George Cacioppo was born in the same year as my dad, in Monroe, Michigan.  He was a great composer, a charter member of the ONCE group, head of the WUOM radio station, and an intermittent professor in the school of music there.  He studied with Ross Lee Finney, among others, and at Tanglewood was a student of my own mentor, Leon Kirchner.  People began asking about our relatedness as soon as I got to music school as a freshman.  In the late 1970’s my parents moved from Ohio to Michigan, taking up residence in a town maybe 40 minutes from Ann Arbor, where George lived.  When I’d visit them, I’d drive on up to Ann Arbor to see George, and it was during that period that we first got to know each other well.  We talked endlessly about all sorts of musical questions, hung out in the radio station and listened to rare tapes, ate lunch at one of his favorite restaurants, The Cracked Crab, or made spaghetti together in his kitchen, all the while discussing issues like determinacy vs. indeterminacy, tonal vs. atonal, urban vs. folk, the efficacy of -ism’s, the limits of notation, etc.  We had had the intention to figure out how exactly we might be related, but never seemed to have gotten around to it, because it was more urgent and interesting to talk about these other things.  So I still can’t answer the question definitively. 

George’s reputation reaches nationally and internationally.  I was on a panel with George Crumb not long ago, who was recalling how when he first came to Penn, he conducted “Advance of the Fungi” with his contemporary music ensemble.  In Venice last November, the Ex Novo Ensemble played a new music concert at Teatro La Fenice,  which included one of my pieces, and various members and other participating composers were asking about George.  His “Cassiopeia” score I believe toured extensively as part of a Library of Congress exhibit of contemporary American music, along with those of Cage and others.  At this point I’ve had the opportunity of meeting two fellow members of the ONCE group, Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma, owing to my involvement with the University of New Mexico Composers Symposium.  I teach George’s music in some of my classes, especially “Time on Time in Miracles,” a real masterwork.  His untimely death in 1985 was a tragedy.  Bill Albright set up a memorial fund in his name at Michigan, and not long after, when he came to Haverford to do a concert with me, Bill and I did a 4 hands performance of George’s “Piano Piece No. 11” in his honor.   Actually I think that recording was aired a year or so ago by Chris Shultis on his KUNM radio program.  Equally sad was the loss of Bill a decade or so later, just as he was reaching the peak of an already prodigious career.  I regret that my sons, both composers now in their own right, never had the chance for direct contact with either George or Bill.

In the U.S. the Cacioppo name is rather unusual, but in Italy it’s not at all uncommon – you never have to instruct anyone on spelling or pronunciation.  And particularly in Sicily, it occurs frequently, and in towns like Sambuca, Camporeale, or Montevago, it proliferates.  It’s difficult then to determine how closely individuals from different branches might be related.  Thanks to the efforts of my uncle, Dr. A. J. Cacioppo, I can trace my own genealogy with certainty to the early 1500’s.  Further heraldic investigation suggests that the line may go back to centuries previous, as the coats of arms that have come down to us incorporate motifs from the time of the Crusades (the Templar insignia and the crescent moon, for instance).  The origin of the name itself is still debated.  George assumed a direct derivation from the Greek Cassiopeia, and my Uncle Tony also saw this as a possibility.  After all, Sicily was part of Magna Grecia.  But Sicily was also ruled by Arabs for a long while, and there are still today as many place names in use that stem from Arabic as Greek.  So this becomes very difficult as well.  The Coccia Institute in Florence asserts that “cacioppu” — with a “u” instead of an “o” at the end — indicates an etymology in a term from Sicilian dialect that refers to the trunk of a tree, and is used to designate someone engaged in woodcraft. Who knows?  Maybe the earliest Cacioppo’s were Arab wood carvers in the employ of King Roger or Frederick II making psalteries, flutes and fiddles for use at Court!  

I don’t subscribe to either point of view.  I’m proud to be a fellow listener, a part of the audience, and I have a player’s background.  Also, I have a sense of adventure, and I trust that altogether this orientation allows me to produce music that others will find rewarding.  “Accessible” AND “challenging” – this is said repeatedly about my work, one of a number of pairings that I am happy to accept.  Truthfully when I’m writing, I don’t think about listener accessibility or challenge, but just keep the faith that if it pleases me, it will please someone else too (I’m not that different from the next person).  It comes back to what I was saying above – if the music stems sincerely from the emotions, it is bound to communicate on a human level.

I do, however, think consciously about the performers and how they are going to regard the work and the task of preparing it.  I intend to challenge them, but at the same time offer a vehicle for their own self-expression and application of skill.  If the performer can come to the piece each time and find something new in it, bring new energy to it and not have the interest wane, then I am delighted.  If the performance experience is gratifying, the reception will be that much more positive.

Certainly there is no greater feeling of fulfillment than to receive the applause of a warm and appreciative public.  But you can’t always predict the reaction to a work, and that in itself may be a reason not to fret about it too much.  Things come across differently depending region, country, etc.  Now and then you can be very surprised.  I remember one time I presented my music in a recording-plus-commentary format to a small gathering.  Among the listeners was a Belgian engineer who had moved to the U.S. after the Second World War.  He had been in a concentration camp and seen it all.  One of the examples I played was a vehement, atonal Klavierstück.  This appealed to him greatly.  By contrast, I then played an elegiac Largo for strings, a tonal piece in E major.  This threw him into a rage: how could anyone in good conscience write anything beautiful again after the horrors that had been perpetrated during the war?  It was the most difficult and polemical situation of my career, an anomaly, but one that I’m not sure I have fully resolved.

I was maybe 14 when I first started composing.  Initially I drew inspiration from music itself, mainly by imitating the music I had absorbed from studying piano, playing or singing in ensembles, or from what I’d heard in concerts, broadcasts or on recordings.  What I had in my ears ran quite a gamut.  My piano lessons were classical, but before that, I had sung in the church choir and spent summers at choir camp.  As time went on, I was in various school ensembles – concert band (as a percussionist), stage band (Dixieland mainly), and accompanied shows and assemblies (Broadway tunes, traditionals) – and had a little combo that did its own arrangements of pop songs like “Washington Square”.  A while after that I had a jazz quartet that leaned toward tunes like “So What” and “Watermelon Man.”  In addition, I like the majority of American kids my age had been exposed to a decade and a half of music transmitted through radio and TV, everything from Dinah Shore and Tennessee Ernie Ford to Elvis and the Beatles to movie and TV themes and commercial jingles.  I had seen Liberace’s show many times and was no stranger to Dick Clark.   After a certain point, I started to exercise selectivity about which type of thing to emulate and which not.  The line up seemed to include Beethoven and Chopin from the classical side, and Brubeck and Bill Evans from the jazz side.  These were the people I chose as my models, and their music provided direct inspiration.  But as I say, this was all something of an imitative trial effort.

A bit further along I got wrapped up in Schubert Lieder, and wrote some art songs in that vein.  I even sent one (a German setting) to Fischer-Dieskau who, by God, actually wrote back (!) encouraging my “great gift” yet advising that I “put it in the hands of a severe taskmaster.”  This marked a turning point and I began to study harmony and orchestration very seriously, and plunged into score analysis.  My focus was adjusted almost solely on the classical tradition, with an aperture toward more modern achievements in large form composition – Strauss, Sibelius, Prokofiev… and Leon Kirchner would soon make an appearance in the horizon.  For the moment, Beethoven remained the supreme figure, but relying on him for inspiration soon would end.  The imitative phase would be over.

My beloved and severe taskmaster, the mentor who guided my piano and theory studies, and who beyond that had fostered broader humanist interests, died.  Suddenly the kind of composition I had been doing was insufficient to express my feelings.  In my loss I discovered that the deepest source of inspiration is within.  Intense emotion impels one to its externalization.  I now sought means to accomplish this, and set out on the road to fashioning my own language.

Still today, if I think about it, real music emerges from the caldron of our emotions and human experiences, from the font of the imagination.  It would be easy to say that I love spending time in Italy, and that the landscape, the hill towns, the monuments are my inspiration.  It is more complicated.  Even a piece like Impressions of Venice is more than a description, a travelogue.  In each of its multiple sections, which granted are designated by titles like “Sunrise over St. Mark’s,” the music conveys my personal, emotional response not only to the site but to the human condition associated with it throughout time.  Scenes from Indian Country is more than a triptych depicting the topography of tribal lands in the Southwest (admittedly another area that I view with awe and where I love to spend time).  It rather presents an emotional landscape colored by sympathy for indigenous peoples and what they have endured, and admiration for their tenacity.  In virtually all cases, the primary motivating factor for me in executing a work is the fundamental human need to externalize emotion in musical form.

Perhaps I am defining inspiration as a manifold process instead of an isolated element.  Something to continue to ponder.  To the question of how I set out on a project, what my method might be, there is no single answer.  I have to feel my way into each different work; rarely do I write in linear order starting at the beginning and moving straight to the double bar; the amount of sketching and length of “gestation” period can vary greatly.  I remember when I was composing Wolf, which sets an excerpt from the poem by Peter Blue Cloud.  The text speaks of a wolf that has been maimed, it has only three legs, and is hiding in the shadows trying to dodge its pursuer.  To get into the right mode, I went out to the woods nearby and, using I suppose Stanislavski technique, got down on three limbs and limped around, panting, trying to find cover, acting out the part of the wolf.  On another occasion, I took to making glyphs on the walls of my studio, drawing diagrams and figures, with fragments of music here and there in different shades.  This was a step in getting the concept out of my head and onto a screen where I could quickly see the relationships between one thing and another regardless of how disparate.  I believe Leslie Marmon Silko does something like this before she writes – she paints large bands of color on the wall of her kiva studio for an hour before setting to work, to bring about the right frame of mind.  I saw her in an interview talking about this.  In my case it helped lead to a very successful final product compositionally, although it got me in trouble with my landlord, and probably set a bad example for the kids!  Generally I don’t have to resort to such extremes.  With most pieces, a certain “divining” takes place, where you let the accumulated material take you where it wants to go.  The moment of confidence that a piece is really on its way is when the “Eureka!”  experience occurs, and like Archimedes, I find the lever.  Suddenly I “know how it goes,” how everything will work out — the solution is in hand.  From there the uphill stage is over, and if you’re lucky, you just cruise to the end.  When you have the sensation that “the piece is writing itself,” it’s a joy.

Then, of course, there might be the urge (the “inspiration”?) to make revisions.  I’ve been asked about that from time to time as well, but will save the topic for a future post.