Clay Zeller-Townson
Making a Ruckus: Clay Zeller-Townson on Baroque Without Boundaries
Below is the transcript of my interview with Clay Zeller-Townson of Ruckus Early Music. The button link takes you to the podcast, video, and show notes with all the other links!
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Let's really show that this music, that all Baroque music is dance music. And what do we mean by that? For me, it means it has to make me want to dance. I don't care really what made Louis the 14th want to dance. I'm not him. I don't, he's not in the room and what's going to make us want to dance, it's probably something different. And that's okay.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman.I have become a big fan of Ruckus, a dynamic Early Music ensemble, and I so enjoyed this uplifting conversation with Clay Zeller-Townson, their Artisitic Director and bassoonist. You’ll be hearing clips from The Edinburgh Rollick with music from the Niel Gow collection, featuring the violinist Keir GoGwilt, and because this music is very much at the crossroads of Scottish traditional music and Baroque music, it delights audiences who are more into folk as well as baroque. Listeners interested in creative pursuits will be inspired to hear Clay’s ideas around crafting something truly personal and unique and connecting with audiences, as well the importance of access to music education at all levels. We also got into Ruckus’ Fly the Coop project with flutist Emi Ferguson with a wonderfully fresh take on the music of J.S. Bach, and a lot of what Clay shared was how the musicians connect deeply with their audiences with contemporary relevance in many different ways.There's a lot more to this episode; you’ll find the track names of the music included in the detailed time stamps. The complete show notes on my website will take you to Ruckus, other episodes you’ll love, the video, podcast and transcript for this episode along with different ways to support this independent project for which I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Now to Clay Zeller-Townson!Hey Clay, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Thanks, Leah.
Leah Roseman:
So I had not known about the Ruckus Ensemble before I heard about you, and I was just like, I've been blown away, not only by your recent album, but your first album, and I've listened to both of them so much. So I'm keen to dig into this. Actually, it's an interesting concept. So maybe for people who haven't heard of you, explain the concept of the group.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Sure. So Ruckus is a continuo band, which is a really specific special ensemble type built into Baroque music. And it's basically just a rhythm section that is on 18th century 17th century instruments. So we've got keyboard, harpsichord, theorbo, the big lutes of all different sizes, guitars of different shapes and sizes, cello, bass, bassoon, percussion. It's really quite similar to the rhythm section in the jazz idiom. And continuo function similarly, they're providing rhythmic texture to Baroque music. And we are also linked up with improvisational practices from more recent centuries in that in Baroque scores, there is not every bit of information needed to see the piece. So let me say that again. Baroque scores have an openness to them and continuo players are improvisers in this 18th century idiom, and they take this open notation and create texture that serves to bring the character of the music to life. And we can talk more about what are the mechanics of this, what does that actually look like on the page? But the gist of it is that this is a section of rhythmic improvisers who create texture to make something really vivid. And our goal in Ruckus has always been to make a very personal, unique approach to continuo practice. And it just, we found ourselves moving towards this very groove oriented, very dance oriented house style, which is, I think really indicative of what Baroque music is and especially what it is for us.
When I was first getting into Baroque music, I was a student at Eastman and I was taking this performance practice class by a legendary lute player, Paul Odette. And Paul would say that there was a time where you could hear a recording of a modern symphony orchestra. I think he was thinking of the mid 20th century. And you would know just by the sound, the sort of attitude, the color, the sound of that. Maybe it was the first oboe really indicative sound. You could be like, oh, that's the Philadelphia orchestra. I know exactly who that is and you don't have to tell me who it is because I can identify it by this sense of unique style. And I think a lot of modern orchestras have sort of smoothed out the edges and became a little bit homogenous, a little bit similar. I don't know if you could really pull that off right now, comparing two live performances of the same piece.
And I was captured by this idea of like, oh, when someone hears a Ruckus recording, I want them to be like, I know that's Ruckus. No one else does things like that. It's very specific to them, and it's not Les Arts Florissants and it's not Handel and Haydn society. It's like we're our own thing. And that's because we built a sound based on a core group of players who each have their own background and interests. And our goal, I mean the goal in all chamber music is to pull that out of each of your crew mates and to make your own personal sound.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I agree. And there's a very expressive earthiness that I really enjoy about your playing and what I find, I did play, I studied Baroque violin and I did play a lot of Baroque chamber music at a certain point. But then as a modern, I'm in a modern orchestra, and when we work with people who do historically informed performance, I find it gets a little, with some people, it gets a little precious or the interpretation of that does because it gets very picky and they're like, no, no, no, this articulation that articulation and you're trying to corral this big group to get them to do certain things anyway. But of course I agree with what you say about the homogeneity as well.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Yeah, I mean, I think we can often get lost in the weeds and lose the big picture because we're seeking uniformity of approach or we're seeking with good intentions. We do want to, it's really satisfying to feel like you're really one with each other in your articulations and with your dynamics. But I think we can often, I think there's a contemporary Baroque style that is pretty in the box, pretty focused on elegance as the final goal. And to me, that's just one thing.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I so agree with you. So let's get into the album a little bit. I want people to have a taste of it throughout this episode.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Cool.
Leah Roseman:
So first of all, I had to Google how to pronounce, so it's GoGwilt, but is it Keir? I don't know how to pronounce his name.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Yeah, totally Keir GoGwilt.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. So wonderful, wonderful violinist, Keir GoGwilt, who's also a researcher. So can you talk about the music? Actually think what's going to be interesting for this episode is people who are really into folk music or it's really going to resonate with them. So I thought it might be fun to start, I think it's the final track that Jenny Nettle set. It has some nicely prominent bassoon.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Indeed. Yeah. (Music, clip from The Jenny Nettles set, The Edinburgh Rollick album)
Keir had been digging through these collections published under the Neil Gow name at the end of the 18th century in Scotland. So we're talking 1780s,90s, 1800 ish. So they're attributed to Neil Gow, but that's just, that was sort of a marketing ploy. These are a lot of tunes that are from the folk ether that were collected and published in a book. So this is what's pretty rare is that oftentimes folk repertoire is disseminated orally, right? It's not often that it's really written down, which is so cool about these. So the Gow family, mostly Neil's son, Nathaniel collected four books of dances from the end of the 18th century. Some of them are definitely originals, some of them are definitely traditional tunes. Jigs reels and strathspeys are the main kinds of dances. Strathspey is a slightly slower, more refined dance than jigs and reels are.
And there's definitely a attitude of, because these are written down and published, they're meant for the upper and middle classes and they have a fair amount of written out ornamentation. There's a slight elegantizing of these earthy, rustic traditional folk forms that happens in the book. So the Gow family is definitely interested in bridging folk tradition and sort of the salon concert world. That is something that Neil did as a performer. So this is how most people in Edinburgh and the surrounding area knew of Neil Gow at the time is he was the most virtuosic fiddle player in the area. And he had patronage from some of the major wealthy families in the area playing usually social dances with a small band. Usually his son Nathaniel was playing the cello with him. Sometimes they had a slightly bigger ensemble. And if you look on the score of these pieces, it's for you get the fiddle line and there's a bass line underneath and it's published that it could be played for violin and cello or violin and keyboard or just keyboard. The presence of the bass line is really crucial for us as a group that's a continuo band. And also just as a unique signifier for this kind of repertoire. It's rare enough that folk tunes from the 18th century were written down. It's even more rare that they're accompanied by a bass line to show harmonic language, to show even some melodic interplay going on.
And that really became an invitation for us as a Baroque continuo band to do our thing with the music. It felt like a really perfect sort of synergistic collaboration with Keir, who really owns the repertoire, really spent years digging into it and compiled these sets that link one tune to the next as any folk performer would be used to. You link these small units together to make these compelling dramatic forms. So that's what The Edinburgh Rollick, the record is based around are these sets from the Gow collection at the end of the 18th century, both traditionals and originals compiled under the Gow name.
Leah Roseman:
So how is Baroque bassoon different than modern bassoon? I assume there's fewer keys.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Yeah, I got less buttons.
And I think more importantly than the buttons is the fact that the body of the instrument is just wood. So that doesn't sound that weird, but on the modern bassoon, you have lacquer to protect the wood. You've got all this stuff to protect the wood, and there's actually some rubber on the inside of the boar. And what that does is it focuses the overtones of the sound. So it's takes the Baroque bassoon sound is just wood and it's very open and it's not made to project far, it's made to, I like to think of it as gathering sounds around it. So it blends really well with strings, which is its main function to blend with cellos and basses to play in unison with those guys. And it blends really well with gut strings. So it's really made to blend instruments. That being said, sure it can stick out as a solo instrument, and I'm happy to do that.
And I also love that there's this thing about the bassoon where you can access something a little, you can turn on higher overtones to get this brighter color. It's a little more nasal. And the Baroque bassoon, I think loves doing that as well. And I played saxophone as a kid, and it can definitely speak like a saxophone does. So in the Jenny Nettles set, you'll hear sort of this earthy bari sax quality of the Baroque bassoon, which is super cool. And at the end of the set, I'm functioning as that bridge between high and low sounds sitting in the sort of tenor baritone range to just basically connect the fiddle range into the harpsichord and the string bass. It's really a bridge instrument.
Leah Roseman:
I've started linking directly previous episodes when I put these out, so I'll be giving people a note about that later. But with my colleague Christopher Millard, he was our principal bassoon player here who retired, but we discussed quite a bit the physics of tone production on the bassoon and the overtones. So if people are interested in that, I'll have his episode linked along with some people who do early music as well. So just to connect those. Yeah. So in terms of working out the arrangements,
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Yeah, so that's a big part of what we do in the room. We have, I think, a pretty good process, which is very time consuming. And it really, it's about the whole length of a project's given life allows for arrangement to happen. So arranging continually, these are not, we don't want it to be too fixed. But that being said, we do make decisions. And the way with the Rollick it worked is that everyone played at the beginning of rehearsals and we had these sets compiled where we knew what tune was going to go into what, and maybe we knew, okay, this is going to be a quiet feature that's maybe not about the bassoon, not about the harpsichord even. Maybe it's just the viola de gamba and the guitar and the fiddle. There's some sort of anchor ideas.
But we really try and keep the decision making open to the generative ideas of improvisation. And that means doing things a lot, doing things in repetition and really trusting the people around you and trusting people's own editing process. And it's really also been, it's sort a conversation that we've had as a group for the seven or eight years that we've been playing as Ruckus. And it's just really important if you're improvising for people to feel free and for people to feel unconstrained. And if you start or if you lead with no, it doesn't work. This is the mantra of high school theater teachers everywhere is yes. And I think that's really no better rule for when generating arrangement improvising together with other musicians. I call myself the artistic director of Ruckus, but I'm not the music director. We don't have a music director. And those are very different roles.
We really try to keep it open. And that being said, there are these just sort of anchor orchestration ideas that we definitely decide who's going to come in when, that sort of thing, or else it would just sort of be everything all at once all the time, which is really fun, but isn't as compelling for the audience. So we try and make medium scale decisions that we feel good about, basic dynamics, basic orchestration is pretty locked. And then everything else aim for openness. Maybe we use more abstract ideas to link to keep our improvisational textures coordinated. But it's an ongoing endeavor and the trust is so crucial and so hard because you really want to knock it out of the park each time and specific, and there's such a different thing from rehearsal attitude to performance attitude for us, and probably for a lot of people, I mean probably for most musicians where rehearsal is fun and just, there's a lot of silliness that comes out in our ideation and we're really trying to just keep the room alive. And if we're laughing, then we're doing it and that silly thing goes away by 70%. We'll wink at each other in performance, but it self edits a little bit.
And I think that's always the hardest for me personally to remember because I want to be like, Hey, we have a show. We should actually link up on this, right guys? And it always happens because we have a really great crew of musicians.
Leah Roseman:
So how about the Mrs. Ferguson's Strathspey? It's a nice,
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Yeah, so that one is, a strathspey is a little bit more of a refined dance, and it features the bassoon. This one has a little bassoon moment in it, and I think it shows really well how that instrument can link up with the violin sound. It can really become one thing separated by an octave that I just think it works really well. There's also Mrs. Ferguson's Strathspey has a tiny hidden, speaking of silliness, there's a hidden quote to Ticket to Ride, which I mean, our bassist Doug is a Beatles scholar. And it just sort of happened that each show there's a little beetles Easter egg somewhere.
Leah Roseman:
I love that.(Music Mrs. Ferguson's Strathspey)
So have you played this particular project for dancers to dance to?
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Yes, actually. So that was how we first started working on this repertoire. And we played a couple social dances, both with kids and with adults with callers of different types. We did one dance with a square dance caller, but not quite a square dance, a hybrid reels and jig dances that were traditional in sort of squares and also some country dance steps. And the thing that's so cool about playing for a dance is it really is, there's absolute freedom in the music because you have such a different function, you're there to provide rhythmic vitality to push the feet into the air, and it means that it can be everyone, everything all the time. And that's fine because you don't have people that are analyzing the narrative of your music in a certain sense. It's cool to have some big changes in the flow to captivate the dancers, but on a more granular level, it's a very free jazz vibe. And it meant that we could just really explore, feel out, try things out. And it's the most fun. I mean, after years of touring and to pretty staid contexts, the life in the room, once people begin to dance, it is addictive.
And I think there's some limitations to it. We do love getting into the nuances of arrangement and making something really dynamic on a small level as well. But I think it was really important for us to live up to the claim that this music is dance music. And that's been sort of an ethos for us recently, is let's really show that this music, that all Baroque music is dance music. And what do we mean by that? For me, it means it has to make me want to dance. I don't care really what made Louis the 14th want to dance. I'm not him. He's not in the room and what's going to make us want to dance a little, it's, it's probably something different. And that's okay because he's long gone and we want to have a good time with these people who are all right here. So let's get a little more backbeat in the thing and let's get all these rhythmic languages that we've all got in our bodies. And
Leah Roseman:
Sometimes you add to the percussion as well?
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Yeah, yeah, a little bit. I mean, a little bit. It's useful because I mean, if it's not in the way it's useful. But bassoon is, it's just, in my opinion, it's a, sometimes food, it's a really presence, and everyone else has these rhythmic instruments. The guitar and some spoons are fine and some tambourine is good. And even the occasional, we did a Handel opera this spring and we found that we really needed some drums in the recitativo just to make things really crackle and dramatic. So yeah, I mean, more options the better.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
I mean, in few years you might see jingles on my bells, I don't know.
Leah Roseman:
Before we get into opera projects, which is interesting, I was just thinking of a former guest of mine. Have you met Alexis Chartrand? So he's based in Montreal. He's a traditional Quebec fiddler, but he also plays Baroque violin. And his mom is a Baroque dance scholar and teacher, and his dad is like a traditional Québecois dance caller and teacher.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Amazing.
Leah Roseman:
So he grew up playing for dancers, and there's that whole world. Yeah,
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Amazing.
Leah Roseman:
You guys should connect.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Totally. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So opera, you guys accompany opera without a conductor?
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Yeah, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
What's that like?
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Hard. Very hard. And the best. Well, it's possible because of the space that we are in, it's not a pit. We're on the floor with the audience and Hudson Hall, it's a 300 ish seat hall proscenium stage. We're right in front of the proscenium on the floor. And our director collaborator, R.B. Schlather, loves what we do, is very receptive to our energy. And most recently with Giulio Cesare sort of built the stage around our setup so that we would have easy sight lines with singers and not have to coordinate with someone singing backstage or something crazy.
But it's a 13 piece band with five to seven singers depending on the show. And I mean, Baroque music doesn't need a conductor. It just doesn't not, I mean it needs decision making and it needs attitude and you got to be connected with your singers. But it was often led by someone from the harpsichord, the first violin. And we sort of operate as a collective conductor. I mean, there's a tiny hierarchy within the collective in so much as myself and our keyboard player, but we really believe in chamber music. And as soon as there's a conductor, people begin to check out. It's unfortunate. And it's because their responsibility is sort of handed over. And I think we get really compelling results that are alive. And that's because our decision-making person is shared. There are, I guess there's probably some limitations by it because I don't know, but we do get things out of our group of people I think are really, that wouldn't happen otherwise.
Leah Roseman:
I'm thinking the singers probably can hear you better because of the setup.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Totally. Yeah. Singers can hear us great and we can hear them great. And we are just right with them. Mean the other thing that, the other part of the process that's essential is that the whole continuo section is at every staging rehearsal.
Leah Roseman:
Wow. It's a lot.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
So that's a lot. And it's exhausting, but I have so much respect for rehearsal pianists after doing this. I mean, because I'm playing, we don't have a whole orchestra. So I'm playing the horn part and then I'm playing the viola part, and then I'm playing the first violin part, and I'm playing the bassoon part here, and then the bass is playing the second violin part. And we're all just trying to cover everything in staging rehearsals to approximate and to learn the score because we're a bit chaotic and we show up with vibe, but we don't have a plan for how it's all going to go. So we basically learn the piece in the staging rehearsals and we know exactly how those singers breathe, and we know exactly what's going to happen with them. So by the time the rest of the strings show up, we are basically just like, come on board, let's ride this train and just come on, just stay with us. We're not slowing down. And it works pretty well. I mean, it's not the most efficient, but it gets great, I think results. And I think because of who we are, it's this thing that I think a lot of people that really excites me about these operas is how we get recitativo to really be,I mean, free jazz meets Vaudeville, meets Handel. I mean it's, it's just any sound could come out of the orchestra during our recitatif, which is usually the death of Handel.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So speaking of singers on The Edinburgh Rollick, you have The Broome of Coudenknowes with vocalist Fiona Gillespie. (clip of The Broome of Coudenknowes)
So had you worked with her in previous projects?
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Actually, this is the first project she did with us, and she does a lot of traditional Celtic diasporic music, does a lot of early music, and we did more with her. We do more with her live than on the record. We had some logistical timing constraints that just meant that we had the two, Lord Gregory and the Broome were her songs on this show, but she also plays Penny Whistle, and that comes out much more in live performance. Also, we're finding more and more interesting songs like these songs that are also made to dance, for people to dance to that are super cool because they're non, their texts are sort of just sounds, they're not words in Gaelic. And what I love so much about her voice is that it's got this real core to it that's I think kind of special among folk singers, it's not something that would have to be on the mic that is very sort of airy. She's got this real core of will in the center of her voice, which I think is really moving. It's not like a big operatic voice. It works really well for the repertoire, but it is just this lovely strength to her singing.
Leah Roseman:
So I was thinking, Clay, it would be interesting for people to hear a little bit about your musical path. So you were actually born in Canada, right? But then you grew up
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Okay, so you're one of us, but not really.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Yeah, I was born in Halifax. My folks lived outside of Lunenberg in Chester, and my dad worked in the oyster hatcheries over there for a few years. And then the hatchery wasn't doing well, and his family had moved to North Carolina. So when I was pretty young, we moved to North Carolina and he opened up a new hatchery. And so I grew up in Eastern North Carolina, but I love Nova Scotia. I did get to go back recently for the first time since I was like two spent a month in Broad Cove, which was great. And I might get back this fall to go to Celtic Colours. We'll see. My family's not particularly classically oriented at all. I grew up really interested in having the most fun with jazz bands, which makes a lot of sense for what I do now. And we didn't have orchestras. It was all marching band and concert band. It was band, band, band, which is I think true for a lot of America. And got on the bassoon because I loved the sound. I had been doing saxophone and I played sousaphone and it was conducting and all this, but the bassoon was the sound that I loved. And I remember hearing it for the first time as a middle schooler and thinking, oh my God, the trees can sing.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I want to let you know that I’ve directly linked several episodes I”m sure you’ll love with bassoonist Christopher Millard, Lutenist and Renaissance specialist Elizabeth Pallett, recorder player Sarah Jeffery of Team Recorder fame, fiddler Alexis Chartrand, organist Gail Archer and cellist Juliana Soltis. In the show notes you’ll also find a link to sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, a link for my Ko-fi page to support this project directly, and my podcast merchandise store with a design commissioned from artist Steffi Kelly. You can also review this podcast, share it with your friends, and follow on your podcast app, YouTube, and social media. All this helps spread the word! Thanks. Now back to my conversation with Clay.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
And so then I came back to it because tenor saxophone is pretty boring and concert band, but fun in jazz band. So I did both of those things. And honestly, my band director being like, you should stay on the bassoon, you'll probably, you could get some scholarship money. And it ended up being true. So I went to Eastman for bassoon and just wasn't feeling the orchestra path that all of my colleagues were pretty drawn to, and the festival rigmarole and excerpt drilling and all that stuff just didn't feel like it was the right thing for me. So when I heard the early instruments for the first time through performance with Paul O'Dette and Kristian Bezuidenhout ,the unbelievable early keyboard player, it was probably like 17th century Spanish dance repertoire that was super rock and roll. And I knew I had that in the back of my head and sort of forgot about it and did my marriage of Figaro and Bolero practice and Etudes, and then eventually got my feet wet with the baroque bassoon and made my way to Julliard. And that's where I, doing an early music program. I met really everyone in Ruckus in those early years. Doug Balliett, our bassist was there when I arrived. One of the first people I met in New York City, Elliot Figg, our keyboard player was in my class.
And an important part of that grad school experience, our guitarist was a little bit after my time, but we quickly linked up, and Paul has this folk music background as well, which I knew was something crucial to my interest. And we did a bunch of different things in different groups right after grad school, we did a lot of new music for period instruments, which is happening all over the place, but it really sort of got us as a cohort, a broad cohort, thinking a little bit outside of how to capture audience's attention, how to diversify a musical experience. And next made a group called Omnivore with Doug, which we did covers of Joni Mitchell and Joanna Newsom. And it was very just sort of an experiment. And I told Doug, look, we need to just make a continuo group with these people and do Baroque repertoire in our own way with our own language. And then it sort of slowly took off. It was right before the pandemic that we started eventually recorded our first album with Emi Ferguson shortly afterwards, which really I think has been something that's been our really great calling card for a lot of people to be introduced to us all Bach.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's just a phenomenal album. And as soon as I heard it, I sent it to so many people. Have you heard this yet?
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Oh wow! Yeah, it's very fun. And we're still doing it because we love it. And it's a great way for people to encounter Baroque music, I think for the first time and be like, oh, this is really alive and varied. So Fly the Coop was our first real project together in a sense. We had done something before that, but Emi is one of the great flutists in the world, Emi Ferguson, and she knew our style. We, we went to school with Emi, we've known Emi forever, and she knew what we were up about and knew that these sonatas are really great. And some usually flute players know of 'em. I don't think they're that big in the Baroque writ large world. There's other pieces of Bach that get a lot more playtime. But our goal was just, let's make these as varied as possible. And what that meant is each sonata is from a different period of Bach's life, and each has its own attitude. And we tried to make each sonata really clearly one kind of color overall, but there are pieces that we recomposed where we would add an additional bass line where we would mash up multiple pieces together. And then there are sonatas where we just sort of play it as Baroque music, as the music that was written down. We don't change structurally, but we change texturally as continuo players and maybe a little more often than you might be used to.
And the goal is just, let's make this Bach feel just like our Handel operas, alive and in the room and something that is just fresh and vivid. And I think we should play, I'd probably have us play this clip of a Siciliana from the E major Sonata, which is one where we did add a extra bass line. And it makes so much sense because the original bass line by Bach is essentially in canon with the flute line. So it's its own real melodic force as opposed to something that's more like a foundation. And so it really works to have a third line, which is the bass line. And it's actually a bass line from Purcell from one of his songs, which I'm forgetting, but it's one of our more, it's groovier numbers. And we called the Sonata that this movement's from is the E major Sonata. We called that one the Eccentric, which I think if you look at it on the page, it seems like there's more angles. An E major, if you're familiar with key signatures, E major has four sharps as opposed to E minor or C major, which are the other sata on the record. So we were really looking for something. Sometimes in E major you get double sharps and A sharps, and there's this truth in Baroque music that keys really have a lot of information and key areas really do mean a lot. And the challenge to performers is how can you show it really clearly and really vividly to the audience that it means something and so this is one of our more eccentric recordings. (Music Fly the Coop with J.S. Bach E major Siciliana, flutist Emi Ferguson)
Leah Roseman:
Just to go back to The Edinburgh Rollick, the Gigg Set has a more conventional Baroque feel, and it has a nice bassoon moment. So maybe that would be interesting to talk about. And actually, another thing about that album before we leave it, I love the album cover, just the image of the shoes. And I was wondering if you, you play many roles in this group, if you have anything to do with that.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Oh, I'm glad you liked that. I'll talk about the cover first and then I'll go to the Gigg set. The cover was designed by our friend Nick Pope, and one of the things that I love so much about working with Keir and with this record in particular is that there's a lot of movement on the surface of this and a lot of activity, and it's fizzy and there's lots of texture and it can, it really takes you through a dancehall experience. But I think there's something that deeper down is very calm about how Keir approaches the music and how his just ethos. And I wanted to focus that with the visual language of the album to help people maybe latch onto that.
And yeah, we knew we wanted just one object on the front, and we talked about chairs, but an empty chair is a bit depressing. And I found just an image of, I was going through images to send to our designer that seemed like the right kind of shoe. We didn't want those muddy boots. We wanted something that was evoking dance and had a little bit of elegance to them, but were also well worn and suggestive of time and place, maybe more like 19th century shoes than 18th century, but whatever. He did just a really, really beautiful job with capturing that sort of spirit of calm and also energy at the same time. Yeah, I really love,
Leah Roseman:
It's a genuinely great album cover, and I see a lot of album covers and I don't think most of them are that good, so.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Yeah. Yeah, I'll tell Nick. Yeah, and the Gigg set, it's one of my favorite sets because I think it's a really satisfying structure with really beautiful slow opening that leads gradually into a dance Lady Charlotte's, which is a really iconic tune that a lot of different players have different names for. And then instead of ending up, which I think is the tendency, sometimes we bring it down at the end with a beautiful minor jig, the Marquis of Tullibardine’s Giga, and that features the Viola da Gamba, features a little bit of bassoon. And this one just feels really indicative of the album cover. There's something really open about this set, really radiant and energetic, but with this real calm underneath it.(Music clip from The Gigg Set)
Leah Roseman:
So for many years you had this very robust freelance life playing in different ensembles, not just Ruckus and touring. And now you're settled in Vermont and you're teaching school.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Actually, I was.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
I mean, now Ruckus is touring a bit more than I can get away with to teach as well, but I had been for three years, I taught general music two days a week, and I would on Wednesdays run off to either New York City or wherever we were touring and then huff it back to be home by Monday morning. And this past year was too much. And that's okay because teaching as performers, it'll be there for you. I kind of, I'm okay with coming and going to that practice. I'm sure I'll come back to it at some point. I really loved teaching, working with young kids, which I was doing, I was working with preschoolers through eighth graders, and I love that they were rural kids that I was working with in rural Vermont, so I was really their first music teacher for a lot of these kids. And that's pretty awesome to provide a space and for those who love making sound and get those kids in a room together and the ritual of it, the ritual of just singing together, which doesn't happen outside of the music classroom in these schools.
They get 40 minutes of music once a week and it's enough to ignite a spark and keep feeding it while you have them, but they've got to take it if they want to be good at it. And a lot of them did want to be good at it. They have to find time outside of that as well. But the thing that we all know and talk about is that music is great for kids who aren't great at school. And I was good at school as a kid, but I loved music. But to have the experience as a music teacher of making a class for music that is good for kids who are not good at being in class was meant that my classes were totally chaotic compared to other teachers' classes. And it was very, very exhausting and very loud. Wasn't great for every kid, but the kids who needed music. I had a great time, and perhaps if I go back to it, I'll find a way of having a slightly more sustainable energy in the room. But I mean, I have the most respect for teachers who are in that every day. It's really hard to imagine being able to do that every day. But these days I'm more in New York City than in Vermont, but I'm up here as much as I can be.
Leah Roseman:
I understand you had an early teaching experience different in North Carolina working with high school students and exposing them to contemporary music and improvisation.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Yeah, that was the North Carolina Governor's School, which is like this beaming light of hope in North Carolina. North Carolina has this history of really good innovative teaching institutions that were formed in the middle of the 20th century, and Governor's School is a free overnight program for gifted and talented kids from all over the state. They have to choose kids to equally represent the whole state. So it's not just the Raleigh, Charlotte kids. And I went there as a student, and it's the reason that I went to conservatory for college. So I went back to teach for a few summers, and my role was like, let's get you thinking about music outside of playing the notes on the page. So let's be improvising. Let's make something with the dance kids. I'm not going to tell you what to do. You've got to make something and you've never done that before.
And just often it's just making sure you're exposing music students to as much as humanly possible. Once they've shown that they're interested in music and taking high schoolers who are pretty good at the trumpet or whatever, let's make sure that they're listening to some composers working right now who are not in the band slash high school music tradition. A lot of kids are totally unaware of the broader classical music culture that's happening. And that's a shame because there's a lot of stuff out there that I think young people can resonate with and can show them that there's stuff out there that's different and weird and engaging. Actually, yeah, that was my first experience into teaching. And Governor's School is a total utopia for young people in a place that needs utopias.
Leah Roseman:
I was thinking about the fact that you were able to study Baroque bassoon. I went to Indiana University Bloomington for my master's, and I didn't do a Baroque degree, but I did study Baroque violent with Stanley, but I saw just recently they've eliminated all the degree programs at one of the, what used to be one of the most robust music programs in the world. It's really shocking. So what do you see as the future for historically informed performance programs?
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Well, it was always going to be hard once Julliard came around because it's free. I mean, the Julliard Early Music Program is tuition free, and that, I think put a lot of pressure on other places, and I think it's a great place. Julliard is, but it's also Julliard, so it's pretty narrowly focused.
Leah Roseman:
Are you in touch with European colleagues? There's much more of a robust tradition over there. I think
Clay Zeller-Townson:
There is. And I also know that Julliard is also working hard to attract students. I mean, it's a small field, and the challenge is, I think, how do you take whatever you're learning from your school that you're in and take it forward into the world and make something special to you that no one else could make? And certainly, how do you find a way to bring it out into the audience? We've been really lucky with just being able to have made certain connections that have really pushed us out of our initial orbit of community. I think there's a risk that with the early music programs being funneled pretty much through Julliard, that we'll have this uniformity of approach that I referenced earlier. And I do see that taking hold to a degree, a uniformity of sound and of attitude. And yeah, there's a little bit of a risk there.
I think even as Robert Mealy said, I think in an interview that Julliard is great at making generalists of high Baroque repertoire, and it means that the level of playing in our string sections and wind sections have just gone up over the last little bit. There's lots of hungry young players out there who are playing really well. Now what we need to do is make groups that have a real sense of vivid style or who are really specializing in music of the Spanish diaspora or of Latin America, or how do we connect being a early music player into this country that we live in? There's so many fascinating alleyways to do that, and I think there are some Canadian groups doing it quite well. And I think we need to really take that initiative here because there's so many interesting intersecting cultural threads to pull apart that from the last 300 years of American history.
So I think for me, that's where the exciting pathway is as a student, you have to go through school and you need to meet the people who you connect with and who inspire you, but then how do you make this instrument, this pathway you're on, resonate to the place you're in? Because if you don't think about that, you can be presenting beautiful Bach and Handel and European music in a way that I think is pretty limited in impact. And we have to think about how to connect this stuff to where we come from. And that means as an individual and as a community, it's tough because it's not the stuff that people want to buy. People want to go to see the stuff that is comforting and familiar. But that's the real frontier for early music in America is how to connect these historical threads here.
Leah Roseman:
And all classical music really, those of us doing it well, I think are doing that. But I was thinking in terms of traditional Baroque music audiences. Yeah, you used the word comfort and I think familiarity. It's dissonant, I mean, sorry, it's consonant music that's very rhythmic, so it's very, people can just settle into it. But I was curious about some of the other projects you're doing, like the last winter you did the Metropolis trilogy with the Immanuel Wilkins Quartet. Maybe talk about that project.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
So this is showing our interest in commissioning works and also showing our interest in expanding our language as improvisers. So we commissioned a piece from Roscoe Mitchell, who is a legendary improvising musician from the Chicago scene in the mid 20th century. So post Ornette Coleman, part of the Art Ensemble of Chicago for many decades, part of the George Lewis scene,Muhal Richard Abrams scene, and Roscoe's a reed player, saxophone. So we commissioned a three-part work that connects period instruments to a jazz quartet through a spectrum of notation and improvisation. And that means that there are sections where everything is fully notated, fully written out, and there are sections that are totally open. There are sections that are somewhat notated, there are somewhat written out, and that are about dialogue in this large ensemble. And the process of doing that music making was really kind of the reason to do it, because it means any sound that comes out of your instrument is really viable.
And I think that really every musician in the classical field needs to be doing things like this because it opens up your musical sense, it erases the cobwebs and it gets you out of your ruts and sort of ticks because it's so open. And I think it's challenging as an audience person I think sometimes, but sometimes you got to do things because it's what you need as an artist. And this is really one of those projects where it just for a little, we went straight from that into a handful of other projects. And the immediate next day after we premiered this piece in Houston, we caught a 4:00 AM flight and got to Connecticut to play Fly the Coop. And that night we were exhausted, but there was such this, there was a little bit more life than there might've been had we not had it done it the night before. And I think even if it's challenging to the extreme to a listener, because it can feel sort of chaotic, it's really the dividends pay off in your body as a performer to do things that are so open. So yeah, we hope to record it and have plans to record it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. That was going to be my next question. Well, Clay, this seems like a great place to close this out unless there's something I didn't ask you about that you'd like to tell us about.
Clay Zeller-Townson:
Oh, we covered a lot of ground. Yeah, I think this was great. Thank you so much for your preparedness and questions and it's very appreciated.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks so much for doing this. Yeah,
Clay Zeller-Townson:
My pleasure.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are on the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
