Musical machines - Princeton Alumni Weekly - Princeton University

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With the JFK piece, Mackey knew
that his “quirky psychedelia” wasn’t
going to work. “My music often takes
humorous and/or ironic turns, and
there is absolutely nothing funny about
those dates in late November 1963,” he
acknowledged in his blog recently.
To write the piece, Mackey drew
partly on his boyhood memories. His
parents had been civilian employees of
the Air Force and were great admirers
of the handsome young president and
his beautiful wife. “My parents were
down with the Camelot thing,” recalls
Mackey. “[The Kennedys] were a goodlooking
couple their age. They inspired
so much optimism.”
On that awful day in November,
Mackey, 7, was home from school, sick.
He remembers one thing clearly: “It
was the first time I’d ever seen my
mother cry. ... My parents never really
recovered. Everything that happened
subsequent to that — Vietnam and
the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy
and Martin Luther King — was the
works are performed in warehouses and other nontraditional
venues.) The cars’ lights blink, horns honk, and two
dancers cavort before they are consumed in a burst of light
in a car’s trunk — “like a scene from Repo Man,” said a
review in The Australian. Neal gets credit for composing and
“devising” the piece, and worked with a choreographer.
In a newer piece, “Semaphore,” dancers spell out SOS with
flags, while percussionists play the same message in Morse
code. The musicians are not merely accompanying the
dancers — they are at the center of the stage as essential participants
in the performance, playing their instruments and
even moving their heads in perfect unison. The work explores
“encoded methods of communication,” Neal explains.
Neal says non-musicians such as choreographer Pina
Bausch, architect Daniel Libeskind, and playwright/actor/
director Robert Lepage are big influences. “We’re such a visually
inspired culture” that it’s hard not to be interested in
how things look as well as how they sound, says Neal, who
also has written music for animated short films.
Princeton’s embrace of different influences is a draw for
artists like Neal. A major force in the establishment of the
composition doctoral program — one of the first in the
country — in 1961 was Professor Milton Babbitt *92, the
mathematics-influenced composer who died in January
2011. For years the music department was known for
Babbitt’s brand of “cerebral music” that “forced listeners to
carefully follow his structurally complex compositions,” the
University’s obituary said.
January 16, 2013 Princeton Alumni Weekly • paw.princeton.edu
unraveling.”
His first step in composing the piece
was to refresh his memory about what
had happened. He read several books
and watched the famous film shot by
Abraham Zapruder, who was watching
the president’s motorcade pass by and
documented the assassination. Mackey
knew he could not be too literal. “I
didn’t want to represent the horror of
this even if I could, because I wanted
the music to be listenable,” he says. He
thought about opting for something
safe, “a solemn offering that really
doesn’t have anything to do with the
event, but is a remembrance.”
Then, he had a breakthrough: “I
latched on to Jackie.”
Jacqueline Kennedy, in his reading of
things, was a hero. Having lost a newborn
son, Patrick, just three months earlier,
she hadn’t wanted to go to Dallas.
But Texas was then a battleground state,
and she allowed herself to be talked
into it. She experienced the most horrific
violence up close, going from
bright sunshine one moment to
cradling her dying husband the next,
even scrambling over the back of the
speeding limousine to retrieve a piece
of his skull in case something could be
done with it at the hospital.
“I was taken by her personal
strength, her bravery, and her compassion,”
says Mackey. “She was out of the
White House that week and had to
make a life for herself. Suddenly she
was a widowed, single mother of two.”
Jackie gave him a window on the
assassination. His two children were
virtually the same ages as the two
Kennedy children at the time of their
father’s death. He remembered the
death of his own mother and that of
his brother.
“I pick things that interest me, like
how time works, and channel that into
my own life experiences and then just
write music,” he says. “It’s not Jackie’s
theme, it’s my theme.”
He wound up with three parts, all
named for traditional musical forms.
While that approach was cutting-edge at the time, things
have changed over the years, reflecting what was going on
outside academia. Concert music “should reveal and be
proud of all the music you love,” says Mackey — whether it’s
Chopin, Shostakovich, or a “guilty pleasure” like rock music.
Mackey reminds students that Mozart was influenced by the
vernacular music of his day, such as Austrian and Italian folk
music and Turkish military marches.
Another barrier also has been falling: the separation
between composer and performer. That schism also would
sound strange to Mozart or Beethoven, but it took hold in
the middle of the last century, born of the modernist notion
that a piece of music could be perfected only when performed
by the most accomplished musicians, explains music
professor Dan Trueman *99, the department’s director of
graduate studies. “That notion that the composer shouldn’t
perform, or the performer shouldn’t compose, has mostly
disappeared, and our program reflects that,” he says.
Most students who go through Princeton’s composition
program these days also perform. When deciding between
two candidates with stellar composing credentials, “we
always opt for the person who gets his or her hands dirty” by
performing on stage, Mackey says: Audiences are interested
in hearing composers play their own work, and orchestras
relate to the composers more intensely. A “sense of drama
and pacing [is] born out of experience communicating one’s
music in real time in physical space,” he says.
Third-year student Caroline Shaw — who started playing
the violin at age 2 and singing soon afterward — long