Interview with Bruce Adolphe
Bruce Adolphe is a composer, author, and pianist. He is the Resident Lecturer and Director of Family Concerts of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the composer-pianist of NPR’s weekly Piano Puzzler.
Polly Want A Janáček Opera?
Contents
Max Raskin: I have a general theme that I want to talk about with this interview, which is how creativity and all your high ideas interact with the day-to-day of your life.
I want to start by asking: What’s the last piece of music you listened to?
Bruce Adolphe: It depends how you think about this. I have a parrot, and he needs to hear music all the time. So, when I have breakfast, I'm sitting with the parrot and my wife is usually there. We are always listening to an opera because that's what he likes.
MR: What's your parrot's name?
BA: Polly Rhythm. He's an opera singer; he is a great singer. But for myself, I don't sit and listen to music that much during the day because typically I would be improvising, getting prepared for a concert, or writing.
MR: When you do listen is it to the radio?
BA: It's usually the radio, though in the morning I tend to put on a CD so I can control what it is because Polly wants to hear singing.
MR: What radio station do you listen to the most?
BA: Well, it's actually the bird who listens to it, it's WQXR. This morning was typical. I put on a [Leoš ] Janáček opera, Katya Kabanova. The bird loves it. He sings a few notes now and then, and then he eats a cookie and sings another note or something.
But when it comes to listening to music straight through for myself without the bird, it often is connected to a real purpose. I find that sitting down and listening to something straight through just without my having a reason, happens less and less over time because I'm just so involved with music in other ways. But I listened to several Janáček operas straight through in the last few months, and I watched a performance of Jenůfa straight through about a week ago.
MR: What kind of a sound system do you have?
BA: Well, that's another strange thing. We used to have giant speakers that I loved, but after redoing our living room, we decided to get rid of them because we couldn't put the room, which had two grand pianos in it, back together the way we wanted it. What I did is I put two excellent speakers right here in my study attached to the computer, they're Genelec speakers. It's possible to listen to super high quality on a computer if you know what programs you're using.
Parrots, A Man’s Best Friend
MR: What do you eat for breakfast?
BA: That was a quick switch.
I eat muesli usually with blueberries, and I have green tea, and then an espresso.
MR: Are you fairly regimented about that?
BA: Yes. I don't like to eat sweet stuff for breakfast. I enjoy the muesli, so it's pretty much the same every day.
MR: Do you have a uniform that you wear every day?
BA: This is a very unusual question in my household, because of the bird again. I've had this bird since I was 10.
MR: It's the same bird?
BA: It's the same bird.
MR: How is the bird that old?
BA: He's 60 years old.
MR: Are birds that old?
BA: Well, not birds, but parrots can live a long time
MR: Parrots live for that long?
BA: Parrots are a completely separate category from every other kind of bird. And there are different types of parrots. I have an Amazon parrot that is 60. He was bought in my family when I was a child, and my mother’s mother had one that lived to be fairly old too. Cockatoos can live to 100 sometimes.
MR: [Speechless].
BA: When the bird turned 40 — I'm about 10 years older than he — instead of being cuddly and cute every day, he suddenly was snapping at me all the time. And then one day he wasn't. And after talking to some people who know a lot about animal behavior I realized I should investigate the clothing I was wearing. It turned out that I have to wear black around the bird now, so I'm always wearing a black shirt. And this has been now 20 years of this, where if I don't wear a black shirt, he gets really angry, and upset, and snapping.
MR: One of the big themes in your work is the unconscious and creativity. Have you ever gone to psychoanalysis?
BA: I have, yes. But the bird didn't come up very often.
MR: The bird didn't come up in psychoanalysis.
BA: A little bit, but I mean, it was the bird's problem that I had to wear black, not mine.
MR: It’s an idiosyncratic thing to have a bird for 50 years.
BA: That's pretty weird, yeah.
MR: What is your psychological interpretation of that?
BA: I mean, he’s a pet and it's very unusual to say, "I don't want my pet anymore." I pet the bird, he sings with me, he sits on my shoulder a lot, he's very smart, he's very entertaining. And I just never thought of not having him.
I thought he was going to die once. A few years ago, he had a stroke, and I brought him to the animal medical center, and they told me, "This doesn't look good." And then a couple of days later they said, "Well, he's getting better strangely. Maybe if you take care of him really carefully, maybe it'll be all right." So I took care of him. It was a difficult three months in 2022.
MR: When you first met your wife, what did she say about this?
BA: He’s incredibly entertaining. The first reaction is everybody loves the way he sings and talks and hangs out. I think the difficulty was that she can't pet him or pick him up because they usually only let one person do that. He bit her once, and she was very upset about that, so she doesn't try touching him. But then oddly, she loves the bird in other ways, and she can take care of him. He just won't let her pet him. But for some reason Polly is fine with our daughter. She can pick him up and pet him and carry him around and do all kinds of things, which is very unusual for a parrot to allow two people to be so friendly.
Psychologically, I think, "Why would I give away this pet?" I didn't realize when I was a child that I would have this bird my whole life. And then both of my parents died when I was fairly young, so it wasn't the family pet, it was mine. The bird wanted to be with me because of the music, and my brother was never that interested in the bird anyway, so it just ended up being my bird. And whatever I've been doing, he's there.
Once I was giving a concert in Vermont and somebody showed up at a rehearsal and said, "I'm from a parrot rescue center and we know about your bird. Would you like to come see a parrot rescue center?" I went and I saw this place that had hundreds of parrots that had been abandoned — they're screaming and talking and singing...it's incredibly noisy. And several of them flew onto me and didn't want to get off because they loved visitors and they were thinking, “Take me home.”
MR: That’s an interesting answer to what you wear.
BA: Yeah, I wear black. Now, if I travel or if I'm going out of the house, I can wear other colors, but there's no point in antagonizing my bird, so I have a lot of black shirts.
Tai Chi and the Flow
MR: You talk about the importance of letting the flow happen. Brahms and his walks, for instance. What are your ways of decompressing?
BA: That recently changed. I did yoga for many, many years.
MR: What kind of yoga?
BA: A mixture of a little Vinyasa, a little Bikram. It was basically standard Hatha yoga. I did that for I think 35 years.
Recently, I switched to Tai Chi. I'm in a pretty good place with it. I've been doing it now for about six months.
MR: Do you have any other hobbies?
BA: I love cooking.
My wife and I both like to cook. I don't think we're great cooks, but we're good. And I know we're not great because I have quite a few friends who are fantastic cooks, and I'm always worrying when they come over if we can live up to their expectations.
MR: If someone came over and you wanted to really impress them what would be your go-to?
BA: If it's somebody I want to impress, I might actually open a cookbook, and I might use an Ottolenghi recipe or we have a huge book of Mediterranean food. I wouldn't necessarily follow it exactly, but I would get some ideas.
MR: What’s the restaurant you think you’ve ordered the most from?
BA: That, I know — there’s one right around the corner called Bodrum.
MR: What do you get?
BA: It might be a vegetable tagine, or they have baba ghanoush and other kinds of meze and things like that.
MR: You're not a creature of habit?
BA: Some habits. Musically, I spend a lot of time improvising every day. And I don't know if that's a habit because I've been doing it all my life, and I would really miss that. And I do some kind of exercise every day, whether it's Tai Chi or taking a long walk or both.
MR: What's the closest piano to you right now?
BA: Right in front of me.
MR: What is it?
BA: It's a keyboard. This is not the music room; this is my study. My computer is sitting on a desk that's really just a big table. And underneath it is my Roland FP-90 digital piano, which is attached to my computer for notation.
MR: If I were to ask you to play anything right now, what do you think the first thing you would play would be?
BA: I would improvise first.
[Plays].
What I just played is an arpeggio made of fourths that I started doing when I was a kid. When I first sit down on the keyboard, I always do this. I don't know why. It makes me feel like I'm opening a world.
When the Piano Puzzler show started, I used that at the beginning when Fred says, "Bruce is here in the studio." And I play that and I say, "Hi, Fred." Even at home, I always start with that.
Piano Puzzler
MR: What’s your process for writing the Piano Puzzler tunes? Do you bang out a bunch at a time? Where physically do you get your ideas? The shower? Walking?
Also, before you answer, I just want my readers know how proud my wife is of me that I nailed the “Girl From Ipanema” in the style of Brahms puzzler.
BA: Congratulations on getting that puzzler!
Sometimes an idea for a piano puzzler hits me unexpectedly. I remember watching a Fred Astaire movie and noticing with a jolt that the Irving Berlin song “Cheek to Cheek” has a brief chord progression that also occurs in Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata. That became a puzzler. But I have to write a lot of them, so I often just decide to recompose a particular song in the style of some composer, and usually I can make it work. It's like solving a puzzle to write these. Once I start, I end up getting inspired by phrases fitting together in a humorous way, and then it’s a joy to write. Often, I pretend to be the composer in question, as an actor would.
MR: What is the piece of composed music that you think you have played the most in your life?
BA: Just sheer numbers, it's probably a Bach prelude or fugue. I'm certainly not alone with musicians who play keyboards that Bach is kind of an obsession. It's like doing Tai Chi or yoga. Bach is so central.
There are certain preludes I would play at the drop of a hat — the E-flat minor prelude from book one, which is so intense and dark and beautiful. I've played that millions of times.
MR: Do you think that there are non-musicians who love music more than musicians?
BA: I don't know what you mean by love more than.
MR: Just love it, enjoy it and love it more. I don't know.
BA: It is the more, I don't know how to gauge that.
MR: I guess I want to ask if being a professional takes anything away from your love of music?
BA: I don't think of myself as a professional. You can be a professional dentist and a professional doctor, and that makes a lot of sense. But music is practically more important than anything else in my life.
MR: I have never in my life listened to music or played guitar when I don't want to. I never have to practice. I only do it when I want to.
If you needed to turn on the juice when you didn't necessarily want to
BA: It becomes a lifestyle. I don't have to think very hard about that because I've been doing music for so long, but also I spend a certain amount of time improvising every day. Let's say my mind is not on music at the moment and I read the news or I'm just really upset about something — of course, that can interfere with anybody's ability to do anything. But I know that improvisation is a path back to it.
MR: It really is sublimation. You really are taking your anxieties and you're working it out through the music in some way.
BA: It takes a long time when you're improvising to get to what's called “the zone.” But you recognize when you're there because things are happening and you feel like you're controlling them. It is sort of clearing my mind and going into a different place.
And I know it's healthy. I mean, it feels fantastic. There’s nothing else that I know how to do that takes me into that place. I don’t think it is just working out anxieties — it’s more like visiting an emotional/intellectual space that is always there, a distinct musical location apart from daily life.
Dead Music
MR: Were you a fan of the Grateful Dead?
BA: Not particularly.
MR: Why not?
BA: Because for me, the realm of classical music is far wider and deeper than most popular music. It's not about whether it's sophisticated or historical or any of that. It's that pure music where there are no words involved — the investigation is really of the mind and the emotions through an art form that is so highly developed.
I enjoy popular music a lot, as you know, and I use it in the puzzlers all the time, but it doesn't do the same thing as going deeply into certain realms of feeling and thinking. Also, I feel like “fan” is not the right word…that it's too superficial for how I feel about a lot of things.
MR: Do you feel that way about jazz vis-à-vis classical music?
BA: Less so, because there are a lot of jazz players whose level of playing is phenomenal. The harmonic, musical world is very rich if you're listening to certain kinds of jazz. The word “classical” bothers me anyway, because I have to say that I include jazz in the music that I'm talking about.
MR: What’s a better word than “classical”?
BA: It’s more “composed art-music” as opposed to music that is mostly about words or entertainment or that's two, three minutes long. I'm talking about larger works of art that are musical journeys. A twenty-minute piece is a real exploration of something.
MR: Yeah — the Grateful Dead did that!
BA: Well, are you trying to convince me that I should go listen to the Grateful Dead?
MR: Yes.
BA: Okay.
MR: I guess peoples’ identity gets caught up in the Dead. They would travel around with them; it was a community. And there’s something deeply tied to America there.
Playing Music Versus Playing Music
MR: I want to ask you some brutish questions. I don’t know from classical music, so these are going to be gross.
Who's your guy?
BA: Do you mean composer or performer? It makes a difference.
MR: Let's say composer.
BA: I really have to say this, that the idea of there being one…
MR: I know, I know but…
BA: It’s like what's your favorite color?
MR: I would say orange.
BA: You would say orange? Well, I don't have a favorite color.
MR: Let me ask it in a different way. Who is the first composer that comes to your mind right now?
BA: Well, I'm not kidding you. I can think of 10 immediately, all at once.
MR: You have to say one.
BA: Well, if I have to say one, it's bullshit, but I'll say Janáček because I was just thinking about him. I just listened to a Janacek opera with the bird on my shoulder for an hour.
MR: Who’s the first popular musician or band that comes to your mind right now?
BA: I've never been a fan of any particular band.
MR: Really?
BA: Really. It's just not part of the way I listen to music. I mean, I listened to The Beatles, but this is going to be a little bit odd to explain — I never put on a Beatles recording. I might take the sheet music and play through the songs. In other words, my relationship to music is not sitting around and listening. That’s one of the things about being a musician. If I'm going to play, “Hey Jude,” I'll play it.
MR: And you don't go to concerts?
BA: I go to concerts.
MR: Do you ever go to pop music concerts?
BA: No.
Tyrannosaurus Sue
MR: For people who have never listened to classical music, what do you think the best introduction is? For example, those Leonard Bernstein Young People’s Concerts are great.
BA: I think it might be one of my lectures from the Chamber Music Society. There are close to a hundred lectures online, and I think somebody could choose a composer or a piece they were interested in.
MR: What do you think is your most popular piece? You see, I’m very interested in mosts and extreme and binary thinking.
BA: Yeah, I get that. Well, I can tell you my most performed piece is actually a piece I wrote for families and kids, but it's performed for adults all the time. It's performed much more than anything else. It's called Tyrannosaurus Sue: A Cretaceous Concerto.
MR: I want to ask you a little bit about spiritual topics. Do you have a religious practice?
BA: Not theological, no. My father was brought up Orthodox, and he was the first member of his family to read a secular book. He broke away from the religious practice because his older brother died and was married, and the family insisted that he go through a marriage and ritual divorce of his brother's wife.
MR: Chalitzah! Levirate marriage!
BA: Yes! He did that and at the end of that, he thought he'd had enough. So then he left…he completely dropped it.
MR: What about your mother?
BA: My mother was also Jewish, but not brought up in a religious way.
MR: Where were they from?
BA: Well, both of them were raised in New York, but my mother's mother came from Poland to avoid a pogrom by herself at age 16.
I grew up knowing a lot about cultural Judaism, and as a kid, I was fluent in Yiddish, which I'm certainly not now. That’s because my grandmother came over every weekend with her parrot.
On Pens and Computers
MR: You talk about capturing these fleeting moments of creativity. What tools do you use to capture them? If you have an idea when you're on the subway or walking down the street do you record a voice memo?
BA: I usually don't use my phone that way. Sometimes I pull it out and go to Notes and type some notes to myself.
MR: More written than audio?
BA: Usually — because you can control it better. And very often you say something and it gets all screwed up anyway. Especially if you're on a train or the subway, it's not going to work very well, but I often will just write things down on paper.
MR: Do you have a specific pen you like to use?
BA: I used to be very, very picky about pens and paper, and I didn't switch to a computer until I was in my early 40s. I used to care about the music paper a lot and the pens a lot, and I have quite a few pens that I love.
MR: And what pens do you love?
BA: Well, I have lots of different kinds of fountain pens. Some are Mont Blancs. In order to write beautifully, you need a flowing pen. And there are a couple of non-fountain pens that write really well, but they also don't last as long and they don't ever flow quite as beautifully.
MR: What's your favorite?
BA: I might get an architectural pen, the kind of thing architects use. I ordered paper from England for music paper.
MR: What was the company called?
BA: It was called Panopus. They don't exist anymore because nobody uses paper. I remember I would have this standing order that they would send me paper every month, but they always forgot I was based in the US, so I would get a phone call at three in the morning. I pick up the phone very worried — although I was sort of thinking it might be this guy — and he’d say, "Hello, Mr. Adolphe, your paper is ready." I said, "Do you realize that it's 3:00 o'clock in the morning?" This happened all the time. I'm kind of sad for that to stop, but I still have blank paper all over the place.
MR: Was there any change with switching to a computer?
BA: It took me a while to change habits. When I think about music, I don't go to the computer as quickly. Even though writing on the computer is fantastic and fast and you can do incredible things and it looks gorgeous, there are some thought processes that are interfered with by the computer.
I think a lot more before I start writing things down.
At the moment I only have one composition student — I didn't really want to have any, but this brilliant young kid appeared and I just couldn't say no. If you grow up working with a computer, you need to make certain decisions before you might normally have to. For example, a computer is all numerical and you need to figure out rhythm before you would if you were writing by hand. The program asks you for a time signature. But if you're writing freely, your mind can say, "Forget time signatures, forget everything." You can just let it flow and then think about how you want to notate it and what you should or shouldn't do, and you can change your mind a lot.
MR: How do you catalog all your raw ideas? Let's say you just wrote a little jot down. What would you do with that in terms of storing it?
BA: If it's on the computer, I’ll just name it.
MR: How do you name your files?
BA: I usually come up with a title for the piece, and if I don't have a title, I'll call it a “sketch” for the instruments involved.
MR: Are you an organized person?
BA: For many things, yes. Not for everything.
MR: And are you an obsessive person?
BA: No.
On Late Life’s Radiance
MR: Do you watch TV?
BA: Oh, yeah, sure.
MR: What's the last show you binge-watched?
BA: I have a lot of actor friends, and so I tend to watch things my friends are in. And, also, my cousin Peter Friedman was in Succession. I couldn't stand the first episode or two and then I found out that nobody could stand the first episode. It started to get better, and I decided to watch it because of Peter, and then I thought it was brilliant by the time it was over.
MR: Do you like movies?
BA: Yes.
MR: Do you talk about your politics ever?
BA: Yes
MR: How would you describe yourself politically?
BA: Left, very.
MR: Who are some of the thinkers that influenced your political thinking?
BA: I know you had an interview with Noam Chomsky. He definitely influenced my thinking maybe 20 years ago. But what mostly influences my thinking is history and watching the present. I read a lot of history.
MR: What are you reading right now?
BA: Just this morning finished a book by a friend of mine named Douglas Penick who wrote a book called Winter Light: On Late Life's Radiance. It’s a book about old age and death and the way different artists — whether they're musicians or painters or writers — the way they have dealt with age and difficulty as they got older. It’s a very moving book.
MR: Do you think about death?
BA: My brother died two years ago, and during the last three or four years, about 10 of my close friends have died…some younger than me.
MR: What part of your life do you feel like you're in right now?
BA: I'm going to be 70 in May, and it's a big number, and it's a strange fact. On the other hand, I haven't stopped doing anything. I have a new book coming out, I'm still working at Lincoln Center, I'm still on stage doing children's concerts as well as lectures. I still do the Piano Puzzlers, I'm still getting commissions to write.
MR: How old did your parents live to be?
BA: Well, both of my parents died very young. They were both in their mid 50s.
MR: When you passed that age how did you feel?
BA: That was huge. I mean, my parents were both about 55.
MR: How did they die?
BA: My father had a heart failure. Something that I think would easily have been handled now, but that was a long time ago. And my mom died of cancer.
By the time I was 19, I didn't have parents. I did have an older brother, but he was suffering the same thing that I was. We were kind of stranded there.
And when I got into my 50s, I was very worried that something horrible would happen to me, which it didn't. And then when I was like 57, 58, I was thinking I was over the hill so to speak. I passed the milestone. And then here I'm going to be 70 and I'm fine. My brother didn't make it. He died soon after he turned 70, but he suffered a year of pancreatic cancer.
I don't have any of these issues, so I feel very lucky. I'm also very limber and loose, and even though I have to take a statin, other than that, I'm in good shape, so I don't have any fears right now. I'm realistic. Many of my friends who died recently were younger than me, and in every case, it was some kind of cancer.
Haydn, Borge, and Bernstein
MR: Your work is a combination of technical intellectualism and playfulness.
BA: Right.
MR: Would you say that's a good way to describe you?
BA: Oh, absolutely. The composer who's most like that in history and a great inspiration for me in terms of that is Haydn. His music is very sophisticated and brilliant and innovative, but it's also often very funny and easy to listen to and accessible. In his time, he was both the most popular composer and the most original, sophisticated, along with Mozart and Beethoven. That always amazed me, and I thought about his music a lot over the years. And I grew up with Victor Borge, Leonard Bernstein…
MR: They were fun!
BA: Yeah — and I wanted to do both of those things. I wanted to teach and be funny and be Victor Borge at the piano. I saw him live a few times. And so the Piano Puzzlers come out of that. I didn't expect that to turn into 23 years on the radio. I didn't know it was going to be on the radio at all. I just started doing it as a way of teaching my students at Juilliard. I'm really glad it’s become what it has. It’s very satisfying that it's fun, popular, light, and also educational at the same time.
MR: What piece of yours do you think typifies that playfulness and intellectualism?
BA: It probably is Tyrannosaurus Sue. It’s a serious composition, but it's funny and it's very entertaining. We just did it in West Virginia — over a thousand people, mostly kids, totally quiet listening to this piece and then standing up and cheering for it. And yet, I feel like I did a real job composing at the same time. It's not just that it's not dumbed down, it's elevating. It's like an invitation, "Listen to real music together as a family."
MR: Just because everyone likes it doesn't mean it's bad.
BA: Or good.
MR: I think if everyone likes something, it means it's at least a little bit good.
BA: Well, you know the old Jewish joke about this guy who says, "Rabbi, everyone says I'm a fool." And the rabbi says, "Well, if you listen to what everyone says, you are a fool. But if you ignore what everyone says, you're definitely a fool."