- John Duffy composes music and he composes situations for other composers to make music.

Mr.

Duffy, a few years ago, won a television Emmy for his music, and he composed the music for the nine part public television series, heritage Civilization, and the Jews now airing at nine o'clock on Monday nights.

Mr.

Duffy is also the president of Meet the Composer, a national organization which creates opportunities for composers and generates new work.

I'll be talking with Mr.

Duffy, who incidentally makes his home now in Hampton, and we'll have music ourselves from guitarist Timothy Ulbrich and music critic Mike Manning will be here to evaluate the recent Mozart Festival in Tidewater.

John, you're an Irishman from the Bronx, and you've written the music for a nine part series on the history of the Jews.

How did, how did you get there to that point?

- It's a good question, and many people have asked me that.

Number one, the producer of the series, his name is Mark Siegel.

He and I have worked on a number of television specials, and curiously enough, though I was reared Catholic and I was born in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx, much of my musical training was from a very eminent Jewish composer.

A man who fled from Russia, went to Paris and went to Palestine and eventually came to the United States to edit, do the last editing on a book on cancellation.

So I have a very rich background in that, but it is a, a very sensible question because when one thinks of the music for civilization in the Jews, you have very eminent Jewish composers here in the United States.

And I'm certain that those thoughts went through the producers, through the minds of the producers.

But Mark Siegel felt very strongly about my work, and he thought it was the best for the series.

- Who was the, your mentor?

What was his name?

- His name was Solomon Rosovsky.

Dr.

Solomon Rosovsky.

He was an extraordinary man.

He, he had a doctorate in law and in music.

He was a music critic in Riga, which is one of the provinces of the Soviet Union now.

And he, his, he came from a long line of Jewish caners.

His father, for instance, was a cantor who was still singing at the age of 20 of 85.

And his father was a student with Tchaikovsky in the Petersburg Conservatory, and he was sought after as a singer, but he, for opera.

But he turned down all of those offers because he felt that the voice, his voice anyway, should be used to praise God and that's all, and no opera for him.

- Of course, the great Richard Tucker came from the same kind of background, right.

He was a cantor - Yes.

- Before he became the metropolitan star.

- Right.

And in fact, in this series, I have engaged several characters to, to sing or to chant a cancellation at one scene, for instance, in show two, which will, will be on following will be on tomorrow night.

The, the setting is Babylon, it's the Babylonian exile, and there are beautiful images of flowing water and lovely flowers.

This was taken in Israel, and I have just set an accompaniment, and you hear in the background the cantor singing in Hebrew, the ancient ancient cancellation for by the rivers of Babylon.

And then there's a voiceover, which is translating that.

And whenever I hear that, no matter how many times I, I'm very deeply moved by that.

- What is a cancellation?

What do you, what do you, what do you say - A cancellation essentially is?

The, the notes, the pitches that, that were in toned to the books of the Old Testament.

And to give a modern example, Gregorian chant from Catholic and, and Episcopal church that is based on cancellation, except that the language is different.

Of course, the language is Latin, but to give you an example, if you did in English, by the rivers, by the waters of rivers, of Babylon, by the rivers of Babylon, where you have a pitch for, for each syllable.

And I think in the Old Testament, all of this is conjecture of course, because we have no exact history that we do have orally translated these cancellations.

But the Old Testament, the books of the Old Testament were chanted and they, the, the chance those that is the cancellation, and that was passed down from generation to generation.

You had actually the same situation in Ireland in a sense, up until perhaps the present day.

The Irish Bards used to chant their stories.

And in fact, WB Yates, he made a study of this in the twenties and the thirties, and, and he very often would have readings of his poems in which they would be chanted certain pitches.

So we read the Bible in the beginning was the word and so forth.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, but in the past those were chanted and that would be cancellation.

I see.

How did - You work in doing this program?

I take it you saw the pictures first and wrote to pictures the way you described it a minute ago?

- Not always.

Not always.

Sometimes I read the script and talked with the director and then wrote the music, recorded the music, or else I laid down what they call a scratch track, and the, then the editor would cut the picture to my music.

In other cases, I would be given a cassette, a video cassette, and I would go home and stick it in the machine and watch it until I felt the, the feeling of, of that I wanted to evoke in this.

And then I would write the music and then go and record.

But in that case, I would write to exact timing.

It might be, for instance, 30 seconds, very strong and bold music.

And then for 20 seconds, because Abbi Ivan's voice would come in and then there'd be a crescendo.

And that has to be done precisely.

And in recording, the way I do it, I don't use a click track.

A click track is when you, when you do music for television and for films, you have the musicians have an earphone on, and the click is the metronome marking.

In other words, if it was 60 quarter notes, it would be click, click, click.

So that it, it's very precise.

What I do is I put the metronome marking, let's say quarter nerd equals 60, and then I, I just study and beat it, and I watch the measures.

So if we're late, if we're too early or if we're late, I'll take a retard or I'll make an acceleron.

In other words, I want the music to be, not to be mechanical.

I wanted to have some - Space.

That takes a lot of attention to what you, you, you kind of study the whole of the thing first.

- Yes.

- Then you go back and fit the parts, and then you put part the whole with your music, don't - You?

Right.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Well, you see, I also conduct my music.

- Did you do conduct for the series?

Oh, yeah.

- I'm the music director and the conductor, and I've had a great deal of experience conducting.

I've, I've conducted sometimes 400 times in a year because I've been music director and conductor of regional theaters, Shakespeare festivals, and I've also conducted small orchestras, so I'm able to, I know the music and I also am key, keep a stopwatch, so I watch that.

So if for instance, I measure 25, it's supposed to be 24.5 seconds, and we get to there and I see that it's, we're a couple of beats behind.

I make an acceleron or the opposite.

- Nifty.

Nifty takes a lot of careful work.

- It does, but it's, it's wonderful because it's part of the collaborative process.

- Nine hours this show is though now, that must have been a challenge to both get some sense of wholeness to this, some sense of repetition, some as well as variety.

What did you do?

I mean, did when you, did, you know, this was gonna be nine hours to begin with?

- When I started, I thought it was gonna be 15 hours.

So it was a staggering Challenge.

The idea was, and, and I believe the idea in a series like this is to find a good, strong theme to, to compose a good, strong theme and then to create variations on it, because that gives continuity.

It helps to integrate the, the shows and, and subconsciously, almost subliminally people hear those themes.

So that's what I did.

I, I composed this theme and, and then did variations on it.

For instance, in the old, in pre biblical times, Babylonia, Egypt and the culture of war, the music there has it, it's very open intervals, fifths and octaves.

And I used a chamberlain in the orchestra and horns to give it a certain character, and I used rattles.

Then when you come to the period of enlightenment, that same theme is in a, a trio for horn, violin piano in the style of Mozart, and it's very engaging.

And then in the period of Bach, it's, it's, the theme is a solo cello, like one of the Bach suites.

And in the seventh show, which is America, the opening has a almost the sound of what is known as minimal music in our time.

And I weave just the first couple of phrases of, oh, beautiful for spacious skies with the theme of the show.

And then it builds to crescendo and it goes into kind of Americana of western pioneering music.

And, but it's the same theme.

And in that music, I use a harmonica just coloring the violin, so it has an Americana sound.

So what the music does is to give a sense of the particular time, the setting and, and to color that.

- You did the orchestration too.

- Oh, yeah.

I, as I'm writing, I, I orchestrate - It must you must have worked with a whale of a lot of musicians.

- I did.

I, our largest session was for about 60 musicians, mostly the musicians from the New York Philharmonic and the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

And then we worked in smaller groups.

One recording, we used four brass, the four first brass players from the New York Philharmonic, and then three Violas harp, piano and percussion.

One session we just used trumpet, percussion and chim, so there were varieties.

And then I spent a great deal of time.

I worked at the Columbia Princeton University electronic music center, mixing filtering.

I used for instance, the Shofar, which is the rams horn.

I, I took that sound and I altered it by filtering it and doing some digital delays.

And then I mixed that with some of the themes and it's, it has a really haunting, timeless quality to it.

I brought some of those tapes, but those, those that music will be heard over the course of the nine weeks.

- Yeah, I bet you had fun.

It sounds like it, the way you described it.

Yeah.

- Well, I love to write music that keeps me my spirit alive.

And it's always wonderful to be paid and for what you love to do and to have people who love to collaborate with you.

It's been a very rich experience.

I've worked with, with probably 25 writers and that many editors, and we've, like, in all collaborations like this, it, it takes, it, it takes a tremendous amount of open spiritness and loyalty and, and that's a very rich experience.

The other thing, working on a project like this, we who are Christians and even Jewish people don't understand or, or don't have knowledge of their background.

And I think what this series shows are, it shows the common links that bring humankind together.

Christianity came of course from Judaism, a as did Islam or, or Islam honors the, the great prophets.

But for instance, in in show two, which deals with Paul sa, who later became Paul in Ephesus, there's something in that show that strikes me as wonderful.

The bin who's the narrator is talking about the fact that during Paul's stay there in Ephesus, there on the same street, there were a number of synagogues.

And in one synagogue they were reading from the Torah of the books of the Bible and the other synagogue they were reading from one of Christ's sermons.

So you get the impression that there was a lively involvement and, and coming together of ideas.

And it was during that period that Christianity separated, or the Jewish people who followed Paul then separated from the, the traditional - Yeah, that was what, 30 ad along in there, 55 ad - I'd say around there.

Yeah.

And then at the same time, you had the Romans, the Roman army, which the Rome of course had huge holdings in, in the Middle East.

Rome was Quelch rebellions of which Christ was considered one, and the, the Maccabees, and later on the destruction of the temple, the show is filled with history and very enlightening.

And Aben, who's an extremely distinguished statesman, he's a, he's a fabulous man, great intellect, and he's very eloquent.

So it's, it's civilization, it's our civilization, it's our history, and it's the particular Jewish impact on that civilization and the civilization's impact on Jewish culture.

So it's not just about Jewish culture and history, it's about world culture and history, and it's about the links that bind us as people.

- One of my favorite music stories, particularly about the craftsmanship of composers and the necessity for craftsmanship is the one about Tchaikovsky writing the Nutcracker and Swan Lake and how petti pa, various petti, the choreographer would send him notes and tell him how many bars he wanted of this, and then how many bars of that.

And Tchaikovsky sat down and wrote it exactly to the specifications petty pa asked for.

And look what we wound up with.

- Right.

- You know, you work exactly the same way.

Great craftsmanship.

- I think.

So it's wonderful.

In our time we have become so, so singularly interested in the individual, and there's so much talk about art and the artist.

I think that's a lot of bunk.

I think what really is craft - Right - Is what frees you, and it becomes an inspiration that it's like a runner.

When someone's jogging, they get to a point where they forget their ankles, their knees, and they are running because something has changed in their body and in their spirits.

And that's what craft does.

And it frees you.

I think Bach whose work in my judgment, is the greatest music ever composed.

He, the, the consummate craftsmanship is just, it, it's a source of giving him flight and, and he's able to write these gorgeous pieces.

I think even in jazz, you had Charlie Parker, who was such a master of, of jazz and of the alto saxophone.

He, he was able to go on those fights because he had mastered this and it freed him.

Thank you for - You.

You want demands, you want the, to work within the demands that somebody makes on you.

I do.

Yeah, I do.

Yeah.

I think that all, all all great composers and all great writers, do you know, gosh, we never got to talk about Beat the Composer much.

I wanna talk to you about that too.

Will you come back and let's, let's talk about that - Too.

I, oh, is our time gone - Almost?

Oh dear.

We've got to go, go on to Tim Ulbrich and Mike Manning and I wanna do the meet the composer too.

But the television series is running, so we, we covered that current issue right now, but come back and we'll do Meet the Composer.

- I would be delighted to, and it's a pleasure to be here.

- Thank you very much.

And now Tim Ulbrich will play the introduction and Variations on a theme by Mozart of Fernando Soar.

And following that, Mike Manning will comment on the recent Mozart Festival.