Even for fans of serial music, the tightly constructed nature of pitches arranged without the safety net of functional harmony is hard to ascertain upon hearing. But for Robert Morris, the venerable professor of composition at the Eastman School of Music who retires at the end of the academic year after 44 years teaching at Eastman, aurally identifying all manors of note clusters is as easy as hearing a perfect cadence.
“It’s not so much a matter of the ear,” he says, “it’s a matter of the mind.”
A highly intellectual mind known for both his compositions and his contributions to music theoretical research, Morris’ music is featured on his final Faculty Artist Series Recital on Thursday, March 28 at 7:30 p.m. in Hatch Recital Hall. The concert is a joint retirement celebration with faculty composer Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, who also retires at the end of the academic year. To read more about Sanchez-Gutierrez, visit this link.
Additionally, Morris’ electronic works will be on display in a Portrait Concert with the Electroacoustic Music Studios @ Eastman (EMuSE) on Thursday, April 11 at 7:30 p.m. in Hatch Recital Hall.
Morris says that his time at Eastman has been especially meaningful. “In many ways, the school has enabled me to do my work. And there are many aspects to that.” Morris’ interests reach beyond just composition and music theory—he brings in areas from philosophical thought to mathematics and science into the realm of composition. In addition to teaching across the composition, musicology, and music theory departments at Eastman, he has published two books and numerous scholarly articles, has been the subject of others, and received several awards for his compositions.
“He is one of the great musical minds alive,” says faculty composer Sanchez-Gutierrez. “He is the kind of person who you just let speak because when he opens his mouth, great ideas come out of it. He is incredibly supportive of his students, and he has always been a great colleague.”
At Eastman, Morris has been able to pursue a full range of musical activities and he says he believes he would not have been able to do at other institutions.
He says he developed his keen ears for hearing configurations of sound from identifying Indian ragas, which has served as a source of inspiration since he was 14 years old. Upon hearing him improvise at the piano, his piano teacher’s wife, a dancer, loaned him a record of Indian music, which set off a lifelong interest in artists like Ravi Shankar. The interest maintained through his development and professional life, which led him in the late 1990s to pursue a semester-long fellowship on Buddhist thought with the University of Rochester’s religion and classics department while on faculty at Eastman. It’s the kind of deep dive into music and knowledge that Morris is known for.
In the concert hall, he’s best known for his serial compositions—those in which pitches are assigned numbers and subjected to many kinds of ordering and operations—as well as works inspired by his extensive knowledge of Indian music. His music is often complicated. He says that complicated music may be difficult for listeners, “but if they stick with it, they will get great pleasure out of it in the long run. And it’s true for classical music as much as it is in any other field.”
He thinks of his pieces like gardens: fixed places architected so that there are many possibilities for perusal and enjoyment. “That’s the way I think about composition,” he says. “A composition is something, a place, a kind of thing that’s open ended and the listener can use it in different ways. And then every listener will hear it a different way.”
The analogy with nature is not a one-off thought: Morris is preoccupied with nature as a composer, and even composed works specifically for the outdoors. The first such work of his was composed for OSSIA, Eastman’s student-run new music ensemble, which was premiered in Webster Park in 2001. The performers spread across different spaces and corners of the park, performing simultaneously, only to come together at the end, requiring listeners to make their own path through it. The works ask questions about composed sound verses the sounds of nature, and the role of composed music in a vastly different environment than the concert hall, among other philosophical questions about listening and composition.
The openness of thought also permeates his teaching. During one lesson when a student brought in an ingrown toenail as inspiration for a piece, Morris went along with it—until it was clear to the student that another direction might be best.
“What I have learned is that composition is very personal. And it happens in a lot of different ways for a lot of different reasons. You have to be open to that as a teacher.”
On the FAS concert, Morris will have works performed that showcase Morris’ differing interests. A pair of works Grave (Per se) and Giocoso (Per se) are written for a Pierrot ensemble (combination of flute, clarinet, piano, and string trio) and are puns on “grave” (solemn) and “giacoso” (cheerful). The other two works are for solo instrumentalists. Vif, a solo piano piece based on Indian ragas, opens the concert. And Knot Lilacs for solo saxophone is inspired by bebop and modern jazz.
The EMuSE concert on April 11 features two works that bookend Morris’ output with electronic music, both based in non-Western musics. The first is a work called Thunder of Spring Over Distant Mountains, which was created pre-Eastman when Morris became the director of Yale University’s electronic music studio in the 1970s. The second piece is his newest electronic work, Musics of the Sphere, which brings in about 150 different kinds of music from around the world and was commissioned to be performed in a spherical space with 78 different speakers. In Hatch, the work will use 14 speakers to approximate the spacial aspects of the work.
EMuSE director Mikel Kuehn ’93E (MA), ’95E (PhD), who is new to the composition faculty this year, was a student of Morris’, as was new composition faculty member Daniel Pesca ’05E, ’16E (DMA), who will perform Morris’ work Vif on the FAS concert. He calls them both “tremendous.”
“As I retire and see these two people at school,” he says, “it makes me happy that something from me is going to be here after I’m gone.”
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Faculty Artist Series: Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez & Robert Morris, composition
Thursday, March 28 at 7:30 p.m. | Kilbourn Hall