A Conversation with Katrina Krimsky
Bret Schneider (BS): So you're in San Francisco, is that right? Or the Bay Area?
Katrina Krimsky (KK): I'm in San Francisco.
BS: It looks like there was an interview with you by someone in your community?
KK: Oh, yes. One for my local paper, Potrero View, in San Francisco.
BS: It was good! I was surprised because I was like, “Okay, this is just like a little community newspaper thing,” but actually it was pretty revealing because you don't have too many interviews out there — that I could find, at least.
KK: That’s true. I have not in a while — and thank you for inviting me to the interview. I got to go into my figurative attic and move the cobwebs around and find treasures.
(Both laughing)
BS: Yeah! What did you find?
KK: Oh, just my life — a long, full life when I've done recordings and performances, and people who have crossed my path.
BS: You've done quite a bit. I was really surprised to see the wide breadth of different artists that you have worked with because I didn't really discover your music until recently, when I came across 1980. I've been listening to that album repeatedly, it's really great. I was surprised, after spending a little bit of time with it and reading about you, that you spent some time with Luc Ferrari and Stockhausen, and I would never have guessed that from listening to the work. It’s kind of rare and unique, it seems.
KK: Well, I went from the classical discipline and sought new adventures, which took me to Europe and to the avant garde. I was fortunate enough to work with Stockhausen, I played his piano pieces and memorized several of them to his delight, and he worked with me on them. I found little things… like a note that wouldn’t sustain. Then at his home he had an old upright, and I realized he had composed that particular piece on that upright which sustained that note (laughing) and all my efforts on all the other pianos to sustain that note did not work. But we had a lot of fun. It was a delightful time.
BS: And that was what year?
KK: ‘64.
BS: So you were really exposed to the mid-century avant garde works when you went to Europe.
KK: And I performed their works in concerts.
BS: How long were you in Europe? And how did that transfer over when you returned to the US? How did you perceive that moment, that European avant garde moment, compared to, say, what it was like coming back and working in the US?
KK: It was very cerebral there, in Cologne. I'm an instinctual performer, but I did it, I trained in this study, and then John Cage came out with Silence and I realized, "This is the right moment for silence," it's just between Boulez and Stockhausen and the rest of them. It was getting so complex. I was really delighted to come back, I had the opportunity to go to Buffalo, the Center of Creative and Performing Artists. That was a new world, and the young Americans were pursuing other things.
BS: I get the impression that, when you say it was so complicated and cerebral, it makes it seem like you think it was too complicated or maybe overwrought. I'm curious what you think about that. If you've always known that you've had more of an interest in simpler forms or a more direct approach — or I guess you describe it as intuition.
KK: Intuition, yeah, the feeling just didn't quite sit right. I needed to go on to something different, and in Buffalo I was able to do that. Pianist Yuji Takahashi was there and David Rosenboom, who's been a dear friend and colleague for many many years. He wrote the liner notes for 1980 and soon to be released will be my next recording by Unseen Worlds of Bell Solaris by David Rosenboom. I premiered that huge work in 1998. While I was in Zürich at my piano working on it and David was in California, we communicated back and forth, and he sent me pieces of his score. It was a wonderful time working together on that piece in twelve movements. All the material transforms and comes into its primary place in Hymn of Change, which is the tenth variation. So it takes material from it, augments and changes it, varies it, and then it comes out in this exquisite gospel waltz. It's absolutely exquisite. Tommy McCutchon of Unseen Worlds found the live recording of my performance at Merkin Hall, and he has it all digitized and ready for release. My recording 1980 has already been released.
BS: So you have quite a bit more to be released? Would you say this is just the beginning of uncovering this work? Is this going to be an ongoing thing, or are you just going to be doing selections of a few of your pieces? It sounds like this is one of your more ambitious, magnum opus kind of pieces.
KK: It is certainly an “ambitious magnum opus” as you said. I never know what comes next, Bret. I just do my music, love the music, couldn't live without it, and have had a long life of music. I recorded the Samuel Barber masterpiece Sonata for Piano, as well as Prole do Bebê (Books I & II) by Villa-Lobos, and Bell Solaris. And I'm enjoying playing Satie at the moment.
BS: Oh yeah! Any particular Satie pieces?
KK: Trois morceaux en forme de poire. Debussy said, "You have no form," and so Satie wrote that. It’s for four hands. I'm doing quite a bit of four-hand playing.
BS: I saw that on your website — how is that going? I mean, even when you listen to the 1980 pieces it sounds like you almost have four hands.
(Laughing)
BS: Just with your two! Is that new, doing these four-hand compositions? Or is that something you have done quite a bit in the past, as well?
KK: As a child, my mother and I played four-hands. And now I do it with Sofie Siegmann, a wonderful artist and my daughter through marriage. I taught her in Zürich, and we are enjoying playing together.
BS: I wasn't really familiar with Villa-Lobos before listening to your work, and that was something that really struck me about a lot of your work, the historical quoting even in your own compositions. Even in your interview you said that you like to quote quite a bit, and it seems pretty unique to move about different quotations so fluidly. I'm curious how you have developed that practice. I'm sure a lot of it comes out of being a performer since you were a child and playing a lot of pieces and being familiar with them enough to be able to do that. But I'm also curious about how you think about it; how much of it is just a natural quotation, and how much of it is intentional on your part — i.e., if there is almost an educational dimension to it or something. It can be very educational listening to your work.
KK: I was led to Villa-Lobos by Don Buchla. Then Joe Henderson wrote Black Narcissus based on Moranina (the paper doll) from the first volume of the Villa-Lobos. Things just come into my life somehow, you know. I'm curious, I'm interested, that's what you have to be because it's all out there for us to have and to enjoy, and we just have to trust our instincts, be curious and interested. Then we take this, then we take that, and we put it together.
BS: It’s very unique because it seems like a lot of composers in your generation have really kind of endorsed specific styles, for better or worse, and it seems like there are a lot of forms certain composers will not touch, right? They've kind of tabooed it in their own repertoire or something, so 1980 feels very free amidst this, perhaps that's the instinctual dimension of it. You're definitely a composer as well, right? You're live-composing this, but you're notating it as well — after — or, how does that work for you?
KK: Repetition brings ideas, and then I jot them down here and there. You know the freedom was because of the environment I was invited to be in at Woodstock. It brought it out. Karl Berger wrote, "Essentially it all goes to the sense of flow that we all have, thinking is too slow for music, you need to trust your musical instinct," and going to Woodstock and coming from Zurich I felt free as a bird, and I just played. It was early years of improvisation for me. I have gotten a little more sophisticated since.
(Laughing)
BS: I hope that's a good thing!
KK: Whatever, I just enjoy it. I enjoy playing composed music, I enjoy composing music, and I enjoy playing piano.
BS: That definitely comes across. So what was the environment like there? This was in Woodstock, right? And this was a residency, or a short school?
KK: Short — it was a workshop and a concert in a barn, and there were not a lot of people. I do recall Simone Forti was there at the same time, the dancer… more of that I cannot tell you about!
(Laughing)
BS: So how long did it take you to become this fluid? With the work — I guess the way that some of the press has framed 1980 in particular is that this was a bit of a watershed for you, that you had a sort of breakthrough, and I'm curious what the prerequisites were or something; in order to get you to that point, did you feel like you had to have a certain amount of experience, or was it — what were those conditions, exactly, how much of it was personal with you, how much was it like an objective cultural environment that allowed you to do it?
KK: Improvisation — I started actually playing with Woody Shaw in my studio in the ‘70s. I had never improvised a note of music and was now already grown up and many years had passed of playing composed music. Then I started improvising and I started listening to jazz musicians at the Keystone Korner. They were interested in classical music, they liked to hear Debussy, Ravel, and different composers. I recall Cecil Taylor sitting in the front row, the club was empty and I was hired to play from seven to nine, so I played my composed repertoire with him sitting there. But… the time was not finished so I had to improvise and that was challenging, but I let it go, and he became a good friend and mentor and I appreciated his music a lot. So it started there, Bret, it started with just infant steps and playing with people. I had a studio, I had a trio with bass and drums, and I was doing tape delay; I had electronics, and big Altec speakers and I was going around SF with my setup and my trio and playing concerts. People would come to my studio and play with me. So I enjoyed a lot of playing and opening up and improvising and more and more of that was incorporated into music and my joy of it. I was also influenced by Terry Riley in the earlier years and I've recorded his Rainbow in Curved Air twice. That's been a long-term friendship and relationship.
BS: Yeah, you were the pulse in In C, right?
KK: That's right, on the original In C for Columbia Records, and back then it was so amazing because it was something so new. I wore black kid gloves with Band-Aids inside, but nobody knew about the Band-Aids (laughing) and it just opened up people's awareness. These little fragments that require the player to listen to your neighbors and move according to their movement is all about listening. So I did two other performances playing the pulse — with David Rosenboom's CalArts orchestra in Disney Hall and then the big 45th anniversary of In C in Carnegie Hall where all the luminaries were on stage, including Phil Glass.
BS: I was reading one account where there were so many people on stage, it was like there were more people on stage than in the audience.
(Laughing)
KK: It was huge! And it went for so long! I never played those C's for so long! (Laughing) I think an hour and eighty minutes or something and they positioned a wonderful percussion group behind me, and these guys were right there for me! It was a fabulous experience, a beautiful performance.
BS: So it was just as enriching, the reprise of it, many years later, as it was the first.- Though I'm curious how it was the first time, you describe the newness of it — which you know, for my generation it's been, you know, like I've grown up with it, I heard it pretty young, Rainbow in Curved Air made a pretty big influence on me and musical repetition is part of the repertoire of what a lot of young musicians just learn now. But I can't imagine what it must have been like when it was new, when it was not really — when it seemed to come out of thin air, and maybe it's a tall order to ask you to describe that feeling because it's really hard to describe those new exciting feelings, but what was it like, being exposed to Terry Riley and a lot of those other composers who were doing something that seemed totally new — did it come out of nowhere? Or did it seem to be a natural development out of western music or jazz? In your opinion, where did that watershed moment come from?
KK: I think everything comes from someplace, I mean the influences come from someplace. Ravel was already doing this with Bolero. I was surrounded by artists in NY who were all doing repetitive work, their own work, that was successful and they repeated it to their benefit. This is something to my disadvantage, because I kept moving, there's always something new that attracts me. So in NY I met LaMonte Young and Marianne Zazeela, and the first time I went to their studio the sine wave generator was going, I had never heard anything like this — I walked in and all these overtones were coming out of my voice? That was a monumental change. So I played tamboura with them every morning and I sang with them and learned to feel that, and then we did the Munich Olympics and I sang with Marion and LaMonte — he was a great influence, also on Terry, you know, so we were all just having a great time, playing all night long and singing and it was a very enriching time, but that’s how new things happen — they just kind of float and you just participate in it and then its in your repertoire.
BS: So you got to experience the early instance of the Dream House, then.
KK: I was there when Pandit Pran Nath arrived, I spent a lot of time with him.
BS: And what was that experience like?
KK: Oh, it was magnificent! I mean, he was totally different — he was raw, absolutely raw, like a lion! And full of his music, and very kind to me. Very demanding of his disciples. Therefore I never became a disciple, but I was a friend. He lived in an apartment behind me in San Francisco in North Beach and he would come up and do his morning practice in my extra room and I played tamboura with him — I accompanied him in San Diego and elsewhere, and it was beyond — I cannot describe it, it's beyond description. Marvelous.
BS: That's what I've read from the Terry Riley interviews, that's how he describes it, as well. Do you think that whatever it is is being transmitted because I think that's a big part of, well, I guess what La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela are trying to do, to preserve that legacy because there's a lot of talk of it becoming totally lost. Do you think that it's a sort of form that's lost to history, or do you think there's room to grow for it to be continually interpreted?
KK: Oh, I think that they are keeping the legacy alive. Terry is also doing that, he's doing more and more of that now. I think it was an influence and it's incorporated in music, it's not exclusively there for the passage of time but it is an influence that exists, it opened up a new realm. I was very interested in world music. Later, when I was based In Zürich, Krishna Bhatt was living in Lausanne, Switzerland part time and he would spend days visiting me and we would play day and night. To put the sitar with the piano is challenging!
BS: I know! I couldn't believe you did that with Rainbow in Curved Air, I was like "Wow, that's a very difficult thing to do," and you did it very well.
KK: Thanks! And the Four Moons, too! He told me not long ago he thought that was one of the best recordings he had done. It was because we just played together all the time and we found a way to merge our talents and our listening and our instruments. It was tremendous for me, and for him, too, I think, we had a wonderful time. So I spent a lot of time in Zürich playing with him and then Trevor Watts, the free jazz musician from London would stay weeks, we would play day and night. I mean, this is all how we grow. I was very fortunate, I have been very fortunate.
BS: I'm curious, you know what's interesting is that with all the work with Riley and Young, I was surprised that there wasn't a lot of focus on alternative tunings or just intonation for you, that you still seem to kind of stick with what some people would call more traditional — I don't mean that in a bad way at all. So it was very interesting to hear you doing something with resonance, right?
KK: Well the piano is my instrument and it has lots of possibilities and a huge range and you mentioned resonance — that is what I seek, that's what the repetition is about, finding the resonance that connects and when I get that, I am lifted out of my world and into another.
BS: I like the description that you had in the last interview — or was it in the poem, maybe? A text piece you wrote about joy, something about, um, the joy of music?
KK: My poem! Haha, the only poem I ever wrote, and Jacqueline Humbert performed it a couple times. Yeah, “notes of truth always clear,” that's in the refrain, “joy and grace transcends and abounds, listen, listen, we can hear,” Yes, I wrote that poem in ‘74, ‘73, way back when I was going through changes in my life, radical changes, and somehow, “perseverance furthers” was a constant in my mind from the I Ching that guided me and carried me along through that hard time. I followed my instincts, and somehow, it all worked out. I was very fortunate, ‘cause I've had some hard times, everybody does.
GRACE
Leave the past and that ol' place
Layered with years of tonal lace
Break channel open to a timeless space
Tender air input your Grace. Listen, listen we can hear
Notes of truth always clear
Free the source to visions galore
Mirrored tones make dialogues soar
Create the sound and love will abound
Joy and grace transcends and surrounds Listen, listen we can hear
Notes of truth always clear
BS: You've had quite a long career, I imagine there have been some really difficult times in there. One of the things I was thinking when I listened to the interview, the '77 interview, when you got on the air, was "Wow, Katrina has a really amazing, sonorous voice! I wonder if she sings a lot." You said at the end you were singing for some piece, and I know the piano is your instrument, but do you still do much singing or any singing?
KK: No, Bret, but I always sing when I play because my mother taught me that, she said “Just sing, when you play,” and then the melodies come out naturally, the lines come out naturally, nothing is repressed that way. It's easier, so I always had my head singing whatever I play, and of course I grew up on Chopin, full of melodies, and I've moved beyond that, away from that romantic, feeling but I do want to tell you about my piece Fluid Silk, which is a 28-note pattern and it’s sequential, one voice remains the same, and the other shifts, one note at a time, and after 28 times you are in unison again. This is a meditation, this is a training for the brain, I must say. Then from that, I have a very romantic lyrical middle section, and then I again do the patterns, and I do love this piece. It has not been recorded, but it was performed by North/South Consonance Ensemble in NY with flutist Lisa Hansen. William Susman did the arrangement of it brilliantly, and that was June of ‘22.
BS: And when did you write this?
KK: Uh, when did I write that? Um… back in the ‘90s, in Zürich. The name Fluid Silk is because Lake Zürich feels like fluid silk when you swim in it.
BS: Sounds like it’s a bit of raga form and a bit of romantic music?
KK: I don't know about the raga form, but the pattern music, the minimal, and phase shifting which Steve Reich of course started long ago. I knew that and wanted to try it with this 28-note pattern I developed, and I still play that piece. I am very happy when I can come out in unison after 28 times (laughing) I wrote out the pattern, then worked with it and the repetition brought ideas to me. I often like to have a contrast, sometimes I'll put a chorale in or I'll insert a lyrical section like I did in this or like in my piece Elise's Dream — that is a humorous piece.
BS: Very fun.
KK: Then I have a big cadenza that I wrote out in Elise’s Dream in order to make a masterful cadenza. It is meant to be fun and a takeoff of Beethoven’s Für Elise.
BS: It’s very fun. It's very playful. It's hard to find pieces that have a great balance of being serious but playful and fun at the same time, and I think that it does that very well.
KK: Good, Bret! I intentionally wanted people to listen to me, and they always listen to Für Elise, so I thought, “Okay! Well, let’s do a takeoff of Für Elise, and they'll recognize it.” Lisa Hansen is a fantastic flutist and my niece in NY, and she has performed it brilliantly. Elisa’s Dream was written for her.
BS: I wanted to ask you a bit about repetition as well because it’s something that comes up a lot with younger musicians, too — that there's an interest in repetition. I like the way you describe it as kind of a way to generate ideas. Why is it that, for the last half century, repetition seems so compelling; do you think that repetition was always just sort of part of the musical experience, or do you think it's really specific to our era?
KK: Hmm, I'd have to think about that at length. I'm not sure. In history there must be repetition. but how it is used now is specific to our generation, I think. And it evokes ideas. Just the process of repetition frees the other instincts to come aboard and want to be heard, too. I feel ostinato is very useful for improvisation. More and more, I'm using it as a platform, it's a good platform for me to move on and create, and I contrast it and go away from it and come back to it and play with it, as in 1980, that’s what’s happening there, so it assists in the process definitely.
BS: I wanted to ask you about your use of electronics as well, if that’s still something that’s part of your process, that you were using tape delays, like Terry Riley; is that something you were experimenting with for a period of time and put aside, or does that still kind of captivate you?
KK: I used it for a while, but then I discovered I wasn't able to play enough because of the delay. I had two delays, so that limited how much playing I could do. Then I felt frustrated, I wanted to play more, I wanted to bring it all out more myself, so I reduced it to one delay, then I removed the delays altogether. I enjoyed it, it gives a new sound and it’s good. Terry did it a lot and that influenced me to do it, but I'm too much of a pianist, I needed to play.
(Laughing)
BS: Well, how much of it, too, was a necessity at that time for filling in voices? Since a lot of musicians and composers at the time were not really working in the concert repertoire, they didn't really have ensembles available, right? It seems like electronics are brought in as an additional player.
KK: Yes.
BS: And of course a lot of it does sound very good, too. And I’ve always been curious with that generation, how much of it was a necessity and how much was perceived as, like, just a really interesting aesthetic form that sounded good, too?
KK: That! The latter. Definitely. It sounded wonderful, then when I put my bass and drums with it also… it was great. I had two big Altec speakers and tape recorders, the old wonderful Ampex tape recorders, I had a whole setup, and a student would lend me his VW van, everything would get put in there, including the bass and drums and we played a lot of concerts on the West Coast.
BS: You're not hauling all this stuff around anymore, huh? Are you still performing quite a bit, in public?
KK: No Bret. I am finished doing live performances and this is the only live interview I'll be doing for a while, probably…
(Laughing)
BS: Well, thanks for that! That's great.
KK: Back to my garden and my roses.
BS: Do you think there are younger artists and musicians taking up your work and trying to perform your compositions? Is that something that you've noticed?
KK: No, it's not something I've noticed. However, it's very possible.
BS: Yet.
KK: Yet.
(Laughing)
KK: Another great musician who influenced me and I enjoyed working with a lot was Irmin Schmidt of CAN. He was the founder of this rock group in Europe that was huge! We're still very good friends. He produced my piano recording, Ambrosia, of my piano pieces, tunes.
BS: When was that?
KK: Well, he was in Cologne when I was in Cologne, that's when we became best friends and we stayed in touch, he and his wife Hildegard, CAN’s manager, and often they came to Zürich or we met in Paris. Ambrosia was recorded in 1986. Sadly, it's not available anymore.
BS: Oh, no — lost to history?
KK: Well, my Time Over Time album, which is a retrospective album I put together, includes some of the pieces from Ambrosia, so not all lost!.
BS: Also on that album is the Katrina Ballerina which was composed by Woody Shaw? Or was that a collaboration?
KK: Woody composed Katrina Ballerina, which I improvised on and performed several times — we composed together a piece called Specs, and another called Epilogue, which are on my very first vinyl recording, simply named Katrina Krimsky.
BS: And was this moment you described earlier — with Woody Shaw and some of the other jazz musicians having a classical music interest — as that kind of convergence unique to that time, or was that always there with jazz?
KK: Oh, I think it was always there with jazz. I know Woody listened to Bartok's string quartets and a lot of esoteric music. Yeah, I think they all did, the great ones, they listen to everything.
BS: What do you listen to? Do you listen to a lot of music — or do you listen when you play?
KK: I listen to various music and I do listen when people give me their music, give me their CD or whatever, and I certainly listen then, and I listen to concerts. I'm often playing and then I need silence, as things come up out of silence.
BS: Well, we've covered a lot! Thank you for indulging all the questions.
KK: Well, it was very good for me to do this because I got in touch with my history. I tend to keep moving and forget that there's a whole history back there, and you pulled it all out.
BS: You are like the history of the last 50 years.
KK: I know! I've lived a long time and I'm lucky I'm healthy. I can still do it all. I do not want to do live performance anymore! I avoid any stress in my life!
BS: Oh, it's stressful for you? Live performances are stressful?
KK: I found performance to usually be stressful until I got on stage to the piano. Then I relaxed and felt at home. Except Woodstock — I was free as a bird! Nothing mattered, I didn't know anybody, I was free to just do.
BS: This is very educational for me, historically. Sometimes there are just people who seem to be a nexus, like a lightning rod for a historical moment and, like, if you were an alien coming to earth and wanted to know the history of music for the last 50 years by only studying one artist, you are one of those artists who has a lot of different music is folded into their work, and it's kind of like a microcosm in a way, and it's fantastic, thank you for revealing your history and sharing that.
KK: Well, thank you, Bret, for being interested, and listening. I appreciate that. I know you are a pianist and a composer and I really do appreciate your letting me reveal myself.
In order for your readers to hear my music and stay up to date, I recommend putting a link to my website and to Bandcamp. The score of Fluid Silk for flute and small ensemble arranged by William Susman has just been published and is available on Universal Editions.
