In recent years, I have become increasingly beguiled by contemporary music, and I find it especially fulfilling to perform relatively new music. I stumbled across flutist-composer Claudia Anderson’s “Weather Conversations” for flute, alto flute, and electronics (electronic material by John Rommereim), published in 2017, while looking for solo repertoire for alto flute. I couldn’t stop thinking about the interplay of the electronic material with the flute, which I would describe as searing, spiky, and gorgeous, and it left an emotional impact on me. I presented the piece at the Mid-Atlantic Flute Convention this past February and was fortunate enough to connect with Claudia and learn all about the piece and her as an artist.
Corinne Mona: Where did the idea for Weather Conversations come from? Was it always called Weather Conversations?
Claudia Anderson: I have been accused (often correctly, as it turns out) of coming up with a title for a piece before I even start writing it. Thinking about the increasing number of extreme weather events happening around the world (now 10 years ago) and talking with one of my daughters who was writing a song called Weather Conversations, I instantly made the connection to my vision for a piece. Her meaning of the phrase had to do with light, superficial conversations – quite different from my intention. But I loved that there was a link to her, and the title stayed.
The piece “Winds for Change” by Cynthia Folio, written for your duo ZAWA!, is about climate change. Is that an element in Weather Conversations?
Absolutely, as my previous answer implies. I don’t like to say too much about my own impressions, so that the listener is free to make whatever associations they wish. But the opening dry and staccato sounds conjure up a desertlike scene to me, adamant and unrelenting, with the flute interjecting every so often but not seeming to be the main player. When the mood changes and alto enters, there is a sense of water for me. This leads to a climax of a nature that can be whatever comes to your mind.
Please tell us about the creation of the electronic material for this piece. How did you and John Rommereim collaborate?
This is a great story. First of all, the electronic material was all taken from my own sparse sound inputs, recorded into John’s program Max MSP. So this is a totally organic piece, with everything coming from the same source. When it came to making the soundtrack, we sat beside each other kind of like captain and co-pilot – John manipulating the software in real time and myself commenting as he went. I think we had some sort of general idea about how it was going to progress, but honestly it felt like a weird kind of improv that evolved from the sounds he was generating and from my ongoing comments like, Oh more of that! Or, let’s transition to a new mood, etc. Five minutes later we had a soundscape! I used this as my structure upon which to write the live part. It was great because I didn’t have to worry about creating my own framework, and the soundtrack inspired me to create the live part, sometimes integrated and sometimes going against or attempting to be let in to the conversation.
Weather Conversations uses many extended techniques, including spoken sounds into the flute, pitch bends, multiphonics, custom fingerings for notes, and singing and playing, which all contribute to making awesome aural effects. I’m just going to ask about one of them: Why did you include singing and playing for much of the middle alto flute section? How would you go about practicing singing and playing for this piece?
I wanted to emphasize the human element with the S+P in this section, to expose the vulnerability (ever increasing) we face with nature’s extremes. My aim was to actually make it difficult to sing as the tessitura rises; there is a strain for me at least, to reach the top of the line and be somewhat in tune with the flute. I often think I should explain this to the audience, or put it into my notes. Something stops me though: maybe it would be giving myself “permission” to be faulty or imperfect to my audience, and my instinct is to keep the struggle internal.
In practicing this technique here, I would first sing the flute line in unison/octaves to find the best throat placement for you. When you go to the third above, try singing across the blowhole and just fingering the flute notes without trying to play them. You will generate enough air to hear the interval as you sing. As you know, the sensation of playing while singing entails pushing faster, more concentrated air through the tube. When you add the flute sound, be aware of keeping the throat very open and focusing on the voice over the flute. I feel I’m using 2-3X more air support and need to be especially aware of my abs when I go to the highest spot in the line. Without that, my pitch suffers and my throat will want to close. Though voice quality is not paramount (the untrained, vulnerable voice adds to overall effect), pitch is pretty important.
What advice would you give someone who is playing a piece with electronics for the first time?
Have as much information as possible at hand about the soundtrack from the composer. Notation is still at fairly early stages for electronics in a score; from my experience, every composer has their own approach. Sound/timing cues are crucial to absorb as you learn both the track and your part. Since the track won’t flex, you learn discipline on a new level. Give yourself more time than normal to learn the backing track’s important cue moments, for the simple reason that all the pressure to be accurate is on you alone! It’s a collaboration and integration of sound between the two of you, but only one of you is able to think and respond in the moment. Having a tempo-altering app such as Amazing Slow Downer is extremely helpful, especially if the score is at all complex. Plan to learn in small chunks and get used to the sense of time as you play. Some pieces require or are aided by having a stopwatch on the stand; I am often surprised at the reality of 10/15/30 seconds and have to adjust up or down with my tempo and/or pulse. The other really important thing is to achieve proper balance between your live sound and the recorded track. Having another set of ears is crucial, someone whose ears you trust. This is harder than it may seem! And the overall effect of the piece hangs in the balance. I use a wireless mic to amplify my sound; this allows you to boost the track and often to hear things that are not clear at a lower level. I cannot emphasize this point enough, as I’ve heard too many flute and electronics performances that are not as impactful as they could be because the balance was off and/or because the overall level was not enough.
Please tell us a bit about yourself. How did you come to be a composer?
Decades of performing many kinds of music – solo, chamber, orchestral, opera – and doing lots of commissioning and arranging with my flute duo ZAWA! (With Jill Felber, formed in 1997) accumulated in my ears and head to finally give myself a mandate to start writing on my own. I was always drawn to contemporary music and would rummage through the bins of my local music store as a teenager, looking for the odd-looking and sounding things that nobody else seemed to want. I was looking for ways for the flute to do what it was not “supposed to,” to go beyond its traditional boundaries. Composing has been a more recent thing, and I never thought of myself as a composer before the last ten years or so. But in fact, I had been composing in various ways that included arranging and working closely with the composers who wrote for our duo.
Cynthia Folio is a great example of a marvelous composer who wrote Winds for Change for ZAWA! In 2014, and before that Z3 in 2008. In each instance the three of us collaborated closely on our respective visions of the music. By the time we commissioned Winds for Change, we all knew each other well and Jill and I could dig further into our wishes as virtuosic performers combined with how we heard the music’s arc develop. Cynthia, from her part as the creator of this 14-minute concerto, of course had her own ideas that challenged us to be more specific and to give her a “shopping list” of what we were after. We laugh about this now, and Jill still has the list on a torn piece of paper! Cynthia laughs too, but at the time she was a bit overwhelmed with the demands from these two strong and determined women!
The result was an incredible work that we tour with now, in a version evolved from its original string-plus-percussion score to 9 flutes (picc down to contrabass) plus percussion. Our colleague Angeleita Floyd tours with us as conductor, and she pulls together the group of players in a couple of days to perform with us, often at colleagues’ flute studios and regional, national, international flute festivals. We are about to travel to Penn State for such a festival (Feb 25), performing Winds for Change along with three other pieces written for us with this flute “band” backing. The PSU flute studio makes up the band and it becomes a truly collaborative and inclusive community event, with their participation and involvement in making great music.
My interest in solo flutes with a soundtrack represented the next flute “horizon” for expanding my sense of what the instrument could do. It also put me in a position to start thinking about creating my own soundtrack, and the pandemic gave me the time to explore this. Although I had written on and off before this for my instrument, nothing substantial or convincing for me emerged until the notion of combining live flute sound with recorded sounds (many manipulated from my flute sounds input into the software) took hold.
What upcoming compositions or projects are you excited about?
Glass Ceilings, my commission-composing-performing project initiated in late 2019 and resulting in 5 amazing works (all by women) that I have been touring with since 2022, has given me the impetus to write more for this program as we move further away from 2020. I wrote a piece premiered at the 2023 NFA Convention in Phoenix called Desert Night Chi, using nocturnal animal sounds from the Sonoran Desert among other sounds, and now I am looking at writing a version for my duo ZAWA!. We recently put out a call for scores for our duo with electronic soundtrack, and we are working with several composers who submitted scores to us to put together a new program to tour with in the coming season. ZAWA will also premiere a new work by Ali Ryerson for two flutes and soundtrack at the 2024 NFA Convention, “Touching the Clouds Again.”
Claudia Anderson is known for her originality and brilliance as a solo and chamber music performer across the U.S. She is a founding member of the innovative flute duo ZAWA! (with Jill Felber) and the summer flute intensive Passion Flute: Foundations for Creative Performing. Principal flute with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls (IA) Symphony and on the faculty of Grinnell College, during the summer Anderson is flute faculty and Wind Area Head of the College Intensive program at Rocky Ridge Music (www.rockyridge.org) in Colorado. She has taught at the Universities of Iowa and Northern Iowa, Ithaca College and the University of California at Santa Barbara. An active member of the National Flute Association, she recently completed a 4-year term on the NFA’s New Music Advisory Committee.
Claudia’s solo album In This World (released in 2014 on cdbaby) includes her debut as a composer, Weather Conversations for flute and electronics. ALRY Publications released Weather Conversations in August 2017, the company’s first flute and fixed media publication. In 2019, ALRY released the latest in a series of ZAWA! arrangements and original compositions for the duo, Snap! for two flutes and fixed electronic media by John Rommereim. ZAWA! commissioned flutist-composer Cynthia Folio to write Z3 for two flutes and piano (2008) and recorded it on Cynthia’s chamber music CD Inferno Azul in 2014 (BCM&D Records). In 2014 ZAWA! commissioned and premiered Cynthia’s double flute concerto, Winds for Change, a musical meditation on the environment. Winds for Change tours nationally and internationally in its latest version – an all-flute chamber orchestra – with Angeleita Floyd conducting. Most recently, ZAWA! released their album ZAWA! RemiX in December 2023, on cdbaby to all major streaming services. Claudia’s newest project, Glass Ceilings, commissioned several high-profile women composers and flutists to write pieces for flute(s) solo and electronic media, with its originating theme of gender inequality expanded to embrace the effects of COVID-19 and racial tensions of 2020. The program of works by Eve Beglarian, Lisa Bost-Sandberg, Allison Loggins-Hull, Ali Ryerson, and Anderson began touring nationally in early 2022 and continues to tour in to 2024. As of September 2022, all the commissioned works are published: Eve Beglarian’s music at evbvd.com, Lisa Bost-Sandberg’s with Chromaworks at lisabost.com and just flutes.com, Allison Loggins-Hull at Flutronix.com, Ali Ryerson’s at Theodore Presser Music, and Claudia Anderson’s at alrypublications.com. Anderson’s Glass Ceilings won the NFA’s Newly Published Music Competition in 2023.
Corinne Mona is a musician with roots in Maryland and all over the world. A champion of contemporary music, she has played flute, piccolo, and alto flute throughout the contiguous 48, Norway, the UK, Spain, Italy, France, Poland, and Japan. Corinne currently freelances in the Maryland/DC area in various orchestral and chamber music settings and she also loves to teach. In November 2022, she organized a successful solo charity recital in support of Ukraine.