Steve Horowitz’s 25 year career integrates his experiences as a band leader, with his explorations as a multi faceted composer. Horowitz can be found working and touring with his group The Code Ensemble, a 14-piece electro-acoustic chamber ensemble, and has released 10 compact discs to date. 
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Related Podcast: The Lean Linkage between Composers, Architects, Statisticians
Transcription of Podcast
Joe: Lean is really a knowledge-creation type thing. It’s kind of plan, do, check, act–typical scientific problem-solving type method, which is very attuned to how you write music a little, probably. Very iterative.
Steve: I agree 100%. It’s iterative, and that’s the thing about composition and about music that people don’t get a lot is that it is about solving problems.
Joe: The lesson to be learned from it and especially when I talk about flow and talk about systems thinking, about how you look at the big picture, and then you write a single note.
Steve: Absolutely. No, it really is and, like I was telling you, my dad’s an architect and I remember when I was studying that at Cal Arts, and I was living with him on-and-off, we had a lot of great conversations about music and architecture and the crossover between them and the similarities and the dissimilarities, and those were always some of my favorite conversations I’ve had with him, actually.
Joe: It’s amazing with those similarities and what you can learn from them because it seems that music and math are kind of separated or completely at odds with each other even though they have the same roots, somewhat coming together but more from the music end; I would say, than probably the math people.
Steve: In general, I think math education is not heavily-centered on music and that if they thought about it a little more, it would help with the creative thinking of their students. A saxophone player who’s on that recording you were listening to, the New Monsters recording, Dan Plonsey, those are his compositions; he also teaches math at Berkeley High here in California. He’s able to really bridge that gap between math and music–he has the mathematician brain and then the super-creative composer side. I think that if they looked at it more that way, if the mathematics community took it as a way to inspire students, they would get a lot of positive results.
Joe: With me today is Steve Horowitz. Steve is the creator of odd but highly-accessible sounds and a diverse and prolific musician. Steve’s music integrates his experiences as a bass player and band leader with his explorations as a multifaceted composer. Steve has been honored with a Grammy, a Webby, and is in several books. Steve, I’d like to welcome you, and you’ve got to explain to me what’s meant by “odd but highly-accessible sounds.”
Steve: That was a quote from a writer named David Weiss, who actually was doing a story on me, and that, was his line and I think what he meant about “odd but highly-accessible” was I tend to do a lot of different things, and I tend to have my own moniker as a composer and as a creative musician. So whether I’m writing for games or films or writing for my own ensemble, I sort of have my own little odd take on things and people seem to enjoy it and it’s a little bit left-of-center or right-of-center–I don’t know which one–but it’s a little bit off the mainstream at times, but it still seems to work very well for a lot of different genres in a lot of different ways, so I think that’s what he was getting at.
Joe: Well, tell me, how did you ever get started in composing? How does a composer get started?
Steve: For me, it’s an easy question to answer because I was drawn to music from a very young age, and there was really nothing else I wanted to do. I started playing guitar–my sister had guitar lessons at the time; we lived in Florida–she took guitar lessons and I kid you not, at a place called the House of Music, which was run by The Bars. They were actually our neighbors in Florida. I thought that was a good one: you have a music store named; your name is The Bars, I thought that was pretty good.
Anyway, so I took guitar lessons there and I started and I stopped, I took group lessons, and I took private lessons and I really liked that. It was getting together with a friend of mine–Frankie Lowry, when I was about 10 or 11 years old—and we would get together, and we would learn the songs of the day.
So for my guitar lesson, I would learn to play songs by Blue Oyster Cult or The Beatles or whatever I was learning, and Frankie would learn his tunes and one day, I wrote a song which, if you listen to it now–I actually haven’t listened to it in many, many, many years–I actually used to have a cassette with it on there because we used to play our guitars into the stereo system, and we could record onto cassette tape. It was a pretty god-awful little piece that didn’t have any lyrics, and it was instrumental, which is getting back to your question about odd music, as well, because I don’t usually write songs–I mostly write instrumental music.
But I wrote this little piece, and it was really short. It was based on the blues and, like I said, it was pretty bad but Frankie stopped talking for me and then for like two weeks; we weren’t friends until he wrote a song, and then we were friends again. So, for me, that was really the beginning of being a composer, that I heard music, I was playing music, I loved music but I also had that extra feeling that I wanted to write my own music. I wanted to put those notes together and arrange them in ways that made sense to me.
Joe: So, at that age, you really could see the flow–for lack of a better word–the flow of notes on a sheet of paper.
Steve: Absolutely. You know, even though I wasn’t really technically reading music or reading from the barlines that we know of. I was using graph notation, what they call tablature for guitar, which is pictures, of “here’s where you put your hands.” I was learning basically rudimentary theory and, like any folk musician, sort of bringing my ear up to speed on tonality, Western tonality. As I developed as a musician, it really branched out from there.
In high school, I switched over to playing bass because I had moved to Berkeley and at Berkeley High they had an award-winning jazz program run by a fellow named Phil Hardyman. Phil gave me my first bass and showed me how to do walking bass lines. I had found my instrument then. Even though I still play guitar to this day, I am a bass player. So in high school, I switched to bass and then as you learn more, like you’re saying, about flow or the notes of harmony and as you start to put the picture together more formally, that’s where–for me; it was always following where my ear went the music that interested me, and I started to become–in high school, I was listening to a lot of Frank Zappa, who was a big influence on me and Zappa would talk about Edgar Varese and contemporary classical composers like Slonimsky, and I was drawn to find out about their music. Writing music on my own, I was mostly self-taught until I went to Cal Arts when I was 24 years old to study composition.
Joe: When you start developing music, do you have like a grand idea, a big idea of what you want or is it just a small section, a tune that you strummed out for 30, 40 seconds that you want to develop into something?
Steve: Yeah, that’s another interesting question. So when I used to write almost completely autonomically, which means that I would hear music in my head, and I would go to a piano and I would notate that music and then want either myself and my friends to play it or a group to play it–a chamber orchestra, whatever it was. When I went to study at CalArts, I went to study with a really brilliant fellow named Steven “Lucky” Moscoe, who is no longer with us. Lucky listened to my music very quickly, and he’s like, “Well, have you ever thought about not writing a piece from the beginning to the end but maybe starting at the end?” And that was revolutionary for me! I was like, “Wow; I never thought about that!”
I think that kind of gets to the point of the question that you’re asking, which is sometimes it’s a small idea that grows into a big idea. The opening for my first orchestra piece, I had the opening, the first minute and a half in my head for, like, six months before I finally notated it and then the rest of the piece followed from there. Sometimes a whole piece will drop out at once like a baby. And sometimes you have to fight with it a little bit, and so it’s really a combination of things for me, anyway, that can start with a small idea–with really just a germ of an idea, a few notes–or it can start with a bigger idea and flow from there.
Joe: We always talk about pull in the Lean world and is the music really kind of pulled out of you? I mean; you start with the end in mind or starting with a certain portion in mind and it’s developed from there.
Steve: The way I can understand it–when I got to CalArts and I studied with Lucky; he would talk about the morality of a piece of music. Now, being a young man at that time, I wasn’t big on morality. I didn’t quite understand what he meant but, over the years, I’ve come to understand that when a composer puts pen to paper or pencil to paper or enters notes into the computer or gets your keyboard out and writes it, we’re always trained to be egotistical about that–“I’m creating this wonderful thing”–when, in fact, if you step back and you listen to what the material that you’re developing is asking of you; it’s actually asking you something, as well.
It’s asking you to open your ear and to give the music what it wants, and that’s what I understand to be that sense of morality in music now, is that music wants something from you. There’s a reason that you’re composing, and it’s asking you to develop that and if you can open your ears up wide enough to hear it, then there’re a lot of wonderful payoffs.
Joe: From other discussions, I had a feeling that you improvise a lot or maybe all musicians do a little, but can you explain to me how a jam session flows, how the other musicians create music for you or how you follow them?
Steve: Sure, and that question is really tied to genre, right? Different musicians improvise in different ways so the way a rock musician is going to improvise may be very different from the way a jazz group gets together when they do improvisation because, in jazz, there are sometimes very set formulas, right? So you kind of put yourself in a box so you can expand beyond that box. So it’s a hard question to answer because improvisation in music has been around for a very, very, very long time.
I mean; you can go back to Bach–many of his of his pieces have no dynamic marking and many of them, there was an ancient form of writing called continual which just basically kind of gave the musician at the time a basic outline of where to go–almost sort of like chord notation now for jazz and rock–and then they would sort of fill in the gaps form there–you know, what octave they played in, that kind of thing.
So there’s always been improvisation and freedom in music, you know, and it’s different in classical music. Classical music, there’re a lot of graphic scores and open forum music starting with John Cage and Feldman and Earle Brown in the early 60s in New York City. There’s improvisation in pretty much every form of music. For me, anyway, the essence of improvisation is also the essence of a process, too, for helping you to define and to create what it is you want to create on your instrument or through your composition. I mean; a lot of people have referred to composition as “slowed-down improvisation.
Joe: You always think of that composer sitting there pounding on a piano, scribbling notes, writing a new note, pounding a little more, but does he get feedback? Is it an iterative process? Are you getting feedback? Like, does the music score go out as a prototype?
Steve: Absolutely. And in this day and age, I mean, people are very used to that iterative process because what they’re doing is they may be writing a little bit, but then they’re inputting it into a compute. Either through a notation program or through a sequencing program, you get instant feedback that way. In some instances that can be good and, in some, it can be bad.
When you’re writing by hand, you’re still getting feedback. I mean, if you have perfect pitch, you don’t even need a piano to do it. You can write notes, and you’ll hear it in your head. If you have very good relative pitch, you’re at a piano, and you’re able to hear that music and even if you’re just playing on a piano, you’re hearing it and your imagination takes it to that next level–“well, is this melody that I’m writing, is it for a piano? Maybe it should be–if it’s an orchestra piece, does this part go to the clarinet? Does it go to the woodwinds? Does it go to the strings?”
All of those decisions, all those problems that you have to solve in terms of what the material is asking you to do and then on the other side is this sense of when you’re putting it into a computer, it will play it back for you but what instruments are you playing it back with and how much of your imagination are you putting to it and how much are you just copying and pasting because that’s a new tool you have?
So there are more ways than ever now for composers to hear their work, to develop an iterative process, much easier than it was back in the day. A lot of times, composers are not necessarily great piano players. I’m not a piano player; I’m a bass player, right? I’m mostly string instruments–bass, guitar. There are a lot of different ways to write music and a lot of different ways to get that feedback, but the biggest feedback machine, of course, is your ear and your mind that’s putting those things together.
Joe: By the instruments that you play, does that dictate how you compose music or the type of composing you do?
Steve: For me, not. And for me it’s important to stay away from that because I don’t want my limitations as a player to dictate what I can write, right? I want my imagination to dictate what I can write.
Joe: You’re listening to that music as you’re writing it, and you’re switching instruments and hearing that sound.
Steve: Absolutely, absolutely.
Joe: Now, do you work side-by-side with another composer at times?
Steve: Sometimes, yes, but for the vast majority, I would say no. There’s a fair amount of improvisation that does happen when musicians get together, and there’s also free improvisation, as well, which I used to do a lot more back in the day, and I don’t do as much now but there’s a whole school of free improvisation where players just get together and play freely and really are composing together on-the-fly.
Joe: Now, I see a lot of composers jumping from different areas, whether it’s gaming, film, TV–that’s a pretty wide spectrum. How are you able to do that?
Steve: I think that starts with the age-old question–which I think your audience will understand–which is “Where’s the money?” Right? I mean; I want to get paid, and it also starts with that old business adage “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” right? So I talk to–one of the of the groups I’m involved with is the Manhattan Producers Alliance. I helped to start an organization on the East Coast, and now I’m the head of the West Coast chapter and constantly, music professionals; you’re in a very fluid, very liquid environment that’s changing constantly–the landscape of music and music business and how business is done and new digital forms–it’s changing all the time, so, really; you’re forced to evolve or die, in a lot of cases.
Musicians are all the time looking on the other side of the fence. I’ll talk to classical composers who are like “God; I’d love to get into film scoring; you know? This classical thing is driving me crazy.” I’ll talk to film composers who are like “God; I’d love to just write an orchestra piece and not have a director there bothering me.” Then I talk to people who are working on TV, and they want to get into games and there are people who build instruments who just want to get into doing for games or film or TV. It’s very much a business driven by “the grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence.
Joe: Well, you had mentioned that your father was an architect, and I had talked about statistical and quality with you. From your viewpoint, what is that relationship that math has with music or that architecture might even have with music?
Steve: Right. Yeah, and we were talking about this a little bit, too. There is a composer, Johannes Xanakis, who was both. He started out as an architect and also became a composer and quite a famous composer, and I think that there are a lot of parallels between music and architecture, especially if you talk about writing music for commercial purposes–whether it’s film or TV or games, any of those things–that there’s the old architectural adage that “form follows function” really does apply in those cases and what’s you’re really trying to do is you’re very much like an architect.
An architect goes to build a building, right? So they have to sit down and say, “Well; first of all, where’s its going to be? What’s the client looking for? They want this; I want that.” They have to balance their creative judgments based on many, many, many factors in terms of how they’re going to be able to build this building and then you get into the materials you’re going to use and how you’re going to put those together–very similar with composing. You have to think about, first, what the audience is, who it is if you’re working with a director, then they’re going to have, you know; that’s the equivalent of working with a client if you’re building and building, how are you going to juggle what their needs are, what they want and get them what they want and, at the same time, put together a building that will actually stand up.
Now, at the end of the day as an architect, when you’re done, you’ve built this giant building, and you get to stand in front of it or a house or whatever and you’re like “ah; I built that.” Now, as a composer, as a musician, at the end of the day, I’m not sure, we’ve been as functional to the general population at large with our creations, so if there’s one difference between architecture and music, I think that might be part of it — it’s very rare you’ll see a building built for building’s sake but, in music, you will many times hear music made for music’s sake and for the edification of the composer and not necessarily for an audience or a client.
Joe: Now, you do a lot of your work–we talk about the digital aspect of it. How much has that changed what you’re doing and the way you work?
Steve: I think it’s changed my workflow quite a bit. I used to only write–well, back in the day, we didn’t have computers when I started with music, so I’d only write with pencil and pen and paper. Now, I spend most of my time on the computer and even when I do have those rare and wonderful occasions where I’m writing with pencil and paper, I then input it into the computer, so I think technology has changed the compositional process for me quite a bit.
Joe: What are your thoughts about the math side? I mean, how does the math relate to the music?
Steve: Yeah and that also gets back to your point and the question about architecture, too. I think; you know; I’ve thought quite a bit about this because my son has a very mathematical brain. I never thought of myself as having a very mathematical brain, actually–I think it gets down to pattern recognition. Music–Western music, if we’re talking specifically, we’ll talk specifically about Western music now–you have 12 notes. There are 12 notes, right? And the permutations of those notes for, however, much music has been written over the last X hundred of years, that’s what you have.
With mathematics, too, there’s maybe an infinite amount of numbers, but you’re dealing with finite sets of numbers and there’s a school of music composition–I don’t know if you’re familiar with it–serial music? Arnold Schoenberg in the early part of the 1900s developed a new way of composing, which was completely based on serialization, mathematical formulas in music and some people like it; some people don’t. It can be controversial. It can sometimes not be as beautiful as listening to Mozart or Vaughan Williams or something like that.
I think that there’s a natural connection between music and math simply based on material, right? You’re dealing with note sets; you’re dealing with numbers, and you’re dealing with pattern recognition, especially–being able to see patterns and develop patterns, and I think that’s really, for me, what it boils down to. It’s that pattern recognition and that tie between music and mathematics.
Joe: It Is that the explanation what would call systems thinking when we’re looking at the whole entire system and then we break it down to individual components because we’re recognizing the patterns between the individual components and the overall system.
Steve: Yeah, absolutely. I mean; it’s very, very similar in terms of how to get these systems to work. How to solve the problems that you deal with and developing systems that do work. I think in a lot of ways you can really think about composition and music in that way because it brings its own set of challenges and problems that need to be solved for it to work.
Joe: Can you tell me a little about the Composers and Schools in Concert?
Steve: Sure. Composers and Schools in Concert is a wonderful organization; I’m on the board with those guys. They, specifically, their charter is to bring composers, specifically into the high schools to work with the students there. It’s really a wonderful program. I, for example, was brought into it. Lisa Oman, who runs the organization, got in touch with me, and I wound up writing a piece for 70 players at Berkeley High–Karen Wells, who’s the music director there. I wanted to go back to my old alma mater—and I wrote a piece for their orchestra along with some of the jazz musicians from the jazz program, as well. I brought in a very amazing guitar player, Fred Frith, who some of your audiences may know about. People can look up and know a little more about Fred’s music.
It was absolutely transformational experience to go into the school and be able to work creating music and writing music for high-school students and working with them, so Composers and Schools in Concert is really focused on how to bring music back into the school, bring composition into the schools–we all know the problems schools are having these days in terms of budget and money and keeping the arts alive and it’s a wonderful program for doing that.
Joe: What type of student becomes interested in composing?
Steve: Well, I mean, that’s the thing: you just never know, right? So when I was at Berkeley High and working there with students, there was a wonderful cello player who came up to me, and he was like, “I wonder if you could look at a piece I’ve been writing.” I said, “I would love to.” I had no idea he was also writing music; he was a great cello player. So, just like a basketball coach, right? I mean, when you’re a musician and you’re working with players, their talents will reveal themselves, and you’ll see what people are good at and you get to know their music a little bit and you get to know the person.
I’ve always found that once I get to know a composer, I really can’t separate their music from them, from their personality because it really is them. So you really tend to as you’re working and most of the time, they’ll find you if they’re really interested in it. And you can only hope that by working with kids, especially in high school, in exposing them to music they haven’t experienced before or exposing them to things they haven’t heard before help to spark their own musical creativity, and they’ll take it to explore their interests.
Joe: What are you working on right now?
Steve: I’m in the middle of mixing a live album. The group that you heard, The New Monsters, we were picked on NPR’s 10 Best of 2012, so things have been going very well with that group–that’s with a saxophone player named Dan Plonsey and Steve Adams, drummer John Hanes, and a pianist named Scoot Looney–and I’m in the middle of—we recorded a live album in a place called Studio 55 and I’m in the middle of mixing that.
I’m also in the middle of working on music for several different games for different companies–one is a game for Leapfrog; I’ve been working with them, as well as Nickelodeon and Nick Digital–and, at the same time, I’m also working on my third-string quartet. I also, like I said, I’m running the West Coast chapter of the Manhattan Producers Alliance and we’re a group of, the MPA is basically a networking organization, an incubator for individual composers, audio professionals, and music professionals. And, lastly, I have been doing a bit of teaching these days in developing curriculum in sound and music for games and interactive media.
Joe: How can someone contact you and what is your website?
Steve: They can just go to www.thecodeinternational.com. The Code International is my band and my ensemble, my group, so I have about 16 albums of original music out. They’re all just out there, and they can just go to the website, and there’s all of the information for that right there.
Joe: I would like to thank you very much, Steve. This podcast will be available on the Business 901 iTunes Store and also the Business 901 blog site, so thanks again.
Steve: Fantastic. Thank you, Joe. I really appreciated it and had a great time here. Just to talk about Xanakis alone, I mean; Xanakis would go in, and he would look at computer print-outs of gas bubbles exploding, right? He would take those and turn those into musical data or data so he could write his pieces. He was taking a lot of real-world stuff and modeling that, in the compositional realm, trading numbers for numbers and taking it really structurally as an architect.
There’s a lot of that kind of music work that’s been done over the years where people get their influences in a lot of different places and a lot of different ways and bring it in compositionally. There’s the whole that world, that line between the composer and the player, so when you start to get to Cage and Feldman and Earle Brown like we talked about–I mean, Earle Brown was influenced by Calder’s mobiles, right? And he went to the museum, and he’s like, “Well, if you can have a piece of sculpture that’s in the Museum of Modern Art that’s constantly moving and constantly changing, why can’t I write a piece of music that would be like that?” Then you get the music of Earle Brown, so there’re so many different cross-currents compositionally, musically, structurally, that are just fascinating, fascinating.
Joe: It just seems endless, and it seems that music goes across all borders, all languages, all different thoughts. It seems like a unifying principle.
Steve: It really is, and I mean, there are those people who say music has been here since the dawn of man, right?
Joe: Before math, right?
Steve: Yeah! We were thinking cogently; we were making music! Then you have that whole school of thought–also, the guy who wrote that book; This Is Your Brain On Music–that there’s a whole school of thought that music is actually just a sort of a throwaway, a leftover side effects of language development. That the need for language development, we also developed these abilities to make music, but it’s a side-note. It’s not the important part; it’s the stuff on the side. So there’s a whole school of thought that sees music as completely needless.
I think if you’re talking about iteration, you’re also talking about in terms of, for example; a process that I might use for composition might be something like I would sit in front of the piano with a pencil and piece of paper, be hearing music in my head, and write some of that music down onto paper, and I would take it downstairs and go to my studio and then input those notes into a notation program–something like Finale. Once I do that, I can assign different instruments to it. I can listen to what I have, and then I can be like, “Oh, well; that’s good. Maybe I should repeat that bar there.”
I would put that together to a point, and I might go back and use that, print that out, and add onto it, go back to the piano, write some more, and then input some more, and that’s a very iterative process of going back and forth between what’s in my head and hearing, getting direct feedback from the computer.
Another series of compositions I did if people wanted to check this out is pieces for Disklavier, it’s an instrument called the Yamaha Disklavier which is basically a MIDI grand piano. It’s a grand piano that will play itself, and you can run it with a computer. So I did a series of pieces–it’s an album called Stations of the Breath–for Yamaha Disklavier and, essentially, I didn’t write any music for that. I would sit in front of the piano and improvise and put that into a program called Pro Tools–which is a professional recording and editing program called a digital audio workstation–and I would manipulate the data inside of Pro Tools as MIDI information and that would play the piano for me.
I could, not being the greatest pianist, go in and put in passages, put in ideas, and then take those ideas and work on them and hone them in and have them play it on a 9′ grand piano, a beautiful instrument. I don’t know if that’s a good kind of thing you’re asking about, but I think that’s some of the ways technology and composition have sort of melded together and are changing the processes. I could sit by myself and write this piano music that it would take a virtuosic piano player to play, or maybe a human being couldn’t play sitting at the piano with only two hands and have it play back on a beautiful instrument.
I think in the future; more and more of that stuff is going to be happening, as well, as more instruments cross that line between the digital domain and the physical, analog world. I don’t know if that gets to the point that you were asking, but that’s some of the ways that I see processes as developing and being very iterative in terms of composition is constantly having to go back, rework problems, see how things are coming together, and see if those “systems,” as you call them, work themselves into a satisfying piece of music.
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