Musical machines - Princeton Alumni Weekly - Princeton University

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Almost from the moment
he first picked up a guitar, in the fifth
grade, Steven Mackey could coax
amazing sounds out of it. By the time
he was 13, his two older brothers, then
23 and 28, enlisted him to serve as a
sort of magical- mystery-tour guide during
their experiments with LSD.
“They would drop acid and I would
play the guitar,” writes Mackey in liner
notes to his 2001 album Tuck and Roll.
This was northern California in the
late ’60s, in the sunny afterglow of the
Summer of Love. To Mackey, who did
not indulge, it felt safe and wonderful.
They would light candles, turn on colored
lights, and little bro would begin
to play — serving, as he put it, as their
“designated driver of sorts.”
The music sent the brothers spinning
in circles, dancing, laughing. “For
a teenage boy, it was like having a magical
power. ... I could improvise for six
hours,” Mackey says. “It made me feel I
had a talent for it.”
Forty-three years later, Mackey has
proved beyond a doubt he has a talent
for it. It’s not just that he’s the chairman
of Princeton’s music department,
who this spring is teaching an Atelier
class on musical theater and a graduate
composition course. He also is a versatile,
highly sought-after composer —
one of the leading composers of his
generation. Last year Mackey’s piece
Lonely Motel: Music from Slide, on
which he collaborated with singer and
librettist Rinde Eckert and the group
eighth blackbird, was nominated for
four Grammys and won one, for “best
January 16, 2013 Princeton Alumni Weekly • paw.princeton.edu
small ensemble performance.” Mackey
played guitar on the piece.
“I don’t think we’ve ever had a composer
at Princeton who’s played so
much in the big leagues,” says Mackey’s
colleague Paul Lansky *73, a major
composer himself, citing Mackey’s collaborations
with famed conductors
such as Gustavo Dudamel of the Los
Angeles Philharmonic and Michael
Tilson Thomas of the San Francisco
Symphony. In August, Mackey completed
a piece that is sure to draw
attention when it debuts at Carnegie
Hall Feb. 12. Commissioned for the
Brentano String Quartet, it commemorates
the 50th anniversary of the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy.
Mackey was 10 when he joined his
first band, playing in a fifth-grade
talent show. He quickly learned the
Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No)
Satisfaction,” and was hooked: “The
sound of an electric guitar is mother’s
milk to me.” He learned guitar licks the
way most people did back then: by
picking up the needle on his turntable
and lowering it again and again, listening
over and over until he figured out
what his musical heroes were doing.
They were the usual suspects: at first,
Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, Jimmy
PLAYLIST
THE MUSIC ISSUE
Composer at work
THE CRITICS SAID ELECTRIC GUITAR AND STRING QUARTET WERE
OIL AND WATER. STEVEN MACKEY PROVED THEM WRONG
By Merrell Noden ’78
Download selections
by Steven Mackey and
student composers at
paw.princeton.edu
Page, and Duane Allman; then jazz
players like Al DiMeola and John
McLaughlin. At age 17, he became the
youngest member of a band called
Good Day, which played clubs all over
northern California. When touring
bands came to Sacramento, Good Day
was the opening act of choice, playing
on the same bill as Tower of Power and
Canned Heat, among others.
Still playing in the band, Mackey
went to the University of California,
Davis, to study physics. He was good at
it, and the counterintuitive world of
20th-century physics remains a touchstone,
guiding his understanding of
sound waves and vibrating strings but
also giving him a profound sense of
the world’s uncertainty. But he found
himself pondering the point of getting
a degree in physics. “Was I going to
join the military-industrial complex
and design nuclear weapons or something?”
he wondered. He was, he says,
“a long-haired, guitar-playing teenager
from northern California in the 1970s.”
A new direction began to appear.
Entering an arena for a rock concert in
Sacramento, he heard some of the
weirdest, most wonderful music he’d
ever encountered coming over the
public-address system. “I thought,
‘Whoa!! What is this?!’” It turned out
to be Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite.
In a survey class at college he was
encountering more fantastic music:
Beethoven’s late piano sonatas, works
by Debussy, and more Stravinsky: The
Rite of Spring. With the innocence of
someone who has not yet been blink-
PETER MURPHY