Kurt Rohde is a violist and composer. He has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, such as the Rome prize, the Berlin Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. A recipient of a 2021 Creative Capital Award, Kurt is currently working on a collaborative project with artist Marie Lorenz and writer Dana Spiotta. Their new piece, Newtown Odyssey, a floating opera on the Newtown Creek, addresses environmental catastrophe and justice.

What initially drew us to Kurt Rohde is his particular relationship to collaboration. He has worked with musicians and visual artists, as well as transformed the works of a number of authors into music. Among what is astonishing about Kurt's collaborative work, to our untrained ears, is how it reveals of the source material that which we didn’t realize was essential. It achieves this without ever slipping into translation or impression — allowing the music to have its own vitality.

In this conversation we cover a range of topics, among them, his approach to collaboration, process, and what it means to fail. Because talking about music just isn’t the same thing as listening to it, we thought it would be nice to preface our conversation with It Wasn’t a Dream, the first part of his song cycle based on Diane Seuss’s poetry collection Four-Legged Girl.

— Editors Christine Degenaars & Grayson Wolf

Solar: You’ve worked in collaboration with a number of authors and artists — Diane Seuss, Donna Masini, Scott Hunter, Dana Spiotta, and others — has collaboration always been a central part of your practice?


Kurt Rohde: Let me put it this way — it has always been central, but I just didn’t know to what extent or begin to accept it as such until about twelve years ago when I was in Rome at the American Academy. For a lot of reasons that year was a real shift, a real choice to change things regarding my mental health and my creative life.

More recently, I read Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming by Agnes Callard, and it resonated immediately. Callard’s ideas about self-creation and its connection to our values, has allowed me to recognize the amount of agency involved in the acceptance that I DO deeply collaborate with others as a part of my process.

Much about my life (our lives) really is out of my (our) control, but the power to change ourselves (or not) is something we do have some say in. It’s certainly not a straight line, and it can go quite badly at times, but it is possible. The smallest possibility is still a possibility.

My creative life started (and remains) as a violist. I trained as a classical musician but I ended up playing a lot of very new music; composing music developed in tandem with playing. Collaboration (that generative process that occurs when people come in contact with one another intentionally or unintentionally and form a “third space” for making) is the core to the practice of musicking. Or at least I think it is; it certainly is for me. Even the most “soloed” performers have, at some point along the way, had to encounter and engage with others in order to create. They may be alone but they’re not in a vacuum. Isolation is not a vacuum; it is “removal from,” but never reaches complete absence. Being alone is not being in a vacuum, it is not emptiness — there is always the possibility for connection with… possibility.

I am a pretty quiet person, perceived by others as an extrovert but in fact I’m deeply introverted. Listening, being present, considering, and acknowledging others feels organic to me. And it is exhausting. That being “in the presence of” asks me to be patient and take the time to process. Listening feels like proto-collaborating, and since I love to listen, I love this initial stage.

Engaged listening with presence makes my mind whirl, spinning towards possible interactions with others. It took me years to understand this is how I make my music, and even longer to accept it as a valid process — seeking out, acknowledging, honoring the relationships with others, looking for beauty. Working with others is a beautiful thing for me.

Years ago, Paul Mann (an astounding, uncelebrated poet who taught at Pomona College) gave me a copy of Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just. Scarry observes that when we encounter something of beauty we want to capture and “reproduce” it. In that encounter, we are captured by the beauty, and this brings us outside ourselves — a “radical decentering” — and we feel the need to preserve the beauty so it can be shared with others. Scarry’s observation is far more involved than I’m explaining here but suffice to say it marries the urge to create (to reproduce and share) with the desire to collaborate (to decenter ourselves and work with others with compassion and equality) so simply.

The world of contemporary new music can place a lot of currency on notions of the individual and the singular. I am not that. I need others, and it has nothing to do with being ostensibly a very private, solitary person. I want work to bring people together (by the way, there’s nothing wrong with moving or drifting away from one another; each relationship has its own life cycle) and to be a part of a shared space where really odd, weird, intimate, and touching stuff happens. I’ve said all of this and now I must be honest; being this connected and close with others scares the shit out of me; a conundrum, one of many. I have a very messy brain.


Solar: You based your chamber piece It Wasn’t A Dream on a selection of poems from Diane Seuss’s book, Four-Legged Girl. You also make an appearance in several of her poems. In one poem from Diane’s book Frank: Sonnets, there’s this great exchange between you and the speaker: 

Music, Kurt says, is not a language, though people

say it is. Even poetry, though built from words,

is not a language, the words are the lacy gown,

the something else is the bride who can’t be factored

I’m fascinated by that statement — music is not a language — what did you mean by that?


Kurt Rohde: Ah yes — the language thing … Diane gets it right! (I am still amazed that she remembers all our conversations.)  I consider Diane to be an emotional genius. Mythmaking and MacArthur Fellows aside, genius in our culture feels assigned to a certain type of intellectual for whom there is a specific social utility and assigned value to their work. I feel there are emotional geniuses who incorporate the intellectual prowess of a scientist or scholar, but whose utility is mightily different. The currency for emotional intelligence is vastly undervalued and often dismissed as being less than. I also think it is more difficult to talk about, hence, art. Diane’s work does not adhere to the hierarchy of more or less, it just is what it is (remarkable & rigorous) and I believe that’s what makes her writing potent and lingering. (Lingering…please read her I can’t stop thinking of that New York skirt, turquoise sequins glued onto sea-colored cotton.) Onto the question…

What do we mean by language? Speech, written word, rhythm, syntax, the way the brain is hardwired? Becoming competent at verbal communication, using the agreed upon meaning of things called “words,” organized with this thing called “grammar,” adhering to basic cognitive functions surrounding repetition and recognizability — only then do we have the starting point for a common understanding of what we mean by “language.” And we have not even talked about utility, culture, or place. Much of the time, I feel like language is not more than metaphor operating on a spectrum of specificity. We can get so fucking close to a commonality of unified understanding and yet there are still these grey areas.

Then one hears that “music is a language.” Music is ALL grey area! And music’s grey area is not metaphoric in the way language’s is. Music feels like communication because it resonates. It can make us feel something unlike anything else (that singular experience only music can generate). But it isn’t. It is connection. Music achieves more often what language strives for over and over: connection. Let’s leave the communicating to language.

And there is the conundrum of songs — words put to music or music put to words or utterances that are sung — all so fascinating. A song assumes that the words matter to the listener; of course, they do to the composer/musician/singer. But I believe they matter differently. I believe the words become un-worded when music is attached. Songs have a potential for connection and meaningfulness, they become something other than communication. This same potential simply cannot be realized through words alone.

Perhaps this is why poetry is my go-to language art. The nothingness of poetry is astounding because it is really everything that non-poetry is not. The economy, the twistedness, the abstractions, and the simple revelations — all of it can jolt us in a way that is so, so close to the musical experience — “the lacy gown, / the something else is the bride who can’t be factored…” We so want music to be a language because it fills in the gaps where language fails. Poetry is a bridge between those worlds of music and language. Yet still, they are not even close. But what do I know?


Solar: You’ve described your creative process as an act of imagining a composition through the medium of another art, whereby you account for your experience of the source material but also consider and incorporate the formal techniques that have allowed the source to create that experience. This sounds like a wonderful way to not only create new work, but also to understand the work of others. Could you talk a bit about that process?


Kurt Rohde: I received great feedback from a mentor about what I was thinking when I did something of interest to him in my music. He said, “Turning a non-musical idea into music — that act of transformation, of alchemy and invention — that is where the spark of new understanding and knowledge occurs.” It’s spot on.

I have always been far more interested in imagining spaces outside myself, especially those spaces I have no expertise in.

I am not a visual person, but I love the image and the infinite approaches a visual artist can undertake to render this physical form of art.

I love reading but I am not a writer, and how any poet or novelist or scholar can synthesize potent meaningfulness through words — they are only marks on a page! — astounds me.

I don’t dance and my relationship to my body is problematic, and it is the dancer that sweeps through a space or stops time who can make me weep or howl.

These surface points of contact allow me to imagine musicking using tools from another medium. I can look at a chair, figure out how it was assembled, and find unusual analogs to assembling a piece of music. Considering the function of the individual parts of an unfinished chair and how they can fit together allows me to ask: Can I make a piece of music as if it were a chair?

Perhaps an example of this would be through program notes for a new piece for solo double bass and effects pedal I just finished:

auf einer wellenlänge / (navigating the distance)

The process used to create this piece is the painting technique of pentimento, whereby the presence of earlier images or strokes are changed by being painted over. For a piece that uses sound, not pigment nor paint, I needed to identify the features of the material that were (to my ears) sonic analogs to the physical materials of painting.

My closest friends who are creatives are not composers but writers, poets, and painters. My research involved conversations with these people, all of whom are so dear to me. They were able to help guide me towards thinking not as the composer of sound, but as someone making a figure with a stroke and then covering or smudging it up.

By identifying the qualities I wanted to bring into this piece, I recognized I needed to be talking about these ideas inside the same space as my non-composer friends. We needed to try to get onto the same wavelength (hence the idiomatic German phrase), and figure out how to navigate the distance between us that was made of modal differences and experiences. We needed to acknowledge the unknown. The revelation that we needed to get as close as we could get, and then get by with the stuff we didn’t know, became the crux of my decision to use the pentimento technique as the actual form of the piece.

The music and the physical motions of the performer are presented on the canvas of the instrument and stage. These strokes and images are smeared, turned and overdrawn (oversounded); the piece becomes thicker, layered, sunken. The qualities of sound — the sonic paint — I ultimately limited myself to are:

Thinness

Viscosity

Blurring

Bleeding

Revealing


SUNG TEXT:

Here I am/Here/am I Here

Here/We go/Here

Go

Solar: Recently, you've been working with the poet Donna Masini on creating a micro-opera based on the Water Lilies section of her collection, 4:30 Movie. How did this project come about? What interested you about this collection? How did you identify the micro-opera as the best form for this new collaboration? 


Kurt Rohde: Small clarification: I am using all of the [deleted scenes] poems, and only one of the Water Lilies poems from Donna’s 4:30 Movie for the micro-opera. I have started a series of solo soprano works using the full collection of her luminous Water Lilies poems.

The micro-opera project came about after I read 4:30 Movie. I was struck by the range with which Donna tells the story of her sister’s battle with cancer. It’s disarming; the humor, the shades and shifts in tone, the gravity of the sadness by the writer, but also of her sister who is fully aware of what is happening and kind of pissed because she’s doing all she can to survive while knowing she won’t. Donna’s work is so unpretentious and loving; it’s so clearly grounded in the need to be fully honest and open. That is a beautifully difficult thing to do. After thinking about the design of her collection, I considered the nesting of different narratives at work throughout. The [deleted scenes] poems feel especially ripe with opera-land potential. These poems are parenthetical to the full collection, and yet the story would not be as powerful without them. They feel performative.

And since I brought it up, a micro-opera is a relative new subcategory in the genre. Micro-operas tend to be short in duration (no Götterdämmerung), highly portable (no Götterdämmerung), for only a few singers and instrumentalists (no Götterdämmerung), all while allowing for unusual and atypical narrative exploration (OK —  Götterdämmerung does have some unusual narrative innovations). In many ways, a micro-opera can be everything a fully staged grand opera is not. It is the focused intimacy that might be the micro-opera’s most powerful feature.

Poems are enigmas, they tell stories through deft acts of deception and manipulation. But it is the great poem that does this because it is the only way to tell that story honestly. The great poem is minimally synthetic but it maximally synthesizes. I love that Donna uses the commonplace act of watching movies as the place for sharing, togetherness, being simple with intimate quietude. All while cancer is sitting there, watching the movie as well, working in silence, an act of intimate devious magic.

I have been living with cancer since 2017. It is under control and simply needs to be managed until I die. I’m very lucky to be able to do this. My cancer didn’t surprise me. I’ve been thinking about my own ending my entire life. I had a brother who died from leukemia, a brother who died in a house fire which I survived, a parent who died in a car accident at age 48, and immediate family members who have struggled with mental illness and suicide. Death has always been in my front pocket, observing and participating in my everyday life; I’m intimate with Thanatos. My cancer activates the friction between my humility and my “oh shit – what am I doing and why isn’t it more…?” buttons. We are built to fail; our bodies will fail, and our death is our worst, most personal, commonplace and fully boring catastrophe.


Solar: I was curious about something mentioned on your site. It noted that you've been interested in the codification of failure in current culture — can you elaborate on this? How have you tried to incorporate notions of failure and catastrophe into the way you make your work? 


Kurt Rohde: Failure and catastrophe… this obsession of mine has really permeated everything I do. Art is about the pursuit and ongoingness of beauty in life/lives/living. Breakdowns in systems, knowledge, and understandings are a part of failure. When things work, we have the vocabulary to describe that process. Vocabulary begins to fall short when the breakdowns — the failures — become more severe. Failure can be benign. Catastrophe cannot. The enduring impact of catastrophe can consume us because it can destroy. One can imagine continuing after failure; this becomes more difficult with catastrophe.

We are made to fail, beginning with our bodies. We live and we die because of a physiological failure to continue living. I do not imagine most failure as being attached to ethics; I imagine catastrophe as the space where the stakes surpass failure and move toward having profound ethical consequences.

As such, the way we assess, understand, or judge success implies a world of failure for which there is very little vocabulary, and the vocabulary that does exist typically is pejorative and lacks nuance. This crude vocabulary demonstrates a real lack of curiosity about how failing inhabits a work of values — values that are largely assumed to be about destruction and shortcomings.

This blindness about failure in part feeds what I think is a pretty dark, pretty unconstructive understanding of the role failure has in our life. Failures guide us, not just away from a place of unworkability, but (if one is open to imagining it) towards real insight, real revelation. My path has often been a linkage of failures. It has taken extreme patience and humility for me to wade through it all and recognize paths forward.

If language is communication, music (art) is connection, and beauty stirs the urge to stare and capture and reproduce and share, then failure is the opportunity to look at ourselves with humility and occasionally be brave enough to try to aspire to something more.