Victor: So, I guess the first thing I want to ask is – tell me about the title of your piece.

Chris: The title comes from a lyric by a rapper named CL Smooth. It’s from a song from CL Smooth and Pete Rock; the name of the song is “Act Like You Know.” And honestly, the piece itself was conceived of and some of the technical approaches to the form were really inspired by my interest in early 90s hip-hop beat making and production. So, I was trying to choose a title that kind of reflected that influence in a way, and I think the best way I can describe why I chose that particular line was that there’s a certain jerkiness to the to the rhythmic language. There’s this underlying rhythmic process that’s happening, but it’s always prevented from kind of falling into a regular pattern, right? So, there’s always this feeling like it’s about to settle into some kind of regular pattern, but it pulls back from that. So, I like just the idea of the stutter-step, you know. This kind of dance, avoidance of regularity.

Victor: You talk about hip-hop influences, you talk about dance. As I understand it, it’s like kind of trying to capture the irregularity of human movement. Human speech, would that be part of it as well?

Chris: You know, not consciously in this case. A lot of my music does deal with human speech, and so I’m deeply interested in the kind of musical shapes and musical material that that speech offers, and so I’m sure that somewhere in my consciousness that exists. But I’d say in this case, the speech wasn’t as much of an overt influence and it was much more about thinking about the way that, let’s say, a DJ or producer would manipulate a breakbeat, right? So, there’s some kind of underlying rhythmic feel that perhaps could be regular and groove based, but there’s kind of this little asymmetry that’s thrown in to keep the regularity always like a little bit out of reach.

Victor: I’m reading from your program notes here; it says, for example, “the sample is individuated but cloven from its history;as a musical atom, it is combined into a heterogeneous mosaic structure.” And what I got out of that was the fact that you’rekind of working in individual units and they’re kind of irregular on that level, but all for all, after you kind of take a step back and try to hear it, there’s this paradoxical regularity going on, is that right?

Chris: I would say so. the reference to the “sample” there is another part of kind of how the piece is inspired by the beat making processes of sample-based beat making. I love this era of New York hip–hop from, let’s say, 1987 through 1996. To me, [this] is this really fertile era of innovation for these beat makers, and when it comes to the use of samples, I’m always fascinated with how the samples can be a note, it could be a single attack, or it could be a little bit longer, but how they are recombined and kind of sewn into this new harmonic language that – I don’t know if I used this analogy in the program notes,but I was thinking of this as a really great illustration of the idea of assemblage. If you know the term assemblage, it’s a term that – I don’t know if it originated in Deleuze and Guattari, but they definitely usethat as an idea. It’s this heterogeneous combination of things, each with its own interiority, its own context. But when they’re put together, all of those things kind of come into conversation with each other,but without ever collapsing neatly into an organic hole. Every bit has its own kind of impulse to individuality and to being incommensurate with the things around it.

Victor: I listened to this last night, and matching it with the program notes I absolutely did hear the paradox between the heterogeneity and the composite whole that really comes together to form a unique effect right there. I was wondering about how you crafted these individual blocks. You talk about musical atoms – obviously, they have to come from somewhere: the notes, the quarter tones, the nature of the gesture. How do you do that?

Chris: I’ve got a copy of a spreadsheet that I made way back, which kind of maps out the rhythmic and the textural structure of the entire piece, so it kind of represents all 288 measures. And it was a tool that I used to kind of figure out this underlying process. So, despite all of the activity on the surface, I wanted there to be this sense of glacial movement underneath.There’s always this slowly evolving process, that even though there are so many things happening on the surface, hopefully you get the sense that you move from one place gradually to this other place.

When it comes to how that material is developed, so I’d say that the most important impetus for generating all that material is just a really simple dyad that starts with a minor third, B to D, right around middle C [B3, D4]. And then over the course of the whole piece, that sinks to a major sixthwith the D below middle C and B [D3, B3]. There’s this really slow sinking, and it’s not linear, that motion, but by the end of the piece – it starts out with this B and D, and the very end is also echoing the D and the B. So,taking that as this underlying motion, but then reinterpreting the intervals so that they are harmonized differently and thinking of them not just as equal tempered versions of that interval but how that can be converted into some just intonation source of harmonies.

So, just to illustrate, one way to start is that B to D at the beginning can be interpreted as the fifth and sixth partials of an overtone series, where they would be where the fundamental G, or you could interpret them as the sixth and seventh partials where the underlying fundamental would be an E.

There wasn’t an electric bass [at Illinois], so we used the upright bass. The upright bass still could approximate a little bit, but one of the nice things with the electric bass is that you can really kind of specifically trigger these fine gradations in microtonal pitch difference by hitting harmonics. So,hopefully, as it goes, there are these little variations, but they can spawn really big changes in the sense of harmony, so that that’s kind of what’s going on throughout.

Victor: You mentioned the D for example, they can be rendered as different partials, and obviously if you’re using E as a fundamental, the D is going to be significantly flat, right? That does shed a lot of light on how you’re dealing with the microtones and the different nuances of each individual note.

Chris: I’d say a good place to hear that is actually the very end of the piece. I think it’s the cello, the piano, and the bass;they’re playing the B and the D, and you get both versions of the D. The one that’s higher, and then the one that’s the seventh partial, so it’s 31 cents lower.

Victor: Oh, I see, you have a C quarter–sharp right there.

Chris: So yeah, about the notation of the microtones – when I was writing this piece, it was right before I discovered the use of Helmholtz-Ellis, so now, my just intonation accidentals are much more accurate. And so, in this piece, the accidentals were an approximation. But on a personal note, I have to credit my friend and colleague Austin Wulliman from the Jack Quartet, for really being a great collaborator and expanding my horizons when it comes to just intonation and also how to notate it.

Victor: I noticed that on initial listen actually, just this incredibly crystal-clear G major. And now, after what you’re talking about, I understand it’s not really a tonal aspect, it’s really choosing a spectral thing to finally land on, so it’s not really G major at all, it’s more of a G fundamental.

Chris: And one of the things about the harmonic language is – I thought of the piece as rhythmically divided up into what I called slices, and each slice like will often correspond to a beat grouping in the way I’ve notated it. So, maybe it’s like a quarter note or a dotted quarter or whatever, but within each slice, all the pitches are derived from a single fundamental and the overtone series. So, at any given moment,everything you’re hearing should neatly fit into a single overtone series. But then of course, in rapid succession, it can feel a little bit less like there’s a tonal center, but that’s the reason that occasionally you do have these things pop up, where it just sounds like, “oh there’s like a G major triad,” you know, and that just pops out.I think are moments where it does kind of feel like there’s a center, but it’s not definitely not tonal in the sense of functional tonality.

One thing that I do a lot as a composer is I will try something when it comes to my process or the compositional techniques I’m using, and not necessarily know right away exactly how it’s going to translate into the experience. I think in this case, the way that I approached this was developed kind of just conceptually, and I ended up really liking the way that it works in in terms of these changes in harmony, but it wasn’t something that I had in mind, that specific effect, before I set out to write the piece.

Victor: I’d imagine with something as monumental as this, it would be impossible to really visualizeyour mind right away the overall effect of it, and part of it is just the joy of seeing it all come together, right?

Chris: Absolutely, yeah.

Victor: Just one more thing I want to ask is how was it working with the IME?

Chris: Yeah, it was wonderful. I think just the fact that this wasn’t just like an award and an honor – of course, that that’s great too – but the fact that it came with the opportunity for performance and the chance to work with and meet a lot of the really talented musicians at University of Illinois was just a really positive experience, so I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to do it. And anyone who’s played my music knows that it’s not always the easiest thing to undertake, and so I appreciate the work that everyone put in. And you know, Professor [Stephen] Taylor put in a great amount of effort to prepare the musicians,and he was emailing me months before the premiere, so he was clearly thinking about it very deeply in advance, so I appreciate all of that. And of course, the excellent performances by the students.

Victor: Yeah – it’s always comprised entirely of students who really want to be there, and probably worked with composers themselves many times and really respect a composer’s wishes and the nuances of how to bring it to life. And that’s not something we have at just any school, so when I was there, I’ve always felt so lucky to have an ensemble like that. Was there anything during the premiere that you didn’t expect? As I recall, this has been performed before, is that correct?

Chris: It’s been performed twice before, and both times by Ensemble del Niente, whom I wrote it for originally. This was the first time that I heard it performed not by them, and also by a student group. Of course, it’s a very good student group, but it’s a really illuminating experience to hear a piece that – especially since it since I also got a good recording out of the second performance [by Ensemble del Niente] and it was released on my portrait album, so like I’ve grown very accustomed to that particular performance and way of interpreting the piece. So, I think it’s just exciting to hear the piece come out a different way. And especially – there are a lot of moments where individual members of the ensemble come to the forefront, and the way that I write for a lot of these of instruments, usually there’s a great variability how it can be played and how the techniques will speak. So sometimes it’s surprising, that something that you’re used to hearing one way comes out a completely different way, and sometimes it’s a really nice surprise. I would definitely call out the oboist [Kaitlynn Dunn], who I think did a really nice job with the oboe solo at the end. I was really pleased with hearing that – I always imagined it as kind of this moment of that polished oboe, kind of classical oboe playing that emerges out of the wreckage of this piece that has gone through so much by the point it gets to there, so that was a nice moment.

Victor: I guess does go full circle back to the concept of this piece, you talking about the individualities,the uncertainties of performing gestures, and how ultimately the individual performances can bring out completely different nuances depending on the individualities of the performers and the directors. I guess that’s part and parcel of how you wrote the piece, is that right? You want to really just bring those possibilities out?

Chris: Right – there are moments when individual performers or individual bits of material come to the surface, but then they fall back down, so there’s this kind of undulation – I guess is a good way to put it – of that material that comes out or then is subsumed into a larger texture or sound. So, definitely. And one other thing that I would just mention, because for anyone that doesn’t know the piece, one of the things that I think is the most challenging for putting it on is the way that I wrote for the piano. There are two assistants who are constantly kind of manipulating things within the piano, and some of it is things that are percussive, but other times it’s very specific harmonics that need to be activated and especially for people who haven’t done it before, that can be like a really difficult task to find exactly the right spot and exactly the right string. So just the fact that a group is willing to attempt something that requires such an open mind and such a willingness to accept the challenge, you know, that’s wonderful.