchestras and foundations have unlimited funds hiding behind an arbitrary budget, and young composers often conclude that any organization charging a fee is an evil profiteer. Young composers often avoid any competition with a fee, regardless if it’s equitable for raising the prize money and any admin costs. It doesn’t matter if these potential entrants are incorrect; if you want a good pool of applicants for young composers, there can’t be a fee. The American Composers Forum’s iconic listings of competitions segregates competitions with entry fees apart from those without fees, because that’s such a primary filter for its constituents.

ICA: I think burnout is something many of us go through at different times in our careers. It’s an important discussion to have, although many find it difficult to discuss or do not talk about it all. If you have had some periods of “burnout”, can you share some instances of when you felt burnt out, what led up to it, and how did you get out of it?

DD: I haven’t experienced it to the extent you’re describing. I’m not as famous as I’d like to be, my music isn’t performed as much as I’d like it to be, and that’s something I’m objectively aware of. However, I love the exhilaration of hearing my music performed, and when I hear about people I don’t know who have found a piece of mine to perform, I know they’re genuinely touched by that music, not just playing something by a friend. What can be more flattering than that? I can be frustrated thinking about how many major orchestras have never played my music, but my original compositions have over a million views on YouTube, and for some reason I tend to focus on the happy stuff. Maybe more fundamental, I set out to be “as successful as possible,” rather than having a specific checklist of accomplished goals. That might seem artificial, but it’s genuine. Very famous composers are also not played as often as they wish, because we’re all striving for more and more. This might be more the case with composers than instrumental performers because performers can strive for permanent first-chair jobs and other tangible achievements; composers’ successes can be more nebulous or short-lived.

I think “benchmarking” is a dangerous thought process common among most people, and sometimes an ominous path to burnout. We compare ourselves to other people to evaluate how we’re doing, when we’re all dealt a unique hand, are balancing different life situations, and worst of all, most people measure themselves conveniently against people who are in their daily life regardless of circumstances, rather than against people with similar circumstances. There are always people doing better and doing worse than you, whether it’s the speed of playing an etude, or performance history, or wealth, or happiness. And everyone is coming from a different background, family setting, maybe is coming back from a family hiatus or successful non-music career.

So with that in mind, what is burnout? I get fatigue sometimes, and often know I need to take some time away from a piece I’m writing to come back fresh. And occasionally I’ve decided “from now on I’m only writing orchestra music” or “no more arrangements” or “only clarinet music from now on,” but that’s more like recalibrating the course.

ICA: Are there other musical activities/projects that are important to you, beyond composing?

DD: I see everything I do as interrelated, and many other musical activities are part of composing, other than the actual writing processes:

Listening to and learning from the unfamiliar is a joy, and necessary to keep growing and staying fresh. I’d like to think that’s how I can write in roughly the same surface language all these years without new pieces sounding like the old ones. To paraphrase an earlier answer, the language is just the vehicle, and there’s an infinite amount of content to write in any language. My teacher Ralph Shapey, who was my antithesis on the surface, used only one tone row for every piece he composed for the last 30 years of his life, and each piece exploited “The Motherlode” row differently. I learned a lot from Ralph about craft, and that transcends style. Learning from the unfamiliar is crucial to remain creative. I have a poster of all The Beatles album covers in my studio. Of course their music was a tremendous catalyst for my life, but I’m talking about the album covers: they looked different on every album cover; they didn’t have “a look,” they kept redefining themselves personally, and if you can do that, you can keep thinking about new musical ideas without being hung up about “that isn’t what I do.”

Playing instruments with other people, practicing, the thrill of performing – this keeps my musical daydreaming alive and nourishes that magical place where raw ideas bubble up from.

Preparing sheet music optimally is one focus that every composer needs, but few care enough about, to facilitate practice and performance. Learning how to use software proficiently is only the beginning. If composers want performers to keep their minds on the ensemble, phrasing, expression, and their artistic finesse, the performers can’t be glancing around to see where the tempo changes or accidentals are, or trying to count rests while the tempos change with silent downbeats. I literally could go on for hours about this and used to give lectures on spacing, peripheral vision, and simply doing whatever it takes to facilitate the performers’ ability to focus on bringing their full attention to the performance, not just navigating the notation. It’s all attitude, and I spend the prep time in my own self-interest since I want performers to focus on the musical artistry without distraction. This is similar to why some teachers require students to memorize their repertoire – not for the impressiveness or mental exercise, but to perform with all senses on delivering the artistry. I got the Editor job at Presser, doing this for our composers, by the luck of being in the right place at the right time with the right approach, and it simply comes down to giving everyone’s publications the same TLC that I give my own.

ICA: What non-musical activities do you enjoy?

DD: This is a tough question because in recent years I’m involved in so many musical activities beyond composing and my day job. Travel, visual arts, and nature are wonderful escapes, but I’ve only got one brain and these non-musical escapes often inspire compositions. One of my flute friends has pointed out that most of my program music and titles come from direct experiences rather than total fantasy or literature. This is most evident in my flute music (Sonatine de Giverny; Spirit of the Hudson; Sleepy Hollow, for example), and Perennials for Flute, Clarinet, and Piano came about when I learned to garden.

ICA: Where can people learn more about / hear / buy your music?

DD: Finally an easy question J !  The best way to learn about what I’ve written for clarinet is at www.danieldorff.com/clarinet.htm which has complete listings and a lot of links. There are also some other interviews and articles on my website, and listings by instrument for non-clarinet music as well. I’m also active on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok using my regular name.

All my compositions are published by Presser, and they can be bought from any sheet music seller worldwide, or directly from www.presser.com; many of these are available as pdf downloads from presser.com as well as standard print publications.

Almost everything I’ve written has YouTubes of live performances shared by the performers, and many are on commercial albums that are available in the standard download and streaming platforms. Also, I’m pretty good about answering emails and DM’s.

ICA: I extend my gratitude to you for graciously dedicating your time to participate in this interview for ICA’s Composer of the Month series. Your insights and perspectives are invaluable contributions to our community, and I’m sure we all deeply appreciate your willingness to share them with us.  Looking forward to hearing and playing more of your music.