Channel to the Future: A Conversation with Elliott Sharp on ‘Die Grösste Fuge’

Throughout the ages, some of the greatest composers have gifted to the world pieces not meant for their time. Often such artists are unappreciated until decades after their death. In other cases, the artist recieves recognition, but their controversial work is written off as some wild aberration. In both cases, however, time often proves the true master of brilliance. One can find a great example in Ludwig van Beethoven’s ‘Die Grosse Fuge’, a single-movement work for a string quartet. A quarter of a millennia after Beethoven’s death, Elliott Sharp’s opera, ‘Die Grösste Fuge’ – which will have its American premiere at Roulette Intermedium on June 13, 2024- pays homage to the composer’s Great Fugue not by merely copying it but instead by pushing into previously undiscovered territory.

While Beethoven has generally been heralded as one of the greats of Western classical music, ‘Die Grosse Fuge’ was viewed by many as an abomination upon its release. A critic in 1826 called the work “incomprehensible, like Chinese” and “a confusion of Babel.” As late as 1947, Daniel Gregory Mason described the work as “repellent.” But later generations found great merit in it. To Glenn Gould, ‘Die Grosse Fuge’ was “not only the greatest work Beethoven ever wrote but just about the most astonishing piece in musical literature.” A large part of the divergence of opinion over time came from how innovative the work seemed upon its initial release. It was an early assault on the diatonic tonal system.  It was a precursor to Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and heavy metal music long before the world was ready for any of those things. Igor Stravinsky – who dubbed ‘Die Grosse Fuge’ “the most perfect miracle in music” – addressed this well when he called the work  “an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever.” 

Given this backdrop, the central plot of Sharp’s ‘Die Grösste Fuge’ seems evident. Beethoven can express the sounds of the future because he visited it. The composer traveled forward in time to experience the chaos and beauty of a world far removed from his own. Sharp – himself an adventurous composer who has been a central figure in New York’s experimental music scene for decades – portrays the stark contrast between the Georgian era and the modern one by creating a work that marries a string quartet with the baritone vocals of Nicholas Isherwood, visual art, and a series of pre-recorded tracks featuring modern instruments – including the electric guitar. Texts are cut up, rearranged and translated using artificial intelligence (AI). ‘Die Grösste Fuge’ is captivating both in its homage to Beethoven’s work and its decision to itself veer off into new and futuristic-sounding directions. It is a wild trek through time for which adventurous listeners are invited to climb aboard. 

PostGenre: You write and perform a broad range of music. What is it about creating an opera that you enjoy most?

Elliott Sharp: I love multimedia. I love cinema. If someone gave me twenty million dollars, I would use it to make a movie. It’s not likely to happen. But we can do these operas with two laptops and live performers. We can present them in a small gallery or a big theater. 

The videos are all on a drive, as are electronic backgrounds. When we do this opera, I’m triggering electronic parts to augment the live string quartet and the singing. Sometimes, I have actual singing. I would record [bass vocalist] Nicholas Isherwood in advance and process his voice so it became part of the electronic backgrounds to augment the orchestration. 

PG: And how does the visual art fit into ‘Die Grösste Fuge’? 

ES: Well, it’s very important. For one thing, Janene [Higgins] is my partner in life. When I met her, she was a graphic designer and only starting to dabble in video art. Then, she began collaborating with people like Zeena Parkins and Alan Licht. We also worked together on my ‘Port Bou’ opera. That was the first one where I asked her to create videos that would serve as a counterpoinat to the singing, the text, and the music to add layers of meaning to them. That’s very much how she works anyway. Layered and filled with allusions and references. Also, poetic extensions of concepts.

With ‘Die Grösste Fuge’, we talked a lot about the arc of the piece, what would happen in it, and how best to illustrate or amplify various concepts. Then, I left her to work on her own. Later, we watched things together, reviewed them, and discussed possible editing modifications. It’s a very great way to work together. 

PG: What inspired you to create an opera tied to Beethoven’s ‘Die Grosse Fuge’? 

ES: I would say it just came to me, which is a classic response. But a presenter I had worked with before was planning a festival in Bonn [, Germany] to celebrate Beethoven’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday. He was looking for proposals of things to present at the festival. The idea behind ‘Die Grösste Fuge’ came to me in about thirty seconds because I’ve always loved ‘Die Grosse Fuge.’ I have long imagined that Beethoven, somehow, had a channel to the future that enabled him to compose the work. After that general concept, it was just a question of figuring out what could be the mechanics of the story. Have you listened to the recording? 

PG: Yes, it is fascinating.

ES: As you know, it’s not a linear narrative in any way. I wanted to get the story across yet have it be more random in its moments to reflect how we understand things in real life. So, I came up with a proposal, sent it in, and the festival’s organizers approved it. Then I came up with a libretto and a trajectory for the narrative. 

PG: Did you need to do a lot of research on Beethoven to create the opera?

ES: Yes. However, I have always been interested in Beethoven and love his music. Often, when I was a kid, my father would play ‘Symphony No. 6, Pastoral.’ I went much deeper into his works in the ‘70s when I was a graduate student [at the State University of New York at] Buffalo. The Cleveland Quartet was in residence and did the Slee cycle – the complete Beethoven string quartets – every year. I went and heard them do so as often as possible. 

I also did a lot of reading on Beethoven. I picked up the Maynard Solomon biography [Beethoven (Schirmer Trade, 1977) because I think that’s one of the best on his life. I dug into that and then just began writing. I was also reading [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe, [Frederich] Schiller and [Friedrich] Hölderlin and finding ways to fit them into the work. After trying to piece together some ideas about how the opera could work, I made a schematic of it. The more I began to work on it, the easier and more apparent it became how it was supposed to go down. 

PG: One of the more interesting things about ‘Die Grosse Fuge’ is its reevaluation over the years. Most people hated it when it first came out but now many call it one of  Beethoven’s greatest works. It was ahead of its time. 

ES: People, especially in the classical music world, tend to be very conservative in their approach to music. The music business is often far removed from what artists are hearing. Have you ever read the book Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time (W.W. Norton, 1953) by Nicolas Slonimsky? 

PG: No. 

ES: It’s a collection of bad reviews composers received through the ages. It’s really fantastic. It’s hilarious. Most of the book was reserved for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. If ‘Die Grosse Fuge’ was hated, the Ninth Symphony was absolutely reviled. 

PG: As someone who makes creative or experimental music, do you relate to Beethoven on that? It seems often critics do not necessarily understand music that is outside the mainstream. 

ES: Well, it’s always an issue. Very often, when you scratch the surface, you find that a critic is a failed composer. I am thinking of people like Virgil Thompson. There is some of his music that I like, the Gertrude Stein opera [‘Four Saints in Three Acts’ (1928)] for one. But I mostly don’t care for his music at all. And he was scorching contemporary composers when writing reviews in the New York Herald Tribune. There are a lot of critics who hate composers or music. So you have to contend with that. 

I try not to read reviews. I rarely read music magazines these days or articles about contemporary music. I’ll read technical articles about equipment that’s out there. Or if someone were to interview a friend of mine. Or a piece about someone I’ve been interested in the past that is only now coming to light. Julius Eastman is a great example. Julius was a friend in Buffalo, and in New York too, and I worked with him a little. It’s great to see Julius finally getting his due. I’m always happy to read things like that. 

PG: The Roulette performance will be the first time you present ‘Die Grösste Fuge’ in the United States. How do you feel it will differ from what you performed in Germany?

ES: For one thing, it will be in English. I dislike the idea of subtitles, so I rewrote the libretto in English. I found it very interesting that rhythmically I could transfer much of it directly from German to English, and the phrasing still fit many contours. Very little editing was required. In a few cases, I had to stretch out a word or substitute it. But the German translation that I used was a final translation into English. I had dreaded sitting down to change the piece to fit the translated sounds. I figured it was going to take weeks and weeks. But I did it in only about three to four long days. 

PG: As for composing, you often use a graphical scoring system. Did you use this system for ‘Die Grösste Fuge’?

ES: No, it is completely through composed in traditional notation because I had to contend with the fact that I have very little rehearsal time for it. I was working with the Asasello Quartet and Nicholas. I had previously worked with Nicholas for my opera about Walter Benjamin, ‘Port Bou.’ He also led the vocal group Vox Nova Italia on ‘Filiseti Mekidesi,’ a work of mine that was a cross between an opera and an installation. So, for ‘Die Grösste Fuge’, I knew I could count on Nicholas to be a great sight reader. But I also asked him if I could have a section where there is some spoken word stuff and gave him a few pointers on how I wanted him to speak for those parts. Maybe he had a word stretched out over a few measures, and I could let him interpret that. But almost everything else is completely composed. 

There’s one section where Beethoven is in the future where the quartet is supposed to walk around. I gave each player a sequence of six pitches they can play in a loop. They can play it slowly or quickly in that section, but it’s hardly improvised. The pitches are all predetermined. 

PG: In terms of improvisation, Beethoven subtitled ‘Die Grosse Fuge’ “tantôt libre, tantôt recherchée,” which roughly translates to “sometimes free, sometimes learned.” The subtitle was to reflect how some of the work stuck to formal structure and other parts did not. Do you see a connection between that and improvisation? 

ES: Well, improvisation was actually very much a part of Baroque music. Players were expected to improvise cadenzas and codas to things. At some point though, that aspect got lost as music notation began to take over. It wouldn’t surprise me if Beethoven improvised at the piano. 

I recall reading about how he would invite people over to dinner. He was a terrible cook. The meat would be raw on one side and burnt on the other. And he would play for people. This was also when he was deaf and his friends would complain about his horrible cacophony. But he was probably making incredibly beautiful music, and they just couldn’t appreciate it. We can’t know for sure since it wasn’t recorded. 

But Beethoven thought in a very fluid way. He wasn’t afraid of spontaneity. From everything I’ve read about him and his philosophy of music, especially how he would draw upon models from nature, he was very open. 

PG: As far as your own works, you learned composition partly from Morton Feldman, correct?

ES: Yeah. I had several meetings with Morty when I was working on my Masters [degree] at Buffalo. Lejaren Hiller – the first composer to write music with a computer – was my advisor. One of the reasons I went to Buffalo was to study computer music and algorithmic composition with Jerry. Jerry was very open and would talk with me about the ideas for pieces. We talked about possible strategies for notation, or if a piece even needed notation, at all. Sometimes I would write instruction sets in an algorithmic approach, use graphics, or make recordings that were then layered with each layer the score for the next layer in the performance. 

But Morty kind of ruled over the music department. I loved Morty’s music. I was the maintenance person for the electronic music studio and Morty’s office was right next to the studio. So, I’d often see him in the morning and he would always ask me what I was working on. We got along pretty well and occasionally he’d call me into his office to ask about something I was working on or just to chat. 

I arrived at Buffalo in August of ‘74, and my first concert there was in October of ‘74. The performance was with a ninety second through-composed soprano sax melody that I’d slowed down by half, dropped an octave, and recorded through a ring modulator. Then I added another layer of modulated soprano saxophone that was fully improvised, slowed down by half, and dropped down an octave. I ended up with a six-minute two octaves dropped pre-recorded tape which I then performed live with a ring modulator and soprano sax. The next morning, Morty called me into his office and said “Sit down! Improvisation- I don’t buy it.” That was probably my most severe lesson with Morty.  And then in the spring of ‘75. I was involved with Attica. Do you know about the Attica prison uprising? 

PG: Of course.

ES: Many people don’t. I’m amazed by that. I’m teaching at Bennington College this semester, and many of the students have no idea about it. Anyway,  I was involved in Attica support activities and wrote a composition called “Attica Brothers Life Cycle.” Part of it was through composed and microtonal and part of it used algorithmic instruction sets. Another part used only a conductor and a timeline. A conga player was playing a sixteenth-note pulse throughout the piece. We were in Baird Hall for the Composer’s Forum. The place was packed. We were setting up on stage with an electrified string quartet, drummer Bobby Previte, a percussionist, and a conga player. We were about to play when Morty stood up, and shouted at me, “Where’s [the conga player’s] music stand?” I told him he didn’t need a music stand; he was being cued by the conductor. Morty got up on stage, grabbed an empty music stand, dropped it in front of the conga player, and said “Now you can play the piece.” 

Morty called me into his office the next morning and said I put too much sociology in my music. He said that “music should be listened to while sitting in red plush seats” and that my music was for sitting on the floor. [laughing]. Today, I have to laugh at the whole thing that went down. At that moment I was furious at Morty. But now it’s a good story. I still love his music. In fact, he wrote some excellent pieces in the ‘80s – ‘For Samuel Beckett’ and ‘Coptic Light.’ To me, ‘Coptic Light’ is one of the great orchestral pieces of the Twentieth Century. 

PG: You mentioned electronics. You also have an electronic element in ‘Die Grösste Fuge’ in how you use artificial intelligence (AI) to take excerpts in German and translate them into English and then back. What inspired you to do that? 

ES: Well, I’ve always been interested in the transformation of language. I also did not want to use any texts verbatim. I wanted to transfer any texts I found until they could be in my language as much as they were. It’s more important to capture the essence of what an original text is saying than its specific words. I’ve always believed in operating from that perspective. For me, that’s the key to creativity. You have an inspiration of some sort, somewhere inside you that is your connection with the cosmos. However you wish to define creativity – and there are a million definitions – you can find a proper space in the spectrum to output it. That outlet can be music, cooking a meal, making a painting, or really anything that expresses your creativity. 

I wanted to take these texts and transform them in some way. I’ve always been a huge fan of William Burroughs’ writing. I first discovered him when I was in high school. But even earlier than that, I was a big fan of Jack Kerouac. So, I went from Kerouac to Burroughs. In fact, they lived in this building where my studio is and where I used to live. There’s now a plaque out front. I used to run into Alan Ginsberg here in the building taking journalists on tours of his old haunts.

Anyway, I worked with Ginsberg on a couple of recordings. He would use the cut-up technique invented by Brion Gysin, where you would literally take pages of text, cut them up, and glue them back together. The actor Steve Buscemi and I performed Burroughs texts that way by putting them through an online cut-up machine. Then Steve channeled Burroughs in the performance while I did sonic accompaniment on computer and guitar. I did something very similar with the text for ‘Die Grösste Fuge.’ The way we cut pieces of text up and replaced them together could even be seen l as an extension of post-DJ culture with the idea of remixing raw materials to find other meanings or to amplify meanings.

‘Die Grösste Fuge’ will have its American premiere at Roulette Intermedium on June 13, 2024. More information is available on Roulette’s website. It will also be available for free livestream on Youtube. The German version of the work, recorded in Bonn, is available on Infrequent Streams and can be purchased on Bandcamp. You can also learn more about Elliott Sharp on his site.