Stanley Grill Composer: An Unexpected Life
This interview transcript is linked to the podcast and video versions as well as show notes.
Stanley Grill:
When it first happened to me, I was pretty depressed actually going, "What happened to my music dreams?" But over the years, I realized that was a happenstance of life that turned out to be really positive and for the best for me. Because when I was just teaching, I taught at the Manhattan School of Music and the prep division for half a dozen years, and everybody would sit at lunch and go, "Yap, yap, yap. Music, music, music, music, music, music." And I remember sitting there going, "Life isn't just about music. There's got to be something else." So I wound up having a whole life of something else. It was fascinating and difficult and challenging and fun. And it never stymied my music at all because afterwards, in a way, it was a benefit. Friends I knew who were doing music all day long wanted nothing to do with it at the end of the day.
And me, I was like a pent-up tiger wanting to burst out of my cage and write music. (Music clip from The Mystic Trumpeter)
Leah Roseman:
Hi, Stanley. Thanks so much for joining me here today.
Stanley Grill:
It's a great pleasure to finally get to talk.
Leah Roseman:
Yes. Well, we've been in touch for a while and I've been listening to all your many albums the last couple years that have come out. I know that you wrote a lot during COVID, and my listeners know I don't ever like to start at the beginning with people. I often like to start with something more current. So if we could do that, I though we could start with The Mystic Trumpeter.
Stanley Grill:
Sure.
Leah Roseman:
So inspired by this Walt Whitman poem you found and each part is based on part of the poem?
Stanley Grill:
So it's a little more complicated than that actually. We're living in a peculiar time in America, and I began leafing through "Leaves of Grass", looking for something relevant to the state of democracy, because after all, he famously lived through the Civil War and accompanied Union armies and assisted soldiers who were dying in hospital tents. So I was looking for something relevant and instead ran across "The Mystic Trumpeter", which has nothing to do with American democracy. It's a much broader subject about just your whole relationship to life. And I said, "I'm going to do this instead." And I though about setting the words and then ultimately decided not to do that, but rather the trumpeter is such a character in that poem from the first one where he talks about a distant trumpeter playing wildly somewhere unseen until the end that I decided just to write it for trumpet and string orchestra instead. (Music: clip of The Mystic Trumpeter, 4th mvt)
That's basically how I accidentally came across that poem and decided to do it. And it was only afterwards that I started looking around and finding out that other composers, unsurprisingly, have done things with that same poem, including Gustav Holst, who set it for soprano and orchestra, and it's a beautiful setting. Anyway, it's always good to discover those things after you write.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, that's right.
Stanley Grill:
Rather than before.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. My father died recently and Leaves of Grass was one -
Stanley Grill:
My condolences. I'm sorry.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you. "Leaves of Grass" was one of his prized books. It was one of the first books he ever bought, and I have that copy on my bookshelf, but I admit I've never read it. Do you have a starting place? Should I just start at the beginning? Do you love the whole book or have you just sort of delved in?
Stanley Grill:
Well, I've read much of it, but books like that, my own personal way of reading is I take out the volume and I open it and I start with whatever fell open on that page and I leaf through it. It's not meant to be read in order. It's not like a prose book or a novel. So whatever you find in there, it's just one gem after another. The guy is America's great ecstatic poet of life, and it's just amazing poems.
Leah Roseman:
So in terms of The Mystic Trumpeter, there are these eight short movements and it features Josef Hofbauer. Actually, I was kind of curious. So this is the Zagreb Sinfonietta, and this received a gold medal for composition from the Global Music Awards. Congratulations. How did that recording project get organized?
Stanley Grill:
So I self-fund my recordings, and I've been looking for years for people to collaborate with. They're affordable for me. And the conductor, Miran Vaupotić , with Zagreb is a recording orchestra that's set up to do remote recording. And I reached out to him, got in touch, and I did one previous recording with him. Mystic Trumpeter is my second. I did a fantasy for piano and string orchestra with him last year, and I did it where I'm sitting right at this moment with you. I was in communication via WhatsApp with his assistant while listening with these headphones to his recording session and typing comments to his assistant who I would then hear speaking in Croatian saying something, and then they would do another take and it would go, "Oh, that does it. Thanks." So I'll probably do more with him. I'm planning one for February of next year of several string orchestra pieces.
Leah Roseman:
How wonderful is that? How the internet can be a force for good, right?
Stanley Grill:
Funny you should say that because that's a frequent thought I have. The internet, like other technology, is 90% awful stuff because people do awful things. And then there's that other side of it that is miraculous that allows people of like-minds to communicate from around the world. And whatever problems there used to be with latency seem to be resolved because I don't experience that at all when I'm doing these remote recordings.(Music: clip of The Mystic Trumpeter, 4th mvt)
Leah Roseman:
So architecture and music, something you're very interested in. And I understand as a young man, you were really influenced by Schenker and his follower. What his name? Felix Salzer.
Stanley Grill:
Yes, exactly. So that interest started... When I went to Manhattan School of Music, I started out as a pianist and switched after a year and a half, I think, to music theory, largely because I had a teacher who marked up my scores so ferociously, you could barely read the notes under his pencil markings. And I kept thinking, "How does he know how to do all of that and how am I ever going to learn it? And I'm not going to learn it this way," and decided theory would reveal the mysteries of music to me. I never looked back, and they did.
But while studying piano, I was studying with Abby Whiteside disciples, and the way they taught piano was totally different from anything I'd learned before. It was looking at long, long phrases and how to use your body to get from here to something that was happening a long way off in one fluid gesture without worrying about all the scatter of notes in between. And that got me interested when I discovered Salzer's book and Schenker, because they were talking about the thing on even longer scales in how music was constructed. And from then on, I began to look at all music that way, and to listen to music performances in that way. Was the player caught up in the minutia or were they hearing and seeing their way to the long goals where the music was headed? And of course, when I write, whether I'm successful or not is another story, but I really keep that in mind as I write that everything has to tell a musical story and go someplace.
Another great book is Charles Rosen's book about the classical sonata. Why did so many composers write that way? They weren't going, "Oh, there's this form and I have to follow it. It's a rule." They weren't doing that. They were feeling their way through form as a way of carrying music forward and giving it an arc that tells a story. So you always have a sense of I'm going somewhere or I'm stating something or, "Oh yeah, wow, I just arrived at a destination that's been in preparation for minutes and minutes and minutes, and here I am." Or, "Now I'm in a closing section. It's obviously coming to an end and boom, here I am." So how do you get that feel for where it's going? That's musical architecture. And it doesn't have to be a sonata form. It can be a form you make up. It can be a ABA type form like so many scherzo-trios are or minuet forms or rondo forms.
Why do rondos come at the end and not at the beginning? Because after 40 minutes of listening, people's attention spans are lapsing. So you have to repeat things more than you did when you started. So there's reasons for all these architectures in music to help carry the listener through an entire experience. And to me, if music isn't aware of that, and unfortunately I feel a lot of contemporary music lacks that sense. It just sort of drifts somewhere, but without any clear destination in mind, it's missing a key element of what makes music so powerful and makes you come back to a piece over and over again and discover new things about it because it's just emotionally carrying you from place to place to place. And that's architecture. It's not harmony, it's not just melody, it's architecture.
Leah Roseman:
It brings up a couple thought in my mind. I was thinking about when I was an undergraduate at McGill, I remember a lecture on Schenkerian analysis, and I think I read that other book you're referring to. But at that point, I was so concerned with just learning the violin. And as a performance major, it was just something I had to get through, these theory courses. I didn't appreciate them. Now that I've played in orchestras for over 30 years and played all these great symphonic repertoire, I have a much better appreciation for form and such. It's also interesting to me now that I improvise, when I get together with my improvising group, Collected Strands, we do have an instinct towards form, I find, and we do have a high point of resolution without planning it. It's just something intuitive that happens through lifetimes of music, I guess.
Stanley Grill:
Right.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stanley Grill:
And great improvisers, I think, do that instinctively, if not consciously, one way or the other. And I enjoy improvisation and I enjoy jazz, for example. But the thing that always brings me back to classical music is that when I'm listening to it, I always go, "If somebody really worked at this idea a little more, it would be better." And when you look at classical music, particularly certain composers would immediately spring to any classical musician's mind, they reach a height of perfection where there's no note that isn't the perfect note for that exact place. And again, that's architecture.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, let's move on to your Two Symphonies album. Let's talk about your Symphony of Peace.
Stanley Grill:
Sure. I've been writing music, a music for peace project for a very long time with a lot of music in it. And for some reason, I don't know why I'm not done. So since I won't ever be done, it means a lot of future projects, but I keep hammering away at it. And Symphony for Peace, I'm trying to remember the word for it and it just slipped my mind, but it goes back a very long time in music where you take somebody else's melody and incorporate it into a piece, sometimes disguised or not. There's a word for that, but it's been 50 years since I was a music theory major and I've forgotten it. But anyway, I love doing that and I do it in a lot of music. For example, in the Mystic Trumpeter in the fourth movement, which is about chivalrous nights in armor, the main melody I stole from Richard the Lionhearted.
It's a melody he wrote when he was imprisoned, captured on his way back from the Holy Land on the crusade. He wrote this tune and it's just a gorgeous melody.
So it's in that, and I do that all the time. So in Symphony for Peace, given the subject matter, I went back and researched the Dona Nobis Pacem, Grant Us Peace from Renaissance all the way through to the fifth century and picked out melodies that composers had used to set those words, and they are sprinkled throughout the symphony in every movement. And my idea was, I don't want to use a chorus. I don't want to have people just say the words, but I wanted musicians when they're playing it to be able to, in their own minds, think the words while they're playing the melodies. How that changes a performance, I have no idea. But anyway, that was my concept when writing the piece.
Leah Roseman:
We'd feature maybe a bit of the fourth movement. (Music: clip of Symphony of Peace, 4th mvt)
And I was curious about writing for brass. It's all this beautiful brass writing.
Stanley Grill:
Right. Let me start off by saying I'm a big Bruckner fan, and I love the way he orchestrates, and that's been a big influence on me. He orchestrates like an organist, which he was. And so an organist, the way they can just press a button and switch a whole bank from woodwinds to brass to whatever and alter the sound, he does that when he orchestrates. He'll have juxtaposed next to one another, brass choirs, and then strings and then woodwinds. So when I am writing for symphony, my main concept is the strings of the core ensemble, and then you balance those or contrast with those using other groups. And brass, of course, can have such a range of sound from the most delicate pianissimos that's so warm and luscious to pounding sounds that it's just a great group to work with and between trumpets and tubas who have quite a range to fill in. It's great.
Leah Roseman:
And the other symphony on this album, Two Symphonies, which is a recent release, is Summer.
Stanley Grill:
Right.
Leah Roseman:
And I thought we could include some of the third movement, the summer walk. It's kind of lively.
Stanley Grill:
Right.(Music: clip of Summer, 3rd mvt)
Leah Roseman:
And you have this love of counterpoint and people who didn't know your music before this episode will be wondering, well, 2026, Stanley's writing in a different kind of style than a lot of composers.
Stanley Grill:
I had a conversation with another composer once. We met for the first time, and the first question out of his mouth to me was, "For how long did you study counterpoint?" And I said, "I don't remember exactly, but at least three intensive years with somebody." And he said, "Good answer, because if you don't know counterpoint, you're not really a composer because the study of counterpoint is what enables you to gain control of the most subtle nuances of tension and release between intervals." And that's what gives music it's feeling and it's passion. It's a moment of tension followed by release. That's why certain harmonic progressions work and sound beautiful and others sound meh.
So to me, that's a core skill, and I always love writing in a contrapuntal style. When I think, I think about voices moving juxtaposed to one another, and the period of music, which is my go-to favorite, is Renaissance contrapuntal vocal music, which I never tire of. And the great masters are always models to follow, which doesn't mean I write like them. Juxtaposition and interrelationship of moving voices influences all my writing, which is why I like writing for strings a lot. I've written, I can't remember how many string quartets because, and you would think as I started out as a pianist, I'd be writing more for piano, but I don't.
Leah Roseman:
I just wanted to say, I think many people listening will know what counterpoint is, but maybe not everybody. So if you were speaking to someone who had never heard the word before, how would you define it?
Stanley Grill:
It's the relationship of two or more simultaneous melodies. And while they're all moving along like this, at every moment in time, they're creating intervals that may be consonant or dissonant. And the motion of that consonance and dissonance as it moves through time, that tension and release creates emotion in music.
Leah Roseman:
Okay, that's good. I sometimes have to explain it to my students and say it's sort of like a grid because we have the vertical and the horizontal in a different way than chords accompanying a melody. So your scores, your PDFs are available on your website and people don't have to pay you, you make things quite accessible.
Stanley Grill:
Right. I'm thinking about beginning to sell some of them.
Leah Roseman:
You should, but-
Stanley Grill:
But that's something for the future. Fortunately, I'm in a position in life where I'm not earning a living anymore. I'm retired and I'm okay, and I'm not worried about my future. And music is something that I'm obsessed with, and so it's something I like to, whether other people appreciate or don't appreciate what I write, I don't actually really care. This is what is meaningful in life for me, and so I do it and I share it. I'm never happier than... Well, I was going to say I was never happier than when I'm sitting and the music is flowing out. I'm never happier than when I'm hanging out with my granddaughter, actually. But second to that is when I'm in a flow and writing music.
Leah Roseman:
Would a close third be when you hear it performed, your music?
Stanley Grill:
It depends. I used to spend a great deal of effort trying to get performances. I don't anymore because usually, especially with contemporary music, you get one piece on a program that's full of the old war horses, they under-rehearse your piece, and then when I go to that performance, I'm cringing through most of it. So no, I don't enjoy it. Instead, I prefer doing recordings because then you can really... The recordings represent my idea of the music because I'm there, I'm commenting while it's being recorded, and in the end, I get the recording that I want and sounds like what I had in mind. And so as an expression that I want to leave behind of what I was intending when I wrote the music, I can only get through recordings.
Leah Roseman:
I want to point out to people that, of course, you've written all these string quartets, but also string trios, and there's a need for this configuration. And in fact, I'm coaching a string trio of young people in my city soon, and I mentioned to them, maybe we could play some of your music because it's a wonderful option, so I'll let you know.
Stanley Grill:
Great. I would be delightful. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And so you have this album out of these Sinfonias with the ensemble Rock Paper Scissors, and what a great name for an ensemble.
Stanley Grill:
Yeah, I think so too. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So I'm going to play a clip of Sinfonia four.(Music: clip of Sinfonia 4 string trio)
Stanley Grill:
So that, of course, is an homage to Bach because Bach wrote Inventions and Sinfonias, and that book is probably sitting out of my piano more frequently than any other, just to sit down when I walk past the piano and play one and then walk away to go on to whatever I was doing. And at some point I just said, "Yeah, I can do those." So I wrote a set of nine inventions, which I'm going to record with two of the players from Rock Paper Scissors on this coming October 1st. And I already recorded this, obviously, the Sinfonias with them, the three part. And again, it's an homage to Bach.
Leah Roseman:
So are the inventions for violin and cello?
Stanley Grill:
For violin and viola.
Leah Roseman:
Perfect. That's great. Let's go back to your earlier history. So you loved music as a child, but you didn't take piano lessons till you were older, till you were a teenager?
Stanley Grill:
No, I started taking piano lessons when I was six. Around, yeah, I was six, my mother took me to Carnegie Hall where we sat in seventh heaven. It was only later that I realized, well, we didn't have any money, and that was what my mother could probably afford. So that's the seats we got. And the one piece that was on the program that actually bloomed right through me was La Mer. And there I was, this little kid looking down, all these little tiny people on stage feeling as if the sea was washing over me like you could get wet. It was amazing. And I walked out of that concert going, "Ma, I want to know how to do that. I want music lessons. You're too young. Ma, I'm not too young. I want music lessons. You're too young." And I finally wore her down. So she started me on piano lessons with the piano teacher who lived around the corner from her house.
And when I was in high school, I applied for music and art and got in. I also got into the Bronx High School of Science, opted for the latter because I didn't know that I was going to be a musician. And I thought I also had a big interest in science. And then met a very dynamic piano teacher who got me so revved up that I spent most of my years at science high school cutting classes and running off to the one practice room they had and playing as much as I could while still getting away with it without flunking out altogether. And after that I had, again, big argument with my mother because I only applied to the Manhattan School of Music and no other colleges. She said, "You have to have a backup plan." No, I don't. My backup plan is if I don't get in, I'll practice 10 hours a day until I do. So that's how I wound up at Manhattan.
Leah Roseman:
I guess when I thought that you had started later is because you got serious in high school, so that was a big change. And you had mentioned Abby Whiteside earlier. I was really interested to read about her when I was researching you. And her idea of outlining is what I call with my students paring away. It's kind of interesting. Can you describe that?
Stanley Grill:
So at some point I got severe tendonitis and was desperate to find a way out. And somebody pointed me out to an Abby Whiteside student.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a quick break to let you know which episodes I’ve linked in the show notes for you, with Nimrod Borenstein, Frank Horvat, Gary Muszynski, Margaret Maria, Sandro Morales-Santoro, and Gerry Bryant. These episodes are linked along with my catalogue of over 250 episodes since 2021.Sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, consider buying me a coffee on my Ko-fi page, or buying some unique podcast merch. 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 Stanley!
Stanley Grill:
Was desperate to find a way out and somebody pointed me out to an Abby Whiteside student who was then, of course, a lot, lot older than I was, but nevertheless. And that cured my tendonitis and changed the entire way that I'd used my hands and arms and whole torso at the piano with the basic idea being if you hammer away at these tiny little muscles hour after hour, yeah, you'll destroy them. But if you don't use these at all to put down a key, but use big muscles like this, you'll never have an injury. The other theory was that practicing slowly and gradually increasing to speed only builds in bad physical habits because your physical motions playing slowly are not the same you need to get through a passage at a very fast clip. You have to do entirely different things. So the way I learned music after that was not by reading all the notes at all, but by playing the first notes on the first measure and then the first note of the second measure, then the first note of the third measure. And then I would go, if I'm in four, four time, first beat, third beat, first beat, third beat, first, and little by little fill in everything that happened in between until all the notes were there, but always playing at tempo. That was a mind blower.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's really different from the way a lot of people teach and practice. And it's something, I do a version of that that I find extremely useful. As an orchestral musician, I have to process a lot of music very quickly. So techniques like this are very useful. The only thing is sometimes it's like how you get from this note to that note. So as a violinist or pianist, it's still the transition, you know what I mean, in terms of your fingering or the leap or whatever it is.
Stanley Grill:
Yeah. I don't know how applicable it is because I'm not a string player. I write a lot for strings and I try to imagine what... I'm not getting it right, I'm sure. But for keyboard, these motions like to play five notes quickly, you can't do that. You have to rip. And to get from here to there when music leaps, for the hand, that's two feet. For the elbow, it's a quarter of an inch. So where your motion is coming from completely changes how you play things. And that's what Abby Whiteside had just analyzed in the most remarkable way, different from any other pedagogue that I can think of.
Leah Roseman:
So she was still alive at the time you were young. Did you meet her or hear her?
Stanley Grill:
Oh, no. No. And whether she was alive or not then, I would have to look it up. I don't know. But I had the good fortune to study with some teachers who had studied directly with her, and it really saved my hands and changed more than just my piano playing, but it impacted my approach to thinking about music altogether and including composition, of course.
Leah Roseman:
Because of the structure and the longer line and...
Stanley Grill:
Correct.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So you got your master's degree at Manhattan School. In fact, you did a thesis analyzing the songs of composer Charles Ives.
Stanley Grill:
Yeah, I did.
Leah Roseman:
Did someone pick that topic for you or was that an interest?
Stanley Grill:
No, no, not at all. Ives is known for the remarkable disparity of styles from crashing cluster chords to simple church harmonies. And in his pieces without words, you can hear those stark contrasts throughout it, like in his Concord Sonata or other pieces. And I had for a long time had a deep interest in how does music convey emotions and looking at texts to see how musicians word paint and set expressive words. So years before, while I was still an undergraduate, I had written a paper on an early Mahler piece. I don't know if you're familiar with Das klagende Lied . It's one of his earliest pieces. It's amazing. You would think it's a mature Mahler. It's for a huge orchestra, huge chorus, soloist, and it tells this tale of a love affair and a lover is murdered and the bone of his forearm is found in the forest and somebody fashions a flute out of it.
And when they play the melody, it accuses the murderer. I mean, it's a great, awesome tale. And what Mahler did with the text is just awesome. So I did a whole paper on that. How does he set those words to get the meaning across, but musically? So my thesis with Ives was similar. It was he wrote 112 songs. Why in some songs is he using the most incredible dissonance in other songs not? And I began to see patterns as I looked at the texts that when he was talking about certain subjects, he used a certain style of music. So the thesis was my attempt to prove that he had in his mind extra musical ideas that informed what choices he made as a composer when picking notes. As an example of that, whenever he has songs about nature, he would do things like there's one song where he starts with a unison seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixth, sevenths octaves, and then works his way back.
So it's a very almost mathematical progression that's very dissonant mostly. Why? Because his idea of nature was Pythagorean, you might say, that nature is a very mathematically organized construct. When he had another subject, he never does that elsewhere. So that was what the thesis was about.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Yeah. And I'm curious, you didn't consider then doing a degree in composition at this point?
Stanley Grill:
I was only composing here and there, and then I was teaching theory, and then my son was born in 1981, and I realized what was good for two of us wasn't going to be good for three of us. And I went out job hunting and wound up with an entirely accidental career outside of music. Don't ask me how, but I've had some fascinating, crazy jobs over the course of my life outside of music. And so I never had occasional time to go back to study composition, but I had studied it on the side while I was majoring in theory. I studied with a number of composers and was doing the usual writing exercises, a lot of counterpoint, as I mentioned earlier, but also the exercises of write me a fugue in the style of Bach, write me a prelude in the style of Debussy, write me a little piece in the style of Schumann so I could master what it is about every composer's style that makes them sound like they sound.
None of them were really interested in what I had to say for myself, which I always thought was, "Yeah, I understand that. That's really good." And in the meantime, I would just start writing music that pleased me and found my way to a style that I was happy with that I think sounds like me.
Leah Roseman:
You said none of them were interested. You mean they didn't want to hear your music, that it was just the exercises that they wanted you to do?
Stanley Grill:
Right. Yeah. They would set me challenges and I had to show that I could master that skillset.
Leah Roseman:
So I though you worked for the New York Transit Authority mostly.
Stanley Grill:
I did for 25 years. So I wound up for the last 15, I was vice president for their contracts department. So I had hundreds of people working for me spending, oh, billions of dollars of other people's money every year. It was a very fascinating job. And then I'd come home at the end of the day and I'd write music and write music on weekends. And I retired from there in 2010, and then for quite a while I was doing similar work also in contracts and contract administration for a worldwide engineering company and got sent all over the place. So I would wind up, they would have some problem project that had procurement teams that were running into trouble, and there you go, "Can you go figure out what and help them out?" So I wound up all over the place and then writing music on my laptop, thank God for Finale at the time, in hotel rooms at night.
Leah Roseman:
So in terms of your skillset to be able to help them with this problem solving, was it because of the experience you have with the Transit Authority particularly or just the way your mind could work to solve these problems for these engineering companies?
Stanley Grill:
Well, my years at the Transit Authority gave me an expertise in contracting and procurement and contract management, which I could then apply. And not too many people asked me about what's this with your music degree? But it may be a stretch, but I do see a commonality in trying to see the big picture and not get caught up in the details of some very complex problem or project, but grasping what is the goal here? What are we trying to achieve? What's the core obstacle that's keeping us from getting there? How do we break that down? What are the steps we need to do to get from here to there in order to solve that problem is how you have to think as a composer and how you have to think as a manager. So to me, it wasn't this great difference in these bifurcated worlds of mine, as one would just assume.
Leah Roseman:
And in terms of you getting that initial job, I mean, why do you think they offered you the job with a music background?
Stanley Grill:
At least in the '70s and '80s, people weren't looking first at your resume. They were looking at your experience, and I got there through a progression of just, it was an accidental career. I found the job in one place. Somebody said, "Oh, I heard there's a job opening over here," and said, "Go talk to that person." So I went and talked to that person, and then I got a job there, and that person recommended me to somebody else, and I wound up at the transit authority via another job because somebody I worked for went to the transit authority and said, "Come work for me." So I said, "Sure." One job led to another. And I only got into procurement because somebody said, "The procurement department's like a black hole. Everybody hates it. Requests go in and nothing ever comes out. Do you think you could fix that?" And I said, "Probably." And so I took the job.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. You strike me as a very calm person. I'm just curious, do you think in terms of managing people, because you had a lot of people working for you, is it a personality thing or just a way of approaching that that worked well?
Stanley Grill:
So it's funny you should say that because people do say that about me, and when I communicate that and share it with my wife, she cracks up and says, "Oh, you just fooled another one." Because I'm really not a calm person at all. I am by nature very nervous and excitable, but I, over the years, have worked hard at shoving that down when it's not going to help me. And if I'm working in an area where you have to be calm and considered and motivate people and not get them all crazed, I can't let that part out of me, so I don't.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's an interesting answer because maybe because you're having to be conscious about it, it's more effective than if you were just kind of flying by the seat of your pants. That's interesting. Okay. And just one more, I'm just curious because you worked in this area for so long. So did the Transit Authority, was it just public transportation? Was it also bike lanes and parking and stuff, or was it just the subway and buses?
Stanley Grill:
It's the subway and buses. The city's Department of Transportation does the bike lanes, but the MTA does subways, the Metro North and Long Island Railroad, the buses in New York City. So I got to oversee the procurement of buses and subway cars and go to subway manufacturing plants, and it was fascinating. And it turned out when it first happened to me, I was pretty depressed actually going, "What happened to my music dreams?" But over the years, I realized that was a happenstance of life that turned out to be really positive and for the best for me. Because when I was just teaching, I taught the Manhattan School of Music and the prep division for, I don't remember how long, half a dozen years, and everybody would sit at lunch and go, "Yap, yap, yap. Music, music, music, music, music, music." And I remember sitting there going, "Life isn't just about music.
There's got to be something else." So I wound up having a whole life of something else. It was fascinating and difficult and challenging and fun, and it never stymied my music at all because afterwards, in a way, it was a benefit. Friends I knew who were doing music all day long wanted nothing to do with it at the end of the day. And me, I was like a pent-up tiger wanting to burst out of my cage and write music, so it turned out to be good.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the Symphony of Sighs, part of your music for Ukraine series.
Stanley Grill:
Looking at my various series, you can see that a lot of the music I write is in response to our world today, and there's a lot to respond to. As an individual, you feel completely helpless. As a musician, I feel somewhat like the old adage of fiddling while Rome burns. What voice or meaning could it have? But to me, that's what I can do. I can write music and I want to express myself, and I'll leave writing words about all these things to the gazillion people on social media who write about it endlessly to no avail, and I'll just write my music and express myself.
So when the Ukraine war started, I wanted to write music in support. I wrote a string quartet based on Ukrainian folk songs. I set a poem by Ukraine's national poet, in Ukrainian, by the way, that was an interesting exercise, for baritone and orchestra. And then I wrote this piece with just a series of falling sighing gestures, and then developing those as a one movement symphony. I also wrote a symphony for string orchestra called When the War Ends, We Will Dance Again, loosely based on Ukrainian folk dance rhythms. And so yeah, now I'm in the middle of a series of music for Israel, so onwards and forwards to the next unsolvable problem that I write music about.
Leah Roseman:
And this album, The Symphony of Sighs, it got the World Classical Music Awards Platinum Prize and was also - Yeah,
Stanley Grill:
I was very pleased about that.Yeah.(Music: clip of Symphony of Sighs)
Leah Roseman:
I was kind of curious about your last name because you're Jewish, but Grill, was that changed by some immigration authority?
Stanley Grill:
No, actually it was not. So on my father's side, they're from the Bavarian region, so North Austria. I mean, yeah, North in Austria, Southern Germany. My family was from somewhere, and I'm not sure where, a small town in Northern Austria, Northern Central Austria. That particular area of the world has a lot of Grills, and there are some Jewish Grills, and I'm not the only one. Oh, if you have time, a quick interesting story, my wife and I went to visit Stockholm, and we were in the National Museum there when my wife runs after me, drags me back to an exhibit showing a beautiful suit of clothes from the 1700s that belonged to a Swedish man named Abraham Grill.
Leah Roseman:
Wow.
Stanley Grill:
So I said, "Wow," and did some research and discovered that a Antonio Grill emigrated from Bavaria via the Netherlands to Sweden, where he became the king's head of his treasury because he was a metallurgist. This was in the late 1600s. And that there's a whole family of Grills who wound up, we became sort of acquainted with one another and they realized I was a composer. They said, "Oh, we have composers in our family too," and started sending... So who knows if back nine generations we're related? I have no clue. But yes, there were Grills around more frequently than one might think.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Curious because I'm Jewish and in terms of the immigration history, when people have a name I'm not familiar with, I'm kind of curious, did someone change it at Ellis Island, for example?
Stanley Grill:
Yeah, not the Grills. On my mother's side, there was a bizarre name change from one thing to another that makes no sense, but whatever. Who knows? On that side of the family, I'm from Poland outside of Warsaw. And I don't know about your family history. If not on this call, I'm happy to talk to you some other time because I'm always curious to know. But on both sides, my grandparents came here in around 1905 and raised families and everybody in their families who didn't come to America is no longer with us. So I'm here because they had either the courage or the need to come to America because they wanted to escape the nonstop pogroms that were happening where they lived.
Leah Roseman:
Well, let's talk about exploring forgotten composers. Who have you discovered we should be listening to?
Stanley Grill:
Oh, that is a very long list. I'll have to share my list because I jot them down on my phone whenever I come across somebody new. But people that are favorites of mine are Gernsheim. I don't know if you know his music. He was a contemporary of Brahms, somewhat younger. When you listen to his music, you go, "Is that a Brahms piece that I don't know?" Because his music is very Brahmsian. But when I began to look into him more, I discovered that he wrote his first symphony before Brahms wrote his, then he wrote a second symphony before Brahms wrote his, and so on and so forth through his fourth symphony.
So I began to wonder, since they were familiar with each other's music, whether Brahms' symphonies are Gernsheimian rather than the other way around. But if you want to hear four symphonies that sound like Brahms sort of, listen to those four symphonies, they're all gorgeous. And if I had to comment on their relative skills, I would say Brahms is the greater natural melodist just writing just gorgeous melodies that go right to your heart. But Gernsheim was the better orchestrator and general architect, but worth listening to. And there's also a ton of chamber music and trios and string quartets and a composer worth exploring. And now I've been most recently working my way through the 27 symphonies of Nikolai Mayaskovsky, who is known as the father of the Russian symphony, and nobody plays his music anymore. And it's a shame. They're uneven, I will say. Some are, well, so-so, not very interesting.
He's not on the level of, let's say, Shostakovich, but out of Shostakovich's 14 symphonies, they're not all on the level of Shostakovich either. So they're worth listening to. And my next project will be to work my way through his 13 string quartets and see how those are. Haven't listened yet.
Leah Roseman:
And I believe on Sundays you have dedicated listening time?
Stanley Grill:
Not really, because I listen to music almost all the time, and I usually have music on little side sleeping earphones all through the night too when I fall asleep. But I started recently just on Sunday mornings putting out a piece and saying, "Here's some Sunday listening music."
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Yeah, because I was reading your blog, that's where I got that idea.
Stanley Grill:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And something you posted on your blog I thought was interesting. You said, "In Atlantic Magazine's AI Watchdog, I did a search for my name and found a number of my music compositions and AI training data set." And then you explained what you did. Do you want to say if that worked?
Stanley Grill:
Well, I thought it did. I wrote a letter, a legal type letter that I used my one and only time using AI to do anything. I used AI to generate a legal notice and I sent it to them. And then a month later I looked on the AI watchdog and my name didn't come up. So I though, well, I didn't get a response from them, so maybe the letter worked. And then a week or so ago, I looked again and my name was there again. So I think I'm going to have to do some further action that I haven't figured out what it's going to be yet.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. And I was just curious in terms of your habits, do you have set aside time to compose on certain days of the week? Is it that structured or...
Stanley Grill:
No, I have to say I'm fairly unstructured about it. If I will just sit down and write, and if I hit a wall, I'll stop and just go out and take a walk and come back later. But on the other hand, if the music is just popping out, for example, we're talking about The Mystical Trumpeter and it's eight movements which reflect the eight parts of his poem. I wrote that in a week.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Stanley Grill:
So pretty much I was writing for hours and hours every day because I had an idea and they were just popping out and everything was going click, click, click. Yeah, I know where I want to go here. And so I just kept writing. And other times it's just like, I'm using the delete key more than I'm using any enter keys, so I could go out and do something else.
Leah Roseman:
It must have been such a transformation when the technology came along. You mentioned Finale as opposed to writing by hand.
Stanley Grill:
Oh, so I used to write in notebooks on the bus on the way into work when I was working at the transit authority and then come home and copy things out or test them out on the piano. And then if I was trying to get a performance, I would write out the parts by hand, but after full work days, and then get into a rehearsal and find out I'd left out a line because I just dropped a whole staff because my eye went from here to there because I was tired. It was horrifying. And then Finale came and it was like an angel to the rescue. I never had to do that again. I just put it in. It was all right. I'd spit out parts, hand them to people, and they would be fine. It was a real blessing. I've never gone back to writing anything by hand.
Leah Roseman:
So thanks so much for this today. Really appreciated it.
Stanley Grill:
And it's really been my pleasure to chat with you and to get to know you a little bit. And I look forward to getting to know you more outside of your podcasts.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this one. Please do 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 in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
