Bang on a Can

Lincoln Portrait is a suite of six pieces which use the vernacular of pop/jazz pieces in a chamber context. Three of the pieces - High Frontier, Full Flow, and this one, Quick Thrust - are named after war games going on in the mid-80s when I wrote the piece. I was working with artist Tim Steele, who'd done these incredible paintings of Lincoln. I was thinking about Copland, and his own Lincoln Portrait. The shift in sensibility was amazing to me - I still think of Copland as a modern composer, but the sense of trust in leaders and government conveyed by his piece seems very distant and dated now.

Most traditional theory books don't really talk about rhythm - Hindemith gives it one page, and basically says it's just this weird thing - whereas in my music it's central. After I got out of school I studied the Schillinger system with Jerome Wallman, and I found in it a lot of techniques that I'd thought I'd invented - isorhythms, using multiple meters, etc. That and A.M. Jones' Studies in African Music were confirmations to me that repetitions and rhythm are a viable structural basis.

When I started out I wanted to prove to myself that I had learned my craft, whereas now I'm more likely to follow my instincts. Intuition is built on the things you learn. My intuition ten years ago was probably fine, but it wasn't as informed. I'm also very interested in coming to terms with the kinds of music I listened to when I grew up - pop, country, and some jazz. Roy Orbison really scared me as a kid. I was from Poplar Bluff, Missouri, and all I wanted to do was get out. I heard this great stuff on WLS in Chicago - great soul - but once I was out, I also had to deal with the core of who I was - Pentecostal hymns, country music.

If music works, it's just because it sounds right - taking all the information you have and maintaining personal integrity. That's the hardest thing; it's not hard to make a pastiche of your influences, but to take those things and make them your own...Everyone comes with their own baggage, and mine was an insecurity - the need to be accepted seriously. At a certain point I felt I'd paid my dues and it was time to let go of that - and that freed me to stop worrying about what I "should" be doing. We're only on the planet for sixty or seventy years, and we're going to be worrying about that? At a certain point it's the only thing you can do. --Mikel Rouse