Jared Miller | Composer

The music community is a small one - even internationally. So small in fact that when I was talking with Sara Davis (the previous interview to this one!) she had mentioned a wonderful composer and former student of hers that I absolutely NEEDED to talk to. It so happened that Jared was not only someone I should talk to, but was recently hired in the same university faculty in which I teach. A small world indeed. Jared and I had a lovely chat and am as excited as always for you all to read the wonderful things he says about music, queerness, creation, and drawing in queer influences to classical music.

{Jacob} - I know you were born in L.A., and then went to Julliard, but I am also curious about your Canadian connection because you seem to have worked a lot in Canada. How did that all come about?  

{Jared} – Well, I was born in L.A., but when I was, I think one and a half or two, my parents, who are Canadian, moved to Vancouver. My dad got a job in Vancouver, or rather Burnaby – so we moved there. I spent almost until age 22 in the Greater Vancouver area. After high school, I went to UBC and studied composition with Steve Chatman and Dorothy Chang and piano with Corey Hamm and Sara Buechner.   

{Jacob} - Ah, okay. Coincidentally someone else who has been interviewed here.   

{Jared} – Yeah! Then in my fourth year at UBC, I applied to several different grad schools. I got into Julliard, and they gave me some decent scholarship money, which was very fortunate because they weren't cheap. So, I moved to New York. I'm lucky to be a dual citizen because I don't have to deal with the challenge of getting a student visa, and, if I want to stay in the states, I have a green card. And so over my master's and doctorate, I was able to build my life here in New York over those seven years that I was at Julliard. During that time, actually – I was in my second year of my doctorate, I think it was 2014 - I just threw in an application to be the composer in residence for the Victoria Symphony, just thinking, why not. What could happen? Maybe I'll get an interview if I'm lucky. It turned out I did get an interview, and then much to my surprise and delight, I got the job just as I was finishing up my doctoral coursework. The final three years of my doctorate, I was commuting back and forth between Victoria and New York. I was finishing my DMA in New York and working on my dissertation and writing a bunch of music. So, I guess you could say I had the opportunity to build my career in both places in various ways, both Canada and the U.S., even though I've been living in the States since 2010. But I go back to Canada a lot, and when I was working in Victoria, a lot of other Canadian groups asked me to write for them. I got to work with all of these incredible Canadian ensembles while at the same time, had a foot in the States. I got to work with some really fantastic ensembles and performers from America and really, around the world. So yeah, I guess that hopefully explains my connection to Canada.   

{Jacob} – It does. You are very lucky indeed to be a dual citizen. It takes a lot of stress and hassle out of it all.   

{Jared} - I'm very much a Canadian though. But, I guess very much a New Yorker at this point too because I've been here for so long.   

{Jacob} - When you were at UBC, talk to me about studying with Sara because she – to my brief understanding is that she's a very intense, methodical, passionate player. How did that vibe with you as a pianist?  

{Jared} - I mean, Sara opened up my mind creatively so much. Here’s what Sara does in a lesson - She'll redistribute the hands in a piano piece so that the writing is more pianistic on the fly. In the moment. She would take a piece by Rachmaninoff even or Liszt, or just one of these piano composers who is an incredible piano composer, and she would show me ways that you can redistribute the notes in the hands to make it easier to play. It taught me how to write for the piano in a really effective way. It made me understand the mechanics of writing for the piano. So, I used to write a lot of piano music because of that. I would just learn so much from hearing her play in lessons as to how you could interpret something and how you could understand certain musical gestures and things like that. And then also, she exposed me to a lot of different repertoire that I wasn't really familiar with before. She was a really phenomenal artist to be around during those formative years at UBC. Even though piano wasn't my major, I was still taking piano lessons very seriously. She was absolutely an incredible mentor for me in that capacity, you know, pianistically, but also artistically. And she was also a great friend to me. She was kind of a mother to me, a second mother. I have an awesome mother as well, but –   

{Jacob} - Piano mother.  

{Jared} - She does act like my mother sometimes. She’s an amazing person and has been so supportive of me over the years. She commissioned a solo piano piece of mine when I was an undergrad that she performed a bunch of different places between 2010 to 2012. And then she asked me to write her a piano concerto. I didn't really think she was being serious, but just right then and there, over coffee – wrote me a check deposit for the concerto.   

{Jacob} - Wow.  

{Jared} - We eventually got funds from the Canada Council to work on it a few years ago, and it was premiered by the Winnipeg Symphony at the beginning of last year, which you know, was kind of a dream come true in a lot of ways to be able to write her a piece. That was pretty fantastic.   

{Jacob} – Yeah, I bet it was.  

{Jared} - I had a lot of really incredible mentors at UBC though. Dorothy Chang, and Steve Chatman for that matter, were both amazing, amazing composition teachers that I got to work with. Steve Chatman basically taught me everything I know about how to write for orchestra. You know, the fundamentals that he taught me were so strong and I'm very grateful to him for his generosity as a teacher for that reason. Dorothy Chang taught me how to listen to and appreciate music that I didn't initially like, which has proven to be a very powerful skill in my profession. She really opened up my mind too, creatively. So my years at UBC were really just formative and important.   

{Jacob} - That's good. I think its probably a 50/50 split if people's undergrad was phenomenal or terrible. I don't think there's a whole lot of in between. You either had a UBC experience or you had a shit experience and then everything you learned was after your undergrad. So that's great that your undergrad was so useful!  

{Jared} - Yeah. I learned so much from my undergrad. I learned a ton during my master's. During my doctorate, I studied with John Corigliano for two years, the two years of course work, and I learned so much from studying with him and just understanding how he thinks about music. I don't know, doing the doctoral coursework and the dissertation were a whole other beast. But, you know, everybody's dissertation is, to some extent, a challenge. So that's what that was for me, especially working full time as a composer, which is an incredible, incredible opportunity.   

{Jacob} - Yeah, that pulls you and your brain in multiple places. Not to mention a nightmare for scheduling and trying to allot times to different projects.  

{Jared} - Trying to be in multiple places at the same time is hard, but I'm not complaining about that. These days, especially, I would give anything to be able to fly back and forth between the West Coast and East Coast regularly.   

{Jacob} - I always ask in these interviews how closely you identify with being a Queer+ artist in your writing. And the answer I get is always a bit like talking about an undergrad experience. 50/50. People either strongly identify with it, or don't identify at all. Where do you fall on that spectrum?  

{Jared} - That's a good question. I am an artist who is queer, who is gay. I would be remiss if I said my life experience didn't inform my creativity. So, I mean, like, for instance – I would say I'm sort of on the cusp of gay men who know what it's like to be in a world where the only place where you have acceptance is in a gay bar or in a gay club. You know, guys a little bit younger than me, who literally, let's say, grew up with apps, or grew up with the Trevor Project, or grew up with all of these resources, who don't necessarily hold the role of a gay bar in such high esteem in their life because they've been able to form communities outside of that. Whereas, during some of my formative years, it really was the only place to go to be openly gay, and really sort of the place where me and a lot of other people find and accept themselves as being gay. So, if I think about that, I’ve been so influenced by the music that I hear in gay bars. Also weirdly that connects to my creativity as a composer - particularly with how I approach orchestration and things like that and so to that extent, I think my music is queer. But on the other hand, that's simply because that's a facet of my own experience and I'm saying it's queer because I am queer, and I happened to hear it in a gay bar or a queer space. If a heterosexual person, a straight person, was to write the same music and heard it on the radio, and just wrote it because they liked the sounds and didn't necessarily have such a personal connection to it, would it still be queer? I don't know. I think that's for other people to decide. But that's not what I always write about or that's not what always inspires my work either. I'm inspired by nostalgia a lot of the times or by world events or social issues in certain contexts. So, I would say it's definitely a facet of my creative being but it's not the only facet. Does that answer make sense to you?  

{Jacob} - It totally does – what year were you born? How old are you?  

{Jared} - I'm 32, so I was born in 1988.  

{Jacob} - Okay, so we're the exact same age. So I'm also an '88. My partner is five years younger, so he was born in '93, and we always talk about those crucial five years. How it is that difference between gay bar and not gay bar. And it's so true, that five years that is so crucial.  

{Jared} - When I was 17, I started to go out to gay bars in Vancouver. There was the Odyssey and the Dufferin, both of which didn't ID. And there were back door entrances that you could go, they wouldn't ID you. I was extraordinarily lucky that the group of people I fell in with there happened to be relatively decent people. They didn’t force me to take drugs or drink heavily, and they educated me on the importance of safe sex practices and things like that, which weren't taught in school at the time.   

{Jacob} – No they were most certainly not.  

{Jared} - I was extremely lucky. Whereas, not necessarily everyone was, in terms of who they might have gotten to know in that context. Or maybe they were lucky for different reasons, I don't know. But you talk to someone five years younger than you, and they don't necessarily get it. Or they say "Oh, you're sort of around the same age, how could you possibly have ever faced any discrimination in your life? I've never faced discrimination." So it's an interesting thing. I think the Trevor Project was founded in 2007 maybe?  

{Jacob} - That sounds about right, yeah.   

{Jared} – Because, on one hand, we're Millennials, people say, "Millennials, blah, blah, blah, being gay isn't a thing, or whatever, anymore," but they don't quite understand the baggage that comes with the pre-Grindr, pre-Trevor Project life, so to speak.  

{Jacob} - Baggage is a good word. I grew up in a small town. Small-town Nova Scotia. And my partner grew up in Montreal, and so he was a downtown Montrealer, five years younger. So being gay was never a thing for him.   

{Jared} - Right.   

{Jacob} - And I always tell him, we had a gay/straight alliance, we had a GSA, but it was three people, and they would announce the room that we were going to meet in the night before, like on a piece of paper, and you would clandestinely go meet other gay people in a room at about 7 a.m. before you would go to class. That's the experience, that's that five years difference in a small town. Which now, I go back, and they have pride flags up in my old high school, and it's wild to me.  

{Jared} - Yeah. We didn't have a GSA at my high school when I was going there. Apparently, they had one at other high schools in Burnaby, but my school, nobody came out. Burnaby is right next to Vancouver. It's not a small town somewhere. But it had a very small-town mentality at the time.  

{Jacob} - I can see that.  

{Jared} - That’s so interesting that you're with a guy five years younger than you.   

{Jacob} - Yeah, we have this conversation all the time. The difference that five years makes is astounding sometimes. So the music that was ingrained in your head as a young, gay man, from bars, and that you bring into your playing, how does that translate to orchestra world for you?  

{Jared} - Well, I mean I happened to, let's say, ‘come of age’ in a time when electronic dance music had a huge influence on popular music. You think about people like Katy Perry and Lady Gaga and all of those performers. But even at the end of the '90s, groups like Ace of Base, and, Robyn.  

{Jacob} - Robyn. Yes, of course!  

{Jared} - I love that music, and I love the sort of cheesy electronic effects that are produced in that music. So, in some of my pieces, I try to recreate and re-imagine those sorts of effects through orchestration. I have a couple pieces on YouTube that might be worth checking out – One is called Luster, which was commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. It pays homage to the fact that electronic dance music, techno, was invented in Detroit. It’s a throwback to some of those reverb effects and multi-layering effects that you would hear in electronic dance music. And then I have another piece, Surge and Swell, which it does a similar sort of thing, which was commissioned by the Victoria Symphony. It was part of my residency there. During that time, I wrote a dissertation on Alfred Schnittke's poly-stylistic music - pretty heavy postmodernist slants. I was seriously analyzing that for a year while writing all these other pieces. After I finished that, I needed just a little bit of a refresher. That’s where all these pieces came from.  

After that time, when I was just writing, I wasn't doing a whole lot of academic work at the time, so I was going out more and just trying to enjoy life. I started to think, maybe I could play around with some of the effects I'm hearing in music at all these bars and clubs that I keep going to. And so then, I wrote Surge and Swell for the Victoria Symphony, which it's based on a simple repeated motif, but I'm playing around with the orchestration to make it kind of sound like different types of delay effects that you might hear in EDM. That’s one way in which I think it translates. I love to play around with colour, orchestral colour, in a way that's almost ...glossy.   

{Jacob} - That's a neat word to use.   

{Jared} – "Bejeweled"?  

{Jacob} - Bejeweled is good too. Your music is so colourful and vibrant, and so I like "glossy," and I like "bejeweled." Those are fun words. Whenever I'm talking to composers in this project or outside, I'm always really interested in personality and how that translates to your writing. I am – personality-wise, I am generally a fairly bubbly human - almost to a fault - and I almost universally program the most heavy, morose, dense, intense things. It's interesting to me that your music is very vibrant and bubbly and bejeweled and glossy. Does that feel authentic to you?  

{Jared} - Yeah, definitely. I mean, unless I'm coming across as this totally morose person who –   

{Jacob} - You're not. No, not at all!   

{Jared} - Good! I think it is indicative of my personality. But I’m also a very sentimental person too, in certain ways. And I think that comes across in some of my music. I'm very nostalgic. In some pieces, that comes across too. I don't know what you listened to.  

{Jacob} - I listened – what did I open? Let me see. I listened to Leviathan, Under Sea, Above Sky, but I did also listen to Luster this morning. What else did I listen to? Oh, I listened to Buzzer Beater.  

{Jared} - Oh, Buzzer Beater. That was a fun piece to write. I got a commission from the Toronto Symphony to write a two-minute-long piece to celebrate Canada's sesquicentennial. There's not much you can do with a two-minute piece, and so the only sort of practical thing to do was – I mean, not that I'm composing only in terms of practicality, but it is a consideration of where is this piece going to be played after the premier. I thought, well, a two-minute piece is perfect for a kids' concert, a youth concert. So yeah, Buzzer Beater's been played quite a bit in education concerts.  

{Jacob} - Oh, interesting.  

{Jared} - It's sort of an outlier, though, because I don't have a ton of pieces that are like Buzzer Beater. I guess it's kind of a bubbly, sparkly piece. Leviathan and Under Sea, Above Sky, they're both very atmospheric pieces, and I'm very interested in colour and creating an atmosphere, especially in orchestra work. There are a couple of pieces that are more nostalgic. One is called Palimpsest, which is inspired by the experience of helping my parents move homes. It's me finding all of these musical scores that I once had has a kid that have sort of disintegrated over time, and recapturing how scores looked on paper, but also kind of reflecting nostalgically on my parents getting older and moving places. I use a lot of quotation in that piece. I use quotations from Beethoven's VII and IX Symphonies and Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto. Another piece of mine that uses musical quotation is my piano concerto Shattered Night. This piece was written to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht. I'm Jewish as well, and a lot of my family died in the Holocaust, as with many Eastern European Jews. So, it's a topic of great importance to me. Important that it gets remembered and that people don't forget about it. So, in writing this piece, I used Shema Yisrael, which is sort of the centerpiece of Jewish prayer services, that's sung at every synagogue in the world. And used that as a quotation to sort of write this nocturne inspired by Kristallnacht. It is also written with a similar language as my piece Palimpsest.  

{Jared} - I'm writing some chamber music right now. I'm working on a string quartet for the Echea Quartet, who are based in London commissioned by Müzewest Concerts and the SOCAN Foundation. So, I'm working on that. I was supposed to have a piece played by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Under Sea, Above Sky last summer, and that's been postponed to this summer. I just received confirmation that it's moving forward, so I'm really excited about that. I wrote a piece for this group called the Sonora Collective in New York, who plays chamber music in innovative spaces and everything. They're going to record it in an art gallery in a couple of weeks, and I'm very excited about that too.   

{Jacob} - Very cool.  

{Jared} - Things are starting to come back, which is promising. You know, for a while, for everyone, it was thinking – what if this is the end of my career that I've worked my whole life for? I'm so grateful that it's not the end. I'm going to be in an audience hearing my music at some point again, hearing other people's music live too, which is something I'm really excited about. I'm looking forward to things hopefully bouncing back and the world becoming more vibrant and artistic again.  

{Jacob} - I'm really clinging to the idea that it's going to be the roaring '20s again. I'm really jazzed on the idea that we're going to have this huge wealth of new music, and a whole new oeuvre coming out. I would just love that to happen. That would be great.  

{Jared} - That would be fun. I mean, I am looking forward to gay bars opening up fully again. I miss being able to just go to one and not have to book a table or do contact tracing. Or even to be able to go with a group of people. If you go by yourself, you have to sit at a table, you have to order food, you have to make such a commitment out of each one. I'm grateful for what we have right now, of course. I just want to have a little carefree-ness in how I go through life again. 

{Jacob} - It will open. We'll have all of our normal experiences back. We’ll have to find somewhere to go when you come up here. There are no gay bars in Halifax at the moment.  

{Jared} - Oh, zero?  

{Jacob} - Yeah, there were two, but they both closed at the start of the pandemic and are not coming back. They're done.  

{Jared} - No. That’s terrible. 

{Jacob} - Yeah, it really is.     

{Jared} - Oh, that's too bad. It's sort of interesting. I feel like a lot of gay bars here are being extra careful to be above bar with everything they do.   

{Jacob} - Well, that's interesting.  

{Jared} - Because like it or not, gay spaces still get unfairly targeted by the media, at least in America. I remember at the beginning of the pandemic – early March. I'd just gone to Florida, which was supposed to be a week-long visit to visit my aunts but ended up being a four-month-long visit. I remember watching the news around the Miami White Party, which is a gay party that had just happened. These morning shows were excoriating the White Party promoter and excoriating all the people who went. I found it ridiculous that they were doing that, but not doing that to straight clubs that were still open at the time on Miami Beach. Or Donald Trump's super spreader events. It's unfair, I think, to a lot of gay spaces as well, that they are targets for the media in this regard. I think part of it has to do with ingrained homophobia. Other things have to do with more specific instances of people associating LGBTQ spaces with the AIDS epidemic and gay bars not wanting to be associated with another epidemic or a pandemic. So, in a sense, I think straight bars are being much more lax about the rules here, but gay bars can't, which is sort of an unfair double standard. 

But I hope the community bounces back. I mean, I don't think it's necessarily given the attention historically that it deserves, just to have all these physical queer spaces. They’re important spaces. And it's something that, again, straight people just don't really have any idea of because they never need one. That being said, I don't think gay bars necessarily are a monolith, and they certainly don't serve everyone in the LGBTQ community by any means. Of course, historically, there's been oppression within the gay community.  

{Jacob} - Absolutely, but for the people they serve, it's a very vital thing, you know?  

{Jared} - So, here’s hoping they come back. Here’s hoping it all comes back.