Interview, Sean Hickey on Sapiens

Described by Klassik Heute as 'one of the best known and most successful American composers of his generation' and nominated as a contender for 'hardest working man in New Music' by Sequenza 21, the New York-based composer and poet Sean Hickey is also a familiar face at Presto Towers thanks to his day-job as Managing Director of the Netherlands-based record label PENTATONE (a position which he has held since April 2022).

In the run-up to the release of his new fifty-minute solo piano work Sapiens (inspired by Yuval Noah Harari's 2011 book of the same name), we sat down to talk about how the two strands of Sean's career feed into one another, the influential American administrator and composer whose example he strives to emulate, why he abandoned his youthful dream of becoming 'a rock-star guitar-god', and the remarkable young Russian pianist who took on the task of giving Sapiens its first complete outing...

Have there been instances where your ‘day-job’ as a record-label executive has informed your work as a composer and/or vice versa? 

It happens to me every single day. Being Managing Director of a record-label is a good and appropriate reminder that we as a label (and the recording industry as a wider community) simply would not exist without these incredible composers and practitioners. It’s always helped to be able to sit on both sides of the table, as it were, and try to facilitate those conversations between creators and administrators a little more effectively. 

One of my mentors was a great model for a composer-administrator, and that was William Schuman, who passed away in 1992. Schuman wrote seven symphonies, a couple of operas, a lot of concert works and some chamber music, but his day-job was running the Juilliard School: he rose before the dawn every day and composed for four or so hours, then crossed Central Park and went to work. Schuman was one of the most pre-eminent cultural figures in New York (and indeed American) cultural lore in that he also put the shovel in the ground to raise funds for the construction of Lincoln Center, which he also ran for seven years.

One of Schuman’s Juilliard successors Joseph W. Polisi wrote a great book about him called American Muse, which foregrounds the fact that Schuman didn’t really draw a line between his artistic and administrative careers – his was just a life lived in the service of music. I like to think that I try to do the same.

On a purely logistical level, how do you keep all the plates spinning?

Luckily I’m a naturally early riser, and when I started working for PENTATONE a few years ago I knew that I’d need to be up at 5:30ish anyway to synchronise with colleagues in Europe. That’s not quite as early as William Schuman but it leaves me with some time to compose in the evenings, and I’ll do bits and pieces at weekends whenever I can. Twenty-plus years ago - before I became a father, and before working life became so demanding - I’d pour myself a giant cup of tea on a Saturday morning and sit working on a string quartet for five hours, but I’ve not done that in a very long time. 

The idea of going away on a composing retreat sounds absolutely idyllic, and every so often I find myself looking longingly the Aaron Copland House just outside New York City, which offers residencies…but I’ve never been able to find the time to do the application, and it would mean a couple of weeks off to do the residency itself. Everything I’ve written recently has been in very small segments of time but I still manage to make it all work.

Tell me a little about your path to this dual career…

I was born in Detroit Michigan, and grew up mostly in the suburbs. When I was twelve my parents got me a guitar on loan, and by the time we arrived home from the store there was no question in my mind that I would be anything other than a musician: I know it’s somewhat unusual to know what you intend to do at such a young age, but I was very lucky. Of course I didn’t have a clear idea of how that might play out: at the time I thought I would be a rock-star guitar-god in the mold of Jimmy Page.

And I worked pretty hard at that - I both studied and taught guitar all through high school, and then did a college degree in jazz guitar, but I ended up switching majors because the fraternal competitiveness of the whole jazz milieu turned me off for a time. During the late 80s and early 90s I was in a rather successful rock and pop band in Detroit; a lot of people who were part of our scene at the time have gone on to become some of the biggest names in music in the world. By the time the band broke up I’d already switched my focus to composition, because my 21-year-old brain – if I’m being honest - wanted more control over collaborations. Working in a band is not for the faint of heart.

I graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit and almost immediately got a job as assistant manager of a classical-only record store (for any readers who remember what those are). This was during the early 90s when the CD was relatively new: everyone was replacing their collections in every genre, so business was booming. I became a sales rep in 1993, and I’ve been in the business ever since. From there I worked for the Allegro Corporation (a US distributor), then landed in New York to manage classical and jazz for BMG/RCA Victor Group, then spent nineteen years working for Naxos Music Group/Naxos of America before moving to PENTATONE three years ago.

Am I correct in thinking that Sapiens is your first major work for solo piano?

It’s certainly the most substantial in terms of length. I’ve written a lot of shorter piano pieces over the years, and in 2012 I released an album on Delos called Cursive which includes a lot of them – the title-work is pretty meaty, but it’s only around ten minutes long. Sapiens is over fifty minutes, so it was a much bigger, broader and far more ambitious undertaking. 

The genesis of the piece was a little unorthodox for me, both in terms of the time I spent on it and the inspiration behind it. I picked up Yuval Noah Harari’s book of the same name in 2017, and I was so blown away that I had to read the first page four or five times because there’s so much to reflect on. 2017 was a year of great change here in the US, and here was a book that allowed for me to recognise and discern the differences between geological time, human time and the single lifespan that – as far as I know – each of us possesses. 

Harari's subtitle ‘A Brief History of Humankind’ is of course a rather bold statement, but essentially it’s an exploration of why the human race has survived and thrived whereas most other species have not and how and why our particular brains developed to such a degree. I knew after reading the book that a piece of music of some kind was warranted. I initially wondered if it might be an orchestral piece, but I eventually thought ‘Let me see what I can do with an instrument which I have right here…and which I find very intimidating’ (I’m not a great pianist). I reached out to Harari’s team Sapienship - the group behind promoting education of children and adults throughout the world on the history of our species - and they kindly gave me permission to proceed with the project.

Sapiens begins at the piano: the very first thing the pianist is asked to do is to put the pedals down and almost crawl into the instrument and is asked to utter a single breath; the music that follows fairly grows out of that primordial ooze. That particular section is called ‘Pre-History’, which is kind of an oxymoronic term but it just stuck with me. 

The first two sections took shape almost before I knew it, then a few personal things happened which took precedence over everything; as the pandemic bore down on New York and the world I set aside nearly everything for quite some time and only returned to the piece nine or ten months later. So most of the piece was written within the heart of the lockdown, when like nearly everyone else I was holed up at home wondering what was in store for us all… 

How much inspiration did you draw from other composers in the piece? (I thought I detected a nod to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at one point…!)

That sequence of thirteen repeated chords in 'Jericho' is indeed a respectful homage to The Rite of Spring. Much of my work involves quotations and textures that are inspired by other music - I’ve quoted everyone from Shostakovich to David Bowie in previous pieces, but there’s relatively little of that in Sapiens. 

The Creation story has inspired so many composers over the centuries. Certainly moments like the sunrise in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé and Revueltas’s Sensemaya were there in the back of my mind as I was writing, but I don’t think I necessarily incorporated any of that – I wanted to write something original and unique, and it would end up being incredibly virtuosic too. 'Confirmation Bias' and 'Commonwealth' were the last two movements that I composed; they really just flowed like nothing before and I wrote them in less than a week. 'Fertile Crescent' took me four or more months.

When did the piece receive its premiere, and how did you find the right person for the job?

When I finished the piece at the end of 2020 we were still a long way from being able to come together in communal spaces here in New York, so I had no idea how or when I might be able to arrange a live premiere. I had three different pianists on three different continents who all wanted to be the first to perform it, but even organising a trio of performances on Zoom required more energy than anyone had available at that point…

Then at the end of that year I heard from my friend Xiayin Wang, who commissioned a couple of my earlier piano pieces and teaches at the Mannes School of Music here in New York. She asked if I’d like to meet one of her students who was preparing to give his DMA recital and was a big fan of my work, introduced to my piano music by the brilliant teacher Pavlina Dokovska…casually mentioning that he’d already performed individual movements of Sapiens in public settings in New York.

And that’s how I met Vladimir Rumyantsev. He’s not a name that’s super well-known yet because this is really his recording debut, but he performs a lot – he’s currently on tour with the Twyla Tharp Dance Company as their pianist, and he’s played Rhapsody in Blue and a couple of the Rachmaninoff concertos in New York. He is a name you will hear much more of. He has performed Beethoven’s monumental Diabelli Variations some forty times in the past two months as part of the tour.

After several sections were premiered, Vladimir gave the premiere of the complete work in New York in February 2024, just a week before we went down to the Sono Luminus Studios in Virginia to record the whole thing. I’ve rarely encountered anyone who’s so cool and calm in the studio, and we finished half a day early because he literally never makes mistakes – it’s really just a choice between the takes. He has a formidable technique and memory, but more important to me is that he took this piece to his heart so quickly. He really is a tremendous talent, and I think we’ll be hearing his name a lot more in the coming years… 

'The piece begins not on the piano, but at the piano, with a single human breath, as I imagine the first music to have been, somewhere near the dawn of our species. If it is, like most, intended to die off one day, I imagine the very last music to sound more or less the same.'

From the program notes to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Sean Hickey