A Conductor’s and Performer’s Guide to Steven Bryant’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone - Chester Jenkins

117 BRYANT: You know, then it makes it work. Because if suddenly your line goes up way too high, then it’s never going to be that satisfying, even if you have players that can play it. It’s just not idiomatic. So I know that a lot of the satisfaction of a piece comes from if it lays, not necessarily easily, but in the right ranges for all the instruments. JENKINS: Yeah BRYANT: That’s huge, you know. We’re dealing with physics here, and those sort of pragmatic considerations are huge. And then I try to find how does the musical material work within that? And again, sometimes, somehow it just works out. JENKINS: Very cool. Obviously you use motive harmonically a lot, you said you like the sound of thirds and half steps kind of stacked together, sometimes you stack it like…one version at 171, you have it built on D, C, A, Bb and then Bb, Ab, F, F# so you have two different versions of the motive together, with a pivot pitch, serving both. What about that appeals to you? You said you like that ability, and I could probably come up with like eight different chords spelled with those pitches, you know? (Laughing) BRYANT: It just shows how I think different though…I think that pivot pitch, I play pretty fast and once I find my core motive material, I put myself in a box and anything remotely related to that counts for me. I don’t obsess over it too much, once I’ve played with the motive a long time, I intuitively make choices that fit within that sonic world, sometimes I’m not even conscious of them. I know I want a certain kind of density of pitch, so I’ll be like “oh that works…or no what if we overlap it that way”. I have some intuitive sense of kind of the density and dissonance or chord I’m looking for and then I go looking for how can I use what I have to make that thing, and however it overlaps, there’s not a theoretical calculation to it. It is intuitive but I’m using the blocks I’ve chosen, I’ve chosen all yellow Legos. JENKINS: (laughs) BRYANT: Now I’m going to build something wild out of it, it’s all going to end up yellow because that’s what allowed myself to start with but I don’t know exactly what I’m going to build with it. JENKINS: When you’re writing this way do you tend to write lines on top of each other or are you thinking more horizontally versus vertically a lot of the time? BRYANT: Yeah, now sometimes I’m working on it, and if there is a very specific chord progression, say the Solace chord progression, or in the first movement of Ecstatic Waters , that big horn fanfare thing I do, I worked that out very carefully, at the keyboard. But when I compose I’m looking at Digital Performer, in fact I’m composing right now (shows computer monitor), this is what I see. JENKINS: Gotcha BRYANT: You know, all those colored bars and lines and stuff, I’m very visual, so that really does affect how I work. I can see the lines going and I will treat them like taffy and