“Wishbone Suite” Limited Edition and An Interview with Andy Clausen
For the entire month of February we will be offering a limited edition version of Andy Clausen’s The Wishbone Suite with lots of added bonus material all at the reduced cost of $7.00! In addition to the album, you will receive the full score for the 2012 release in PDF format as well as twelve previously unreleased tracks. The tracks were taken from an earlier studio session the band had in the summer of 2010. Much of the music from this session would evolve into The Wishbone Suite, but sounds uniquely its own and shows the evolution of the group’s sound and the changes Clausen’s made to the musical material.
The physical copy of the album comes with a wallet featuring the artwork of Andrew J.S. Also included is a twelve-page booklet of photographs from the Wishbone sessions by Skyler Skjelset, and liner notes by Andy Clausen. For our friends with more modest financial dispositions, we will be selling the digital download without the bonus materials for only $4. If you already have the album and want the bonus materials, send us an email with proof of purchase and we’ll send them to you.
An Interview with Andy Clausen
Christian Pincock of Table & Chairs recently interviewed Andy, who was able to shed some light on his process of writing, developing, arranging and recording the album as well as the story behind the music.
—
Christian: So you’re going to be the featured artist on Table & Chairs for the Month of February with The Wishbone Suite. I’m just curious: what is Wishbone? Is that an ensemble? Is it a composition? Is it the CD? Is it more than that? Is it all of those things? What exactly is Wishbone?
Andy: That’s a very good question. I guess it started off as a piece. It was originally written for a Racer Session and I wrote this piece in it’s initial form and got together some of my favorite musicians from that little community and then liked how it worked and then kept it going. So then it became the band and then it became the record. So it’s all of those things. But the band is not necessarily limited to that.
Christian: Why is it a suite made of short pieces? What’s the background for that?
Andy: It kind of became this big suite because I could never decide on one way to arrange a particular theme. I would try treating the them two of three different ways and then liked each of them in its own way and then just threw them all together in this one extended story.
Christian: So then why not The Wishbone Theme and Variations?
Andy: Maybe it’s not an accurate title but I like the sound of it.
Christian: You have some unusual instrumentations in the Suite. The first one that comes to mind is the glockenspiel. Why the glockenspiel?
Andy: The subject matter of the piece is very playful and kind of childlike and that’s a sound I associate with the glockenspiel and it just adds this delicate little texture to it that makes it more playful.
Christian: You mentioned playfulness. Is there something outside of the actual music that the suite is about? Is it about something or someone? Is there a backstory?
Andy: Yes, there is. The suite is based on a little fling that I had in second grade with this girl. I had a crush on her and I wrote her a little note asking her if she felt the same way and she didn’t and I chased her around and it ended kind of sadly. It was a very vivid memory from my childhood. It’s just kind of playing around with memories of that experience. Every piece has an image that I associate with it.
Christian: What made you choose the particular players on the CD?
Andy: I had worked with each of them in separate settings, some a little more extensively than others but I really liked how they all played and their attitudes and approaches to music and I thought and I thought they would have the right approach to deal with this music.
The piece actually started out with guitar. It was originally written for Jared Borkowski and for about the first six or seven months of the project he was involved and then I brought in Gus Carns because I had expanded the arrangements quite a bit and thought piano would help flesh it out. So we did one concert with guitar and piano and when I decided I was going to record it and keep working on it and performing it with the band. Unfortunately Jared had to bow out due to other commitments and was unable to participate. So then it became piano. It was just wanting to work with those guys and liking them as people.
Christian: One of my very favorite pieces is Badlands. I like it because compositionally, it’s such a tight construction: a very small amount of music that goes a long way. What’s the inspiration for that piece in particular?
Andy: Musically?
Christian: Yeah, musically.
Andy: Geez! Well, to get technical, I was playing around with the combination of the major pentatonic with the minor pentatonic at the same time and juxtaposing them in the upper register and lower register and figuring out what harmonies result from that combination.
I’m trying to remember where I lifted that idea. I think it was a Bartok piano piece that I saw that little thing in so I tried to steal that.
Christian: So that makes clear your choice of the final chord which has always been really striking to me where you have the major and the minor thirds together without a seventh.
So I also checked out that you did another CD called Follow by the Andy Clausen Sextet. First of all, when did you release Follow?
Andy: Follow was 2009; I was a Junior in high school when we released that, so it was a long time ago.
Christian: So what happened to you artistically in between those two releases?
Andy: I started writing a lot more for all sorts of different ensembles. I guess the biggest difference was that I started listening to classical music and trying to incorporate elements of that and larger scale compositions into my bands and what I was doing.
Christian: Who in particular were you listening to?
Andy: The first guy I really got into was Bartok. Why Bartok? I really can’t say but I was really attracted to his harmonies and his folk-like melodies and his ability to treat very singable melodies in odd harmonic ways. It was actually Luke Bergman who introduced me to Bartok—he gave me the Emerson Quartet playing Bartok’s string quartets and it just blew my mind. From there, I got really into Stravinsky for similar reasons: the folk melodies treated in interesting ways. I guess Stravinsky has more of a rhythmic element to it. Also Charles Ives and Aaron Copland for very similar reasons. So I think the thing that ties all of them together is the folk-like simplicity of melody but each [composer] treating [the melodies] in very different ways.
Christian: I think it’s interesting that all of the composers you mentioned were relatively contemporary of each other, working in the early 1900s.
Just as a side note, I just saw a video of the Martha Graham Dance Company performing the complete Appalachian Spring ballet and I was blown away!
Andy: I love that music!
Christian: I had been thinking about film scoring and how film is really in some ways a terrible medium for composers to really compose.
Andy: In some ways, but just a very different thing [from ballet]. The music is the mistress of the film and whatever is going on [visually].
Christian: Exactly!
Andy: …and [the music] is there to support [the visual action] not to underscore it whereas in dance, the music plays a much more central role.
Christian: Exactly! In opera, music has a central role as well. I just really saw a union of the music and the dance in Appalachian Spring.
Andy: Yeah, I love ballet music and writing for dance is something that I would like to get way more into in the future because it’s very challenging.
Christian: What do you think you’d be able to do in that medium? What is exciting about that medium?
Andy: I think just the combined artistic power of dance and music is very compelling and interesting to me. Music itself has great potential to tell stories and to move people, as does dance and I think that the combination of the two gives even more potential.
I think combining music and film also has great potential, a different kind of potential. The ability to create a mood and evoke emotion in viewers and listeners is intriguing and each medium has a different way of doing that.
Christian: You’re also a trombonist. I’m curious if you find it difficult to maintain both identities as a composer and as a trombonist.
Andy: Certainly, both in terms of time management and in terms of marketing. It’s definitely something that’s a real challenge because in some ways each one hinders the other. If I’m in a period of intense composition like I have been in the past four days, I touch my horn very little. If I’m in a period where I’m practicing a lot then I’m not writing, which is also frustrating. It goes in phases and usually one is sacrificed for a period of time. I’m really looking forward to the day when I can balance the two equally but who knows if that will ever happen.
Christian: I imagine that you have a lot of school stuff on your mind, but what projects other than Wishbone do you have on the horizon?
Andy: My most active project right now is The Westerlies, which is an original music brass quartet featuring four guys originally from Seattle who are all now in New York. That project is a year old and we have a huge repertoire of original music that we have been performing and rehearsing and recording in all sorts of venues and stuff. Right now we have three projects on the horizon, one of which is a large scale composition for dance that we’re premiering at Juilliard in April and that’s for brass quartet and electronics. Then we’re working on a record of the music of Wayne Horvitz. I think we’re recording in May; that’s the plan at this point. Then we’re also going to record in August a record of our original material. So, it’s busy. We rehearse twice a week here in New York and play on average about once a month publicly.
Other projects on the horizon: I have a large book of big band music which I’ve written in the last few years. I would love to record that at some point. I don’t know if it will be in the next year or so, but I’m definitely going to keep writing that and trying to perform it when I can.
I have a ten-composition suite (I guess you could call it) of songs which I wrote for Racer Sessions this August. We premiered that with cello, trumpet, two guitars and myself and I have a New York version of that called Shudder which I plan to develop a little more and maybe expanding to an album-length piece.
I also have a band with Evan Woodle and Gregg Belisle-Chi that I started this winter break. It’s a trio project playing random tunes from the past few years.
Christian: I think that’s the group I saw when you were here; did you play at the Royal Room a few weeks ago?
Andy: Yeah, and I think that’s a group I’d like to actively perform with as well.
Christian: That sounds like a lot!
Andy: It is a lot. I’m also currently scoring two short films for a friend of mine who goes to NYC and the deadline is quickly approaching.
Christian: Well that sounds like a lot going on in addition to your all your school work at Juilliard.
Andy: Oh! Oh! Wishbone is going to tour in July: a west coast tour.
Christian: Where can people find out about that?
Andy: All performances are on my web site: http://andyclausen.com and the Table & Chairs website will list that stuff.
Christian: Is there anything else that you’d like people to know?
Andy: Well I think what’s going to be interesting about this artist feature is that I’m going to be releasing some recordings of the piece in its very initial stages. What a lot of people don’t know is that we recorded a studio version of the piece a year before we recorded The Wishbone Suite record and that has not been released widely. A few people have heard it. That’s being released as part of this. After that initial incarnation of it, I arranged the music for big band and expanded it greatly and then I arranged it back down to feature the piano. That’s why I brought in the piano, because it had all these new elements. We’re going to be releasing a live recording from that one concert where we featured guitar and piano and [a recording of] these big band arrangements that had been condensed back down. Then over the next four to five months I whittled [the arrangement] down, rearranged it more into what became the record.
Christian: Then I have to ask why didn’t you release the original studio recording?
Andy: It wasn’t ready in my opinion. It was interesting but I think it had potential to grow and evolve and I wanted to see what more I could do with it. I think it’ll be interesting for people to compare the three versions and see how it changed.
Christian: What do you think we should listen for in these version. What’s interesting about it?
Andy: They’re different; I don’t know! What I’ll say about the original version is that it’s a lot more raw and the melodies are stated more clearly and simply. It was a very fast, intuitive compositional process with very little editing and that’s what you’ll hear in the initial version. In the second version, perhaps, you will hear probably too many different elements happening at once and a lot of information thrown at you in a very short amount of time and that is interesting in some ways and overwhelming in other ways. That’s why I yet again edited it and subtracted elements that I didn’t like or thought were too much and so you have the final version.
Christian: I’m curious: when you compose, does it come very quickly or slowly?
Andy: It’s very different for different pieces. Sometimes it’s a very painstakingly slow laborious process in which I will mull over the smallest little decision for very long periods of time…hours, and hours, and hours. Other times I will catch on to an idea and just throw it all out on the page very quickly. It’s kind of sporadic. I don’t really have control over the process and I don’t think I ever will.
The Wishbone Ensemble is:
Andy Clausen - Trombone
Ivan Arteaga - Clarinet
Gus Carns - Piano
Aaron Otheim - Accordion, Piano
Chris Icasiano - Drums, Glockenspiel
PRAISE FOR THE WISHBONE SUITE
“Brilliant release by trombonist Clausen…[who] finds a way to fuse these disparate musicians and their seemingly ill-fitting instruments into an alluring, whimsical, and just-plain-cool mix of jazz, classical, and experimental music. Challenging music that doesn’t shy away from also being pretty.” — Dave Sumner, eMusic