Last month I introduced a piece by local composer George Lam titled Suite for Cello and recently I had the wonderful opportunity to do a short interview with the composer to ask him some questions about his piece and how he writes music. Please check out the recording of Suite for Cello.
BB: Could you tell me a bit about your musical background?
GL: Sure. So, I was born in Hong Kong and then I moved to Boston Massachusetts when I was twelve and as with a lot of Hong Kong kids I played piano and then switched to violin and I went through the whole ABRSM stuff. When I went to middle school in Boston the school didn’t have an orchestra and I played violin, so I started playing in band and that's when I learned a lot more about all of the other instruments. I started becoming interested in being a music teacher and also being a composer. From there I started arranging music for bands which sort of morphed into my composing of music in general. Then I went to study at Boston University and just kept collecting the degrees!
BB: When you approach writing a new piece what do you do?
GL: I tend to write pieces specifically for the occasion, or for a specific player instead of writing things on spec. Maybe I just don’t have enough imagination to just write a symphony, I prefer to find something personal to relate to with the performer. And lately, my processes have been focused on something I call musical place making, where I am connecting a piece of music with the place where it will be performed. Often in a documentary fashion. For example, I would get to know the community of people who are living and working there and sometimes even talking with them and getting an oral history and then incorporating that into the piece so that when the audience hears the music in that particular setting there is some kind of deeper relationship between what they are hearing and the place.
The latest piece that does that is called Family Association. It's a GPS enabled app where the listener can walk around Manhattan's Chinatown and depending on their location they will either hear oral histories that I have collected or instrumental solos. There are five different instruments in the piece. The solos are based on the melodic contours of the speech similar to how the third movement in my Suite for Cello was composed.
BB: Speaking of your Suite for Cello, how did you come to write a piece based on Jewish beliefs and folklore?
GL: A classmate of mine at Boston University, Sarah Sitz, helped to found a new festival in St. Louis called the Gesher Music Festival. It’s a festival that connects Judaism, and the local Jewish community with music and I was asked to be the first composer in residence of the festival. I have always liked the idea of a cello suite, and was especially influenced by Bach and Britten, others as well. Of course I am not Jewish, and I thought this was a unique challenge and I wanted to create something that I could connect with personally. Through my research I was able to structure my piece around ideas of Judaism that I connected with.
BB: Can you tell me a bit about the inspiration for this piece?
GL: The first and last movements are related to night, and I really like the association of religious clocks, starting and ending with night. The middle two movements are more directly related to Judaism. The second movement relates a story between Elijiah and a rabbi, with a whole bunch of different characters, so I turned those characters into music. And the third movement revolves around the overtones of the shofar. For that premier it was something very special for the audience to connect to.
BB: Have you had other performances of the piece?
GL: No, however a few years after this premier, I was living in New York and I went to a choreographer/composer ‘speed dating’ event in Hong Kong where I met this one choreographer named Jeff Docimo. He thought my Suite for Cello fit a piece he had created for a solo dancer and ended up using the entire piece which can be seen here. It was really cool to see the piece completely recontextualized as dance music.
BB: How would you go about getting music students involved in composition?
GL: I think the best way to begin, is to start by writing music for friends and just use it as a way to experiment. I try to get them away from sitting in a room hunched over a computer in the beginning. I see a lot of students who come into BU(Hong Kong Baptist University, the place where George teaches) with compositions and they have no recordings. They are missing out on the most fun part, which is trying to get people to play together and put on a concert or something. My advice is to create opportunities for students as a reminder that music is more than exams.