Alex Temple | Composer

Alex is a composer and professor with whom I was also connected via Spektral Quartet. As I’m sure you’ll all read as you make your way through the interview, Alex’s work spans many genres and styles. There is a wonderful breadth of sources, references, and connections to be made when listening. That complexity of resource and reference is also so clearly a part of Alex as a human that it makes sense for it to translate to music as well. Please enjoy what we talked about and I hope those of you who are in Chicago for February 9th, 2020 are able to go see the show!

A sound can evoke a time, a place, a cultural moment, or a worldview.  As someone who loves both the Western classical tradition and the world of pop culture, Alex Temple (b. 1983) has always felt uncomfortable with stylistic hierarchies and the idea of a pure musical language.  She prefers to look for points of connection between things that aren’t supposed to belong together, distorting and combining iconic sounds to create new meanings — often in service of surreal, cryptic, or fantastical stories.  She’s particularly interested in reclaiming socially disapproved-of (“cheesy”) sounds, playing with the boundary between funny and frightening, and investigating lost memories and secret histories.

Alex’s work has been performed by a variety of soloists and ensembles, including Mellissa Hughes, Timothy Andres, Mark Dancigers, the American Composers Orchestra, the Chicago Composers Orchestra, Spektral Quartet, Fifth House Ensemble, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, and Ensemble de Sade.  She has also performed her own works for voice and electronics in venues such as Roulette, Exapno, the Tank, Monkeytown, Galapagos Art Space, Gallery Cabaret, and Constellation.  As the keyboardist for the chamber-rock group The Sissy-Eared Mollycoddles, she’s performed at the South by Southwest Festival and at Chicago’s Green Mill Cocktail Lounge;  and with a·pe·ri·od·ic, an ensemble dedicated to the performance of indeterminate music in the tradition of John Cage, she’s made sounds using her voice, synthesizers and various household objects.

Alex got her BA from Yale University in 2005, where she studied with Kathryn Alexander, John Halle and Matthew Suttor, and released two albums of electronic music on a microlabel that she ran out of her dorm room.  In 2007 she completed her MA at University of Michigan, where she studied with Erik Santos and visiting professors Michael Colgrass, Tania León and Betsy Jolas, as well as collaborating with a troupe of dancers and playing in an indie bossa-nova band.  After she left Ann Arbor, she spent two years in New York, working as the program manager for the New York Youth Symphony’s Making Score program for young composers.  She recently completed a DMA at Northwestern University, where she studied with Hans Thomalla and Jay Alan Yim, and taught aural skills, theory, composition for non-majors, and private composition lessons. As of this fall, she is an Assistant Professor of Composition at Arizona State University.

{Jacob} - So, this upcoming Spektral Quartet show on February 9th in Chicago, from what I’ve gathered, is wonderfully heavy on the queer representation on stage, and you’ve worked with them in the past, yes?

{Alex} - Yes, I wrote this piece for them and they performed it a number of times in 2015. 

{Jacob} - Oh, okay. 

{Alex} - Actually, the history goes back even further, because I originally wrote it as just a set of four songs that premiered in 2013, and then later I expanded it. In 2015 they played it in Chicago, New York, and Saint Paul. That was the first time we did it with Julia Holter.

{Jacob} - Cool, that’s fantastic. I am extremely jealous that I can’t actually be there to see this. As I’ve been talking to and prepping to chat with people, I’ve been thinking that it just sounds like a wonderful show that I’m sad I’m not in Chicago to be able to see it. 

{Alex} - Well, I’m sure it will be recorded, hopefully with video. 

{Jacob} - Well, that’s good to know. Given that there is such a severe under-representation of queer people on the concert stage, how do you feel about the support and enthusiasm of a group like Spektral? They clearly genuinely value the inclusion of othered voices in their work.

{Alex} - Oh, well it’s great, of course. I feel like I’ve been involved in a number of concerts that are somewhat, somehow queer themed or that involve a lot of other queer artists. So, that aspect of it isn’t novel to me, but it is wonderful of course. For instance, Miranda Hill, I don’t know if you’re familiar with her, she’s an Australian bassist, and she organizes or co-organizes, I’m not sure, concerts in Melbourne for the midsumma festival called Homophonic.

{Jacob} - Fantastic. 

{Alex} - They’re all queer composers. So, I’ve been involved in one of those, and I just recently wrote a piece for Spectrum Ensemble, which is a percussion duo of two queer members and a very sort-of queer themed ensemble, and the piece I wrote was called “Ah Yes, The Three Genders”, based on that meme. They premiered that at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in November. So, I do feel like there’s a lot of queer focused activity in my career. 

{Jacob} - That’s great. 

{Alex} - It is great!

{Jacob} – I talk with such a large swath of performers. People who have a lot of agency in what they perform and produce, and those that are part of an orchestra or larger group and have very little. I love that you have had such an emphasis on queer performance in your own work and you get to work with other queer musicians. It’s really fascinating to me to talk to people who have never thought of their identity, gender, or sexuality as anything that had anything to do with their music making, or life, or career. It’s wonderful and it’s fascinating for me to chat with those people but equally fun to talk with people who can name many queer facets of their work! One of the things that I have also started thinking about in my own life and career as an academic, is that changing the system from the inside is maybe a more seamless way to—rather than to integrate queer performance and queer bodies and art into the already traditional system—completely rework the system from the inside and de-colonize it, and really re-think how we include otherness in art in general in academic and performance settings. As someone who works in university and as someone who writes a lot for various institutions, how do you feel about that?

{Alex} - I think it’s useful to have a multi-pronged approach. I think it’s important to try to have people who are trying to change things from within the system, so to speak. I also think it’s important to have people creating alternative spaces, and I think it’s important to have people creating different kinds of alternative spaces. I think it’s important to have new music ensembles that are much more flexible in their programming than, say, an orchestra. Though, I am in Detroit right now because the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is doing a piece of mine this weekend, which is pretty fantastic too. And I’m going to guess that there hasn’t been a lot of music by trans composers in the DSO’s programming, so that’s great, but I also think there’s value in radical spaces, spaces that are predominantly queer and trans. Last summer I played an event sponsored by Bodymilk Tapes, which is a Chicago concert series/label that is queer focused and experimental, run by a trans woman, a friend of mine, and it was a mostly trans audience. It was me and two other trans performers, and it was great because it meant that… Well, for example, I performed a piece called Imogene, which I wrote in 2008-2009. Before I started, I talked about how I had retired the piece from my performances for years because it used a lower part of my voice that I wasn’t comfortable using anymore, but then I paused and said “I don’t care anymore”, and everybody cheered. This is the kind of thing that’s possible in a queer focused space, a queer centered space, that probably wouldn’t happen even at a Spektral concert, as wonderful of an organization as they are. So, yeah, I think there’s value in all of the above—in radical, intentionally queer spaces, as well as in queer focused events by sort of multipurpose new music ensembles, and in people working on the more sort of conservative institutions. 

I like having a variety of different kinds of musical experiences, more or less in conjunction with the institutions of power, because you know, the flip side is, I really like bringing my work to a DSO audience, who, many of whom, have probably never heard anything like that before. I mean, the piece that they’re playing is not specifically queer, although it is in a sense, specifically feminist, and actually afterwards, someone who talked to me after the concert last night, I noticed was wearing a shirt that said “Viva Las Feministas”. Like I said, I like a multi pronged approach. I was talking about different people doing different things, but I kind of like doing all the things, or trying to do all the things. 

{Jacob} - When I was on your website, looking at your works and having a listen, I was immediately struck by the imagery you attached to all of your titles, which I am just enthralled by. Also as I am wandering through your references and your connections… and please, by all means correct me if I am wrong, but there is a playfulness and a fun element to a lot of your work, while it also tackles such interesting conversations about trauma, health, the earth, and life… and like, specifically, I had a listen to Whitman Songs and Support Group. 

{Alex} - What was the second one?

{Jacob} - Support Group. 

{Alex} - Ah, yes. Old stuff. Support Group from the opera I never finished, oh well. 

{Jacob} - Do you write from those places specifically? As in, when you start writing, do you think of those references and feelings before, or do they happen organically? How does that evolve for you?

{Alex} - Well, it varies from piece to piece. Support Group, where did that come from? The thing with Support Group was that I stumbled into this community of people who were afraid of sound logos which is a real online community, although they don’t have real support groups in person. I stumbled into that by accident, I was just going on a YouTube nostalgia trip and I found people who were talking about how the WGBH 1978 logo scared them, and I was kind of fascinated by this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUWygGsyCyY). As I sort of poked through it, I saw how there was this whole culture and people gave them nicknames, and the S from hell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6j8EhsJrIA), that’s the famous one. V of Doom is the 1978 Viacom logo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10LDTLjEPDM), and so on. They give them names, they remix them. I almost think it’s like, logo fan fiction. I was fascinated by that and decided to write a piece about it, which again, it never got finished, though someday it may be, but Support Group was part of that project. So, in that case, I found a topic and then found something to write about it. All the text in that piece is actual YouTube comments by the way, I don’t know if you saw that. I had friends record it. 

With other pieces, it comes more from the instrumentation and thinking about what the instrumentation suggests. So, with Liebeslied, I was commissioned to write a piece for the American Composers Orchestra, and I was like, what am I going to with an orchestra, I don’t know. What if I had a vocalist? So, I proposed that to them and they said yes, and I thought “a voice and an orchestra, what does that make me think of?” and then I started thinking about Perry Como and Nat King Cole and that sort of thing… Jo Stafford, not sure if you’re familiar with her. So, yeah, it depends on the piece.

{Jacob} - I was also struck when I was reading through your titles… there’s a connection to so many different and varied things. What you say in your bio, that you like connecting things that don’t... how did you say it?

{Alex} - I think I said something like “things that don’t belong together”. 

{Jacob} - Yeah, things that normally don’t belong together. 

{Alex} - Something like that. There’s a quote by Ducasse (Comte de Lautréamont). It’s a quote that the Surrealists were really into, which is “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”. 

{Jacob} - I love that, that’s fabulous. 

{Alex} - Isn’t that great?

{Jacob} - That’s a guiding principle to your composition apparently, I guess?

{Alex} - Yeah, not for every piece but yeah. When I was in college, I wrote a lot of music that was very much intentionally smashing genres together in really contrasting ways, and I still do that sometimes. I have a piece called “The Man Who Hated Everything” which is a tribute to Frank Zappa, so that’s got a lot of genre jump-cuts in the way that Zappa liked to do in his early work. In a piece like “Behind the Wallpaper”, I wasn’t so much thinking about smashing genres together, mostly, as I was just thinking about what worked with the text. But there were moments. So, for example, in the song Jolene—the one from “Behind the Wallpaper”, not the one by Dolly Parton, although there is a secret connection between the two—there’s a passage that goes something like “she’s terrified, but you’ve never felt more at ease,” and I remember that it came to me and I thought “is this really going to work?” you know, this kind of cheesy melody? I also thought it would be a sort of fascinating contrast to the text, and you know, I love that combination of something friendly and something dark.

Anyway, so I did it, and I also was like “how do I make this work?”. You know, this melody sounds like something out of Xanadu or something, how am I going to make it work with a string quartet? So, I actually gave it this kind of Mozartian accompaniment, which makes it even more kind of like, denatured, and unsettling, or it takes the ground out from under you. So that was a place where I was very intentionally thinking about genre, in a things-that-don’t-belong-together kind of way. And there were other songs where I was thinking about genre not so much in those terms, but in terms of allusions and references that have something to do with the text. So, for example, the song “Unnatural” sounds French to me, kind of late 20th century kind of harmonic language, and that was because of the opening line “on Tuesday, you sat by the fountain,” which sounds like something from a French song from that period. I was particularly thinking about Fauré’s Claire de Lune, I think there’s something about fountains in there, I can’t remember exactly. So, there, it wasn’t that I was like, you know, “oh wouldn’t it be crazy to suddenly shift into an early 20th century song style?”. It was just what the text asked for, so I’m going to do it. So, yeah, the short version is… more and more as time goes on, shifting genres or styles just sort of is what I do, and doesn’t necessarily need to be emphasized. 

{Jacob} - Right. It just happens. 

{Alex} - Yeah. 

{Jacob} - So, how long have you been at Arizona State

{Alex} - Like, six months. 

{Jacob} - Wow, okay! I’m catching you fresh. 

{Alex} - Yeah, I just moved here in August, and prior to that I was in Chicago for ten years. 

{Jacob} - Oh wow, okay. So, what are you teaching at Arizona state? What’s your course load?

{Alex} - So, right now I’m teaching a seminar, a grad seminar called “Music by Transgender Artists”, and I’m also teaching orchestration, and then I’ve got some private composition students. 

{Jacob} - Fantastic. 

{Alex} - Yeah, and then last semester my seminar “Polystylism and Musical Meaning”, going back to all the things we talked about. I also taught a 20th/21st century theory class, and composition students. It’s great. 

{Jacob} - When you are teaching these classes when you’re at Arizona State, what’s the reception from your students, from your co-faculty, and from the system?

{Alex} - Oh, it’s very positive. The ASU music department is very interested in de-centering the Western canon and expanding the repertoire of music being discussed, which really follows in the goals of the university as a whole. The president Michael Crow talks a lot about this, he says he wants the university to be defined by who it includes, rather than who it excludes.

{Jacob} - Phenomenal. 

{Alex} - So, that’s generally been very positive. In the trans seminar in particular, some people are very familiar with the issues involved in the repertoire, and for others it’s completely new to them, so that’s always a bit of a challenge from a teaching perspective, but I think that everybody understands that it’s a mixed group of people and that’s just how things have to go. Even my theory class last semester had people from a wide variety of backgrounds in terms of their level of past theory education. So yeah, that’s a challenge, but it’s a fun challenge. 

{Jacob} - Yeah, a welcome one, I’m sure. 

{Alex} - Yeah. 

{Jacob} - Well, thank-you again for taking your Saturday morning to chat. It has been wonderful to talk and listen to your music. I will be on the look out for the recording from this weekend’s show!

{Alex} – Absolutely, and thanks!