Ricky Ian Gordon is truly a 'renaissance man' composer as his works range from art song settings of poems to sweeping song-cycles with a decidedly classic flair to complex theater pieces, even to simple cabaret ballads. Regarded by many as one of the leading composers of our time, Ricky's music has been described as being "caviar for a world gorging on pizza" by Stephen Holden at the New York Times. A new work of his, Orpheus & Euridice, has its premier on October 31, which presented me with the perfect opportunity to chat with him.

JF: First of all, let's discuss your new work, Orpheus & Euridice, which is premiering on Halloween at 7:30pm at The Cooper Union's Great Hall (East 7th and Third Avenue, to fully complete the plug). It is a one-woman show with soprano, clarinet and piano, which begs the question: is it a musical or a song-cycle or what?

RIG: It's definitely not a musical. It is somewhere between a song cycle and a theater piece: it's one story told in 11 poems and a dance segment. At one point I called it a "monodrama," now I'm considering it a solo cantata in two acts. One woman tells the story of Orpheus and Euridice and at various points she's Orpheus, or Euridice or the Narrator. The clarinetist is always Orpheus and the pianist is the support of both.

To tell you the truth, I have never written anything like it, which is why it's taken so long for it to be premiered. I wrote it between '95 and '96 after I met this fantastic clarinetist named Todd Palmer. I used to do concerts with Angelina Reaux and did a huge show of my music called Sweet Song, which ran Off-Broadway. Todd really liked my music and asked if I would write something for clarinet, piano, and soprano and we started talking about what the text would be. At the time, I was the caretaker for my lover, Jeffrey, who had AIDS. I woke up one night and suddenly the whole story of Orpheus & Euridice came to me. In my version of the myth Orpheus played a reed instead of a lyre, and Euridice got a mysterious virus that stole her from him incrementally. You know how we use myths to tell our own stories? It's why myths are necessary because that's how we understand ourselves? Well, it was really weird, Jonathan; I needed to tell my story through that myth at that moment. There are lines in it like "as she slept, he wept bitterly and dearly/growing more and more bereft/as in increments she left." There's so much about what happened with Jeffrey and myself that is reflected in the piece.

I had the whole text written in an hour and woke Jeffrey up at four in the morning because I had to read it for him. Then I started setting it to music, and it turned out to be a 45 to 50 minute piece. Todd was probably looking for a little companion piece to The Shepherd On The Rock! (laughs) So it's been hard to find an opportunity to do it, and hopefully launching it at this time makes it something that will enter the repertory, because it's a great showpiece for the players and the singers.

JF: Any chance of it getting recorded?

RIG: I know they'll record it at the concert. My relationship with Nonesuch is very new. I assume I'll do another CD with them, but who knows? "Bright Eyed Joy" did very well critically. And when I did the concert at Lincoln Center last March it was fantastically received. So it's been a good time for me. I'm writing something for Chicago Lyric Opera and I'm about to premier something for Rivinia. In April I'm doing two concerts of my work at the Guggenheim with Audra McDonald, Kristin Chenoweth, Brian D'Arcy James and Darius deHaas. So I've got a lot going on right now.

JF: Have you ever written a 'true' musical, whatever that is nowadays? In reading all your biography materials, I read about your operas and song cycles and the like. There was a list of shows with no descriptions, so were they musicals, or plays with music, or ...

RIG: I did three shows with Tina Landau that were musicals: Dream True, States of Independence and Stonewall. Actually, Bill Hoffman, with whom I am writing the show for the Chicago Lyric Opera, and I came up with the word 'opsical' to describe our work. Without meaning to, we seem to be treading new terrain in regards to creating a form that hasn't been written yet, that is in the process of being invented. Stephen Sondheim brought musical theater to a new place, and frankly many of us thought that it was a precedent; we didn't know it was an aberration. However, musical theater seems to have acted like a rubber band, with an elasticity that made it recoil from its own progress for a little while. I feel that I really am writing a new kind of work, because you write the music you want to hear and the work you want to see.

JF: I like it ... Now that you've given me a great term, what is an 'opsical?'

RIG: First of all, let me say that when I think about writing for the musical theater, it feels really similar to my obsession with foreign films by directors like Truffaut, Antonioni, Bergman, Godard and all the Japanese film makers. In a way, when I had the notion of creating for musical theater, it was to create a type of musical theater that's an equivalent to that style of foreign films. I'm not sure if I have found it yet, but I know that that's what I'm going towards.

JF: I like that analogy. Because it does seem that the genre has split into two veins. You hate to say that one is 'populist,' but there is definitely the style of musical that can only be called 'escapist' entertainment. Not that that's a bad thing, mind you. But you have shows like Beauty and The Beast and The Producers in that category, and shows like Floyd Collins, Violet, The Wild Party and Parade in the other camp.

RIG: Exactly. Not that I have a judgement about The Producers; it's simply not what I do. When I went to see it, I felt that it was so not for me that it wasn't funny. It would be like giving Proust a Barbara Cartland novel. Not that I am Proust ... but we are all different artists. You can't put two words together, 'music' and 'theater,' and decide that all shows and writers must fall under that umbrella. A wider term needs to be used. If I had seen The Producers when I was a little boy, I would not have thought, "That's what I want to do when I grow up." I remember seeing Follies when I was in high school and it floored me! Here was this form that claimed to be one thing, but meanwhile expressed another. It was psychologically complex: the people in it were like broken dolls. It was like Ibsen as a musical. And that's where I became interested.

JF: Aside from Stephen Sondheim, what other composers have influenced or affected you?

RIG: When I was growing up, I lived 45 minutes from the city. Every Saturday I would go to the opera and to the Library of the Performing Arts where I checked out every opera or musical that were either written in English or in the 20th Century: I was obsessed with whatever was written in the 20th century. Some of it was weird, like Werner Egk and Richard Mohaupt, who wrote an opera nobody knows called Double Trouble that I was obsessed about. Or George Antheil's The Wish or Nicholas Maw's opera, One Man Show. I knew all that shit! I also lived near a great music factory, Boosey and Hawkes, and they would sell me piles of scores that they couldn't sell because a page was dirty or the cover was scuffed. So I had all these Britten, Prokofiev and Rorem scores. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was basically shaping an aesthetic. At the time I didn't know I was going to be a composer. I was supposedly a pianist, but I would never be interested enough in a piece of music to learn it completely. I wanted to graze over it and see what the composer did and then move on to another piece.

Stephen Sondheim, however, was really the one who blew my mind, as he was the one whom I really thought was putting it all together. Take Company: it threw in popular music, almost rock and roll, into the mix and combined it with 20th Century dissonances ... all these seconds and fourths and fifths. But Follies was the show that really cinched it for me.

I remember, by the way, when I went to visit Carnegie Mellon for the first time. I was wandering around the airport, waiting to be picked up by someone from the University, and I can remember the three scores that were swirling in my head at the time. One was the Shostakovich 14th Symphony, of which a recording had just come out with Phyllis Curtin and Simon Estes, with Eugene Ormandy conducting. It blew my world apart. I thought it was one of the greatest things I had ever heard; it's all setting of poems about death. Then Ned Rorem had just premiered a new song-cycle called Ariel, which set Sylvia Plath's poems to clarinet, piano and soprano voice. And then there was Follies.

If you had the misfortune to visit me while I was at Carnegie Mellon, you could not enter my room unless you agreed to listen to all the musical tidbits that I had to play for you. It would be anything from Hans Werner Henze to Britten to Barber ... I made everybody listen to Barber's Venessa ... and Sondheim! It was this weird amalgam. So I was definitely putting something together.

JF: It does surprise me that you didn't set out to be a composer, since the events and influences of your life definitely seem to have been shaping you for that career.

RIG: After I got into Carnegie Mellon as a pianist, I started meeting all these poets and writers that I thought were incredible. And it suddenly occurred to me that there was something wrong here: I should not be in a practice room for hours practicing Chopin. Nothing about it made sense to me. I would look at these people and think, "I think I'm supposed to create." So I ended up writing 100 pages of music in three weeks. It was as if I walked into my light; suddenly my entire life made sense.

At that moment I was modeling myself on Ned Rorem, since my other great love at the time was poetry. First I started setting poems of friends of mine to music, and then I started setting poems of my favorite poets, like Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker, to music. I also started writing my own poetry and everything started coming together. I started to write music for the theater department and became an actor there, and was writing music for the music department as well. By the time I got to New York I had already established this schizophrenic 'cross-over' composer personality. I absolutely saddled both worlds and both were equally important to me. One night I might be seeing Merrily We Roll Along, and the next I would see Lulu at the Met.

To this day I'm amazed when people say things like, "But Lulu has no melody in it," since I feel that there's nothing but melody in it. Roger Sessions once said that, "You can never judge a piece of music written in the 20th Century until you know it well enough to know its melodies." And I think he's right. If you listen to even the most dissonant music, eventually it will make sense to you. What has happened in the 20th Century is that people don't want to listen to things more than once; partly, I think, because there's so much information coming at us now. We hear something once and don't like it, we change the channel. At a time when people's attention spans have dwindled to almost nothing, the music has gotten more difficult than it has ever been. So people couldn't really take in what was written.

Not that I think everything written in the 20th Century is great. But a lot of it is not as difficult as it sounds after continued hearing. Frankly, I think myself and a lot of my cohorts believed that Sondheim ushered in a period when people wanted to listen to theater music more than once and therefore assemble its order in their heads. But I think we were wrong. The only reason I say that is because sometimes the press is so harsh about this new style of work, and it would make more sense if it was listened to more than once. When a critic assumes to know what a piece of music is saying after listening to it once ... frankly it's impossible! I don't even get it after hearing it once. I couldn't go and listen to [the opera] The Great Gatsby once and tell you what the fuck I was hearing. But I love The Great Gatsby now. I've heard it 100 times and I can tell you exactly what's going on. Or take Michael John's The Wild Party ...

JF: That took me three or four listenings before I really started to like and then love it.

RIG: Exactly! I feel that that's the reason my theater scores aren't even recorded. People keep thinking they are too weird. But they're not; you just have to hear them more than once.

JF: Do you like the label of 'art songs' in regard to your work?

RIG: I have to say, I write art songs when I intend to write art songs. Poetry settings are considered 'art songs' because that's what they are. But when I write theater songs I write theater songs. People think of them as art songs only because their ears aren't sophisticated enough yet to just accept a new form that may be more meandering and less "ABA." To me it's just theater music.

JF: Are any of the songs on the Bright Eyed Joy album from a musical?

RIG: I don't think so. I almost put a song from Dream True on it. Maybe next time. But a song like "Run Away" is, I think, more of a theater song, even if it wasn't written especially for a show, than something like "Wild Swans."

JF: I have to admit that the songs of yours that resonate the most with me are the ones for which you wrote the lyrics as well as the music ... "Run Away," "A Horse With Wings," "Once I Was."

RIG: I really appreciate that. That's what I really like about Orpheus & Euridice; it's all my text.

JF: One album I think I am going to have to buy of yours is Water Music/A 2 Part Requiem. [Note: for those of you trying to find it, it's on the CD Of Eternal Light with Musica Sacra, Richard Westenberg conducting ... label: Catalyst]

RIG: Oh thank you! Water Music is an a cappella requiem that I wrote the music and text for. I use the word 'requiem' loosely. RCA was launching a new label that was going to host new contemporary music. It was to be their first CD and they commissioned me to write whatever I wanted. At the time, I felt like I was going through a kind of personal death; you know when an old version of yourself dies and you have to be born to the new one but you don't know what it is yet? I was unbelievably sad at that time in my life. And in a way, it wasn't a requiem for the dead, but rather for the death of a time and a spirit. But interestingly enough, it's done as a 'true' requiem now. In a way, I think spiritual and physical death are the same thing.

JF: It sounds fascinating and completely like my sort of thing since I'm addicted to requiems! I especially like the imagery you have of water in terms of death and rebirth/baptism.

Here's an intriguing thing I read about you ... you were in a book written in 1992 called Home Fires ...

RIG: Home Fires is literally the story of my family! It was a huge book and was up for a national book award. The full title is Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle Class Family in Post War America. The man who wrote it, Donald Katz, was my running partner. He was making a name for himself as a social historian based on the Heiddeger Principle, which states that if you study one thing long enough you learn everything. If you study one cell, for instance, you can learn the story of the world. Don wrote a book, The Big Store, about the crisis and revolution at Sears Roebuck. It ended up being this Dickensian portrait of a post-war corporation, but it's really a story about America. For his next book, he wanted to study post war America through one family. I had always been talking about my family, because if there was a seminal event happened in history, one of us was always there. So he wrote this 700-page book about us. We were on Good Morning America and Charlie Rose ... it was like being the Loud Family for a little while! It was fascinating, because I wasn't the 'composer' in that book; it was more about my being the gay son, and drugs and alcohol ... there's a lot of addiction in my family ... so it was all high drama. And sometimes I felt that it focused less on me as an artist. But I also think I hadn't emerged yet as an artist ... that has happened more in the last few years.

JF: Let's get back to Morning Star, the piece you are writing for the Chicago Lyric Opera. Is it completed?

RIG: No. As a matter of fact, I'm about to go on November 1st to play them the first 50 pages of act two. It's based on a play written in the early forties by a woman named Sylvia Regan. It's a fantastic play. I was working on piece about my family somewhat like Home Fires, and I had already done a little salon where I got the people from the Goodman and the Lyric around the piano to hear ideas for it. At the time, Frank Galati had unearthed the play Morning Star and had done a revival at Steppenwolf where it was a big hit. Someone at the Lyric saw it and thought that I really needed to read the play since it closely resembles my family. It takes place in 1910 and is the story of a Jewish family with three daughters and a son, who is the youngest child; the same constellation as my family. The mother's name is Becky and I'm named after my mother's mother, Rebecca. The central drama in act one is the Triangle Shirt Factory fire, and my mother's mother worked there and on the day of the fire was sick and didn't go in. Act one, for example, ends with two of the main characters about to be engulfed in a fireball and then jumping off the building as the rabbi and company are singing the Kaddish. Isn't that scary?

JF: The image conjures something else right now, I'm afraid ...

RIG: It's unbelievable! So someone sent me the play while I was at work on the other piece about my family. I read it in the bathtub and was just sobbing! So I called the Lyric and told them to please get the rights for me. Bill Hoffman and I had always spoken about writing something together, and he read the piece and loved it. He read another play called God of Vengeance, which he talked about doing an adaptation of. I love the play, but I didn't want to work on something that dark. Morning Star has a lot of humor and light in it, so we started to work on it. Last spring we presented act one and it went really well. Part of it was an audition for Robert Falls to see if he would want to do it at The Goodman, and luckily it received a resounding 'yes.'

JF: Are you the writing lyrics for it?

RIG: No, Bill is writing the whole libretto and I'm writing the music.

JF: When is it going to be produced?

RIG: We're doing a full reading of it next spring with Bob Falls and will do the production next year.

JF: Well, I wish you the best of fates with that and Orpheus & Euridice, and I look forward to listening to Water Music.

RIG: Thanks!

Orpheus & Euridice makes its premier on Wednesday, October 31, 7:30 p.m. at The Cooper Union's Great Hall, East 7th Street at Third Avenue. Tickets are $20 and are general admission. They are available via Ticket Central (212) 279-4200 (1 p.m.-8 p.m. daily) or online at www.ticketcentral.org.

Photo: Susan Johann

-- Jonathan

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