Anne LeBaron: 

Harp Improvisor, Avant Garde Composer, Chess Master

[Originally appeared in MOLE #9.]

Interview personnel

F: Is there ever a problem figuring out how to place the harp toward an audience?
A: I played with an orchestra recently where I was playing two harps at once and I was sort of sandwiched in between two of them. The first rehearsal we had I was right in front, dead center in the middle of the orchestra. I loved that because I felt protected, but the conductor wanted me out front, so for the concert I was out front. You want to be sure at least half the audience can see your face. I was angled so I had to look at him like this (awkward craning) while the audience was out front. Back when I used to play weddings, I hated being out front. I used to think be played where it couldn't be seen, for some bizarre reason. So I was at this one wedding, and they never told me where to put the thing. They had all this ivy in the church so I just put the harp back behind the ivy and the choir. The wedding went happened and I played my part, but afterwards the mother was in the middle of a rage because she was heartsick about it because she had wanted the harp up front. And no one ever saw it. I thought "it really is special for people to see this instrument."

J: How do you draw musical inspiration from something like a blood chit, which inspired "I Am An American" on the new CD? How do you translate an object like that into musical ideas?
A: When something strikes you that you never knew existed, and you just can't get over its existence, and you imagine nobody else knows about it either. You kind of can't let go of it. At the time I think I was looking for an idea for a piece, I don't really remember what for, Ed, my husband, a colonel in the Air Force, brought home a stack of these things. They were throwing them away. There were three different ones, and they all said basically the same thing as the one on the CD booklet. It was so striking to read this and feel the implicit arrogance of it. And imagine how many people had actually suffered as a result of believing this, and in the goodness of it. In fact I have an article upstairs about a Korean man who was killed and his family captured as a result of responding to this, either out of humanity or the goodness of his heart. But also theres that reward factor.

J: There is a reward?
A: I dont know what the reward is. These used to be sewn into the flight jackets along with a gold coin. I don't know when they dropped the gold coin part. I don't know if the reward is fixed or if it changes.

J: Another thing about that piece, is that it involves the tapes and the noise--which is a positive thing for us--and from a naive view of what you're doing, there seems to be a lot of anger there. It's difficult to piece out where the anger comes from, and the introspection, which definitely seems to be there.
A: I didn't want this piece to be defined as an anti-war or pro-bloodshed piece. I wanted it to be somewhere in the middle so that people who heard it could interpret it however they were going to do so. For my own interpretation, I want to emphasize more the anti-, but not all the way. It's been through a number of incarnations and before the electric harp version on the CD I was never really happy with it because it was always too genteel sounding no matter what I did to the instrument. Finally with this electric harp I was able to get enough distortion that I could take it to another level. You didn't hear that when I performed it here [at the Levine School] because it was amplified, not electric.

J: I think a lot of the irony that you're talking about comes about. And this is the part I'm not sure I can put into words when I hear your music--it's hard to say this is what she's doing, and this is where its going on.
A: You've got the word for it. See, I don't use irony to describe my music but that's exactly what it is.

J: What would be bringing that about? That's a conscious effect.
A: What's causing you to perceive it? If you take it from the end of the piece and go backwards, I take "America the Beautiful" and explode it in different ways. I think my treatment of that patriotic song in that way. I have one effect I really like, that's kind of like firecrackers, and I think that contributes to the irony. And the helicopter crashing, all the sound effects I've used at the beginning with the voice overlay, which I didn't do for a while, I didnt have any vocals in there--no, I never did it live. I would play one of those Korean gongs in this piece, and that was really powerful too. It's very difficult to define how you come to such an accurate perception. I don't know what to say. I mean, I didn't sit down and say, I'm going to write this ironic piece.

J: When you sit down to compose the piece and you'd seen this blood chit, and were thinking about it--since you write the music, do you improvise first just thinking about this thing in the back of your mind, or do you try to push consciously certain things out to people to try to let it develop?
A: If I can accurately remember what I did, which I probably can't...

J: You don't have to talk about this piece in particular any piece. The process you go through.
A:  The process you go through to write a piece is you open yourself. You really become a sponge. Also, you have to have some idea of direction. In this piece, for instance, I went into the studio, at the time I was working with the synclavier, the college at Vermont had access to one. This was back before sampling was widespread. I thought, I want to construct this plane crash kind of sound. I bought four or five sound effects records. None of them had a plane crash that satisfied me. So I constructed it with a car crash and breaking glass and I did a lot of juxtapositions to get that sound and to get the harp under it. I had some older material that I wanted to make come out of that, which is where the little tones start, where it becomes more introspective. I put those together and completely made the tape and then started working on the harp part. I think the first time I ever played was in Toronto at a festival, and it was all improvised. So I had the tape and I tried to remember what I did, and reconstructed for other performances. Bit by bit--I mean, every piece has its own journey and process--this one really did grow out of an improvisational process with the tape. In working with that improvisation, the live effects work with the tape in such a way they highlight or heighten it, cause sometimes you don't know what youre hearing live and what you're hearing on tape, and I always like working that way. Then the effects processor I was using, the battery blew up or something and I lost every single parameter I'd programmed in. I had to start completely over from scratch and try and recreate all this for the performance that you heard. That's just a drag, because you feel like you've finished that work and its nice to play it but you want to move on to other things.

J: I also had a question about the role of improvisation in composed music. You're talking about shaking up what the listener hears and how they're going to perceive the piece, but what other functions do you see improvisation bringing in. I'm also thinking of the opera, The E&O Line.
A: You gather together certain players, and you know they will be fresh and ready to work. It's more than an interpretation. You have Mozart's Symphony in C, you have two dozen, three dozen interpretations of it. When you have a piece that has these openings for improvisation, you have so much more room for so much more to be added to the piece than just another interpretation. I really, really love collaborating in the way that that allows you to do, so the people who are playing that can add their solos to the piece, and it gives them a way to stretch out, too. In the piece I wrote for the National Symphony, "American Icons," the sax player called me the other day, and said "What kind of feeling do you want for that..." Anybody who plays the saxophone has got to have some experience playing some kind of jazz, and in fact he did. And he sang one of his lines and I said, that's exactly it, it's a delayed back beat, of course you don't play it exactly like it's written, you mess with it. But in another place he wanted to do that and I said no, this is straight because it comes out of rock. So even in a piece like that where everything is written there's a little bit of room for that, because you can't write down a delayed back beat, it's something that has to be felt.

J: Is that similar to how you approach it when you play that on the harp, as on the "Blue Studies."
A: Those were constructed on the keyboard, out of samples that were taken from a harp. No I didn't write that one at all. That was very cerebral, and intuitive--I don't think they have very much to do with a jazz format.

J: How do you describe that kind of thinking? Because that would be the immediate way that I would perceive any kind of improvisation, from a jazz standpoint, and its interesting that you would differentiate them.
A: When you think about it in a jazz context, you have to have some kind of harmonic or rhythmic or instrumentation to give you that context. Like Derek Bailey's playing--he doesn't really play with grooves or a harmonic language. It's just out there, and to me it has very little to do with jazz, and in fact he usually doesn't play with jazz players. That's another area that's a boundary that's very interesting to explore. There's this gray area of where jazz is, when you think of Cecil Taylor or Ornette Coleman, and then that area of improvisation that's something else.

F: Is that NSO thing in rehearsal now?
A: I get two rehearsals: one the day before and one the day of. 

F: Maybe it's a stereotype, but it seems to me classical players have a real problem knowing how to swing. 
G: (laughter)
J: That may be his moment.
A: Yeah, [laughs] they do. But fortunately, this guy who plays the sax at one point, he's a classical player. This is an evocation of music from the 50s and 60s so it's really like a rock piece for orchestra and organ, so they're either going to flip over it or hate it. I wrote out a lot of things triplet so parts of it would have the feeling of swing. But there's a subtle feeling of swing that you can hear on recordings, but if you transcribe those recordings, it's not a triplet, it's not straight-ahead sixteenths, but somewhere in between. And that's what we have to feel. Delayed backbeat is one thing to call it. This guy knew exactly what I wanted. I didn't write swing, he could just tell from the context. But he's a sax player, not a string player.

F: I guess that's what I was referring to. I know a couple string players, and when I say "Let's get together and jam," they'll say "I only play off the written page."
A: But you know, Bobby McFerrin is doing amazing things in St. Paul [with the symphony orchestra]. I saw a TV special on him the other day, and I'm a great fan of his. He's really going to another level, and opening people up to what they can do. They can only play off the written page because that's a self-imposed limitation. And years of other people's limitations hammered into them. He's showing them they don't have to play off the page. He has these crusty old musicians singing scat. Its hilarious. And they love it, because his enthusiasm is so infectious. 

J: You said those improvisations on the harp were more cerebral. How are they more cerebral?
A: It was more cerebral because I had more time to determine how I wanted things to sequence out. As opposed to coming up on stage that's totally improvised. It was just very well thought out. I had just hours and hours of tapes that we had done--I mean this was a process where I went in for two days and sampled the harp, all the way up the 44 strings. I started with that simple thing, and then we went to the bow, and then to the spring, and then to the glides. I had a stack of floppies with samples. We took various ones and put them in certain areas on the control. After we had various configurations of these, for each configuration I would improvise, then I brought the engineer and his assistant into it. Ed had one of those gongs and that's why there's a gong on it at the end. Out of this trio, I constructed the final product from all that, how I thought it would build and flow.

J: I had a simpler question about improvisation, regarding the scraping noises in "I Am An American." During the live show, you had something you rubbed on the string.
G: Some kind of foreign object.
A: Was it a long object?
Unison: Yeah.
A: It was a spring. It was my found object from the sidewalk of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

J: What made you decide to put that in as part of the composition?
A: First of all, that spring I feel is one of the signature things that I do. No one else has done it before or since. No one has stolen it from me; I've had other things taken, or shared, shall I say. The spring is really unique; it's a textured bow--it has little ridges, and it's just like bowing with more friction and a higher pitch.

J: How do you notate something like that?
F: We assume you're using Sarfeggio notation on a five-note staff.
A: You should see some of it then, because I've written pieces that use those.

F: So any harp player could play any of the compositions?
A: Not all of them, because I haven't written them all down. The ones that I have written down, I explain very clearly, and it's really weird looking. [Showing scores] This one is where you take the spring and it's a ricochet, it slams back against the string. So you think of a notation that would show that but a way to explain it in words as well. So the clustery thing is where it slaps across the strings. 

F: I notice there's no time signatures.
A: No, its just one-second divisions. This is the bowing--see these bow marks, down up, down up.

F: So anybody can get these at the music store?
A: This one's published by MFB music, so you'd have to order it from them. I stopped publishing my music because sometimes people have trouble getting it, and I can just run it off upstairs and charge what the publisher does, and I see the profit. Otherwise... Unless a publisher does really good publicity for you, you're giving the copyright away. I have trouble giving up my copyright, and I stopped giving my pieces away. This is for the two harps, the harp cadenza, where you're playing in between. These are pedal changes. I did invent some notation. This is a fast glissando, the way you'd hear it on a flamenco guitar. A lot of these are really rapid glissandos coordinated between harps, and I use two because the pedal configurations make it so you can only have seven pitches at one time. With two harps you can have the full spectrum with various harmonic weights.

F: Do a lot of people play two harps?
A: I'm the only one. A concerto like this has never been done.

J: She got that from Beefheart, two saxes at once.
A: Well, you know, various jazz people have played multiple instruments...
J: Rashan Roland Kirk played three horns.
A: ...and when I was on tour once I did play three harps. I had this one, that little one and a big concert one. But for a concerto, I really like the idea of using the pedals in these different formations. And it was really quite successful. 

F: Have you ever written anything nobody can play?
A: I've written things people tell me they can't play, but then I find other people who can.

F: Because its out of their range, or out of their area of expertise?
A: It's just because they think they can't do it. Its just the same way with the people who say they can't play off the page, and they're not the kind of personalities willing to stretch. I'm really adamant for writing idiomatically for the instruments for what they do best, so I'm very careful not to write music that is unplayable. But now kids are coming up through college can play things we thought were impossible a generation before. So it's all a matter of time before what was unplayable is playable.

F: Do you ever run into people who get through the rehearsals and decide they don't like the piece, who started out playing music because they liked to but are now forced to because its their job? I read about a mutiny during a Philip Glass rehearsal.
A: I think I might be one of the mutineers during that! That was another striking thing to see McFerrin took people who were kind of dead and managed to bring them back to life. It wasn't by asking them to do something unpleasant or repetitious, it was really by engaging their spirit.

F: He's giving them a different way to look at it?
A: Yeah, he's giving them a different way to look at it; he's getting different composite sounds, he's making it fun again. When you play the same Beethoven symphony year after year, its got to be a drudge. It's not like he's saying don't play Beethoven, I think he's probably conducting Beethoven, but he's doing it in a different way. You do run up against that. I won a competition in Philadelphia about ten years ago, and the musicians who were going to make up the string trio recorded on Rana, Rituals and Revelation, the original musicians were top players in the orchestra. The rehearsal I had with them was a total and complete disaster. Had I not had the smidgen of self-confidence I had at that time, it would have been really devastating. They basically said "This piece cannot be played and were not going to do it, and what were you thinking when you wrote this?" It just went on and on. Fortunately, one person who was involved got rid of those people and brought in some other ones who were much more liberal.

J: What got you into playing to begin with?
A: To begin with I was given a little portable organ at Christmastime, one of those little things with the chords here, and the buttons you press for C major and minor.

Unison: Cheese organ!
A: I just loved it. I wanted to learn to read music. No one in my immediate family read music. 
My father played guitar; he still does, bluegrass, but he didn't really read other than guitar tablature. I got all these Shaum piano books and I taught myself to read the notes. Then my parents bought me a piano and got me lessons with our Baptist church pianist. I went through all the bad lessons with her and some other people. My mother found the one woman who was a Juilliard graduate in Tuscaloosa, and she was eccentric, straight out of a Faulkner novel. She had run off with some young man when she was younger and the mother had annulled the marriage. So she was really an old maid, and took care of her mother, but she was also someone who had graduated from Juilliard and had a world view of things. In her studio she had one of those machines that would make vinyl recordings, so all of her students got to make a record and have it pressed.

J: I was an acetate?
A: Yeah. I was very good at the time. I was playing Charles Griffiths, which for young ears was really a stretch, especially in the backwaters of country Alabama.

F: The downfall of my piano playing was when they gave me some Bartok, and I couldn't understand it.
A: I think it has a lot to do with your teacher. If somebody just puts that in front of you it's really hard, but if you have a teacher who says "listen to the unusual sounds in this piece..." The Griffiths' piece I heard was the "White Peacock," so there's all this tone painting going on that really helps to understand the poetry of it.

J: How did you choose the harp?
A: Well, it chose me, it really did. It was sitting in a room, when I was in college studying composition, and had this training on keyboard, and also two years on viola, which I never liked because my arm got so tired. I'd pass this big room in one of these old buildings on campus with high ceilings, and there was this golden harp, just like in a fairy tale. No one was ever in that room playing it. I wanted to make its acquaintance, and I thought it needed some company. I expressed my desire to learn the instrument, and found out one of the composition teachers was willing to teach me. Then one of the professional harpists in the state of Alabama got wind that this composition person was teaching harp, and she was horrified. I mean, he could play one thing, his own version of "Thus Spake Zarathustra," the theme from 2001. 

J: Is that a well known harp piece? (laughter)
A: Well, he was gay, and he could play a mean piece; he could do a knockout Liberace thing. But his technique was all wrong, so when I started over, I had to start from scratch, and this teacher from the symphony said we can do this, but you're going to have to be patient, and you're going to have to retrain your muscles and start like a child. It all has to do with the position of your hand and your extension. If you watch folk harpists, you notice they always have this claw thing going on [with the hand], and I always wonder how they manage to play so quickly, being so out of alignment. You kind of know when you find your instrument. I found out since then that its one of the instruments that when you're pulling it back and you're playing it, the sounds go into your body. So you could think of it as a healing kind of instrument, putting these vibrations back into you.

F: There's a downside to that too, I've noticed, cause I've been teaching myself violin, and all the bad sounds come into my face! [Laughter at McCool's expense]
G: But I like the bad sounds, Finn!
F: There are a lot of bad sounds.
J: In Fellini's film Orchestra Rehearsal, the journalist asked the musicians why they picked their instruments; I don't remember what the harpist said, but a lot of them talked about their instrument imitating the sound of the human voice. Is there anything like that with you that made you feel its your instrument?
A: Its a sexy instrument.

J: The harp? Its so big, awkward...
A: It's curvy, curvaceous. It's seductive in a way. It's ethereal, too...If I have to think about it too much, I always get into how it presented such a challenge; I mean there are so many limitations with this instrument. It's like moving furniture every time you play somewhere.

J: That's what I mean--that wouldn't seem very sexy to me.
A: But you don't think about that when you're learning and you're not good enough to play anywhere. Also, the harp is an instrument than anyone can play and it will sound beautiful. So it's not like violin, where you have to reach a certain level before you start to sound beautiful. And there's a magical quality to it, too. When I take it in to the preschool where I do some work, the children just attack it. 

J: It looks like it would be a lot of fun to play because it looks interesting.
A: It's also ancient; it's probably as old as percussion, because it's the one string, the bow and arrow.

F: Have you heard Garrison Keilor's take on the harp? He said it's like living with an elderly parent because it's hard to keep happy and hard to get in and out of cars. [More laughter at McCool's expense, plenty of Butthead jokes]
A: He's not one of my favorite writers!

J: You wouldn't like the Fellini movie either, because the harp player dies in that movie.
A: I've seen that movie!

J: I wondered what you would think of that.
A: It's because of the angel connection. This is a sideline that might amuse you...There are catalogs devoted to nothing but harps and harp recordings, and I sent some of my CDs to one of them, and all the materials came back. The owner said she didn't think this is what her customers are looking for. When you look through the catalog, you see they have representations of classical, a lot of new age, a lot of folk, and quasi-jazz, like this one harpist Deborah Hudson Conant, who bills herself as jazz harp, but it's kind of limited. 

J: I had a rather flippant question along that line, whether there was a harp rivalry between you and Zeena Parkins. Do you know her?
A: Oh no. I know her. I've been at it a lot longer first of all. Secondly, I don't like the kind of noise that she's into. And she's not a classically trained harpist, I mean, the chops aren't really there, and any harpist who's seen her play will tell you this. She's played with some pretty good people, and she's made the scene, which is something I could have done, but I opted to go into composition much more deeply than the harp playing.

J: I know you don't play out very often.
A: I might resurrect the quintet (as on the Phantom Orchestra) for a recording and a show, with new material--like this take off of that Herb Alpert piece, "Taste of Honey," I wrote. It's too bad there's nowhere really here to play. It's really a question of economics. For this thing in New York, the money they're giving split four ways, asking people to come to rehearsal, asking me to go up there, write all the material--it's nothing! It's nothing! That's why I'm in composition, at least people commission you. You're not running all over the place and getting other people together to play; they do it for you, which is much more realistic when you have a child. So it's all this practical stuff that plays into the directions I'm taking right now. It's just too bad to get something like this together and just have one venue for it.

F: On the liner notes for the Musical Railism CD, they talk about your Dad's background in bluegrass...what part of the your music do you see the bluegrass coming through?
A: I don't see bluegrass coming through anything! [laughs] I have very little patience with bluegrass.

F: It's too repetitive? It all sounds the same?
A: That could be it. It doesn't have rhythmic complexity. It's a really a showcase for instrumental virtuosity--people love playing it. But country music and bluegrass, I still haven't come to terms with that. 

J: How did you pick up the blues influence for your music, especially the opera.
A: The blues were a part of my life when I was growing up. When we were little, my mother worked, and she hired a black woman to come in and take care of us. If one of us would get sick, she would howl. At the time, we thought it was really strange, but that's the way she is. And she would be praying. I think that was the first time I ever heard anything remotely resembling the blues, but it was kind of vocalizing that has some relationship to what you hear. In college, we'd have great blues players making the circuit. This was the 60s and people were open, so I'd see people who aren't alive anymore, players from Mississippi; I'd sit in coffee houses this close [front row] and watch them work. 

J: Who were some of the people you saw who really struck you?
A: Fred McDowell, they call him Mississippi Fred McDowell. He's the one on "Eurydice's Death" in the opera. Then my friend Davey Williams played with Johnny Shines. And I'd see various groups like Salt and Pepper, and Johnny Shines and his groups. You know, we were all experimenting with...drugs...which gave it that much more intensity to burn itself into your brain. But one of the lasting things that came out of it was just how deep it was felt, and how universal a language it is.

J: The opera has a lot of blues--what's the genesis of that? Hearing the blues and wanting to do something with it...
A: No, no. You just kind of absorb these things and they come leaping out at you years later. In fact, I sold all my rock albums when I decided I was going to become a serious composer, and a lot of these records are things I wish I had now. I gave it all up for Beethoven. I just rejected so much, all the Joni Mitchell, and Jimi Hendrix, who I love now. I had to through this rejection, and what brought me back to music that was not classical is jazz, groups like Weather Report.

F: When you incorporate jazz idioms, do you see that as an extension of what Ellington is doing? His stuff is almost composed in its entirety, in little segments.
A: Not really as an extension of what he's doing, although I admire him as much as anybody. His great advantage was that he had people he worked with all the time, and he knew their limitations and he knew how to push them in certain directions. He also had fabulous orchestrators. He kept things more under control than I do on the Phantom Orchestra recording. Partially, that's because of a time factor, but it's also because I was coming into doing these pieces from a place where I was totally free with the improvisation. The more I thought about imposing compositional structures on these people I would play free with, the more it seemed to be a challenge: how do you write for somebody like Davey Williams, who's an elementary reader, but once you communicate to him what you want, he does amazing things with it? I wonder how many people like that there were in Ellington's orchestra? If I go back and work more in this area, I would want to write more, and have less free places just so the pieces would hang together tighter than they do now. That may be because I'm not playing free so much now, that I'm thinking in more structured ways.

J: What made you build up to the idea that you could do improv with the harp?
A: You should know this. I hung out with the renegades at Tuscaloosa, among whom were Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith, and other people. We knew and coveted the music of people like Derek Bailey and the improvisers from England, and also from Germany, Paul Robens. We would hear what they were doing and we were doing the same kind of thing, but we didn't have anyone to connect with this. I think it was happening in pockets--this is like the early 70s--all over the country. We would get together once a week, people who explored this way, and we would just play all night. This was maybe a year or so after I had started learning the harp, or maybe less, but I would take the harp in my station wagon, sometimes I would be bitching and moaning about it--why am I going over there--I didn't know at the time it was a way to really grow, to play this kind of music. There was not an improv in sight, we were just doing it to be doing it. There were personality conflicts, and this and that. What came out of it finally, was that Davey and LaDonna formed a duo, and they traveled all over the world for many years. Then they got divorced. So I was learning classical pieces, and I was studying with great players, like at the Salzedo Harp Colony, which was run by people given charge of the estate after Carlos Salzedo died. At the same time I was doing this other thing and I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know how to reconcile them.

J: When did you first figure out you could mix the two?
A: Not that long ago. Maybe four or five years ago.

J: What did you do in the interim? 
A: I got the masters [degree], and I was doing all composing. When I was given the Fulbright to work in Germany, I had them ship the harp over and I wrote to every professor in Europe that I knew, and basically said I'm here! It took about a year, but then they started inviting me to festivals, but by then I was living here again, because the Fulbright was only for a year. So I started traveling over there to play. That was always improvisation. And now there are quite a few people who are composing or making structured scores. I've done some things with Georg Graewe, who's a pianist in Cologne. We have record out actually.

J: For "Eurydices Death," what's the process of gathering things up and putting things together, the blues tape and other things, to put that together? 
A: I really can't tell you what the hell I was doing when I put that together. I had fallen in love with this machine, the synclavier. It's like I was addicted to it; I couldn't get enough of it. You have to imagine before people had sampling, so these sounds had never been heard. I had never heard the possibilities of this sampling technique. You can do it with tape speed, but it's quite something else to be able to play it on a keyboard and manipulate it that quickly in real time. I had this poetry I was working with, and I was trying to get at the undertones of that poetry so it wasnt just the words coming through but everything the words were saying. I came out of that experience with this sonic photograph of her at the train depot: the train coming and the band climbing onto the train and playing this typical New Orleans funeral band dirge. When you change the words, it was really helpful to have these sounds. 

J: You mean Thulani Davis' libretto?
A: She had the tape and she took the old words out and put the new words in. Some of them are very close to the poetry. This technology gave me a way to communicate ideas. It's like looking for a perfume and not knowing how to make it until you find the right raw ingredients and the right way to mix them all, but you know what you want in a vague sense. So that was like my perfume mixer. Finding the raw materials; I used Fred McDowell on there. The train was always there, to have that train sound rumbling around.

J: What made you decide to do the opera with that theme?
A: The opera has a history. I met the original librettist, Edwin Koenig, and he's a poet who taught at Brown University. He had a verse play called "Orpheus Below." I read that late one night at this mansion, this estate with these tall fir trees, and it's really gothic. I really loved what he'd written, cause it seemed so true. Always when you meet a writer and you read their things there's another level of depth. I was exiled back to Alabama because I ran out of money; I had to go back and take a teaching job. To get out, I applied for the Fulbright, and got it. I said I'd write an opera or at least an oratorio. Living in Germany, I was hearing train whistles and feeling homesick, thinking these train whistles are so vocal, and they're so eerie here in Germany knowing the history of what they represent. It was all really scary and I couldn't wait to get back. But I had this very intense idea that I'd do something with trains and the whistles that turned into voices. And then I met the synclavier, and started doing a lot of the tape work that became the opera. The more I worked with the trains and the train whistles the more bluesy it got. The more bluesy it got, the more distant it got from the language of this original librettist. Meanwhile we were having workshops of it done in New York. I realized I couldn't stay with that librettist because he wasn't getting what it was all about, so we broke up. I spent about a year looking for a replacement, until Thulani came along. These things are never cut and dried. You never know how theyre happening to you. It just evolved.

F: Do you see yourself evolving in terms of another instrument?
A: I don't think my life as a musician would be complete if I stopped playing the harp. It's another aspect that I want to keep alive, though I can't do it full time. Certainly I'll never stop writing music, that's what I really love, writing for other people. There's such a connection to being a performer as well as somebody who writes when you're interacting with other musicians.

J: What do you compose at your job for the Children's Museum?
A: Not much.

J: That's your job, right?
A: Yeah. Well, I wrote a piece called the "Turtle Tango."

J: Is this background music for their programs?
A: I didn't write this for the Children's Museum. I work also in a preschool that's called the Model Early Learning Center, based on the Reggio Emilio system from Italy. It's for inner city children aged 3 to 6. It is a paradise. It's the best place you'd ever want to send your child. One teacher for every five students, space like you wouldn't believe, lots of visual things going on all the time; they have a room devoted to music filled with African instruments. The "Turtle Tango" came out of many pages of transcripts the teachers had taken about how the children reacted to having a turtle visit for a week. And they have a cat who lives in the school, named Coco. We did a little performance with dialog and the children speaking through a microphone and different effects so their voices could sound like the cat or the turtle. The highlight of it was [sings] "I have a place/to hide my nose/my legs and toes"--and this was a tango, so I was playing the accordion--"My toes have nails/to scratch the box/when I want out/Please help me find/my home Im lost/Coco lets go." And then Coco sings; that was the turtle: "Oh turtle, my friend please come and play with me..."

J: I had the idea this was your job.
A: This is part of my job to go in and have fun with these preschoolers and do little projects like this.

J: You're like a music teacher?
A: Not really, because I don't go in that much. I don't go in and say "This is C..." We just do projects like that.

J: That sounds like teaching...a more open ended version.
A: Yes. But it's not what most people think of music educators. I'll tell you, these children are starved for it. If I haven't been in for a few weeks, I'm just mobbed.

J: What caught my attention at your performance at the Levine school was the gesture of your hands as you played. It added to the performance; it became very dramatic, the way you'd pause before playing something. Is that intentional?
A: Oh, no, that's the technique.

J: That's really how you were taught to play?
A: I wasn't really taught to do a lot of what I do now. It probably just came out of what I was doing at the time. Nothing I do in that piece is intentional. I have done some theatrical things before. One time I was playing with LaDonna Smith, doing a duo in Alabama, I had decided to do something really crazy. I like to do that when I'm in Alabama, just pull it all out, I don[t care what they think. I had traveled with my vibrators there, and I was experimenting with vibrators on the harp at the time. I didn[t have an amplifier, so the vibrators acted as a kind of resonator. I was sitting in this chair, and I had this vibrator on the strings--a really big one, with this big [ball] on the end. All of a sudden, I fell out of the chair [demonstrating] still holding the vibrator on the harp. LaDonna was singing and playing the violin and caught what I[d done, and she turned it into this big death scene. Afterwards people came up and said "Gosh, how'd you every think of that?" They thought we'd rehearsed the whole thing. It was really just her sensitivity to what had happened.

J: What stage is the E&O Line in now?
A: We're producing it in the fall, two shows at the Lincoln, and two at Opera Americana, and possibly and open rehearsal a Carter Barron Amphitheatre. This kind of thing just takes enormous planning, and both producing agents, we don't have that much to work with, so we're constrained as to how many musicians we can hire from my wish list.

J: Is Myra Melford still going to play?
A: She wants to. I want her on it. Basically, all the same people we'd like to have. I don't know if we can afford it. We're still waiting on the main grant.

J: This is going to be a full costume production?
A: Yeah. And then Croak happens in April 1997. Croak is opera number two, about frogs and how they're disappearing from all over the world.

F: The frogs croak? [relishing the pun]
G: You have a collection of frogs, so I know you're interested in them.
A: The first piece I ever wrote for improvisers was "Concerto for Active Frogs" and it's a graphic score for frog tape, and people are conducted to play in and out of the tape. The reason I have a frog collection is that piece.

J: I've read that your interest in frog dates to when you heard them as a child.
A: We always lived in cities, but they're very much part of a child's life.

F: So that acetate of you playing piano probably has some frogs on it?
A: Uh, it probably does...

J: What happened to that?
A: It got warped in a fire, and it's somewhere in some attic.

J: What's your second recording?
A: Say Day-Bew Records, Ron Pate and his Debonairs. This is the most weird-ass album. You don't know this but you should. This is the Reverend (Fred Lane), an old friend from high school. He should have been in a mental institution then, and he should be in one now.
F: We want to hang out with these guys.
A: It also has a photo of my old boyfriend.

J: Is this all improv?
A: Well, no. Fred Lane sings covers like "Volare" and "Chicago" with Band-Aids all over his face and a tux and boxer shorts.

F: I don't think you can really play something you've never played before.
A: Sure you can.

F: I know these guys have made me play things I wouldn't normally play. How do you come up with something you've never done before?
A: You just do. And sometimes it's so good you want to come back to it.

F: What would spark that?
A: An infinite number of things.

F: But when you start, your hands are always in a specific place where they normally would be.
A: But your ear is leading you to certain connections. It's like when I played with Richard Abrams, I just made a record with him, and a bunch of other people. The accordion player had played on Paul Simons tour, so he was really good; we were told just play a duet to lead into this song. So you just hear harmonically where things are going. With the harp its very tricky because you have to remember where your pedals are. That D string isn't always D. It's D-flat, D-natural, or D-sharp, and you've got to be conscious of the chordal system you're playing with, if you're trying to do something evocative harmonically. Sometimes I just cast it all to fate, and I just play completely spontaneously. For that, because it was the two of us, and he was playing so beautifully, I very much thought it out as we were playing. I'd never done that before, and it turned out very nicely on the record. I think if you play something a lot, the more you play it the worse it gets, because you wear it out.

J: Did you organize the Pataphysical Revue?
A: No, I was just a player. This was organized by the Blue Denim Deals, which was one of these college rock bands that all the guys played in. When you hear the "Frog Concerto," which I wrote [and played on] you'll hear Lane say "And now, ladies and gentlemen, for something completely different...you know these serious composers, bleah!"

G: But it has your stage name on there?
J: Yeah, it says "Raudeluna's Pataphysical Revue." How did your stage name [Raudeluna] get attached to it?
A: Well, my grandmother was the chess champion of the Southeast and played Bobby Fischer [in an exhibition match]--she could have tied him, but she dropped out of the game at 3AM. She taught me to play, and I got very good so I was beating college boys when I was 11 or 12, and actually won a college tournament. Then I started beating her. I joined the U.S. Chess Federation, and because my name was the same as her name, they started sending material for me to her. So I said, I'll fix that. I had joined the federation about the time of that recording, so I just took the name "Raudeluna." You'll know Im telling the truth because if you see the label on these Chess Life Magazines...[shows that it says "Raudeluna Anne LeBaron."]

F: Is there a big chess circuit among contemporary composers?
A: I'm one of the few. Anthony Braxton plays chess; he plays really well.

J: You ever play him?
A: I always wanted to. We talked about it once. I might start playing again. I just found the best chess set; it's light as a feather. It's all made out of foam. It's this day-glo set I found up in Philly last week. It's a travel set. 

F: It seems like it would be hard to find somebody to give you a good game.
A: It's not easy. And people now are playing on computers, and all that.

J: What do you think of that computer match with Kasparov?
A: I really think he's the last human chess master that you will see. There's such strides that have been made--that computer lost to him because it couldn't think originally. He learned after the first two games how to exploit its weaknesses, so he kept things really dense on the board. The strength of the computer is that it thinks 40 moves ahead and it works out all the combinations, and he only thinks 5 or 6 moves ahead.

J: That doesn't seem very fun to me. It's a computer, so naturally it's going to be able to do that. You actually have to play a person, which would offer the same limitations.
A: Just the fact that it's there, and he's the greatest one, so he has to prove himself.

F: Are there any poker faces going on at chess matches? Is there a lot of physical psyching out that goes on between players?
A: Oh, yeah. I got finally got turned off because it was very hard for the male species--I'm generalizing, but I had people get so angry, throw things down on the board. I was young, I would beat people much older than myself. Kids are good at this, they learn quickly...

F: You weren't bratty were you? I mean when you won? You know how kids can taunt and stuff?
A: No, I wasn't bratty. But I sure wish I could go back to the university...The university did not let me go to the regionals; I won the tournament when I was 12, and they said "You can't go to the regional because you're not a student." No one fought for me, and I didn't think it was something that could be fought for. It was definitely discrimination. If they let me play in the tournament, then I  should have been able to represent them. But since I was a kid, the best player just let me have his queen because he wasn't playing with his guard up! I don't think it would happen today. But I don't think there's many girls playing chess.

F: How does the chess fit into your upbringing?
A: My father and grandmother would play, and you see these figures are like fantasy figures--she taught me, and the more I learned, the more fascinating it was. Then I started collecting books about opening theories. Other little girls would play with their dolls, I would sit in my room with my chess books and learn the Sicilian defense. But I tell everybody who asks about it that it was the best training for the intensive work as a composer, because it teaches you stamina, concentration, and to look for the best move, which means a lot of erasing. Not to mention mathematical and spatial abilities. It's a fabulous thing to learn when you're small. The other thing about these tournaments is it attracts all kinds of weirdos. Nerds in the worst possible way.

J: So does music. Present company excepted.
END 

Selected Discography:

Rana, Ritual and Revelation (Mode) Strange chamber music composed by LeBaron, played by New Music Consort and Theater Chamber Players.

Anne LeBaron Quintet: Phantom Orchestra. (Ear Rational) Tuba, trumpet, guitar, harp, drums skronk.

Tellus 26: Jewel Box (Tellus) Anne contributes two Blue Harp Studies to this complation of women in new music

Dora Ohrenstein: Urban Diva (Composers Recordings) Ohrenstein performs various works, including LeBaron's "Dish."

Anne LeBaron, LaDonna Smith, Davey Williams. Jewels. (Trans Museq, out of print)

Raudelunas Pataphysical Revue, starring Ron Pate's Debonairs (Say Day-Bew Records, out of print)--with Reverend Fred Lane, Anne playing harp in various combos.