ursula oppens
in conversation with joshua cody

Ursula Oppens has won equal acclaim as an interpreter of the established repertoire and as a champion of contemporary music. Her performances are marked by a powerful grasp of the composer's musical intentions and an equally powerful command of the keyboard. Her commitment to contemporary repertoire has led Miss Oppens to premiere and commission many compositions. In 1971, she co-founded Speculum Musicae, an ensemble dedicated to bringing contemporary music to modern audiences. Miss Oppens has premiered works by Carla Bley, Anthony Braxton, Elliott Carter, Anthony Davis, John Harbison, Julius Hemphill, Bun Ching Lam, Tania Leon, Witold Lutoslawski, György Ligeti, Conlon Nancarrow, Tobias Picker, Frederick Rzewski, Alvin Singleton, Francis Thorne, Joan Tower, Lois V. Vierk, Christian Wolff, Amnon Wolman, and Charles Wuorinen.

Her discography reflects her dedication to music of differing styles and period, both classic and contemporary, and she has received two Grammy nominations for her releases, most recently for her Music and Arts recording of American Piano Music of Our Time, a two-CD set featuring John Adams' Phrygian Gates and Elliott Carter's Night Fantasies, as well as works by Julius Hemphill and Conlon Nancarrow. Additional recordings include Francis Thorne's Piano Concerto No. 3 on the New World Records label and an all-Beethoven disc of sonatas, including the great Hammerklavier. Other recordings can be heard on Angel, Arista, Bridge, Nonesuch, CBS Masterworks, CP2, CRI, Vanguard, and Watt Works.

Miss Oppens currently holds the position of the John Evans Distinguished Professor of Music at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Joshua Cody, director of the Ensemble Sospeso, spoke with her in New York in 1994.

I was wondering if you began performing contemporary music from the very beginning, as a student.

I should tell you a little bit about my background. Both of my parents are musicians, and my mother is a piano teacher. Even though she wasn't really my first piano teacher, she was very involved in guiding my piano studies. She was very committed to the European, and especially German, tradition of classical music, which means that I grew up with Bach and Haydn and Mozart and Schubert; but she had also studied with Anton Webern, so I played, for instance, the Berg Sonata around the age of seventeen. But it's hard, looking back, to be sure whether my background was completely traditionally classical or if it was quite unusual to have Bartók and Schoenberg there, not as composers I performed habitually (although of course I played the Bartók Microcosmos), but as composers I knew about, as I knew about Mozart and Beethoven.

So these were familiar composers to you.

Certainly insofar as names and existences are concerned. I can't say that I knew the music of Schoenberg as a child in any way, but I did know the name.

Would you say that's unusual for a student?

Maybe, yes.

One topic that we currently hear a lot about is the conflict between different aesthetic schools—minimalism, serialism, neoromanticism, et cetera. At a time when it's often professionally advantageous to take a certain side, you have recorded an incredibly wide range of works. Is style ever an issue for you?

I really think one can have wonderful and terrible pieces in all kinds of styles. Actually, I really like this period, where there are many different styles going on at once. I think it's a lot of fun. Sometimes, when I'm in my most optimistic frame of mind, I think that music, instead of being socially behind the rest of the world, might be socially a little bit ahead of it, in showing that one can be quite happy in a pluralistic society.

Do you feel closer to some schools more than others?

I don't have a terribly long attention span, so I sometimes prefer short, funny pieces to very long ones, which sometimes means that a certain kind of minimalism loses me. But then other kinds of minimalism, let's say someone like Louis Andriessen, really grab me, so it isn't so much the style that is the determining factor, but perhaps my kind of temperament.

Have you ever composed yourself?

I haven't, and I'm working on a Mozart concerto right now in which Mozart did write lots of cadenzas, and sometimes I think if he hadn't, I would be really obliged to try to write one…

Do you perform jazz?

No. I've done improvisation, but as far as jazz, I don't have a good sense of time. I also really haven't learned the chord changes, but more important, I think, is my problem with time. I don't have a good sense of that kind of time, the way a jazz musician can really keep the beat and be free around it. In classical music, one tends, if free, to change the beat.

Are you involved with electronics?

Not really, although a few weeks ago I did play in a piece by a composer named Richard Titelbaum, who is really a master of electronics, and I was playing piano and some synthesizer, and did actually enjoy the synthesizer a lot, but I didn't get so far as to program my own sounds, which is, I think, where it really gets interesting. But still I was very happy to work with non-pitched sounds.

You're celebrated for your Beethoven performances; I was wondering if there are some pre-1900 composers that attract you more than others. But perhaps we should first talk a bit about your philosophy on performing older works.

Well, they were all new when they were written: I think that's the basis of the “philosophy.” And many, many, many composers of the past were famous improvisors. It was actually quite recently that someone told me that with Chopin, in fact, a lot of the works that we think of as “composed” were really improvisations that were transcribed, sometimes even by his friends. Right now, there's this movement called “classic jazz,” at Lincoln Center among other places, which I feel is trying to do to jazz what was done to classical music: to take something that is of the present and try to fix it, place it in a box, contain it, as a thing of the past, with a fixed meaning, when this isn't really what it is.

Here we could touch upon the debate on period instruments. Sometimes it is good to work on period instruments; I think it's not required. But [if one performs older works on modern instruments,] then one must consider it an arrangement for a different instrument. And that's okay! To some extent, you should know what the original instruments could do and couldn't do; for instance, on an early keyboard instrument, the difference between the bass and the treble is greater than on the present one; or on an earlier keyboard instrument, playing many notes was the best way of playing louder, rather than [using the modern instrument's great dynamic sensitivity]. If you know things like that, you can apply those to your interpretations, your arrangements, of older music for the present. But the other thing is to remember the general sense of newness, of fantasy, because it was new music of the time.

So are there certain pre-1900 composers that are more appealing than others, keeping in mind these ideas?

No… I kind of like all the great ones.