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Dan Visconti is updating the image of the classical composer — from lone, fusty genius to dynamic community leader who creates music as a tool for social engagement. Whether he’s telling the stories of Cleveland’s refugee communities or composing a piece for the Mississippi State Prison, Visconti makes concert experiences that invite people to participate. Classically trained, but with a love of American vernacular musical traditions, Visconti infuses his compositions with a maverick spirit—drawing on jazz, rock, blues and beyond. Here, he tells the TED Blog his vision for how to break through the traditional reserve of classical music, making it accessible to a new generation.
How would you describe your compositions? Are you consistent in your style?
In some ways not. But I’m very consistent in my attitude about music. I guess the best way to say it is that I’m trying to make the composer relevant again—not this old guy with a wig and a quill pen laboring in isolation, but a cultural ambassador and collaborator, someone deeply integrated in the communities that he or she serves. One of the ways I do that is by composing music that’s open to diversity of traditions. Often my pieces sound like they’re not classical music. A piece might have the directness of expression of a great jazz performance, or the sense of audience rapport at a small club venue, or the wildness and improvisatory spirit of a really good rock performance. I also believe that music can play a strong role in social change. I think about Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, and the great tradition of protest singing in America: using music to transmit a message. What I’d like to do is to go beyond transmitting that as lyrics in a song, to create an experience that immerses the audience and causes them to engage a larger point of inquiry.
Above, watch the Kontras Quartet perform Dan Visconti’s Ramshackle Songs, a work inspired by the spirit of recreational music-making that characterized the Tin Pan Alley-era of American popular music.
Can you give us an example of how this works?
I recently completed a project with the orchestra City Music Cleveland called Roots to Branches. I set to music some of the stories of the city’s nearly 20,000 refugees, who hail from Bhutan, Burma, Burundi, Congo, Iraq, Nepal, Russia, Somalia and Sudan. We created a whole music festival where we brought in musicians and dancers from the refugees’ home cultures, and the piece of music became a focal point to engage a larger cultural issue. It also had the effect of bringing the city’s different refugee communities together—now they’re working together to solve problems.
I’m also interested in anything that can make going to a concert hall special. For example, a lot of pop and rock musicians employ lighting and amplification, raising the bar so high in terms of stimulating the senses. Classical music really has to catch up and take the advantage of all of those things. Take opera. A lot of people who might otherwise really enjoy it are turned off by the operatic style of singing with vibrato. This style originated because vibrato allows the voice to project more volume in times when no amplification was available. It’s no longer necessary, and now pop singers can sing with wonderful, subtle nuance—they can whisper, sigh. But opera is still stuck where it was in 1600.
You’re also doing some exciting site-specific stuff, such as in the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Tell us about that.
That’s a project I’m working on with the Kronos Quartet, who are celebrating their 40th anniversary this year. They’re one of the biggest pioneers in taking so-called classical music and updating it. They’ve brought in the world music, collaborated with people like Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits. They’ll be performing a piece of mine at this prison called Parchman Farm in Mississippi, properly known as Mississippi State Penitentiary. This is a prison where a lot of the blues greats like Leadbelly and Son House were incarcerated. It’s notorious for being cruel. What we’d like to do is create an event that draws attention to a lot of the crises in our prison systems right now.
To read the full interview, visit the TED Blog >>>