"Accessible" can be a dirty word in contemporary classical music. For decades, composers have outfitted their works with gnarly tangles of complexity, and heaven forbid if there's a tune you can hum. That music rightfully has its cheerleaders, but composer Jennifer Higdon isn't among them. She is a vigorous defender of melody, and when her music is described as "accessible," she doesn't wince, she rejoices.
Traditional-sounding melody, harmony and rhythm are Higdon's building blocks, but her works are anything but old-fashioned. They tend to percolate with an organic freshness, and a musical language that's large in vocabulary but easy to grasp. Across her career, she has pulled off the near-impossible feat of walking the fine line between classical music's fanatics and first-timers, satisfying both camps.
When Higdon writes music — whether it's her operatic adaptation of Cold Mountain, chamber works or any of her 15 concertos — she insists that it communicates, that it's capable of being understood and appreciated. So far, the 62-year-old Brooklyn native's track record is a success. Her music routinely receives upwards of 250 performances per year, and she's won a Pulitzer Prize and three Grammys. She likes to tell stories of finding fans in muddy-booted farmers and little girls who didn't know someone who looks like their mom could write music for a symphony orchestra.
A frank, easygoing conversationalist with remnants of an accent from her childhood in East Tennessee, Higdon joined me on a video call from her home studio in Chapel Hill, N.C., to talk about how she came late to the classical music bandwagon, the importance of supporting women composers and why her new opera, Woman with Eyes Closed, which receives its world premiere this month in Pittsburgh, has three different endings.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tom Huizenga: Back in 2011, you contributed a few blog posts for NPR. One of them suggested that "update" was the key word for the classical music field going forward. "Updating is not putting Beethoven in a leather jacket on a billboard," you wrote. "Updating is playing music of our time, written by folks who live now, for performers who live now, for audiences who live now." How has that "updating" been going?
Jennifer Higdon: It feels like there is updating going on. I know I have a lot more performances. And much to my surprise, since I wrote that, I've been out at universities where there are students who know my music, which surprises me. But I also know a lot of colleagues who write incredible music who still aren't getting programmed very much. So I feel like the ball is moving forward, but we keep having to push a little harder.
You are unapologetic about your music being described as "accessible." That's a word many composers would not want associated with their music.
It doesn't bother me in the least. Because I think the whole point of what I'm doing is to speak to people. To me, "accessible" is an incredible compliment.
And I guess it shows, because your music receives hundreds of performances a year and you have a stack of commissions waiting for you.
There definitely is a demand. And for me, it means I'm on my true path. George Crumb, in my lessons with him, used to talk about how you have to feel, on a gut level, good about what you're writing. You have to feel that what you're doing is what is true to you. I'm not sure all artists experience that, because they have external pressures to do specific things. But I think because my dad, the entire time I was growing up, said you have to question everything, I questioned everything and I didn't take some things too seriously. I'm very fortunate to not have had restrictions put on me at a young age.
Which is not to say your music is simplistic. The Concerto for Orchestra, for example, or your first opera, Cold Mountain — those are very sophisticated works. And some pop music is also quite sophisticated: The Beatles, Radiohead, Beyoncé. Do you think of your music as on the "pop" side of classical, in terms of how easy it is on the ears and how easy it is to comprehend?
That would not have occurred to me because I watched the struggle to put those pieces together. When I write pieces, I say, "It's going to look simple and you're going to think, 'Oh, this won't be hard.' " But 100% of the time when they start assembling the music, everybody goes, "Oh wow, this is really difficult." Strangely, they've coined a term for this called "Higdon Hard." It actually has its own phrase.
I like that!
And it's not that pop music isn't difficult. I look at what Alison Krauss does with bluegrass and some of the layering. Beyoncé's Lemonade kind of blew me away with all the layers, the shifting tones, the way she told the story. In essence, we're all storytellers, and we try to find the thing that feels true to us, but also that will get that information out beyond our own imaginations.
Speaking of popular, let's talk about your best-loved piece, blue cathedral. It's among the most-performed pieces of contemporary classical music today, and it serves to memorialize a family member. Any idea why it's become your biggest hit?
It's a hard question because it's so personal. When I first wrote it, I had no intention of telling a story. But by coincidence, my next-door neighbor was David Patrick Stearns, who was the critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He knew I had lost my brother, and he point-blank asked me, and I didn't feel like I could lie.
I love the spaciousness of blue cathedral. Like some of Aaron Copland's music, it's filled with open-ended promise and hope. The passages for flute and clarinet — instruments that you and your brother played, respectively — are particularly effective.
And you're not going to believe this, but it has passed 1,100 performances; it gets done just about every week somewhere in the world. We are approaching the 25th anniversary of the premiere and it's been phenomenal to share that music with people. I thought the piece was going to be a failure. Sometimes composers don't have a good sense about their own music, and I look back on that and chuckle. I'm like, OK, so I just need to chill.
What is it about melody that is so satisfying? Why do we love it, crave it, even?
I think part of it is that we all speak melody because we speak sentences, and the sentences have shape and articulation. They've got exclamation points or question marks.
Pop songs all have melody, country songs and even rap songs. There's a melody everywhere we go. It's that thread of sound we follow. Even if we hear a bus coming up the street, there's a melody there, it's just not shaped like a Beyoncé melody or a Higdon melody. That's an element of familiarity for us as listeners, as human beings on a planet that has a tendency to hum. And it reminds us that we're here, that we are communicating. That sounds very philosophical, but for me it's so important. Some people want a simple melody so they can remember it when they walk out of the concert hall. Some people want a more complex melody because they want to think about it.
You were a latecomer to classical music — grew up without listening to it. You've mentioned that you didn't even really know Beethoven's symphonies when you entered college. What changed?
I was always attracted to music, but I didn't go specifically for an instrument until I found a flute in the attic that had been my mom's. I joined the marching band and concert band in high school and the experience was so incredible — the camaraderie, but also just the power of sound. Having a stadium up on its feet, it's like you want to be a rock star. Also, my first year of high school, the first Star Wars movie came out and that John Williams soundtrack hit me like a ton of bricks.
And you're right, when I went off to college I didn't know a single Beethoven symphony. There were probably professors who said, "What the heck is this kid doing thinking she's going to be in classical music?" And it's not that I had any extraordinary talent that revealed itself. But I loved it. It was such a joy to learn because I felt like someone had given me the keys to a magic kingdom. And to be honest, I still feel that way. I wake up in the morning and think, "Oh my gosh, I get to write music today."
You ended up doing post-grad studies with two composers who might seem diametrical — the experimental George Crumb and the supreme melodist Ned Rorem. What did you learn from them?
George Crumb and Ned Rorem are about as opposite as you can get for teachers. But I think for a student, that's a great thing, because it makes for a bigger box of tools to work with to make your own decisions.
Ned was all about melody and voice, and how much you think about the voice as if you were writing a song when you write any kind of piece, including purely instrumental works. And listening in your head to the poetry of the rhythm, what is logical. In writing my opera, Ned was in my head the entire time: "Make sure that libretto is absolutely clear in case you can't have supertitles."
Then you look at all the colorful things that George Crumb did — and his sense of time was totally different than Ned's. The handling of text was completely different. The thought of: How do you make a sound world? In a George Crumb sound world, you're completely beyond Disney, right? It is like another planet. Ned takes you in and out of a sound world, but he doesn't stay long. Sometimes it's Paris and sometimes it's America, but it's a feeling. And it's trying to figure out how what both of them taught me feeds into my soul, because the soul is the thing that helps me to do the composing.
Was there ever a classic "eureka" moment while you were studying composition, when you knew this is how you wanted to make a living?
You're going to laugh when I tell you this. But the moment was when I won the Pulitzer.
In 2010? That late?
I know. It doesn't make any sense. I think it's because so many people were asking me to write music that my mindset was literally moving from piece to piece. And because I was freelance composing, you tend to take that month by month. But so many reporters were asking me after the Pulitzer, "How did you get here?" that I stopped and asked myself, "Whoa, how did I get here?" It's totally funny, but it also means I was enjoying what I was doing to such a degree I just didn't stop and examine it.
I thought the light-bulb moment would have come sometime in your college years. Which leads me to wonder about those composition classes — how many other women were there?
At Curtis [Institute of Music], it was the late '80s. There was one other woman, but it was a very small class. When I went to the University of Pennsylvania, half were women, but this is very unusual — it was a very small department, maybe 14 people. Now, when I travel places, I see only one or two. It's still a majority of men.
I have so many little girls come up to me after orchestra concerts and say, "I didn't know girls compose." Being a responsibly visible composer the same way that Joan Tower and Libby Larsen were visible for me really opened doors. And it's my hope to open doors for others.
Did you run into barriers because of your gender? Nearly every woman composer I've talked to has a story — or two, or three — about having to jump through ridiculous hoops or just not being seen.
Yes, for the entire time I was in school, my male colleagues would just talk over my head — like, literally, they wouldn't ask my opinion about anything. They were quick to judge things. I just ignored it, just pressed ahead. It's not that I could make a good argument by saying, "Hey, guys, I'm just as good as you." I figured the music had to do that. The only way to really pull this off would be to make the music work in a way they couldn't ignore. And I did.
For the first several years when my Concerto for Orchestra was performed, I was totally unknown. And I can't believe how many men came up to me and said, "I can't believe a woman wrote that." My response was always, "Well, a woman did write it, so now you know." I tried to deal with it in humor, but I was aware of what was being said to me. Then, after I had been doing this a little while, and other pieces came out, people stopped saying it.
I feel like I'm sensitive to this topic, but I have had to catch myself in the past. I'd find myself talking about the music of Joan Tower, for instance, and describing it as muscular and bold. And while that's true, you can also argue that by pointing it out it's as if I'm saying, in a backhanded way, that women don't write muscular music.
I think it would have been worse if you said it's "pretty." You have to give yourself credit — if someone said my music was bold and muscular, I would take that as a compliment, because I think of it that way. My question as a composer is always, "Does the music work for you?" I often think about the number of concerts I went to when I was a student where I was bored out of my mind. So early on I kept thinking, "What can I do that will make this a more engaging experience? Can I hold people's attention from the first note to the last without them realizing time is going by?"
In a piece Marin Alsop wrote for NPR in 2009 about her friendship with you, she said: "I don't try to dodge questions like, 'Why are there so few women conducting major orchestras?' and 'Why don't we hear more music by women performed by those orchestras?' Neither does Jennifer." I suppose — like we're doing right now — you still get questions like these. Have you grown tired of answering them?
I will answer them until the day I'm in the ground. It's important because it's not always willful ignorance; sometimes it's just that someone hadn't thought about it. And the importance of the conversation is that that one conversation can make all the difference.
I have actually seen artistic administrators go, "Oh, you're right, we have no women on here on our program. We should look around and see what's available." And sometimes they'll contact me and say, "Can you give me a list of women composers?" And I will put one in their hands as fast as I can. It's pretty easy now with the Internet. Before, trying to get recordings and scores into people's hands was much more difficult. And sometimes it's just a matter of someone so busy trying to keep the orchestra on schedule, trying to keep them on budget, making sure they get the soloists and the guest conductors. There are so many moving parts to making a performance that they just don't have time to sit around and think about it, whereas I'm thinking about it all the time.
I've looked at the repertoire for seven American orchestras for the upcoming season — let me throw the numbers by you. The Seattle Symphony: 18% of the composers they are presenting in their classical series are women. At the New York Philharmonic, 16%; Boston Symphony Orchestra, 11.3%; Los Angeles Philharmonic, 8.1%; Cleveland Orchestra, 7.5%; Utah Symphony, 5.5%. Now, here's a shocker: San Francisco Symphony, 2%. There is a single 14-minute piece by one woman in their entire season. Are you OK with these numbers?
No. It's amazing how many people come up to me and say, "I don't understand why they're not performing women." There are so many excellent women composers out there. And you know what? Half of your audience is not being represented. Sometimes conductors say, "I'm too overloaded, I don't want to learn new pieces," which stuns me.
This is one of the things I loved about working with Marin Alsop. Marin is game. She gets in there, she wants to learn. And that makes all the difference in the organization and for the audience and development, because you're actually approaching music from a different viewpoint. Sometimes when orchestras complain that their audiences are shrinking, I'm like, "Don't keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a change in the result." That's not a smart way to keep your organization vital and relevant to your community. Look at who makes up your community — who do you want in that concert hall?
You have a world premiere coming up this month. Woman With Eyes Closed, premiering at the Pittsburgh Opera, is based on the true story of one of the biggest art heists in history, where seven paintings were stolen from a museum in Rotterdam, including two Monets, a Picasso and one by Lucian Freud called "Woman with Eyes Closed." Those paintings have never been recovered; the thieves stored them at the home of one of their mothers, who claimed she burned the artworks to save her son from being charged with the theft. What drew you to this real-life crime drama?
It was a contrast to my first opera, Cold Mountain, and to keep composition interesting. I pivot a lot. I will do an orchestral work, then I'll do a chamber work, then I'll do a choir work, then a piece for band. Cold Mountain is still living inside me; those characters are still there singing. And so to write an effective second opera — and to challenge myself artistically — I wanted to write a chamber opera with just five singers, 12 instruments. And I thought, an art theft that's still unfolding — what would someone do? Would you burn paintings of a famous artist if you thought it would save your kid? Or is there a responsibility towards art? I started asking myself these questions and thought, this might make a good mystery.
What is unusual about the opera is that it has three endings — the story of the heist will end differently depending on the night you see it. Is that because the real-life story hasn't reached its conclusion yet?
That was part of it. But I also admit I was intrigued with the idea of how to write multiple endings. Can you write an opera that is emotionally engaging and doesn't give its hand away as to which way things are going? I thought, "Oh, my gosh, if that woman actually burned a Picasso, Monets and a Matisse, that's taking something out of our shared humanity of how we understand art. Is it important that they're well-known artists? Does that make it a greater crime or not?"
I wanted to see what the mother would do. I actually went around a table and asked a whole bunch of people, and everyone had different answers to what they would have done if their child had stolen the art and brought it home. I thought, OK, there's my answer. Why not try it? It hasn't been done, let's see if we can do it.
It's like, "Collect all three endings!" Go to the opera each night!
The other unusual thing I did was, because it's about art and each of those artists is very different, I decided to do my orchestration like painting. I have the instruments playing extended techniques, really unusual sounds, which just doesn't get done in opera, making it a little more challenging. There's more color contrast to the textures, and people in the audience may not know what instrument is playing — like playing inside the piano, or techniques I used when I played flute, like a little explosion of sound right above the mouthpiece, sounding percussive like a snare drum with a wire brush.
You've written two operas, but you've written more than a dozen concertos. You won the music Pulitzer in 2010 for your Violin Concerto. The same year, you won a Grammy for your Percussion Concerto, then two more Grammys for your Viola Concerto and your Harp Concerto. I dare say you have a thing for concertos.
I do. And the reason I have a thing for concertos — some people call me the "Concerto Lady" — is because, believe it or not, the soloists ask for them. It's the musicians coming to me and asking, "Will you write me a piece?"
It's that easy? Hey, I've got a violin that I don't know how to play very well. Will you write me a piece?
[Laughs] I'll write you something, Tom.
Is there something you look for in a soloist? I'm guessing not every person who asks is going to get a concerto from Jennifer Higdon.
Their enthusiasm, their skill level, how much they want it. Sometimes I say, "I don't have time on my schedule," and they keep asking every year for five or six years. I had this really beautiful incident where Avi Avital, the amazing mandolin player, was asking year after year. One day I got a call: He said, "I'm in the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. I'm on my way to New York. Can you just come and have a coffee with me?" So I got to the station, and Avi took out his mandolin and started playing Bach. And the entire station stopped — it was so magical. He didn't have to say anything. I was like, "Oh, I've got to write for this guy."
You also wrote a Concerto for Orchestra — a commission by the Philadelphia Orchestra, which premiered it in 2002. It's a piece that continues to fascinate me. It's rigorously built, in five movements; it's awesomely orchestrated and it's exciting to hear. Were you at all inspired by that famous Concerto for Orchestra, also in five movements, by Béla Bartók?
That was scary — trying to write a concerto for orchestra, knowing the Bartók, because I absolutely love it. When I got the commission, I remember going home and listening to the Bartók one more time. And then I put it away for like three years, because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to write my own piece.
How did you approach the orchestration — especially the very opening of the piece? It explodes with chimes, busy figures in the strings, French horns, trombones, ping-ponging timpani, chattering winds, and everything surges to a huge climax, all within the first 57 seconds. How do you do that?
Too much adrenaline, too much Diet Coke. That was literally the last movement of the piece I wrote; I was so nervous about messing up the other movements by messing up the first movement that I think you can feel the anxiety and the excitement. I'm thinking, as a young composer who no one knew at that point, "This may be the only time I get to write for the Philadelphia Orchestra." I knew that the second movement would be strings, so I thought I needed a contrast of a lot of emotion, and just to show off the entire orchestra by having a tornado of sound coming at you. That way you wouldn't have a chance to catch your breath until you got to the end of that first movement.
In 2023 alone, I count 13 pieces from you, including a string quartet, a piano trio and music for brass ensemble. Does composing come easy to you? Or are you writing 24/7 in order to be that prolific?
It's not that it comes easy, but I work at it. I'm a full-time composer, seven days a week, four to six hours every day. It's kind of like what I imagine it's like for people who write novels: If you work at it every day, you tend to develop a flow. It's hard when you start the piece because you're trying to find the sound world and the logic and what you think should be the shape of it. But once you get into it, you're like, "Oh, what if I can come up with a cool sound to do this? And where should I take that?" It just flows out, but I have to really work on it. A good day for me is writing 15, probably up to 30 seconds of music. But that's literally being here for six hours and going, "All right, what do I need to do to make this more interesting?" Because that's always the number one thing I'm asking myself when I look at the phrases and look at the melody: What can I do that will keep the experience fresh for the person who's playing it, but also the person who's listening to it?
Am I right that you publish your own music? Why is that important to you?
When I was coming out of school, I conducted the University of Pennsylvania Wind Ensemble and Orchestra, and was also playing flute. I was asked to perform some Elliott Carter for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and we couldn't get the music — I had to play off of Xeroxes. Elliott Carter is a well-known composer. I also noticed I couldn't afford to rent any of the music. And I thought, "Oh, this is ridiculous." There shouldn't be such a barrier. I want to play living composers, but it's so expensive. A three-minute piece was blowing the entire year's budget. I thought, "No one's asking for my music. So when they do ask, I'll just sell them the music and I'll make it affordable and I'll respond quickly." And over time, as I wrote more pieces, the catalog got bigger and the orders just started building. It's hard enough getting your music performed in live situations; it shouldn't be a barrier that things are too expensive. It's simple business.
Much of your music, I think, reflects America. Do you agree?
I do, actually. It's funny — I've lived in Brooklyn, Atlanta, Tennessee, Philadelphia for 38 years, and I'm now in North Carolina. I also lived in L.A. and in Ohio. So I've experienced the country in different ways. I have people randomly come up to me in places and say, "I heard you on the radio." And I'll be looking at this person, and it's a farmer — still in his muddy boots. He's coming in off the fields. He's walked into a restaurant in the middle of Wyoming. I'm in there getting something and I'm like, "Wow, this is miraculous."
Music communicates. I don't know anyone on this planet who doesn't listen to some form of music. And I don't judge people in any way about how much they know about music. In fact, when I'm writing, I think, "Well, let's pretend that no one in the room has ever heard classical music. Will this speak to them?"
When you accepted the Grammy Award for your Viola Concerto in 2018, you said, "When we write classical music, it really takes a village." What did you mean by that?
Well, I can put the notes on the page, but if I didn't have the support of all the people who taught me — I think about those band directors who listened to all those lessons where we all sounded awful. And then you've got performers on the stage, the guy who turns the lights on, the person who sells the tickets, the person who advertises it, the radio person who interviews you, the press person who writes about it, and you've got the audience. Not one of these things brings music into the world by itself.
How do you think that village is doing these days?
I feel a lot of distress in the village — people worrying. I think a lot about that when I'm writing, because I need to be able to write music that can stay calm, that can be a balm. I remember when the pandemic started, I was writing my double percussion concerto, Duo Duel. People expect [percussion music] to be very loud with drums, but I wrote something that used only melodic percussion instruments. I can feel a need to reach out beyond the studio, out to other people. There's going to be a lot of music that comes out of this time, but also I think we need to keep providing the music for this time because the world is scary right now.
How would you like to see the village change in the next 20 years or so?
Support each other. Empathy. Help make the art, and also help others make art — even the kids. Because sometimes art saves lives. I've seen it. Sometimes that's all a kid has. They may be living in a place where they feel completely isolated from their family, like they're really different. But art makes all the difference.
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