The Underfolding: an interview with composer Linda Catlin Smith
“I want to write music that expands my sense of time, I want to make time larger than it is. I want to suspend moments and elongate them. I want to slow things down, so I can hear everything, and crawl inside sound … to be outside of quotidian experience and inside musical thought.” —Linda Catlin Smith
The Underfolding, Volume II of Cheryl Duvall’s recordings of the complete piano solos of Linda Catlin Smith invites the listener inside musical thought. In her masterful understanding of resonance and the decay of sound, Smith takes the pianist and the listener to the heart of a world of colors, layers, and unspoken truths. The Underfolding, elegantly recorded by Cheryl Duvall, shows the progression of Smith’s journey from her earliest piano solos to the long form masterpieces she has composed recently. All of these pieces offer discovery, deep looking, and an invitation to listen to all the activity that lives in the spaces between the notes. Endings decay, notes dissipate into infinity, and in the end, it all comes back to silence. It is an honor to feature Linda Catlin Smith and her piano music on No Dead Guys.
I understand that you not only started piano at a young age but that you had a record player in your room and your mother would send you to sleep at night listening to one side of an LP. Who were some of your favorite composers from that time and how do they continue to influence your work?
Yes, I started piano at age 3, and from about age 5, I was allowed to listen to one side of a record every night - I liked listening to music in the dark. My favorite records were Ravel’s Pavane, a Bartok and Milhaud recording, Debussy’s Clair de Lune, and some children’s musicals – Mary Poppins, Hans Christian Andersen. At 12 or 13, I continued this tradition but by then it was Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, and Buffalo Springfield, and later, Ravel’s opera L’Enfant et les Sortileges and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
You’ve credited your first composition teacher, American composer, educator and author Allen Shawn, with teaching you to take your composing seriously. How did he do this? And how much of his influence is reflected in your own teaching today?
Allen was the first person that took my music seriously. He made it seem like each of my little pieces was real music. Allen, (and much later, my teacher Rudolf Komorous), looked at every note – they went through each piece or each bit of material and offered suggestions that opened my mind and my ears. When I was 15 or 16, I was home sick for a few weeks, and Allen sent me LPs of all four Bartok quartets, with scores.This was really an amazing gesture that helped me through that time – and it introduced me to a whole new world – getting to know music through notated scores.
This experience, with both Allen and Rudolf, is something I’ve brought to my teaching – listening to each student’s thoughts, looking at their sketches in depth, offering suggestions of things they might want to listen to, or read, or look at. I think of teaching as a facilitation of the student’s ideas, rather than telling them what to do and how to do it. I also covered the technical parts – notation, instrumental techniques, orchestration – to help make their music clear. Both Allen and Rudolf were impeccable in that regard. And I have tried to be.
You’ve built an extraordinary career for yourself creating works that have been commissioned and performed by numerous soloists and ensembles in Canada, the US and abroad and receiving multiple grants and awards, including the Jules Léger prize in 2005. In what ways has career success helped shape you as an artist, and in what ways is it a distraction?
I’m really grateful when musicians want to play my music. I’m lucky to have had many musicians play my music, and each experience has helped me grow. But I have a very ambivalent relationship to words like ‘career’ and ‘success’. I’ve always been slightly uncomfortable with attention; I spent a lot of time alone growing up, I’m comfortable with that, with being left alone and unsupervised. Of course, having success is helpful in that it can open up opportunities, and can boost the ego and make you feel good about what you are doing; but, strangely, I often have the opposite feeling, where I end up having enormous doubt if things are going well. Paradoxical, I know. I just prefer to keep my head down and stay focused on the piece I’m currently working on. Each new piece gives me a sense of hope and curiosity.
You’ve stated that the discipline of listening is deeply important to you and that it’s a composer’s duty to understand as much as possible about what’s being written today in order to learn from others. Would you be willing to elaborate on this?
I think ‘duty’ is too strong a word, perhaps. I feel that the best thing I can do for myself is to listen to as many things as I can, for inspiration, for new thoughts, for new colours – you never know where the next amazing sound will appear and knock you out, and change your point of view. I’ve learned more from listening than from anything else.
I understand that your work is informed by your love of certain writers and painters. In what way does interaction with other art forms influence your own?
The influence may not always be evident, it’s more of a background thinking…the subtle gradations of Agnes Martin’s paintings, the muted watercolours of Turner’s Folkestone series, the mysterious backgrounds of still life paintings by Chardin or Morandi, the quivering lines of Cezanne, the sense of time in Tarkovsky films…these inspire thoughts around shading, foreground/background, shadows, subtlety. In literature, a kind of dispassionate quality of observation, a slightly detached tone as in Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner…a flatness, a quietude, the extraordinary in ordinariness. Nature too is a big part of this background thinking, the subtle movement of leaves and grasses, and water – the unevenness, the irregularity, the infinite variation.
Congratulations on the release of The Underfolding, Volume II of pianist Cheryl Duvall’s recordings of your complete piano works! How long have you and Cheryl collaborated on projects, and which of you proposed this ambitious project?
I met Cheryl years ago, when she was a student in my intro to composition class at Wilfrid Laurier University. She became the go-to pianist for the student composers, and later she and fellow student Ilana Waniuk formed the Thin Edge New Music Collective, a very active ensemble, here in Toronto. Through all those years, Cheryl played my piano pieces, and she always consulted with me, playing them for me. She invited me to write an hour-long work for her (The Plains) which she performed and then recorded, (The Plains is the first volume in this series of complete works to 2023). This project was completely Cheryl’s idea, which seemed wildly impossible to me – it would never have occurred to me to do this. So, thank you, Cheryl!
Most of the pieces on The Underfolding were written earlier in your career and were composed for and recorded by other fine pianists. In what ways has Cheryl made them her own?
Cheryl Duvall is highly intuitive and highly technical – she has real clarity of rhythm and voicing, and a strong vision of what she wants to hear. She has a formidable creative imagination that she brings to her ‘inside’ point of view – inside the music, inside the piano, inside time. And she is also very curious about the music and about how to best bring it to life.
You’ve been quoted as saying that you want to write music that expands your sense of time. How do you feel the pieces on The Underfolding lead to The Plains, the 67 minute meditation that was the Volume I recording of your piano works?
Pieces like “The View from Here”, “Bloom” and “The Underfolding” were where I started to move more deeply into sound, resonance, spaciousness – listening to the piano, to how the sound lingers and decays, and how that is affected by register, and how register affects harmony. The piano is an endless resource for exploration.
You possess a masterful understanding of resonance and sound decay, which, to my ear, invites the listener to find activity in the spaces between the notes. In what ways do you use these things to bring dissonance to a place of harmony or resolution?
Perhaps I can think of dissonance as the ‘unexpected’. To me sometimes a silence, or a space, can appear in an unexpected way. After all, not everything needs to be resolved. I love open-ended moments, the kind of ambiguity where we aren’t quite sure what is happening. I think space or silence can turn material into a more mysterious thing, it can make something less knowable, at least for me. I like to get myself into a slight state of disorientation, and silence or near silence – maybe space is a better word – really helps with this.
One of the things I most enjoy about your music is how all activity seems to come from a foundation of vibrant stillness. What can you tell me about your unique musical dialogue between moving and resting?
Moments of stillness are a vital part of the sound world – I like to allow space for sound to resonate or come to silence; it allows the listeners to gather themselves, to register what has been heard, to listen to the space. It’s like the space in poetry – the unsaid things, which nevertheless manage to speak.
I also trained in dance, so the idea of movement and stillness is something I can think about in a physical way. When you come to stillness in dance, you are nevertheless slightly moving – breathing, hovering, swaying, even as you give the appearance of stillness – you are alive, not frozen. In music too, I like to keep things slightly breathing; slowness, sustained notes, sparseness are all part of keeping this apparent stillness slightly alive, the bird on a wire.
When describing “The Underfolding,” the longest piece on this album, you write that you wanted to deepen your compositional experience and to “wander into the shaded areas.” Would you elaborate on this?
I wanted to thicken my palette, both in terms of sheer sound and in terms of harmony, working with overlapping figures in different rhythmic ways; mostly the work is built out of chords, handfuls of notes that contain clusters, that have a thicker harmonic hue. I had the feeling I was working with a kind of impasto painting, overlaying one thing with another, and building up the field of sound, more than I had before. It was another way of hearing the piano.
What has recording your complete piano works taught you about your growth as a composer, and in what ways (if any) has it influenced all your work today, not just your piano music?
I thought I would find it difficult to go back to my early work – I don’t often listen to older pieces, as I feel I’m not that person anymore. But I was able to approach it like looking at a photo album of myself: “oh, that’s who I was then…” I try not to judge too harshly.
What current and future plans are you most excited about?
I’m always most curious about the work I’m doing now, and hoping I can take myself into new territory. When I’m in the midst of something new, I’m really curious to see where it will lead me. And I’m always looking forward to the first rehearsals of each new piece coming up – it’s where I get to learn everything about that piece. Rehearsals are my favourite thing, just me and the musicians and the piece, trying to figure out how best to bring it to life. No pressure of performance, just listening. I really love that.
What advice do you offer your students who wish to make their livings as composers?
What worked for me was to find something I like doing, that could support me as an artist. I worked as a waitress first, then as an assistant in an artist-run gallery, then Artistic Director at Arraymusic, and then as a part-time teacher at a university, and part-time dance teacher. I was lucky to have many grants and commissions along the way, but having those other jobs to support myself gave me the freedom to compose, regardless of commissions - a bit of security in an insecure field. I never expected my art to support me fully – very few people are lucky enough to have that. But artists are creative, so we can be creative about how to survive, too.
My advice is to cultivate relationships with performers. You only need a few people in your life, who want to play your work. There are some musicians I’ve worked with since my early years, that I still write for, thirty or forty years later. Having musicians in your corner, especially at the beginning, is like gold.
Linda Catlin Smith was born in New York, and lives in Toronto. She began her composition studies in high school in NY, with composer Allen Shawn, and continued her music study at SUNY Stony Brook. In 1977, she traveled to Canada to study composition and theory with composers Rudolf Komorous, Martin Bartlett, John Celona, Michael Longton and Jo Kondo at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. She began her piano studies with Jon Verbalis during her teenage years, and continued with Nurit Tilles and Gilbert Kalish at SUNY/Stony Brook, and with Kathleen Solose in Victoria, where she also studied harpsichord with Erich Schwandt. She moved to Toronto in 1981, where she co-presented, with painter Anna-Marie Cobbold, a new music series at Mercer Union Gallery. In 1986, she was invited by Morton Feldman to attend his lectures, as a guest, at SUNY/Buffalo, NY.
Drawn to an ambiguity of harmony and narrative, her work is informed by her deep appreciation of the work of writers and painters, such as Virginia Woolf, Cormac McCarthy, Cy Twombly, Giorgio Morandi, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, and Joseph Cornell, among many others. Her works have been commissioned and performed by many soloists and ensembles in Canada, the US and abroad, including: BBC Proms (BBC Scottish Orchestra), Victoria, Vancouver and Kitchener-Waterloo Symphonies, Tapestry New Opera Works, Arraymusic, Vancouver New Music, Pacific Baroque Orchestra, Evergreen Club Gamelan, Societe de Musique Contemporaine du Quebec, Bozzini, Del Sol and Penderecki Quartets, Fibonacci Trio, Duke Trio, Sabat/Clarke Duo, and many soloists including Eve Egoyan, Louis Goldstein, Philip Thomas, Colin Tilney, and others. Her works have been recorded by: Another Timbre, World Edition, Arraymusic, Eve Egoyan, Evergreen Club Gamelan, Barbara Pritchard, Les Coucous Bénévoles, others. Her lecture “Composing Identity: What is a Woman Composer?” is published in Descant Magazine (#107) and Musicworks (#80).
Many of her compositions were supported by commissions through the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council and the Laidlaw Foundation. In addition, she was awarded several individual artist grants from the Canada Council. Her work Garland was awarded the Jules Léger prize in 2005. In 1997, she received the prestigious Hunter Foundation Award for Emerging Artists, and in 2003 a Chalmers Fellowship. She has created several of her works while in residence at the Leighton Studios of the Banff Centre for the Arts. In addition to her work as an independent composer, she was Artistic Director of Arraymusic, one of Toronto’s major contemporary music ensembles, from 1988 to 1993. She was a founding member of the multidisciplinary performance collective, Urge, (1992-2006). She has taught composition privately and at Wilfrid Laurier University (1999-present).