Orchard: an interview with composer Tyler Kline
Two of my biggest life passions are music and food so I was intrigued when I discovered that composer Tyler Kline combined these two loves in this innovative and beautiful collection of 50 short solo piano pieces. In Kline’s own words, “Orchard is a celebration of fruit. Each sketch draws on a specific fruit’s texture, flavor, scent, and/or shape to create a musical character study.”
In the hands of a lesser composer, a themed collection like this could quickly become kitschy. These miniatures escape this fate through Kline’s enormous range of compositional styles and his exquisite ability to create complete sound worlds within one or two minute pieces. No two are alike, yet they work perfectly together. Perhaps part of this success comes from Kline’s desire to not have the music be perfect, saying, “I want my music - at times - to sound ‘messy’ to convey a sense of the natural world.”
In addition to composing award-winning music, Kline hosts Modern Notebook, a weekly radio program devoted to new classical music, and is co-artistic director for the innovative Terroir New Music series of concerts that pairs music with the work of local chefs and brewers. Yet for all of his innovative thinking and successes, his devotion to Wabi-Sabi ideals (a Japanese aesthetic and worldview that values transience, imperfection, and impermanence) keeps him—and his music—human and approachable. It’s an honor to feature him on No Dead Guys.
When did you first become interested in music, and at what age did you start composing?
My “true start” in music came when I joined the middle school band in sixth grade playing trumpet. I say “true start,” because growing up, my grandma had an electric organ in her house and I remember always being interested in tinkering with it from a very young age, and her helping me “play along” with her as she played from music books.
In terms of composing, I was initially interested in transcribing/arranging for jazz band and basketball band when I started high school, and I think this naturally evolved into an interest in composing. I’m very lucky to have had a high school band director who always encouraged me to write new stuff and facilitated performances of my (very short) pieces with members of the band. So, I was composing my first pieces around age 15 or 16. It wasn’t really until my graduate studies at the University of South Florida that I studied composition formally - up until that point, I was just trying to figure things out on my own, trying to discover composers, read as much as I could about composition techniques, things like that.
Many of your compositions have been influenced by Japanese ideas or writing. As an American born and raised in rural Kentucky, who or what awakened your interest in Japanese culture?
I think like a lot of people my age growing up in the late 90s and early 00s, my first foray into Japanese culture (perhaps Japanese pop culture is a better word) was discovering anime on TV as a kid, but my interest has definitely grown well beyond that and emerged in different ways over the years.
In my adult life, I’ve become especially interested in Japanese cuisine and aesthetics. When I lived in Tampa, my wife and I became friends with the chef at a restaurant called Noble Rice that specializes in omakase meals. Omakase is an amazing concept because it’s a fixed-course meal that puts the chef in control of what you’re served (omakase translates to something like “I’ll leave it up to you”). I think experiencing these meals opened me up into taking deep dives into Japanese food culture (such as learning about kaiseki meals), and then from there leaping to overall design aesthetics and philosophies, like what author Jun'ichirō Tanizaki covers in his essay In Praise of Shadows.
Finally, several years ago I became hooked on the writing of Haruki Murakami and fell in love with his surrealist style and fantastic narratives. Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out how to convey the feeling I get from reading his books in my music.
You write that your work is “deeply influenced by the ideals of Wabi-Sabi, a Japanese aesthetic and worldview that values transience, imperfection, and impermanence.” Where and when did you encounter this aesthetic, and how do you think it informs your compositional style?
I came across the book Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers in 2015 shortly after grad school while I was beginning work on a new piece of music and it sort of clicked that the values of Wabi-Sabi are something I had, at that time, been unknowingly leaning towards in my music already.
The idea of imperfection especially appeals to me in this sense. I think a lot about “rhythmic dissonance” in my music because I want to achieve a texture that might sound organic (or, not oriented to a musical grid) yet intentional. My interest in extended techniques also fits nicely into the idea of imperfection. Basically, I want my music - at times - to sound “messy” to convey a sense of the natural world.
This also extends to performance. I think as performing musicians we’re taught from a young age to play the notes on the page as perfectly as possible. “Practice makes perfect,” we hear all the time. I guess that’s probably a good rule to live by when performing, but with my music, I don’t want performers to stress over it being perfect because I’m not sure even if I want my music to be perfect in a conventional sense. Wabi-Sabi kind of opened me up to this way of thinking and it’s offered me so much freedom of expression in my work.
Tell me about Terroir New Music (an event series of which you are co-artistic director) that combines the music of living composers with the work of local chefs and brewers. How did this idea come to be, and how is it received by audiences?
Complete credit goes to my wife, Susanna Hancock (who is also an amazing composer) for the ideas behind Terroir New Music. In 2017, we were talking about the new-music things happening in Tampa, where we lived, and trying to figure out what we could do to fit into that scene that would be unique and also offer an entrypoint for people who may not know about contemporary classical music.
Susanna has an extensive background of working in the service industry in New York City and in Tampa, and she had this idea of pairing local food/beverage with music by living composers, and putting the performances in these food and drink places. From there it was a matter of getting the right people on board to bring it to life, and we’ve had 9 events ever since. Terroir is a word that basically translates to the conditions of a locale - climate, soil, topography - and how that influences the taste of wine (and other crops, but mostly people use the word when talking about wine). So this was our line of thinking with the event series.
The folks who have always seemed most excited about Terroir New Music have been the food industry people, new-music aficionados (of course), and laypeople. Oddly enough, a lot of times anytime we’ve talked to formally-trained musicians (especially orchestral musicians) about Terroir New Music, they didn’t seem too interested in what we were doing. But the people who didn’t know anything about the music were always extremely enthusiastic about our events and loved even the most far out, fringe programming that we did. And to me, that spoke volumes - that told us that what we were doing was accomplishing the mission we set out to do: to get more people interested in new music.
Tell me about Modern Notebook, a weekly radio program highlighting music composed since 1945 that you host on Classical WSMR. How do you decide what music to showcase, and how much of the program is devoted to the music of living composers?
I will start by saying that almost all of the programming on Modern Notebook is devoted to living composers - and the “since 1945” portion is basically there so I can delve into the past when needed (there’s obviously a lot of great music from the mid-20th century, and it’s worth sharing!).
I love to showcase music that comes my way via new releases, because that’s always going to be the freshest music I can share with our audience. But, besides that, I really want to achieve a nice mix across the spectrum of new music while also keeping it within the context of “classical music.” (As an aside, this also has a lot to do with the fact that Classical WSMR is a 24/7 classical music radio station, so Modern Notebook has to be quite adjacent to that).
I also want to make sure that the music on Modern Notebook reflects the entire breadth of artists making music today. When we look at orchestral programming, a lot of the same composers are being programmed across all the orchestras, even when they’re younger composers who are seen as “up and coming.” And a lot of this music really is fantastic - but, there are so many composers - exponentially more, actually - who do not get programmed by orchestras, or who go unseen in general, and I want to make sure that Modern Notebook can be a platform for them, too.
I found your music through Orchard, a collection of 50 short solo piano character studies based on various botanical fruit that you composed in 2018. It’s simply one of the most unique collections of piano miniatures I’ve ever encountered. How did you translate the taste, scent, and color of these different fruits into musical sounds?
First, thanks so much for the kind words about Orchard!
I did a ton of research and googled the names of the fruits before I would write each piece, and at the top of the piece, under the title, every one of them has a series of “tasting notes.” These tasting notes, in a way, are the distillation of my research and sort of like the main tool I used to do the translation from fruit to music that you’re talking about.
I could maybe write a whole companion book to talk about how I’ve approached this with each piece, but, just to give a few examples:
Some of these tasting notes ended up informing the overall musical vocabulary of the collection and appear in different forms across pieces. I’m thinking primarily of the word floral. A lot of fruits can be described as being floral in taste or scent: key lime, lychee, rosehip to name a few. And in all of these pieces, there are tremolo effects to convey a kind of floral feeling.
Also, shapes of fruits did a lot to inform my musical decisions. If you look at tamarind or vanilla bean - two long, pod-shaped fruits - there’s extensive use of octave figures in those pieces. watermelon - a large round fruit - consists of a series of half and whole note chords. Or, maybe my favorite example, Buddha’s hand: this piece is performed completely inside the piano, with a lot of plucking of the strings. In this piece, I imagined, “what would the piano sound like if I used a Buddha’s hand fruit to play it?”
How did you choose which fruits to feature in Orchard?
For the most part I gravitated towards fruits with interesting names. I thought yuzu or mangosteen or even granny smith simply made good piece titles.
Beyond that, some of the pianists made specific requests for what fruits they wanted. When watermelon and lemon were commissioned, each of those pianists wrote to me specifically requesting I write about those fruits because it was their favorite fruit.
You write, “For quite some time now, I have been interested in exploring agrarian values in my music.” Can you explain how these values influenced the creation of the Orchard collection?
I became very interested in the work of Kentucky-writer Wendell Berry some time ago and that’s been quite influential in my creative thinking (and in other ways, of course). A lot of my family and ancestors have been farmers for a living, and I wanted to find out ways that I could honor that in my music.
There are a number of pieces of mine that draw on themes of plant-life and soil, but Orchard is probably the best example. Composing Orchard changed me as a composer because it offered me a way to explore new ideas and modes of creation within so many different pieces. Not only that, but I view many of these pieces as “seeds” for bigger pieces. blood orange, for example, has made its way into my larger orchestra West of the Sun. And so I’m excited to explore revisiting this music in bigger ways in the future.
Also, this project has allowed me to cultivate so many great relationships with the performers involved and I’ve been able to work with some of them on new pieces since I’ve completed Orchard. Orchard has truly been a project that’s felt like I planted all these seeds over four years ago, and I’ve been able to harvest the bounty that it has produced since. (Not to make too strong of a metaphorical tie there!).
Many of the fruits featured in Orchard are not found in most American grocery stores. Were you able to taste these non-native fruits? If not, how were you able to discern their musical quality?
So, one of the first questions a lot of folks ask when they encounter Orchard is, “Did you eat all these fruits?” And the answer, unfortunately, is I have not. So for some fruits, I had to use my imagination (I’m thinking mangosteen, which perishes very quickly so it’s hard to get into grocery stores far away from where they grow natively).
However, where I could not find the fruit on its own at the store, I found products that utilized the fruit in some way, such as yuzu marmalade or guava paste and this helped with the tasting aspect. And, as I’ve mentioned already, I developed a kind of vocabulary around certain flavors or fragrances associated with a number of fruits and this was able to be utilized across pieces.
When I first listened to Orchard, I started marking my favorite tracks. The list soon became unwieldy as nearly all of these miniatures appealed to me. You have a gift for short pieces—each one is complete and satisfying, despite the short length. Tell me about your decision to employ so many different compositional styles within this one collection?
I saw Orchard as a “sandbox” of sorts where I could try out new ideas or sounds or textures, since there were going to be so many short pieces, so that is probably the main reason there’s such a variety of compositional styles. Additionally, some of those styles were at the request of the pianists who commissioned the work, and some were very specific about what they wanted. For example, E-Na Song, who commissioned “lemon,” requested a waltz, which is something I never would have decided to do on my own.
You write that “Orchard is the result of a commissioning consortium made up of 30 pianists and supporters.” Can you tell me more about how you went about this?
Part of what prompted me to compose Orchard was that I had never written solo piano music before. So I knew that when I launched the project, I wanted to get as many pianists involved from the commissioning phase as possible.
I absolutely love commissioning consortiums for a variety of reasons. First, it makes it more affordable for performers to commission new works; and second, if no one has ever commissioned a piece before, it’s a much more approachable way to become a commissioner.
Orchard was maybe the fourth consortium that I did, and so I thought the novelty of a pianist being able to commission up to 5 short pieces, yet receive EVERYTHING that everyone commissioned, would be very appealing. I was able to do this simply with the infrastructure on my website and with the help of spreading the word via social media and through the grapevine.
Commissioners also filled out a form upon joining where they could give me certain parameters for their pieces. For example, Eunmi Ko, who helped conceive the project with me, wanted me to compose pieces that she could use from a pedagogical standpoint to introduce her students to contemporary techniques. Other pianists made no requests at all. The requests that really pushed me as a composer were ones like, “I’d love for you to write a gospel piece for me,” or “I want a toccata!” It was fun and challenging figuring out how to write in my voice in those styles.
Thank you for making the sheet music for Orchard available for purchase through your website. Given that the entire collection runs almost 2 hours, how would you recommend pianists learn and perform these pieces?
My favorite thing about Orchard is the possibilities for programming are virtually limitless, and in the program notes I indicate that pianists may perform the pieces in any combination, in any order, that they choose to fit their programming needs. In fact, I’ve included a similar note in the liner notes of the CD for folks to listen on “shuffle” because I feel like hearing the pieces in a different order changes the experience every time.
So to the pianists planning to perform the pieces, please program how you like! I love seeing the combinations that pianists come up with when performing the work, and I love to be as hands off as possible when it comes to that.
What current or future projects are you most excited about now?
I have an ongoing project that I compose and arrange for with a friend of mine from college called “musicGROVE,” which is based in Tokyo, Japan, and taking part in this project has put so much wind in my sails as far as my creativity goes. So I’m super excited about doing that and hope to visit Japan in the future to be even more hands on with that work.
Besides that, I am starting work on a new solo piano piece soon which, very much unlike Orchard, will be a single-movement work around 10-minutes long. I have a few ideas for the piece that haven’t quite materialized into anything I can speak about, but I know that I want it to be dedicated to important people in my life, so it will probably be kind of sentimental and nostalgic in character.
What advice can you offer to young composers who are just launching their careers?
There’s so much to say here! But, I will try to keep it simple.
First, composing is not too different from playing an instrument: it takes practice to progress in the directions you want to go.
Second, compose pieces for the composer friends you admire and truly collaborate on projects together. Looking up how instruments work in a book works fine, but truly working with a performer will be a far better education on how to write for a specific instrument than looking something up in a reference book could ever be.
Finally, be open to listening to any and all kinds of music and really try to appreciate it. Specifically I mean contemporary classical music, but I also mean all kinds of music. Anecdotally, there’s been times in my life where my first encounter with a piece of new music might have actually been negative, but in being an empathetic listener and open to things outside my taste, repeated listenings of the same piece led me to actually love it. And in turn, that expands your ear - and expands your toolbox as a composer.
Tyler Kline (b. 1991; he/him/his) is a composer, audio engineer, and radio broadcaster whose work is deeply influenced by the ideals of Wabi-Sabi, a Japanese aesthetic and worldview that values transience, imperfection, and impermanence. This manifests in Tyler’s music in a variety of ways: the use of extended sounds/techniques in order to obscure musical textures; rhythmic dissonance that disconnects melodic and harmonic lines from the overall pulse; and fleeting gestures that evoke the natural world.
Recent compositions have included Orchard (2018), a collection of 50 short solo piano character studies based on various botanical fruit; West of the Sun (2019), an orchestra work inspired by the writing of Haruki Murakami; various chamber works for solo clarinet (liveoak, 2020), violin and piano (Eight Aspects, 2020), melodica and piano (basil eyes, 2020), and toy piano (Sycamore, 2020); and a string quartet composed for Tokyo-based musicGROVE (2021).
Recognized by ASCAP, Hillsborough Arts Council (Tampa, FL), and Creative Loafing (Tampa, FL) for his work, Tyler’s music has been performed throughout the United States, and internationally in Europe, Asia, and Brazil. His compositions have been presented at a variety of venues, festivals, and conferences, including World Piano Conference (Novi Sad, Serbia), Dot the Line New Music Festival (South Korea), London International Piano Symposium (London, England), San Francisco Piano Festival (San Francisco, CA), Southeastern Regional Tuba/Euphonium Conference (Tallahassee, FL), Lucca International Festival (Lucca, Italy), Atlantic Music Festival (Waterville, ME), Maryland Wind Festival, NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, International Computer Music Conference, National Association of Composers/USA National Conference, and the Penn State University New-Music Festival and Symposium (State College, PA).
Tyler is co-artistic director of Terroir New Music, an event series that combines the music of living composers with the work of local chefs and brewers. In addition to his work in composition, he is a classical music radio announcer at WSMR (Tampa, FL), where he also produces and hosts a weekly contemporary-music program called Modern Notebook.
A native of Kentucky, Tyler holds a Bachelor of Arts from Morehead State University where he studied euphonium with Dr. Stacy Baker and held a multi-year undergraduate research fellowship mentored by Dr. Deborah Eastwood. He received a Masters of Music from the University of South Florida, where his primary composition teachers were Dr. Baljinder Sekhon and Paul Reller. He currently resides in Cincinnati, Ohio.