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Battle Music By JOHN MACKEY
I was lucky to meet Robert Battle shortly after I graduated from Juilliard, and I've been his parasitic composer ever since. Whenever Robert has a commission, I do whatever I can to ensure that I can write the score, whether that means sending letters to sympathetic ears to beg for funding (difficult), or pestering Robert to apply for a grant (almost impossible).
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| John Mackey (Photo by Preston-Schlebusch) |
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By my count, this new piece is the ninth work on which Robert and I have collaborated. The first collaboration, Damn, was—like the new piece for the senior class—a percussion work. (Robert and I both like drums. Really loud drums. Quiet drums are okay, but at some point, it's crucial that they become excessively loud.)Damn was a short piece—only about four minutes long. The new piece, though, is more than 12 minutes long, and I quickly realized that it's difficult to write a single-movement, 13-minute piece for percussion alone. Then there was Robert's initial idea of the "dancers as a choir." This sounded like a great idea—until I tried to write majestic, choral-like music for percussion. So the piece had its challenges.Fortunately, the percussionists at Juilliard are the best around, and Dan Druckman, the director of the Juilliard Percussion Ensemble, agreed to devote a lot of rehearsal time to this rather tricky score, which they'll be playing live, onstage with the dancers. (Dan even scheduled a "music-only" performance of the work the week after the dance performances, on November 24 in Alice Tully Hall on the Wednesdays at One series.
The process has been great, as it always is with Robert. There was one moment early in the rehearsal process that encapsulated why I prefer to collaborate with other artists. The music is really just sustained tones for the first 90 seconds … and then, finally, there's a traditional minor chord in the marimbas. I pointed it out to Robert—that, to me, that isolated chord felt like a "moment"—and on the spot he rethought what he was originally intending for that measure, and instead created an image that perfectly complements the moment. (The dancers, spread around the stage right before this chord, all suddenly move together to form an image like that church choir that Robert first envisioned.)All I did was say, "I like this measure, 'cause the music changes a tiny bit here, and it's kinda pretty"—and Robert immediately visualized something subtle but beautiful. It's hard to describe, but it was amazing.I'm lucky to work with him. Plus, I'm lucky that the Juilliard percussionists can play really, really loud.Composer John Mackey earned an M.M. from Juilliard in 1997.
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