ursula oppens
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The relationship between contemporary music and the audience might lead us to the subject of popular music.

I don't really know popular music very well. I kind of like it when I can hear, especially in the context of electronic music, that some very inventive stuff has made its way into popular music. Then there's an area, which I haven't followed much, of experimental rock that is interesting. Popular music is not interesting to me when it gets commercialized and smoothed out, just as you can do with classical music by selling a record of tranquility, or “The Greatest Melodies.” I just don't think this is good for music when this happens in any of its areas.

On the other hand, I've been playing some Schubert recently, and I think that with Schubert, almost more than with any of the German classical composers, you hear how full it is of the folk music of this time in Germany and Austria… Actually, I think that in today's period we probably aren't as good as integrating as composers were in the past; I think it's done with more difficulty. When it's done self-consciously, sometimes it doesn't work. But even Elliott Carter says he was very influenced by jazz, and you can hear it. But it's a very well-integrated influence; it's not on the surface.  

You're going to begin teaching at a university shortly, for the first time. Have you taught at a conservatory before?

I taught a little bit; maybe the most interesting was teaching for one month at the B.U. Institute at Tanglewood, where I had some really wonderful piano students for a month, and some not-so-good ones… But the main thing [at the upcoming teaching period at Northwestern University] is that I'm not going to be specifically assigned to teach piano; I'll be free to do various different kinds of things, and that is very, very exciting to me, because I would like to coach chamber music, among other things; it's going to be an experiment. One thing I hope to do next spring is a course that involves having musicians do one piece by a composer who can meet with the class. The classroom would have the sense of a laboratory, trying to find out what you can get from the score, and what the composer means, when you can really involve the composer. I hope there will be a lot of student composers involved. It's a much more interesting question for a performer to make a piece of music happen in real time, in real sound, when you don't have the aural model, when you just have to make it happen from what you see on the page. This is something I'm very excited about doing, and we'll see whether it works.  

Is there a good and a bad side to the academy?  

The good thing is that there really are skills you have to learn, and there's practice you have to do; there's no way of getting good at anything without a fairly disciplined and rigorous approach to it, where you work pretty hard at things that aren't much fun. This isn't true only in music; it's true of every discipline and every form of music: Indian masters, jazz musicians, African drummers. In this large sense, I think the academy is necessary—or an academy, whether an apprenticeship or enrollment in a university. I really do believe that you have to work very, very hard in a traditional way in order to learn how to break the tradition in an interesting way. You have to become a master of the form, whatever form you're studying.

I think that academies are torn by the fact that you can't teach everything if you're going to teach something well. That fact, however, doesn't mean that the academy is limited to teaching “the European tradition.” But for me, it would more interesting to take one other tradition and teach it in depth, rather than providing a very general overview of everything. Different universities could specialize in different areas. People who are against this broadening of curriculum say any broadening will be superficial, and that's of course nonsense. But then one must divide the disciplines between various schools.  

I read that you studied English and economics in college.  

My parents were musicians, and I had nonstop music growing up. So I studied English literature. I had the ability, before going to college, to read a book one day and to forget its title, author, and contents the next. It was really terrible, and I'm not sure I improved much in college. In that sense, the studies I did in economics at least stuck with me a little longer. I do think the ability to read and write are absolutely basic. At the same time, I do regret not having studied counterpoint enough, not being expert in keyboard harmony or transposition, and perhaps that's why I'm so much in favor of the academy in some sense; I think that the more skills you have, the freer you are.