Embracing America
by Ed Dorsch
Night after grueling night, Richard Danielpour went to sleep at 11:00 p.m., only to wake up at 2:00 a.m.
“I tried everything I could think of,” said the Grammy-winning composer. “My doctor prescribed sleeping pills. I tried melatonin, magnesium, this, that. Nothing would do it.”
It was March, and COVID-19 was grinding the world into a new normal. In the US, the turbulent politics of a divided nation were splintering into deep fractures of political and social unrest. Like many of us, Danielpour was anxious—and for good reason.
From these long, dark hours came the seeds of An American Mosaic, a series of short piano works commissioned by the Oregon Bach Festival. The 15 miniatures paint instrumental portraits of Americans who have suffered heroically from the virus.
Danielpour’s creative process—a virtual, transnational collaboration—and the upcoming debuts, one online and one in person, are also emblematic of a bewildering year.
In a matter of weeks, Americans figured out (with varying degrees of success) how to learn, teach, and collaborate over the Internet. Now that we’re constantly connected on Zoom, Skype, Teams, and Slack, we’re still isolated.
Can we create and share art using these tools? Can music heal and unite us across cyberspace? Absolutely, said Danielpour. In fact, coming together through music is more important than ever before.
Danielpour lives in Los Angeles and is collaborating with New York pianist Simone Dinnerstein to premiere An American Mosaic during a free live-streaming event in December. The Oregon Bach Festival organizers plans to present the in-person premiere at the 2021 festival in Eugene.
“I want, through Simone, to bring people together at a time when we are physically separated,” Danielpour said. “I want music to redefine the ability of what it means to recognize we are all members of the same family—and that family is the human race. What I’m trying to say in my writing is that we can somehow be joined in tones.”
It all started with Danielpour’s insomnia—and a collection of soporific harpsichord pieces written more than 250 years ago.
“This spring, I was reading the New York Times every day about all these heroic people—doctors, nurses, and even grocery store workers,” Danielpour said. “I thought my God if I could just hug every one of them. But I can’t. All I’ve got is my work. That’s all I have to pay tribute to these amazing people.”
But he wasn’t sure how.
Danielpour was putting the hours of sleepless isolation to good use, working on his latest opera libretto, The Grand Hotel Tartarus. But he couldn’t shake an aching need to respond somehow to the virus in the only way he knew how—through music.
“I believe this virus is a kind of physical manifestation of a spiritual illness that’s engulfed our country,” Danielpour said. “I feel it’s not unrelated on some level we don’t understand. Maybe a quantum physics expert could understand this. I just feel it.
Nationwide divisiveness—extreme, pervasive, rampant—coupled with the relentless tragedies and daily inconveniences of a global pandemic kept him awake through the early morning hours.
“I was worried about so much. But then I discovered the one thing that could get me back to sleep: a recording of the Goldberg Variations by Dinnerstein.”
There’s some debate among music historians about the genesis of Bach’s 1741 compositions, but many believe it was created for a Russian count who couldn’t sleep.
As the story goes, Bach wrote the piece for Count Keyserling, who had been sending his musician, Johann Goldberg, to Bach for lessons. Bach wrote the variations specifically to help him fall asleep. It worked (for Keyserling—Goldberg had to stay up and play the harpsichord).
“I wasn’t thinking about all that at the time,” Danielpour said. “I was just thinking ‘How the hell am I going to get to sleep?’ It was the only thing that worked.”
But it wasn’t just Bach’s composition. It was also Dinnerstein’s performance.
“She plays like a goddess,” Danielpour said. “She has some extraordinary energy passing through her. By the beginning of May, I was finally getting calmer and getting to sleep earlier. She was saving my life.”
Then it occurred to him that Dinnerstein had performed at the Oregon Bach Festival in 2018, the same year the festival commissioned Danielpour’s The Passion of Yeshua. So he called Michael Anderson, the festival’s director of artistic administration, and told him that he wanted to personally thank Dinnerstein.
Anderson said he’d ask first, but he was certain she’d be delighted to hear from him.
“I wrote her a fan letter,” Danielpour said. “I don’t think I’ve ever written anybody a letter like that. I told her that her Bach is in a class by itself. The only other person alive who plays Bach in as convincing a way as she does is my friend Yo-Yo Ma. There’s no one like her. There’s love in her sound.”
In addition to introducing him to Dinnerstein, Anderson opened the door for An American Mosaic.
“When you’re a composer,” said Danielpour, “the question everyone asks (if they haven’t spoken to you for awhile) is ‘So, what are you working on?’ Of course, that’s what Michael asked me.
“I told him I was finishing a libretto, but I wanted to write one giant embrace for all of America that would pay tribute to the heroes, as well as people who suffered and—in some cases—didn’t make it.”
But Danielpour had to find the right pianist. Anderson suggested Dinnerstein. Danielpour hadn’t even considered her, because she was so good she seemed out of reach.
“To me, she was this unapproachable Brooklyn virtuosa. But of course she’d be the one. It was right in front of my face the whole time.”
Danielpour asked. Dinnerstein wrote back the next day. They met on Facetime. Of course she would do it. She loved his ideas, and suggested the last movement should end in a four-voice chorale.
“That’s exactly what I had planned,” said Danielpour. “I told her ‘It’s a little weird Simone. But it’s like you’re in my head.’ It was really freaky. ”
Danielpour is of Persian Jewish descent and grew up in New York City and West Palm Beach, Florida. He studied at Oberlin College, the New England Conservatory of Music, and the Juilliard School of Music.
One of the most recorded composers of his generation, he also works on behalf of the next generation as a mentor and educator. He’s a professor of music at the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA and a member of the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he’s taught since 1997.
Danielpour’s commissions include Yo-Yo Ma, Jessye Norman, and Dawn Upshaw; the Guarneri and Emerson String Quartets; and the New York City, Pacific Northwest, and Nashville Ballets. He’s worked with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Maryinsky and Vienna Chamber Orchestras.
With Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, he created his first opera, Margaret Garner He’s received two awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Award, the Bearns Prize from Columbia University, two Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin.
But he’s never worked with Simone Dinnerstein until now.
“I’ve collaborated with a lot of wonderful musicians, and It’s always give and take,” Danielpour said.
“Sometimes they come up with solutions to problems that improve the work. It’s a constantly evolving process. Simone told me a lot of composers can’t write for the piano. But she said she’d heard my stuff and she wasn’t worried. I told her If I can’t write for piano by now, then I should be selling insurance.
“We talked about how she had just finished recording the last Schubert sonata, and we discussed at length one particular trill that was somewhat of a mystery, how things are often best left unsaid, much like the Jewish tradition of not uttering the name of God. I knew right then—this was the right woman to be playing my work.”
One of the most important skills a budding composer can develop, said Danielpour, is the ability to create “music that sticks to the roof of the brain.”
“The biggest problem with living composers today is that they don’t place enough of a premium on music that is memorable—inevitable without being predictable. For me, the secret is harmony. My teacher Leonard Bernstein said to me ‘It’s very hard to write memorable music without being in possession of a personal harmonic language.’”
And, said Danielpour, you have to think about how the musician feels.
“I always say to composers who write for singers, you’d damn well better make them feel good. If you make them feel good, they’ll love you forever. They’ll never forget you. Music is physical and visceral by nature.
“It’s the same for any instrument. It’s not just how it’s organized or how it ends up sounding on piano. It’s also how it physically feels to play it. It’s not going to feel good 100 percent of the time, of course. But the secret is that the rest of it is comfortable most of time, so we’re willing to struggle with stuff that’s not comfortable.”
Danielpour doesn’t use a computer. He wrote An American Mosaic (like all his compositions) by hand. He plays everything he writes, then sends his music out for engraving.
“I use my ears, a piano, a pencil, and paper,” he said. “Everyone else uses technology. I’m hopelessly 20th century.”
An American Mosaic comprises 15 parts. Most of these piano miniatures honor specific groups—for example, caretakers and research physicians; parents and children; rabbis and ministers; and photographers and documentary filmmakers.
One miniature pays tribute to those who oppose tyranny and greed. One is for survivors of the virus, and another honors those who have perished from it. The miniatures also honor journalists, poets, and writers; teachers and students; and doctors and interns.
In what Danielpour calls “an elegy for our time,” the middle section is a tribute to those who have died from the virus. Four of the miniatures, which Danielpour refers to as “consolations,” weave together variations on a theme that create a piece within a piece. The prologue will be a single voice over a long pedal tone. The second consolation, one-third of the way through, is a two-part invention. Two-thirds of the way into the work, there is a three-voiced fugue. The epilogue is a chorale.
These four consolations, Danielpour said, will conjure images of angelic figures that come to comfort—even cry with—those who have suffered.
“Literally and spiritually, it’s a very sick world we’re dealing with. My hope is that this experience can be a catalyst for some kind of healing from the suffering. I’ve always believed music can be a catalyst for healing. I’ve seen it in my own life.”
At age 26, during a fellowship in Rome, Danielpour suffered a ruptured appendix. Every day in the hospital, he listened to (on his Walkman II) Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C major (the Jupiter Symphony), Mahler’s 9th Symphony, and Brahms’ B Flat Concerto—the cassette tapes that happened to be in his duffel bag.
“I was released on the twelfth day,” said Danielpour. “The doctor told me ‘This is impossible. You should not be leaving. But you’re healthy.’ I said the music helped me to heal faster. The doctor said ‘You know what? You might have a point.’”
“Music is music, whether it is live or shared through technology. I believe in the power of music to heal.”
Danielpour also recounted a live example of this healing force—a Leonard Bernstein performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony in Kiel Germany during the late 1980s, just over a year before Bernstein’s death.
“He asked the composers to sit in the first row, to give him energy,” said Danielpour. “He looked at us. I could hear him wheezing. His face was white, like a shirt. I thought he was going to die on stage.
“He started the second movement. It begins slowly, with a beautiful oboe. Then slowly reaches a gorgeous climax. He put his baton down, turned around, looked straight at me, took a huge, deep breath, and let it out.
“There was no wheezing. He had a big smile on his face, there was color in his cheeks, and he looked 25 years younger. He conducted the hell out of the next two movements. Then I saw something I had never seen before, and never since. The audience rushed the stage like a rock concert. We had to run. We were going to be trampled.”
The process of composing An American Mosaic hasn’t been as salubrious for Danielpour (at least not at first). He physically collapsed when he finished writing it, but has since recovered and believes it will, ultimately, serve as a healing experience for him and audiences alike.
“Normally, a work like this would take four months,” he said. “I did it in 62 days. I didn’t realize I was running on adrenaline. At the end of every night, I was dog tired. And yet music was pouring out of me. When the muse knocks on your door, you don’t tell her ‘Why don’t you come back later?’ You tell her to come on in. It was exhausting.”
Also, cathartic.
“Because there was so much sadness in me as I was writing this, it gave me a way to let it out. I want this to be a comfort to people when it is performed. The COVID-19 pandemic will eventually end. While it’s going on, we all need to be comforted. I’m using this work to embrace every person I can who has been heroic through this crisis and has prevailed.”