Interview, Missy Mazzoli on Dark with Excessive Bright

In the wake of the first full-length album of her orchestral music on BIS (featuring Swedish violinist Peter Herresthal), the American composer talks about some of the writers and musicians who've inspired her work, the importance of tapping into 'an immediate sense of community' as a composer - and the plans which are afoot for her new opera Lincoln in the Bardo, which will be performed at the Metropolitan Opera in 2026...

So many literary references are threaded through this programme, from Milton to Rilke to James Tate – has the written work always been a major source of inspiration for you?

Definitely. I became a composer in part because it allowed me to access so many other fields all at once: even when I was very young I was interested in literature and theatre, and I think there’s something about being tasked with writing a large-scale work without words that leads me to want to engage with texts in a more abstract way.

In his excellent booklet-note, the novelist Garth Greenwell compares your phrases to the sentences of Henry James: was he a conscious influence, or did that come as a bit of a surprise?!

It was a surprise, but who wouldn’t love being compared to Henry James?! Garth and I actually met through Twitter, but I’d fallen in love with his writing long before we became friends. Garth’s an omnivorous consumer of art, and I find that so illuminating: of course his primary job is being a writer, but he also has a strong background in music and the visual arts so he’s able to make connections that I’m not even aware of in my music. Sometimes it takes an outsider to join those dots for you, because until a piece is out there in the world it can be difficult to see the bigger picture yourself. So whilst James wasn’t in the forefront of my mind, I read that essay and thought it sounded absolutely right – perhaps it’s something about the darkness of the writing…

Speaking of becoming more aware of things once they’re out in the world, I notice there’s a theme here of revisiting scores – do you ever feel like a work is truly ‘finished’, or are you always tempted to return if the opportunity presents itself?

I do get to that point where I’m ready to leave a piece alone, but it often takes a few iterations. I think I’m a bit like a painter who’s working in series: my artist friends often produce ten or twenty paintings that are iterations of the same thing, and then they get it out of their system and move on. It’s not that they’re repeating themselves, just that it takes more than one pass to get at the essence they’re aiming for.

There’s a practical dimension, too. The title-work on this album, Dark With Excessive Bright, began its life as a double-bass concerto for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and you know only a certain number of people are going to hear a piece like that. Bass-players love it, it has its own unique audience, and the violin concerto version I created with Peter Herresthal behind it has a whole other audience - people who are really obsessive will listen to both, and that’s great! It’s not like I have a TV show and every episode’s the same: these things typically get out into the world in a much more limited way, so I’m very happy to work on an idea until I’ve completely exhausted it!

How did you go about adapting the concerto for the violin?

It was impossible to do a straight transposition: the piece just wouldn’t work, so I had to really rethink so much of the material. A lot of it involved turning the orchestra upside-down - for example sometimes the solo bass line stayed as the solo line, but all of a sudden it was at the top of the orchestra because of the violin’s register. At other times I gave the soloist lines that were originally within the orchestra, so it’s quite a different work altogether.

Your writing for strings always sounds like it would fit so beautifully under the hands – did you train as a string-player yourself?

I’m a pianist who just happens to love writing for strings: I took violin lessons for two months when I was 18, and I just thought ‘I am too old to sound this bad!’. But I’ve kept the connection through the wonderful string-players I’ve worked with over the years: Jennifer Koh, Olivia De Prato (who premiered my Vespers), Alisa Weilerstein, Matt Haimovitz...I could go on and on! They’re all so open-minded and enthusiastic about new music, and they’ve really opened my eyes to the possibilities of writing for their instruments.

I think that the sound of strings is somehow very nostalgic, and also so flexible – you hear it in romantic film scores, in horror movies, in everything from Ligeti to John Williams… I’m also very interested in Baroque music: works like the Bach sonatas, partitas and cello suites have always been super-inspiring to me, because I love those very clean, clear structures and getting into the math of it all. I think that comes from working with Louis Andriessen, who had a real love for Baroque and early Classical repertoire as well as for contemporary music, with this gulf of Romanticism in between (although he did also love Beethoven and Wagner!). There’s something magical about Baroque sonorities, too, which I’m sort of imitating in the concerto in particular.

You’ve also made striking use of instruments more usually associated with folk and country music in your operas and orchestral works…

I went through a phase which lasted about ten years where I was really into the harmonica, and I used them in three major works: my opera Proving Up, Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) and a chamber piece called Still Life With Avalanche. Again, it has a kind of nostalgic quality which fascinates me – most of us know what it’s like to blow into a harmonica and you don’t need a degree in music to make that sound, so there’s something really cool about putting it alongside virtuosic string textures in a symphony orchestra and I love the tension that generates.

What’s the story behind your friendship with Peter Herresthal?

About six years ago I was commissioned to write a piece for Norwegian National Opera (which eventually became The Listeners and premiered last summer), so I took myself out to Oslo to look around the opera-house and generally get a feel for the city. My publisher told me there was this great Norwegian violinist who did a lot of new music, and suggested we meet; Peter picked me up in his Tesla for a drive around Oslo, and we hit it off instantly. On that initial ride Peter asked where he could hear some of my orchestral music, and I said ‘Well, I don’t want to be whiny, but none of it’s ever been recorded!’. In America it’s very hard to get orchestral works recorded: it’s mostly an expense thing, but it’s not something orchestras do all that often.

Peter is a bit of an impresario and has a real gift for making things happen, so he said ‘Let’s do it right here, in Scandinavia!’. Having Peter’s weight behind the project was an incredible gift: he’s such a respected soloist and also has a contract with BIS, so he was able to vouch for this American who was 37 at the time and had never had an orchestral piece recorded!

Was the violin version of Vespers made at Peter’s request?

Peter wanted to do a solo violin piece on the album, and since I only really had one concerto I decided to revisit and extend Vespers. He really connected to that piece, and I love that his interpretation is so different from Olivia De Prato’s. In my mind Vespers is the final track of the record, and the second version of Dark With Excessive Bright is a kind of bonus track.

When you’re writing/reworking a piece with a specific soloist in mind, how much do you collaborate with them?

I usually try to bring them into the process very early on, and even before I start writing I go through a process of listening to their recordings and talking to them about what sort of musician they are. There’s so much variety, especially with writing for a string soloist: do they like to do the crazy flashy stuff, or is it more about sustained stillness (which I think is often just as hard to produce)?

With Peter I asked him to send me recordings of his favourite concertos to play, so I was able to get in his head a little bit; he sent me the Saariaho and Adès, and even though my music doesn’t really sound like those composers I’m very inspired by the way that they think. Once I have a rough draft there’s usually a long detailed back-and-forth: Jenny Koh has been known to call me from the road to say we need to change the length of one specific note, and I love that!

How do you usually like to work: at an instrument, or straight onto the page/screen?

My ideal workspace is actually where I’m sitting right now: I have a desk with a keyboard that I can pull out from underneath, and soon I’m getting a real piano for the first time in my life which will be great! I think being a pianist helps me to be able to have things in my fingers and improvise as I’m writing: the circumstances of my life are such that I do have to write on the road a lot, so I travel with a keyboard. In my school-days we were always being encouraged to just ‘write from your mind’ - but then I learned that Stravinsky didn’t do that, and I thought ‘Oh well, then I don’t have to either!’.

You mentioned working with Louis Andriessen: which other composers spoke to you most strongly when you were growing up?

When I was very young, hearing the music of composers like John Adams, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk was a real revelation for me - people who are in the minimalist camp. My music is not minimalist, but I was and am very influenced by the way they think about music. This was in the 1990s, which isn’t that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but stylistically it was a time when things were more siloed.

And I think it was important that these were people whose lives I could relate to, in that they were living in New York and creating musical scenes of their own. They were doing work with major institutions, but they also had bands and parties and salons, and that was a world I could see myself in. Big commissions are great, but I don’t know anyone who is happy just doing that: I think there has to be a more immediate sense of community, and of something you’re building yourself.

What are you working on at the moment?

The deadline for my new opera is approaching, so I’m working flat-out right now – it’s been nice to take a break and chat! The performance-dates haven’t yet been announced, but it’s a commission for the Metropolitan Opera and it’s an adaption of the George Saunders novel Lincoln in the Bardo (which came out about ten years ago). Saunders is my favourite writer, and my librettist Royce Vavrek and I have been working directly on a lot of aspects of the libretto with him. It deals with the death of one of Abraham Lincoln’s children, but that’s not even really the main story – it takes place in a graveyard, where everyone’s dead and people are trying to figure out what’s going on… It’s hilarious and dark at the same time, and I’m really excited about it!