No, but he's very kind to make up something like that When you start using words like millennium, that's pushing the boundaries of good taste.

DM: He explained that the technology you have mastered opens up compositional possibilities never available to any composer before.

Well, the sad thing is that the technologies that I've developed are probably not going to be available to any composer afterwards either, because the technologies are all so expensive. Unless something happens to bring down the cost of the tools that I'm using, then most of the other people who are writing music will never be able to deal with it.

DM: So you don't think there will be a drop in price as the technology changes?

If there's another whole machine invented that does what the Synclavier does and sells for a reasonable amount of money, yes, but I don't see any chance in the word that the Synclavier's price is going to come down. As a matter of fact, at New England Digital they're trying to phase out their relationship with musicians and design the machine purely as a post-production tool for video and motion pictures for doing sound effects. This thing was originally designed as a digital instrument for the musician, but that part of their consumer base is the least significant now, so all their research and improvements are going in the direction of making a useful tool for grinding out commercials and soundtracks. [Ed. Note: Since this interview, New England Digital has gone out of business.]

DM: That makes you one of the only inhabitants of the little island in what happened in music in the '80s and '90s.

Probably.

DM: That's kind of sad.

Well, I don't think it's going to be any great loss. Nobody knows what I did anyway, so how are they going to miss it?

DM: You have a sense that no one knows what you're doing?

I don't think that anybody has any idea what goes on in my room over there, because very little of it has been released on record - they have no idea.

DM: You've had trouble with distribution, but is it also part of the problem that the refinement of your music creates a smaller and smaller audience?

I think that the shrinkage of the audience is inevitable, but the distribution problem is not inevitable. That's an unfortunate situation that I can't really do anything about, but I don't believe the access to distribution or the lack of it is an accidental occurrence.

DM: You say you can't do anything about it. Is it curable by anyone?

Not in the United States. I mean, I think that I still have a potential market worldwide outside the United States, but as long as we have the current type of political and supposedly moral machinery of the United States, the Way it is now, it's not likely that this music has much of a future in this country.

MG: What's gratifying to me is that some of your stuff is available now on CD. I go into very conventional record stores, and I see this huge row of your CDs.

But not in every state. California or the Los Angeles area may be neat in terms of the amount of stuff that's in stores, but there are other places where major chains won't carry it. There was an article in Billboard last year about some chain based in Washington State that has over 100 outlets that didn't want to carry this stuff. One of the things that they were trying to do is say that the lyrics on these albums were too nasty, but one of the things that they didn't want to sell was Jazz from Hell, which is an instrumental record. When Billboard questioned the guy about it, he said, "Well, if it's not the lyrics, then it must be the cover." The cover was just a picture of my face.

MG: I saw you perform, I think it was in 1981 at the Santa Monica Civic, and I was startled to see this nice, portly old man come out and perform with you. It was Nicolas Slonimsky. How did you get him to join you onstage?

I'd been asked to be the host of a concert in New York for the celebration of Louise Varese's 90th birthday, and my function in the concert was to be the MC. What they were trying to do was get a younger audience to come and hear the music of Varese, and I thought that to do a good job, maybe I should talk to some people who knew something about Varese's background and get some anecdotes that I could pass along to the audience. It turned out that this was completely unnecessary, because when the concert occurred, the audience was so unruly, it was just like a Palladium Halloween audience. The concert was at the Palladium. They were behaving like a rock and roll audience. They sat completely still when the music was being played, but as soon as the music stopped there was pandemonium, so there was no way to tell them anything. But I did make the attempt to get some information from Slonimsky about Varese, and that's how I met him. At the end of the '81 tour, I think it was the last day, we invited him to come onstage and participate in some improvisation. He was a good Sport and went out and did it.

DM: He said it was one of the great experiences of his musical life, partly because the crowd was a rock and roll crowd that jumped up and shouted. He was used to small crowds of polite music listeners.

I've been to a few of those, too. Every once in a while they do a little Nicolas Slonimsky birthday celebration here in Los Angeles. Composers contribute little compositions as birthday gifts. I've done two of those. I went to one of these things; it was held at an art gallery in downtown Los Angeles. It was pretty mild. There's no substitute for a rock and roll audience.

DM: He said to me that he wanted sometime soon to sit down with you and talk about "the basics." Are there "basics" you'd like to talk to him about?

We've had some little discussions about technique in music. I'm reasonably familiar with his books, and on one occasion, when he came over here, we videotaped him, and I asked him to explain the theory behind the chords in that book of scales that most people are familiar with. It was really quite interesting, because it's based on the simple idea that if you take an octave or groups of octaves, and divide them into proportions other than the way in which normal music is divided, then you wind up with different types of harmony. lt never occurred to me that that was the simple logic that was generating all those scales. But that was basically me listening to him talk. Maybe on some occasion we should sit down and talk about the way in which I put my stuff together, but there hasn't been a convenient time to do it.

DM: He described you as being what he would call a classical constructionist, meaning that you use 12 tones and 11 intervals - as is tradition in Western music - with not a whole lot of reliance on quarter-tones or other modalities, and that in the samples that you do for the Synclavier, you're constructing new sounds with these 12 tones and 11 intervals. Would you agree with this description?

It's true that I haven't written very much music on the Synclavier that involves pitches that are not on the tempered scale, but in live music performances we'll deal with any kind of musical material that happens to be at hand. The closest I can get to quarter-tone music is when I sing

DM: Is that intentional?

No, I just don't have any control over it.

DM: Do you have a feeling that you'll ever go into other tunings, or is dissonance just something to be resolved?

Well, I don't always resolve it. Most of the time I just leave it squatting there. I did a lot of early experimentation with quarter-tone stuff and found it not to be that interesting for my ear. To me, the net result of a whole composition based on quarter-tones sounds like a badly tuned piano. I've heard recordings of Ives quarter-tone piano music which just sounds like the piano tuner was an amateur. You would imagine, if you were a music student and you were interested in dissonance, that you could be even more dissonant by writing quarter- tone music and stacking clusters of that. But to my ear, it doesn't really work.

DM: When you construct music, are you thinking vertically - thinking of chords?

Any stack of notes you can call a chord - or any stack of sounds, whether they're musical pitches or just textures. I mean, I like chords of percussion instruments where you get a chordal result if you have a bass drum, a castanet, a jingle bell, and a guiro at the same time - if they're all hit at the same time, you will get some sort of a chordal sensation out of it, partly because there is a pitch content to all those instruments. It doesn't hit you in the face like a trumpet, but there is pitch content. You can prove that by taking a sample of the bass drum or any of these instruments and playing up and down the keyboard - you'll hear the pitch move.

DM: But when you're sitting down and thinking, "Today I'm writing music," are you thinking, "This is in the key of C# minor"?

No, I never did that.

DM: How do you resolve things in your music? How do you build and resolve? Is there a plan?

It depends on what kind of piece it is. And there are a number of ways you can enter the data into the Synclavier. One is to play it on the keyboard, another is to play it on the Octapad. You can type it in in this obscure language called Script - which I don't know how to do - or you can type it in on the "G page," which is just a stack of numbers, kind of like a phone book, or you can type it in in music notation, which allows you to see staves on a screen. So there's a lot of different ways to enter it. Depending on how you enter it, that makes a difference in how you develop whatever was there to begin with. Since I have only minimal keyboard technique, anything that I play in on the keyboard, I have to do it with the speed knob turned way down. Then do a lot of editing to it after it's been entered in. But all those piano parts on "N-Lite" - you know, those cadenzas and stuff? I played them.

MG: Did you know where you were going with that piece?

No. Because the most boring part of composing is when you finally understand what the object is that you're working on, and you know what the boundaries are, you know where it's beginning and where it's ending, and then you're down to the drudgery of cleaning it up. That's the most tedious part to me, but it's something that has to be done before you put it onto tape or transfer it into music printing so that somebody can play it. The fun part is getting a new batch of samples and figuring out how you can manipulate them. You'll be starting to generate the material. One of the reasons why the stuff takes so long to do is that the preparation work to do a composition is so lengthy and involved that just gathering up the material to make your piece could take two or three months. Then, on a couple of days, you'll sit there and do some stuff to it and come up with the beginning of the piece, and then it just stays on the hard disk in storage for however long until you get interested in it again.

MG: Do you work on a lot of things at once?

Yeah, right now there's probably about five hundred different titles.

MG: Unfinished.

Yeah.

MG: Do you know what they are?

No, once they're in hard-disk storage, when I go back to them, all you're doing is looking at a computer number. You call it up, and you have only the vaguest recollection of what the thing was or how it started out. First of all, when it's stored, it's stored with the software of the age in which it was done, and there could have been two software updates a year, so things can be outmoded fairly rapidly. Also, it's stored with the older samples that were available at the time, so the first thing I do with an old piece that I want to listen to again is call it up and look at what sample patches are already on there and check to see whether I have newer, better samples for any of those sounds to replace all those things. I piddle around with it for a while, then re-save it in its somewhat updated edition. I might not even do any work on it - just haul it out, and listen to it, and see where it's going to go. But for the past year, I've been so involved with this Ensemble Modern project that most of the composition work has just been that drudgery part - just cleaning it up, getting ready for this thing.

MG: Do you rank your music in any kind of hierarchy? Do you consider the rock and roll stuff inferior to the classical stuff?

No.

MG: It's all the same?

It's a different aspect of the same thing. I've got an imagination. So I earn a living by producing merchandisable manifestations of portions of my imagination.

MG: So you don't do one type of music in order to pay for another?

No, I would probably do "Baby Take Your Teeth Out" if nobody paid me. I mean, nobody did pay me. That particular song was concocted at a soundcheck at the place where this concert was taking place in Frankfurt. We played at the Alte Oper in 1982, and that song came from that soundcheck.

DM: I'm still stuck on something you brought up about not ranking your compositions. If something like `N-Lite" took ten years to do...

... and "Baby Take Your Teeth Out" took 20 minutes, why should they be the same?

DM: It seems to me you've put more into one than the other, and therefore you might have an opinion of that effort yielding more than the 20-minute one.

Well, the function of both things is to entertain. The one that took ten years is probably way over budget in terms of how much bang for the buck you're going to get. The end of any piece is basically: you're decorating time. "Baby Take Your Teeth Out" is a minute and ten seconds. Okay, so it shouldn't have taken ten years. It should have taken much less, and it did, but if that minute and ten seconds amuses you, okay, fine. And then there are people who will never be able to sit through "N-Lite" - it's 23 minutes long. They would rather have a minute and ten seconds of something that'll make them laugh. The point is that each piece, for what it is supposed to do, achieves a certain level of entertainment success.

DM: If you don't rank your pieces, what differentiation do you make between live work, Synclavier work, and some of the work being done to find this so-called "more serious" music?

Well, if I had never done any rock and roll, I wouldn't have a Synclavier. It's as simple as that. I mean, I earn my living by making rock and roll records. But I didn't set out to do rock and roll just so I could spend my sunset years frying my room with a high radiation source.

MG: Did you anticipate the development of this technology?

Not to the point that I see it being available now. All along, from the point that I could afford to buy new audio tools, I would seek out those designers - and there are plenty of guys in Los Angeles who'll build you any kind of a box you'd care to describe, so long as you can afford to do it - and in the '70s I used to do certain experimentation with electronic devices for making music, but it's always better to have something off the shelf with a company behind it that will repair it when it explodes.

MG: In other interviews. you've said you were exasperated by your music not being played correctly.

Well, yeah.

MG: And it seems that this technology is the answer to Frank Zappa's problem. Here it is exactly the way you want it to be performed.

Well, even with the most perfect Synclavier performance, you still don't get 100%, because there are certain nuances that are going to be absent just because the music is being played by samples, which means every note will always be the same sound.

MG: You can't alter that?

You can put vibrato on it and change its amplitude and change its duration, but basically it is a digital recording of some event. What you lose is - for example, you have a patch of clarinet notes, and every clarinet note is perfect, and they're lovely clarinet notes, and then you tell the Synclavier to play this ungodly fast clarinet riff that no human being could play. That's nice. You could never get it another way. But on the other hand, if you have a really fine clarinet player, every one of the notes that he played would be different, and your ear detects that variety. I think that the ear prefers variety, unless you happen to be one of those Mongoloids who thinks that the drum machine is the greatest device known to mankind. I can't stand to listen to them. Even in the case of kick drums and snare drums, you hear exactly the same pulse at 100% amplitude each time.

MG: So contemporary pop music doesn't do much for you.

Yeah, that's true. On the Synclavier, when we do repeated patterns with percussion samples, what we want to try and do is have multiple samples of the snare drum and the kick drum, so that every time the pulse comes along, it's actually a different recording and gives it more texture and variety.

DM: When you were talking about the Synclavier being an endangered species, what does that mean for the future of music? Will composers revert back to guitars and live groups and small synthesizers?

I don't think there are going to be that many composers in the future. I think that in today's world, if a person decides to be a composer, that person should probably seek medical help, because there's no way for you to earn a living. You can't. You have to have another job. You can't just write music.

DM: That's sort of sad.

I don't think it was ever really that much better, but things are getting especially tough now because there are no budgets for the performances, no budgets for rehearsal. If a chamber group or an orchestra does a performance of something, it's probably something that's already been written for a hundred years, and the orchestra already knows it, which means that they don't have to spend money for rehearsal. They play only the hits. And some guy who decides he wants to write music in the United States, what does he do? He may be able to write it down, but he's never going to get it played. And it takes so long to do it, and the mechanics of preparing just the paperwork to hand it to an orchestra are quite expensive, so it's an exercise in futility.

MG: But that's what you do.

Well, I don't think there's even an opportunity to do that anymore. If I were to go out and try to get a record contract today, as a new artist, I couldn't get one.

MG: It seems that the culture is so fragmented that people who would be interested in composing serious orchestral music don't know anything about pop music. You're one of the few people that has jumped from category to category. Who else has orchestral music in the rock bin at Tower?

Yeah, but basically that's neither here nor there. Just because I managed to get away with it doesn't have any real impact on what the real problem is. If you expect to have a future history of music, somebody's got to write it, and they can't write it unless they can survive while they're writing it. That's what's being endangered. I mean, spotted owls are nice, but nobody gives a fuck about composers. They have no meaning, they have no lobby, they have no power to control the payment of royalties due them for performances of their material. Those industrial entities that consume the compositions - like the commercial business, the movie business - all have contracts which are basically designed to deprive the composer of all of his rights. For example, if you do a film score, it is not likely you'll be able to maintain your own publishing royalties. The motion picture companies are going to take all that away. So what do you do?

DM: In Germany they're funding these performances with lots of money, and you've mentioned other regional groups or territories coming up with similar festivals. Why does it work there and not here? Or will it start failing there?

It's difficult there, because the German economy has the major burden of bringing the East into the 20th Century, and that's eating up a lot of the cash that might be spent on culture, but they still maintain cultural events. The thing is, in the United States there is an anti-cultural bias. You can't even use that word. There are two words you don't use in connection with the U.S. government: You don't use the "C" word, which is "culture," and you don't use the "I" word, which is "intellectual."

When [Czech president/playwright Vaclav] Havel gave a speech to the Congress, he did something really unbelievable. He got the entire Congress to cheer for intellectuals by using this spurious jujitsu method, claiming the Founding Fathers were intellectuals, thereby forcing the American legislators to go "Yeah!" for intellectuals. But that word has never been used effectively in conjunction with any form of U.S. government before. Just as it's very easy for candidates to say things like, "We will solve the deficit by slashing waste, fraud, and abuse," it's also easy to take aim at the National Endowment for the Arts or any other kind of cultural funding and give the public the impression that the world would be a better place if you never spent any more money keeping artists alive because who needs that? It's interesting that that kind of logic is so successful to the American electorate. They are willing to buy into this theory that any support for artistic activity is somehow unhealthy, when in fact if you look at the economic numbers there are ways to show that investment in things of an artistic nature creates jobs for other people that had nothing to do with art.

The best example would be if you have a decaying inner-city area like SoHo in New York. Before the artists moved into SoHo, it was just warehouses - it was a run-down area. So a few artists moved in, and they did some painting, and then they opened a gallery, then they opened a coffee shop, and the next thing you know the whole thing was gentrified and you've got apartments in the area that are going for $3,000 to $5,000 a month. That same type of scenario has repeated itself in other cities in the United States, but nobody ever looks at that. The result of just a few dollars spent to make life easier for artists eventually turns out to make profits for people who are not connected with art.

These arguments against the National Endowment for the Arts really piss me off. On the one hand, I hate the idea that government should be involved in any way with the arts, because it means that somebody with a government title who knows nothing about art has to pass out money. But on the other hand, the bulk of the cash of the NEA yearly budget - which is a mere 175 million dollars, a pittance compared to other government projects - the bulk of it does not go for financing things like the Mapplethorpe exhibition. Mapplethorpe [a photographer whose exhibition included male nudes] got $45,000. The bulk of the money goes to support regional ballet companies, regional orchestras, or things where there's some community involvement. That's the reason why it was set up, and that's the way the bulk of the money is spent. And if you throw that away, then what have you got? Do you really want to see a country like the United States converted into nothing more than a nation of drones, getting up, going to their miserable little jobs, producing odd products that nobody wants to buy, and then coming home and watching television? Is that - I mean, there has to be more to life than just going to work and then wallowing in the garbage that you created while you were at work.

MG: There also seems to be sort of a backlash against the arts because of a correct perception that most people who are involved in creative self expression have contempt for that, or at least they're opposed to the more conservative ideas. And people can't accept that.

I think the whole idea of a conservative bent in the United States is a media fiction. There are two important media fictions that you have to see through in order to comprehend life in the United States. One of them is the constant drone of these guys, who are basically right-wing operatives, who go on television and complain about the liberal media bias. This simply doesn't exist, because all the media are owned by right-wing guys. There's no liberal media bias there. That's a straw man that has been constructed. When they constructed it, the idea was that, "Oh! If there's a liberal media bias, we must balance it by having more right-wing content in our programming," thereby giving them the license to saturate and spin-doctor all the news that comes to you. I don't think that the sentiment of the population really is the way that television would convince you things are. The whole goal - especially in news broadcasting - is to convince anybody watching that all things connected with the Republican Party are good and all things not connected with the Republican Party are bad. That's the subtext of all of this. No matter what it is, if it's not of the Republican species, then it is bad.

DM: How do things like The Simpsons slip onto television?

Well, that's a good question.

MG: I'm mystified myself. I don't know.

I just hope they don't cut you.

MG: I think that - as you know - you make people laugh, and sometimes you fool them.

Yeah, but you didn't fool the nuclear industry, or the lumber guys.

MG: No, the fact that a little radioactive rod falls in the back of Homer's neck in every episode, they caught on to that one. No, you can say anything on television as long as you say it once, but if you start repeating it, then they start catching on. That's why - you can't imagine the kind of stuff we get taken apart for on The Simpsons. It's everything. Promoting homosexuality, and disrespect. . . .

DM: Is humor the preferable way to tell the truth, or a safe may?

It beats the hell out of turning to somebody and saying, "Boy, you've got bad breath." Or whatever horrible truth you have to do. I mean, why make life even more difficult for the person who has the problem?

MG: So how do you oppose these guys?

You want to know what they hate more than anything else in life? They can't stand for people not to take them seriously. If you laugh at them for an instant, it's just like - the devil walks in the room, right? And he goes, "I'm the Devil," and you take a fork and poke him in the belly, and the gas comes out, and he'll go twirling around the room like an unleashed balloon. That's the way these guys are. You can't laugh at them. They hate it, because they're so full of shit, they're so full of themselves that they just can't believe that people don't appreciate them for the grand, highly evolved creatures that they imagine themselves to be. They hate to be laughed at. If they weren't so fucking dangerous, it would be fun to laugh at them all the time, but sometimes you have to take into account how much damage they can do.

DM: When you were at the Senate in '85, were you serious or funny?

I thought I was funny.

DM: Did they?

Well, the audience did. They kept telling the audience to shut up. The atmosphere there was really very strange, because the hearing itself was such a mongrelization. It took place in the Science, Commerce, and Transportation Committee - the least likely place in all of the U.S. government you'd think that the matter of rock lyrics should be brought up. The reason it was there was that five of the members of the committee had wives who had signed the original PMRC [Parents Music Resource Committee] letter, and they were using it as a photo op, and it was wildly attended. There were 50 still photographers and something like 30 video teams. It was a big media event. And one of the senators said, "I've been on committees dealing with the MX, the budget, this thing, that thing, and I have never seen anything like this in my life." It was the hot ticket of 1985.

DM: What do you mean, he'd never seen anything like it?

The media zoo that sprang up around the issue. One of the stars of the hearing was Paula Hawkins, the Nancy Keagan lookalike from Florida - she had the reputation of being the least effective senator; she was really a disaster. Another one of her outstanding features was that all the Watergate burglars had found employment in her office in Florida. She was just this miserable thing. She wasn't a member of the committee, but she was having trouble getting re-elected, so Danforth, who was the chairman of the committee, did her a favor - one Republican to another - and allowed her to participate in the media circus, make some comments, and, you know, to grill me. She was the one who wanted to know what kind of toys my children had.

DM: How come you quit going directly before political groups? Was it because the bad guys were getting too much publicity out of it? Or are you just tired of the chore?

No, no - it's not being tired. I mean, I'll still make comments about it, but to go on these debate shows, to be commoditized as yet another talking head anytime somebody wants. . . The topic of censorship comes up, my phone starts ringing, you know? Some rap group gets its record banned someplace and my phone rings. And they think that the next day, they're going to have their special sound bite where I'll go on and debate with Tipper Gore. I mean that's the mentality, the level of the debate. And I just refuse to do that.

DM: So it's a stupid use of your time?

Well, it's for a worthy cause, but I think you could be more effective just talking generally about the idea of why this type of censorship is occurring and who's behind it than to do the talk show circuit every time one of these things hits the news wheel, and go on and you be a character who is against censorship and you will be debating somebody from some Christian organization. It's just hokey.

DM: Why is it that some of the rap groups are getting a better deal than you are? What has changed? You were a bad guy back in the '60s and '70s, and your records are now banned for distribution in certain states or places, yet most of these groups are going out there to the record bins. How come you're so honored?

I don't think any of those records pose much of a political threat to the people who'd like to see it stopped.

DM: What's your political threat?

I can talk. And there's always the possibility that someone will ask me a question, and I'll tell them what I think. They don't want to have anybody make fun of them. Besides, the situation with the lyrics of most of the rap records is, you've got basically two topics. You have sex and you have racism.

DM: Do you think there's more racism in music now?

Yeah. But it's a reflection of the times. I think there's more racism in government.