Faculty Interview: Nick DiBerardino—Part One

From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Roman mythology to caffeinated mania, the oxygen-producing effects of beet juice, and the Tibetan Buddhist “mind-training” practice called lojong, how do you choose the subject matter you write about, or rather, how does it choose you?
I’m interested in everything. For me, there’s something about music that can capture certain aspects of the human experience. Sometimes it’s weird, small stories or facts I find fascinating that inspire me. One example that comes to mind is a brass sextet I wrote called Ornithopter about failed flying machines. There have been hundreds of years of concept drawings of ornithopters—people were trying to engineer a machine that could fly under human power. None of them worked. Someone once asked me, “Why did you write a piece about failure?” But I find the effort that went into those machines fascinating. I think that aspect of the human experience is kind of beautiful. The project of making ornithopters was aspirational, even if it was useless. There is something about the way we want to fly or the way we want to try to experience the world in new ways that speaks to me. I think music can represent those kinds of complex shades of emotion around a topic. It can stretch out a single image, thought, or idea.

My composition about Beet Juice is a different example. I think facts about plants are cool, and the fact that beet juice can enhance athletic performance—like Lance Armstrong’s blood transfusions, basically—is the most bizarre fact about a plant I’ve ever heard. I wrote this piece for the Aizuri Quartet, and I knew the first part of the piece would be very athletic, and that the quartet would have to be doing their own kind of exercise. And then I started thinking about this aspect of beets, and the ideas joined together. So, I do sometimes feel like the ideas chose me. I just happen to be obsessed with something, and by focusing on that in my music, I’m able to vivify the sound world and make it more particular and distinctive—maybe even more authentic as well. At the end of the day, I believe the reason you might come to hear a piece of new music is to experience something authentically idiosyncratic.

How has this process changed since you began composing, and how do these topics, objects, stories, or places inform the shape of a particular work?
Some composers’ output has a thread, and their work over a lifetime is a chiseling and refinement of that thread of interest. I’m not sure that’s me. I think I’m the kind of composer that expects to always be changing. Stravinsky is hanging in the background of a piece I just composed for L’Histoire septet, and he’s a great example of a composer who was exploring many different kinds of concepts, even though Stravinsky still always sounds like Stravinsky. I think I’m that kind of composer. I always want to try new things, and that’s part of what generates my creativity.

Early on, my relationship with stories was very direct and earnest, and I even wrote a piece about my childhood home. I had these wistful feelings about aspects of my childhood, and it felt like they were coming out in the melodies I was writing. It was a very Romantic, with a capital “R,” way of thinking about things. As time went on, I became a little more self-aware about what those stories were doing for me, and I started to think more actively about how much of a story was supposed to be coming through to an audience.

For a while, I started shaping narrative elements before I wrote any notes at all. Now what usually happens for me is that I start by writing some music I like, sometimes with no idea where that material will eventually end up in the piece. Then, as I’m trying to figure out how to shape things across the course of the piece or through time, that’s where extra-musical elements really help me focus and vivify. Lately, I’m letting those things come to me more loosely as I work—it’s been more about composing music about music, and then letting title or story elements come to me as they will. I don’t know how that will develop next. Who knows? That’s kind of exciting.

Tell us about the recent premiere of your new Star Trek-themed chamber work, Darmok & Jalad. How did the challenge of writing a new work for the L’Histoire septet inspire this childhood TV memory and the interstellar soundscape of the piece?
Going into writing this piece, I knew it’d be a companion piece to L’Histoire du Soldat, and it would have to be for this weird septet, a challenging and very particular instrumentation in many ways. You have this violin, bass, trumpet, trombone, clarinet, bassoon, and a percussionist in the back playing tom-toms and a triangle, more or less. That group produces Stravinsky’s ostinatos well and can play as three duets, but it’s not especially good at blending. It’s a very particular sound world, so working with it was challenging—challenging enough that I decided to short-score the piece. I wrote the whole thing as a two-voice skeleton so that any pair of instruments could play the tune at any point. And then I translated that material back into the septet. I wouldn’t normally write in a short score for a chamber piece.

I knew John de Lancie would be narrating L’Histoire on the tour that this piece was commissioned for. I really admire John’s work, especially because I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and I love his amazing character, Q. I met John at Curtis before I wrote this piece, and I realized then that John was okay with talking about Trek. That’s when I thought, “I’m going to write a Star Trek piece, because I love it so much.” John had no idea I was doing this. I later learned during the [Curtis on Tour performance] in Phoenix, Arizona, that John had discovered I composed a Star Trek piece, and the ensemble told me that he seemed to really like it, which was exciting.

If you know the episode “Darmok & Jalad,” you know it’s all about language and a whole particular situation with an alien civilization called the Tamarians. Nobody understands them. It becomes clear at the end of the episode that it’s because they all speak exclusively in metaphor and symbol. I think this is a fantastic concept. Two inspiring things came out of that for me. On the one hand, the episode created a feeling of near intelligibility that I thought was interesting, aesthetically, as a viewer. I felt like I was just on the edge of being able to understand what the Tamarians were saying. And then, on the other hand, there is this deep idea about language, where language breaks down, and the power of metaphor. Since I see music as a metaphorical language, that naturally tracks into the musical domain for me. That may be why the episode resonated so well.

I described my approach to recreating a sense of the Tamarian grammar in my music to Joe Menosky, the writer of the episode, who wrote me an email because he saw, I think, the interview I did in the Willamette Week with John de Lancie. He said it sounded like I had effectively reverse-engineered his process for writing the Tamarian language and that people have been writing about that episode for 25 years. And that I’m the first person who emphasized this kind of near-intelligibility aspect. I was like, oh, wait, what!? I was dying inside!

What I did was take little bits of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Mahler—little chunks of formal syntax and standard patterns of tonal grammar—and bend them a little. An analogy would be: if I say to you “Romeo and Juliet at the window,” and reference our own cultural context that you and I both understand, you know roughly what I mean. But if I’m saying to you, “Darmok and Jalad on the ocean,” that understanding starts to break down. I tried to do that musically. Familiar elements from tonal music are animating the piece, but they are slightly weird, with these kinds of screwball chords. To get that effect, I moved the familiar stuff through a strange background scale, so the result is music that’s always almost something you were expecting, but not quite. If you want to get nerdy about it, the music is a familiar pattern of thirds voice-led to each other, but moving through an eleven-note scale—with no B-flat—which means that this familiar thirds thing from tonal music is constantly getting a little bit deformed by the scale as it moves around.

What are the most difficult and rewarding aspects of working with soloists, ensembles, and orchestras to bring your compositional visions to life?
All composers have their own version of this, but: the aspects of writing that are the most difficult for me are the ones that are the least aligned with my personality. I have a facility with the music itself, but what’s hard for me is disappearing into a closet for months, alone, and trusting that this will all come out on the other side. I’m an extrovert, and that’s where I appreciate the work I do at Curtis with other staff members, faculty members, and with students. I love working with them. It’s super inspiring. But nobody else cares about whether I’m working on my piece except me. So I have to protect the space to do that.

I grew up as a saxophonist. I did not grow up a classical musician. I don’t play a string instrument and am pretty bad at piano. My secondary piano instructors at Curtis would nod their heads at this. Everybody comes to composing differently, and none of us play all the instruments. It’s virtually impossible—although some have tried, like Hindemith, who was pretty good at playing a bunch of different instruments.

For me, the biggest musical challenge is translating a strange idea, like the one I just described to you, into something idiomatic enough to be expressive in the context that I care about—which is a room full of performers, who are bringing decades of artistry to the table. Our students bring incredible talent on their instruments into the room. That’s a virtuosity you have to respect, and you have to engage with. The weirder you want to go, or the more idiosyncratic your ideas are as a composer, the less likely it is that they’re automatically going to be familiar with the instrument. So, making the music both authentically strange in the ways that I think will communicate what I’m trying to do, but also trying to express that music idiomatically on the instruments and in the bodies of the performers is a real challenge. It’s very rewarding.

I individually met with each of the students playing Darmok & Jalad to talk to them about how to make the ideas more idiomatic. With every piece a composer writes, we get better at that part of the process without having to ask. We figure out how to come up with some really interesting, authentic, engaging musical ideas, and then we also learn this craft side of things, how to translate those ideas and embody them for the performer. It is always incredibly useful to get that input from performers.

It feels like an enormous privilege every time there’s a room full of incredible musicians who could be playing anything, and do play everything, and are coming together to play my music. They are all bringing their talents forward—and in the case of Darmok & Jalad there are seven of them—and negotiating all of this passagework I’ve concocted. Some of it is kind of fiendish. A lot of the rhythmic language of Darmok comes from the world of electronic dance music and the work of composers adjacent to that space, like Anna Meredith. It’s not easy to play. But I love the aspect of collaborating with other musicians to bring these crazy things into the world. Having that connection with the performers, and then also listeners, and in this case, John de Lancie too, makes it all feel worthwhile to me.

Visit Nick DiBerardino’s official website HERE.

Interview with Mr. DiBerardino by Ryan Scott Lathan.

ABOUT NICK DIBERARDINO
Composer Nick DiBerardino (’18) is noted for creating “richly textured, multilayered” sound worlds (Minnesota Star Tribune) that tell fantastical tales. He has written music about everything from failed flying machines and Star Trek to Walt Whitman and tall glasses of beet juice.

A Rhodes Scholar, Mr. DiBerardino has received commissions from many distinguished artists and institutions, including Symphony Tacoma, the Dover Quartet, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Sandbox Percussion, the New College Choir, arx duo, Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, Music From Angel Fire, and saxophonist Matthew Levy. His works have been performed around the world by the American Composers Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, Aizuri Quartet, Contemporaneous, So Percussion, and many others.

Mr. DiBerardino founded England’s first laptop orchestra, OxLOrk, and has designed several collaborative composition initiatives, including a children’s opera composed with students at Girard College and a workshop series for people living with Alzheimer’s disease, created in partnership with the Penn Memory Center.

Mr. DiBerardino is the chair of composition studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he also serves as director of Ensemble 20/21 and dean. He holds composition degrees from the University of Oxford, the Yale School of Music, the Curtis Institute of Music, and Princeton University.
Photo Credits: 1.) Nichole MCH Photography 2.) Courtesy of artist’s official Facebook page. 3.) Steven Mackey, Nick DiBerardino, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Jonathan Bailey Holland in Field Concert Hall; Gene Smirnov. 4.) John de Lancie as the narrator in L’Histoire du Soldat; Jeff Reeder. 5.) The ensemble of L’Histoire du Soldat; Jeff Reeder.