Today we’d like to introduce you to an Oregon composer who’s a little off the–well, he’s not so much off the beaten path as he is on a different beaten path. Where most contemporary composers work in a distinctly contemporary idiom, a soundworld where Stravinsky is considered old hat and socially relevant post-tonal aleatoric graphic scores are all the rage, Andrew Lewinter composes music inspired mainly by Brahms, Bach, and the other “Dead White European Males” that fell out of fashion around the time of the semi-apocryphal Le Sacre riot and–despite the best efforts of Bernstein and an army of eagerly conservative symphony directors–have never completely recovered.
We first heard about Lewinter upon the release of his album Music for Brass and Piano last year. He wasn’t exactly on our radar, but the players on the album are all Oregon Symphony pros–specifically the principals of the legendary OSO brass section (Jeffrey Work, Jeff Garza, Casey Jones, and JáTtik Clark) and that raised an eyebrow–so we looked him up. First result: Andrew Lewinter, Employment Attorney.
“Employment attorney Andrew Lewinter fights for victims of employment discrimination, retaliation, whistleblowing, and sexual harassment in Eugene, Oregon. Mr. Lewinter advocates for employees in State and Federal courts. Mr. Lewinter also represents individual employees before State and Federal administrative agencies, such as the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI). Mr. Lewinter has been an attorney for both public and private sector labor unions in a wide spectrum of fields.”
Um. Right guy? A little more digging: Andrew Lewinter, Composer. Same guy! Far out, man. It’s always fascinating knowing what composers do for a living. Philip Glass famously worked as a plumber, a cabbie, even had a moving company. Andy Akiho was a sushi chef. Charles Ives was an insurance executive. And so on.
Anyways, since “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” we sat and listened to the album–which turned out to be awesome.
Not too many composers do this sort of thing anymore. In the cathedral of Classical Music you get the canonical DWEMs–the Hallowed Three B’s (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms)–but not a lot of serious new music composed in the old style, perhaps slightly updated for modern ears (a chromatic mediant here, an overtone scale there), without the slightest trace of irony or “deconstruction.” Here is a composer, we thought, who really likes this stuff.
So we wrote to Mr. Lewinter and asked him the burning question: why write Romantic music in the 21st century?
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This interview was conducted by phone and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.
The A-ha moment
I’ve been writing music since I was a little kid. I would make up music and play it on the piano; my mother came into the room once where the piano was and asked, “don’t you want lessons?” And I said, “No, mom, I like making up my own songs.” Later on, I started playing the horn, and I got really serious as a horn player. I studied at Juilliard, went to Northwestern, had a great teacher in New York City, and then got a job when I was nineteen years old. I worked as a professional horn player from age nineteen to thirty three, playing all the symphonic music, including playing at the Santa Fe Opera, which I did for several summers.
And then I stopped playing for health reasons. Age thirty-three to fifty, I didn’t make a note of music, I was just practicing law. I became a lawyer; I‘m still a lawyer. But when I turned fifty I thought, “you know, this is kind of ridiculous. I’ve always been a musician and I haven’t made any music. So I’m going to do something about this. If I can’t play anymore I’m gonna start composing music.” I was going to start my adult phase of composing music. I started off by reading books. I read Paul Hindemith, Kent Kennan, Vincent Persecheti, Walter Piston–a whole bunch of books about theory, counterpoint, harmony, everything. And then I started writing music. When I made the first project, I thought, “I’m going to make this relatively easy on myself, now that I’ve studied so much of the music that I enjoyed playing for so much of my life–I’m going to write a horn sonata. I’m going to write it in kind of a classical, romantic style. I know what I’m gonna do structurally cause all I have to do is look back at what Beethoven did structurally and kind of follow that framework. And we’ll see where it takes me.”
So that was the goal, to write one horn sonata and then see what happens next. So I wrote one horn sonata, and I contacted an old friend from Northwestern where I’d played horn and I said, “Hey, how would you feel about recording this?” And he was into it, and we put out a recording of the sonata for horn and piano. That was written in 2016-2017.
Then I started writing more music, and a friend of mine who ran a chamber music festival in Florida—I used to mostly play in Florida—she liked it, and said, “Hey, how would you feel about writing a nonet for our group?” It was a somewhat unusual grouping: violin, viola, cello plus woodwind quintet and string bass. I did that and they premiered it, and it was a ton of fun.
So then I just didn’t stop. So far I’ve written about seventeen pieces. Some of them have been recorded. Hindemith wrote a sonata for every orchestral instrument, and some instruments that aren’t really orchestral instruments like alto horn. I thought, “well, why don’t you do that? I’ll make that kind of a life goal over the course of my life.”
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I fell into writing what’s really Romantic music, because that’s what I like. I don’t feel any obligation to write avant-garde music because I don’t want to. There’s enough to intellectually really study, and really pay attention, and take time to study Brahms, and think about what he did. Why is it exciting? Or Beethoven or Bach or Mahler? Why is it exciting? And what things do I want to incorporate from that music into my own music, to make something that’s both intellectually satisfying and emotionally satisfying? So that’s what I do, and that’s the goal with every piece: to make it fun to listen to, enjoyable, and to not take myself too seriously and be creative with it.
There’s so many things you can do. If you look at Brahms, for example, he’s developing themes that are introduced early in the piece, and then there are inversions, and sometimes there are themes superimposed one on top of the other. Early on I thought to myself, “why do I like Bach so much?” And I decided that part of the reason is that he’s modulating through so many keys. Your mind is always trying to find what’s the key, you know, what’s the tonic? And he’s taking you through a roller coaster throughout the piece, through different keys, and he does it so deftly you don’t necessarily notice and go, “Oh, he’s modulating here.” That’s part of what makes it fun.
So I decided to start off with brass sonatas. I had already written a horn sonata, so then I wrote a tuba sonata. I wrote a trombone sonata and a trumpet sonata, and a piece for brass quartet. One of my teachers in New York played in a brass trio, which always seemed a little less satisfying to me because it is missing two people. I thought, “I’ve never heard of a piano quartet that uses brass instruments in place of what are typically string instruments.” A standard piano quartet is violin, viola, cello, piano–so what if I write a standard piano quintet but instead of violin, I’ll make it a trumpet. Viola, make it a horn, and instead of the cello a trombone. So I wrote a piano quartet that substitutes brass instruments for what would otherwise be string instruments. And then since I started off with a horn sonata, and my skills and my thoughts have changed so much since I first started this part of my life, I decided to write a second horn sonata.
I was talking with Jeff Garza, the principal horn in the Oregon Symphony, and came up with the idea of making this album of all the brass sonatas I had written, plus the quartet. Jeff suggested Liz Dorman, who is a pianist in San Francisco. She was interested, and we made the album.
Recording the album
It was a ton of fun. It’s so gratifying hearing really good musicians interpret the music you wrote. It becomes a collaborative process between the composer and the performers. We recorded it at The Madeleine, a small church in the Irvington neighborhood in Portland that had just the right acoustics.
I heard an interview years ago with Christopher Rouse, and he was talking about his experience writing music; he said that it’s painful, it’s like giving birth. And I thought, “really? It’s not for me!” If it were, I would just stop. I think it’s a lot of fun just to do so many things where you’re using your brain and your creativity and thinking about things and trying to create something. That process is fun in and of itself, whether or not it ever gets played.
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A typical composing day
Generally I write in the early morning, and then half the time I wake up in the middle of the night thinking, “Why didn’t I like that?” I didn’t like what I just did, for some reason. I get out of bed, write for another forty-five minutes, and go back to sleep. I’m not sure if I could do this all in one sitting, because it takes time for me to think about what I just did and how I can improve it! And that’s all done away from the piano, not at the piano. Very often I think there’s something about this I don’t like–”what is it?” Every piece that I’ve written, I’ve written it probably twice over again. I mean overall, just in the sense that I’ll delay a bunch of stuff, and maybe I’ll decide I don’t like this development section and junk it. I think that generally, when I delete things I do it for a reason. And then whatever I write afterward is much better.
Oregon, Ho!
I’ve lived all over the place. Someone might think I’m on the lam! I got a job in Florida as a french horn player in the Florida orchestra and then the Florida Philharmonic. I was principal horn for twelve years. During the summers I played in the Santa Fe Opera as principal horn. And then my wife who was also a French horn player—I married a French horn player, and so did she—decided to go to medical school. I was teaching at the University of Miami, and I was playing in the Florida Philharmonic. So when I stopped playing for health reasons, which was actually quite a bit after she started her process of going to medical school, she did her residency in Atlanta and I went to law school there. Then we decided, since we like Santa Fe and its really vibrant art scene, to move to Santa Fe for a couple of years until she got a much better job in Eugene. I didn’t know anything about Eugene. I’d never lived in the Pacific Northwest. Everything’s an adventure.
I think the state is gorgeous. It’s a very sophisticated state. I like the people, and the politics are obviously something that I like.
Why write Romantic music in the 21st century?
I study Brahms more than anyone else. Brahms does so many interesting things in his development. One thing to learn from him is never stop developing. This is something I’ve changed over time: I’ve made the recapitulation different from the exposition. Throughout the development, the themes change; when they come back in the recapitulation you still recognize them as forms of the original iteration, but they’re new, and that makes it interesting.
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I’m always trying to find ways to explore those composers, and see what makes it fun. What makes it exciting? Why do I like it so much?
Music is timeless in a way that visual arts are not. In other words, take a French Impressionist painter. They’re painting things that they see in their environment. I mean they’re doing it in their own style but it’s definitely tied to the world they lived in. I think music is more timeless than that. This is something Hindemith points out: the overtone series is part of nature, and therefore it’s actually part of our minds. There’s a reason that we’re always looking to follow that tonic.
The other thing is this is the music that I enjoy. Why not see what I can do with it? It’s not like I’ll be copying anyone. It’s my music. It’s just, well, I guess it’s new wine in old bottles.