Russell Steinberg: Lectures/Press

John Schneider Interviews Russell Steinberg - KPFK Global Village (Nov 1, 2007)

Martin Perlich interviews Mitchell Newman and Russell Steinberg on their upcoming performance at the Globe in Topanga of Steinberg's Daniel Pearl Tribute: Stories From My Favorite Planet.

Ode to Ludwig

RUSSELL STEINBERG COMPOSES MUSIC THAT STICKS TO THE RIBS
By MELISSA SCRAM
Staff Reporter

You've driven your commute to work so many times you have it memorized. You can anticipate every bump and dip in the San Diego Freeway. At lunch, the words " Your total comes out to $4.05" make you shudder. And you could draw a detailed map of your route in your sleep.

But could you set it to music?

" Here all the cars are running down the freeway,"says Russell Steinberg. " The idea is you're cresting over a hill, just before you see a huge gridlock."
And the music that has been tumbling from the speakers in his Palisades apartrnent stops. Just for a nano-second.
As it continues, Steinberg points out red lights, green lights, passing skyscrapers and the muted cacophony of several car radios in his Symphony #1 "CityStrains."
"CityStrains" was commissioned by the Westchester Symphony Orchestra in upstate New York where it debuted in 1998, and was performed again last May by the Hopkins Symphony Orchestra in Baltimore. According to Steinberg , everyone thought it was written about their city. But it's really about LosAngeles, about the strains and stresses of Los Angeles but with a very optimistic energy," he says. "Ironically, I wrote this completely as an LA person and I've never had it performed in Los Angeles."

Steinberg, 40, says that he enjoyed working with the conductors and players of both orchestras and that he was able to do more than assume the usual composer position of sitting in the back during rehearsal.
"They let me crawl around like a monkey behind the orchestra and suggest things to different players," he says.
The third and final movement of the piece contains a car crash in which the percussion section simulates broken glass by pouring nuts, bolts and bottle caps from one metal container to another. A dropped triangle provides the sound of a radiator cap popping off, and a cymbal, thrown on the floor, has the sarne slow, spinning sound as a rolling hubcap.

"The whole challenge was could I throw this into a piece and have it fit in," he says. "It all kind of comes out of the harmony."
Steinberg is also working on a solo album, called Desert Stars, inspired by Death Valley, which is due out this month. The album contains music for piano and guitar, both instrurnents that he has played since the age of eight, and the main piano piece was premiered at Theatre Palisades. He's planning another concert at Theatre Palisades next year.
He has also composed some music for film, and recently completed the music for a documentary on philanthropist and oil tycoon Charles Chapman. In addition, he worked for software companies producing CD-Roms, including one on Strauss and one about the orchestra.
Steinberg is looking forward to writing another big orchestra piece,this time about the ocean. He say he tends to gravitate toward themes about the natural world.
But now, Steinberg is putting his Symphony #1 on CD in order to market it to other orchestras "It's really important to let the audience out there know what I am doing," says Steinberg, explaining that people are longer being taught how to listen to classical music.
'We live in this world where music, at least classical music, is dying," he says. 'They're listening to "Bach for Breakfast," using; it as background music. But music is something that seizes you by the gut.
"If they can't even listen to Be¢thoven's music, how can they listen to my music? How do I convince an orchestra to play my symphony, if they struggle to just to play Beethoven and Brahms?"
(continued, right column) What is the solution? "There is no choice but to go through education," he says. Steinberg recently completed his first year as Director of Music at Stephen S. Wise Schools, where he is building a music academy. He taught a class at the school called Rock vs. Classical, which included high school students, their parents and students from UCLA. The students ranged in age from 14 to 65, and debates ranged from Jimi Hendrix vs. Vladimir Horowitz to the Beatles vs. Beethoven.
He conducts the Los Angeles Jewish Youth Orchestra, which debuted last year under the sponsorship of the Los Angeles Jewish Orchestra. The youth orchestra is now under the sponsorship of Stephen S. Wise Schools and is open to students from all over Los Angeles.
He also teaches extension classes at UCLA, his alma mater. This fall he will teach a class entitled Classical Vienna.
"My brothers grew up listening to me play-they couldn't stand it," says Steinberg, referring to his three younger brothers. "It's fascinating and gratifying to me that now they sometimes come to my classes at UCLA. The stuff that I'm involved in is stuff that sticks to your ribs.":
Steinberg got his Ph.D in Music Composition from Harvard and also spent two years at the New gngland Conservatory in Boston. He grew up in the North Hollywood and Encino area with his mother, a screenwriter, and his father, an Interior designer. He moved to the Pacific Palisades in 1997.
"I had no idea my life would turn this way," he says "I grew up as a valley boy."

By Eric Davis

Russell Steinberg spends most of his time nowadays composing for first-rate classical music ensembles. A resident of Pacific Palisades for the past three years, he is currently busy fulfilling his most recent commissions from Los Angeles ensembles and those abroad, most notably from the Westchester Symphony for an orchestral work to be premiered in New York next March.

His newest work, a piano quartet, was premiered this weekend by the distinguished chamber music ensemble Pacific Serenades. Entitled "Mulholland Fantasies" and inspired by the myriad vistas found from L.A.'s serpentine mountaintop road, it has remark-able coherence for all of its rapidly shifting diversity of ideas.
As Steinberg explains, the entire piece is unified by a single sonori-ty, from which a breathtaking vari-ety of rhythms, moods and textures "spin off." The scoring throughout the 25-minute piece is expert, espe-cially in its understanding of how the instruments communicate with each other. Both the piano and strings (violin, viola, and cello) explore a multitude of fresh combinations, creating with each a unique musical vantage point on the same essential materials. (continued, right column)


And yet, Steinberg is not loath to tradition. In "Mulholland Fantasies," the composer is unabashed in acknowledging Brahms as "an inspiration". He substan-tiates this claim, particularly in the final movement, with an abundance of rich, lyrical counterpoint in long, luxurious allegros which do just homage to the old master.

Rhythm clearly plays a critical role in Steinberg's musical language. Even at his most aggressive, he seems to take joy in creating rhythm rather than in trying to defeat it. His sense of motion has sweep, and is not fragmented by the many natural interruptions and changes of pace that occur, all which contribute to the larger motive of their given movement and of the entire piece.

While Steinberg may still be considered a young composer at 37, he has an impressive list of accomplishments to his credit . His s awards include an ASCAP Young Composers Grant, MacDowell and Aspen Fellowships, and First Prize in the New World String Quartet competition. He holds a Ph.D in Music from Harvard University where he studied with Pulitzer Prize winning composer Leon Kirchner.

October 22, 1983 PIANO TRIO

Emotional impact was certainly the overriding thrust of Russell Steinberg's 20 minute piano trio, a work striking for its dramatic amalgram of sweeping romantic melodies with a mixture of traditional diatonic harmonies and ones that are quartal (constructed with chords of fourths rather than thirds). Though Steinberg's music lacks truly memorable material, structural tightness, and rhythmic intensity (even the Allegro molto seems an andante at heart), his communicative flair shines through any shortcomings. His development bears watching.

February 17, 1984 SONATA FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO

To be present was to be reminded again that today's music speaks in many different voices, some of them intent on sounding like yesterday's. Russell Steinberg's lush and warmly romantic Violin Sonata could have come right out of the mid to late-19th century; its expressive vocabulary, which manages to avoid anachornism or camp, might have appealed to such virtuosi as Jan Kubelik or Eugene Ysaye. In its quite different, ornate and witty way, Steinberg's Fanfare for three trumpets seemed the product of a lively sensibility also.

October 12, 1984
RHAPSODY FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO

Russell Steinberg's Rhapsody for Violin and Piano, though it was instrumentally grateful also, wearied on in a neo-Romantic idiom; it wasn't tasteless, but at Warner Brothers (whose musical predilections it did evoke) a lot of it would have wound up on the cutting-room floor.

February 27, 1989
"WHITE CRANE STUDY"

Russell Steinberg's "White Crane Study for Soilo Violin" is expertly conceived for the instrument and has some perky charm. However, except for its effective evocations of crane calls, it reminded me of the solo violin sonatas by the turn-of-the-century Belgian virtuoso Ysaye.


June 20, 1989
SEQUOIA, PIANO SONATA

Steinberg's Piano Sonata had some of the same musculature as the big Romantic concertos, but with nothing "neo" or meretricious about it. To these ears the floating, luminous music of the middle movement was also the heart of the piece.

CLARINET TRIO

In his Clarinet Trio, Russell Steinberg appropriates with youthful exuberance the idioms of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, but in a way that seems personal and honest. His piano writing, with its spirals of high notes and colorful trills, is deft, as was the performance by Ian Greitzer, Michael Curry and Kathleen Supove.

SHORT DESCRIPTIONS OF RUSSELL STEINBERG'S MUSIC:

Emotional impact
a work striking for its dramatic amalgram of sweeping romantic melodies
his communicative flair shines through
His development bears watching.
lush and warmly romantic
expressive vocabulary, which manages to avoid anachornism or camp
different, ornate and witty way
the product of a lively sensibility
expertly conceived for the instrument and has some perky charm
effective evocations
the same musculature as the big Romantic concertos, but with nothing "neo" or meretricious about it
floating, luminous music
youthful exuberance
in a way that seems personal and honest
piano writing is deft
eclectic and fanciful