ICA: Welcome, Derek Bermel, we’re very happy to have you as our November 2021 composer-of-the-month!
DB: My pleasure.
ICA: Tell us a bit about the featured composition.
DB: In 2013 Wolf Trap commissioned a clarinet quintet for me to play with the JACK Quartet. At the time, I was Artist-in-Residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and I had attended several lectures on the subject of space-time, gravity, and the multiverse by the physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed. Nima’s talks, which were always expansive, vivid, and inspiring, described gravitational phenomena at both tiny and enormous ends of the cosmic scale. So in the quintet I set out to recreate that feeling of wonder and expansiveness—both horizontally (in time, i.e. duration/speed) and vertically (in space, i.e. pitch/contour). By exploring various ways of stretching and compacting, or “curving” musical spacetime, I tried to evince a sort of general relativity for the ears. JACK and I recorded the quintet as part of a new disc of my music that will be released on Naxos in 2022.
ICA: What other works have you written for clarinet?
DB:
Voices (clarinet concerto)
Thracian Sketches (clarinet solo)
Twin Trio (clarinet, flute, piano)
Coming Together (clarinet, cello)
Mulatash Stomp (clarinet, violin, piano)
SchiZm (clarinet, piano)
Theme & Absurdities (solo clarinet)
Wanderings (woodwind quintet)
Tied Shifts (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion)
ICA: Tell us a bit about yourself.
DB: I was born in NYC. My father was a playwright and translator, and my mother was an editor, so I grew up in a literary family. My neighborhood and friends were diverse, so I came in direct contact with great jazz, classical, gospel, Latin, and hiphop musicians, dancers, and other artists. The public schools in New Rochelle were great, and my clarinet teacher Ben Armato, my chorus director Bernice Satterwhite, and my youth orchestra conductor Vic Lionti inspired and encouraged me to explore composition and improvisation. For the past 25 years I’ve lived in Brooklyn and worked as a freelance composer and clarinetist, and I also serve as Artistic Director of the American Composers Orchestra, where I program concerts and mentor up-and-coming composers.
ICA: How would you describe your music?
DB: Tactile, theatrical. I like to get my hands on the music, which is why I spent years learning to play in different styles, from jazz and Latin music to studies in Ghana, Bulgaria, Ireland, and Brazil. So there are many influences, but it has always been important to me to study technique with context. Artists can face the seductive danger of skimming culture, like surfing the internet; the connections can be facile, fragile, shallow. Learning musical traditions as part of larger systemic frameworks has challenged me to appreciate and face the depth of what it means to be human and make art in this complex world.
ICA: What are some of the important influences on your work?
DB: I was inspired to start composing by so many composers—Béla Bartók, Olivier Messiaen, and George Gershwin come to mind—and of course Mozart, Brahms, Nielsen, all those composers whose work I performed on the clarinet. I also loved music by Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus; I taught myself piano in order to internalize Monk’s solos. So I was playing classical concertos and in jazz combos, but I also grew up in New York during the era of funk, punk, new wave, and hiphop, and I played in bands from junior high school through college and beyond; because of this my musical language was also informed by Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Annie Lennox, Prince, Nina Simone, Tears for Fears, Run DMC, and Rakim. It took me some time to figure out how to synthesize these overlapping strands into a unified “sound”. I was lucky to have great teachers—at Yale, Michigan, and in Amsterdam, Paris, and Jerusalem: Bill Bolcom, André Hajdu, William Albright, Michael Tenzer, Louis Andriessen, and Henri Dutilleux. And over the years I’ve been privileged to collaborate with and learn from some of my favorite artists whose music I knew: Wynton Marsalis, Midori, Paquito D’Rivera, Luciana Souza, Mos Def, and others.
Theatre was a big influence too. Growing up in a theatre family, I had seen all Shakespeare’s plays before graduating high school—not to mention French comedy, which was my dad’s specialty as a translator: Molière, Courteline, Racine, Feydeau, Cocteau, also the Italians: Gozzi, Goldoni, Pirandello…. And we read my dad’s plays at home, which helped me understand pacing and interplay, the importance of silence, relations between characters. During his research for a textbook on farce, my dad took me along to tiny cinemas in the West Village, where we would sit all afternoon viewing old films: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Keystone Cops, Harry Langdon, Mae West, W.C. Fields, Harold Lloyd. Of course as an 9-year-old kid I loved watching people throw cream pies in each other’s faces! But it also had a formative effect on my aesthetic, particularly in understanding comedic timing.
And sometimes it’s easiest to learn from artists in other disciplines. I’ve absorbed a great deal from working with the writer Wendy S. Walters, the visual artist Sook Jin Jo, and the choreographer S. Ama Wray. I learn from their processes, the way they make decisions, the way they play with their materials, which might be words, color, shape, or movement, all of which have corollaries in music.
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?
DB: I prefer to work in the late afternoon and early evening, but sometimes I do my best composing in the early morning (3-6AM), that magical, monastic moment when the world is asleep. I tend to start on paper and eventually gravitate to the computer at a late stage. I like orchestrating on manuscript paper—full score—because I take more risks. Computers encourage template thinking, which I try to resist. But in the final stages of writing, I often employ MIDI playback to help assess proportions; it lets me stand back from the work objectively in a way that I can’t while hacking away at the piano.
ICA: How does being a clarinetist yourself impact your writing for clarinet? Do you approach it differently than writing for other instruments?
DB: Years ago when I was a student, I drove with the composer Krzysztof Penderecki from Ann Arbor to Chicago. He listened to what I was writing at the time and declared me a “contrapuntalist”, as opposed to a “harmonist”. I think this orientation toward line comes from being a clarinetist. I love harmony and am a sucker for a great chord progression. But to me, the line remains supreme as a structural underpinning. You can hear this in the shorter, theatrical solo works like “Theme and Absurdities” and “SchiZm”, the winding virtuosic works referencing Bulgarian and Brazilian rhythms like “Thracian Sketches” and “Short History”, and even in the large, sprawling works like my clarinet concerto “Voices”. And my improvisations and explorations on the clarinet have continually pushed me to innovate on other instruments. I love writing for strings—maybe even more than writing for winds or keyboards—and that could be because I’m most free to imagine my most improbable dreams on instruments I can’t play myself.
ICA: As an active performer on clarinet, how do you balance composing and performing in your life? Do you think of yourself more as a “composer who performs,” a “performer who composes,” both equally, or something else?
DB: Since the moment I wrote my first composition at age 11, a eulogy for my guinea pig called “A Pig”, I’ve always been the composer who performs. That said, there is nothing like playing music; I love performing, and it has been the single most defining aspect of my creative life, both from an artistic and from a career perspective.
ICA: How has the coronavirus pandemic impacted your work?
DB: Well, of course, the first months were devastating in New York; we were losing more than a thousand people a day. I started to do some fiction writing, a kind of apocalyptic diary, just to organize my spiraling thoughts. After a while I rediscovered a compositional rhythm and resumed working on an opera, an orchestra piece, some creative works that I had set aside. My wife Andreia Pinto Correia is also a composer. She was working upstairs in a little garret, and I was downstairs with the piano; we had never spent so many consecutive months together!
ICA: Now that things are hopefully starting to return to “normal,” what is one thing you’re especially excited to be able to do again?
DB: I think I’ll continue to take long walks, in Prospect Park and in Green-Wood Cemetery, near home. These days I’m most excited just to gather with people. I don’t take that for granted anymore, and we’re still not out of the woods. This pandemic has been transformational.
ICA: Tell us about a current project or two that you’re excited about.
DB: I’m excited for my upcoming Naxos disc with the JACK Quartet. I’m also writing a piece for the chamber orchestra ROCO, inspired by photographs by the environmental activist J. Henry Fair, and soon I’ll be writing a new string quartet for the Ying Quartet. Right now I’m working with Sandra Cisneros on an opera based on her novel “The House on Mango Street”; it’s one of my favorite books, because it reminds me of my old neighborhood. Sandra is brilliant and I am learning so much about writing from collaborating with her. These days my colleagues are my teachers! I try to keep absorbing, because without input there’s not much output.
ICA: Are there other musical activities/projects that are important to you, beyond composing?
DB: At ACO I have been able to flex some other creative muscles, to create systemic opportunities for composers in the orchestra field. I helped design and implement the Earshot network of new music readings throughout the country and abroad, the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute, and the SONiC Festival, which all offer mentorship, readings and first performances to emerging composers. I founded (along with Michael Boriskin) the Cultivate Institute at the Copland House, and I am co-director of the composition program at the Bowdoin International Music Festival. I’m grateful for these opportunities to help empower composers at the early stages of their careers.
ICA: What non-musical activities do you enjoy?
DB: I love hiking, biking, swimming in lakes and oceans, all ways of engaging with the outdoors. I like Salsa dancing but am terrible at it. I enjoy cooking, but am only really skilled at a few dishes. I have a real passion for learning languages; I have good French, decent Italian, sketchy Portuguese, and smatterings of a few others. I enjoy word games, crossword puzzles, and sudoku, and also a good book before bedtime. I love animals, especially cats, and most especially my cats Marvin and Zoe!
ICA: If you weren’t a musician, what would you be?
DB: Probably an actor. Or a veterinarian. I’ve always had a secret desire to be a physicist—in fact I tried my hand at physics at college—but I just didn’t have the left-brain for it. I’d love to take up astronomy as a hobby one day, but I’d have to move out of Brooklyn for that.
ICA: Where can people learn more about / hear / buy your music?
DB: My music is published by Peermusic in America/Africa/Asia and Faber Music in Europe/Australia.
My music is recorded on the following albums:
Soul Garden (Chamber) New World Records (2003)
Voices (Orchestra) BMOP/Sound (2009)
Canzonas Americanas (Large Ensemble) Cantaloupe (2013)
Migrations (Orchestra) Naxos (2019)
Intonations (String Quartet/Clarinet) Naxos (2022)
You can also learn more about me on my website and my blog, Inspirations, where I occasionally write about people, events, and ideas that have inspired me.
ICA: Thanks for taking the time to share your work with us! We really appreciate it!
DB: Thanks for inviting me.
