ursula oppens
page two

Do you think your career would have been different had you concentrated on performing the standard classical piano repertoire?

I think that I would have been different. When I was in my early twenties, I think that because I had had such an intense musical environment growing up, I had to find some area of music that was completely my own, so to speak, that I hadn't been taught. It was necessary not so much in career terms, but just in terms of my own growing up as a musician, in order to discover something about myself.  

You've lived in New York your whole life. How do you feel about the contemporary music scene in New York?

Well there's a lot of it, and the main danger for someone of my age is that we can't keep up with our own contemporaries, what's interesting, of course, is listening to young people that one has never heard of before. So the “scene“ should always be changing. In the last ten years in New York, you know, the scene of the Knitting Factory sort of became the interesting scene… But the main thing is that a young composer looks for some place to present his or her own music, and whatever place allows a composer to do that is automatically interesting. The cutting edge of today will finally tend to present only the music of more established people, so in some sense one is always looking for a place that is wide open.  

Have you ever lived in Europe?  

I never have, although I've travelled a lot. I'm very English language-bound at the moment; I don't speak another language well, and I love to… talk. [Laughs.]  

Do you have the impression that contemporary music is very different in Europe?  

I think so. In Europe in general, I think of contemporary music as being better funded and better supported by the state; but that also means that there are fewer cracks through which people whom no one has heard of can enter, because it is more organized. The other thing that I've noticed, quite to my surprise, is that there is less integration of contemporary music into the subscription program. It's very often “This Week of New Music,“ or a special festival like Darmstadt; an audience who comes to hear a Beethoven symphony is never forced, in a way, to listen to something new, and in some senses American orchestras do more of that.  

Louis Andriessen thinks the attempt to force the twentieth-century repertoire into the American orchestral system is ridiculous: the audiences don't want to hear it, the musicians don't want to play it…

Oh, I don't think that's true. When I played Lutoslawski in Chicago, the orchestra seemed to be very much into it, sort of with a sense of, “Well, let's see what we're getting into”—as opposed to, “Oh, we're dying to play it!” But once they were involved, they enjoyed the experience and were pleasantly surprised, and I didn't find there to be a big reluctance. I think I disagree with Andriessen, and in that sense maybe I'm very committed to this American way of trying, again, to integrate the new and the old, just as we were speaking of stylistic plurality.

Well, it's a wonderful festival.