To celebrate the release of jazz pianist Mark Limacher’s newest album with Juno-winning vocalist Caity Gyorgy, “Caity Gyorgy with Strings”, we’re looking back at his conversation with CMC Prairie Director Janna Sailor, diving into working with Caity, his compositional journey, and more!

Artistic Identity

Janna Sailor: I’m going to start with a question that I ask so many of my guest creators: how do you describe yourself as an artist and your creative output, which is truly so multifaceted?

Mark Limacher: There’s a certain practical reality. I play the piano a lot, and that becomes an obvious first way in, but that causes a lot of psychological mix up for me because I never trained to be a pianist and  to be frank, I feel always a little bit like I’m gonna be found out one day, because there were real pianists in the world and I watched them and I am in awe of them. And don’t confuse me with them, that’s the internal struggle there. 

Janna Sailor: I think we all have that. Imposter syndrome never really goes away, even when you’re 50-51. 

Mark Limacher: That’s what I’m thinking, and maybe when I’m 60, 61, we’ll be over it.

There’s also the fact that I write a lot of music, and so you might think, “oh, you just say you’re a composer”, but the problem there is, once again, I’m working in often opposing fields audience-wise, so I arrange a lot of music for singers, Caity Gyorgy in particular, so that has a classic studio orchestra vibe: think the traditional pop singers of the fifties and things. But then my other totally legitimate passion that I try to do as much as possible, is some kind of contemporary chamber music, and writing for small orchestras and things. Those audiences are not really the same, nor are they a lot of crossover.  So that’s also a bit of an internal battle, like which of these things, I’m not really sure. I write music and I play the piano sometimes, and I like how deflating that is.

Developing a Diverse Musical Skillset

Janna Sailor: As you mentioned, you work in the classical scene. You have mad skills as a performer. You’re in the jazz and improv scene, you work in musical theater, and as a composer and arranger. That’s such a diverse skillset. How do you go about developing yourself in all those different ways? I’ve gone over to your house, and watched you improvise on operatic themes; you have this innate knowledge of so many musical genres and eras like that, such a diverse skill set.

Mark Limacher: That’s one of those things. You wake up and suddenly that’s the reality. I love all of those kinds of music, especially from a historical standpoint. So I’ll be pretty upfront with something like musical theater: I know the older material fairly well, but I don’t really resonate with the modern output, so I’m pretty ignorant on a lot of that. But the one thing that connects my equal passion with something like Ligeti or so, is that I have always been very obsessed with orchestral music. That is my deep passion since I was three years old. I wanted to learn the violin at three because I wanted to sound like these Puccini recordings of the Carrione. But the passion for that music and that sound is what has always driven me.

I’m obsessive and fanatical about orchestration and I love thinking about it and studying scores and things. The reality is I’m not sure I actually differentiate between the stylistic, like the artifice of these things, that is clearly different. That’s the front facing thing about it, but really, they’re functioning in my head in the same way. Different approaches to harmony and melody are clearly different, but it’s just instruments making sounds together, and I’ve always really loved that. That evolved into a passion about a microscopic sense of that. When I was a teenager and got into things like Feldman and you could hear single timbres for a while. That is so vexing and beautiful. 

And somebody might remark that has absolutely nothing in common with the Conrad Salinger orchestrations for MGM or something but I think both of them probably had the same comprehension of sounds that instruments make, and that passion is the core of all of it. Playing the piano is much more utilitarian, a story because I never meant to be a pianist, I didn’t think I was ever good enough to be one, and now that I do that, and I’m terrified every time I do it I think, there’s a sense of what kinds of piano sounds do I like, and those tend to alienate me from a lot of commercial musicians, because I like very soft, pure sorts of lingering sounds which don’t obviously lend themselves to jazz. When you are brow beaten by a kind of aggressive male dominated, jazz-pure culture, which is not my jam. But the piano is just another kind of sound, and it’s a frustrating instrument. It is not an orchestra, and that is always annoying to me. How do you develop this? I don’t know. I really think it’s not on purpose. You just wake up one day and it’s over, 

Compositional Journey & Influences

Janna Sailor: I do have when I’ve experienced you as a performer many times, and then in the past couple of years, I’ve started to discover your compositions, and it was a very different world from what I’ve experienced, of you working together. 

Tell me about the more traditional compositional path that you pursued for a while, and some of those influences and how that manifests or perhaps doesn’t. Perhaps you worked in that genre, and then moved away from some of those aesthetics that are evident in your work now?

Mark Limacher: Any of that traditional compositional training to me is universal. I think that’s in everything that I think about. When I was a teenager, I was in the very avant-garde classical music, and I thought it would be totally appropriate to get a degree from the university where John Cage used to teach. I wanted to attend a new school for social research, which of course, by that time, no longer did the music part. They’d branched out and so on. And I’ll cut a long story short, which is that there was still an experimental sort of new music program at the Downtown Music campus at the new school, but they ended up just getting rid of it and rebranding themselves at jazz school.

So I ended up at the Mannes School of Music. I look at the internet, it’s this very cool, very progressive place, but that was not true when I went there. This was still during the era of dying European faculty who fled the Nazis and had very conservative ideas about tonal music and things. That’s in a way the best and worst outcome. The best thing about that was a very hardcore traditional music education. So things like all the most boring terms you can think of. However, because they identified me as from the other campus that they hated, they wouldn’t really give credits, which meant I had to find a way to graduate. So I did a lot of private study and that was the best outcome, but I did very odd things. I studied counterpoint with a guy in the Bronx a couple times a week, who was this crazy old Armenian guy who was magnificent. But that, that sense of counterpoint study, that’s brain damaging, right?

But I’ll never get over that and I’m deeply fixated by that way of thinking, which a lot of people might not understand if they hear my music, where you have say two notes and then nothing, and then another two notes. But really I’m actually thinking about it, as these voices and things. I also studied with an ethnomusicologist, private lessons for several years, which is of course not really useful because that’s not a thing that happens in that discipline, be it primarily academic. But it was that traditional environment, I think instilled if nothing else, just a curiosity in music and musicianship. I am a very bad academic though because I have a lot of trouble taking it seriously. That’s always been true. I’m a terrible student, and I’m very curious as a person, but in a classroom it becomes odd. The best experience I have from that college experience, would be my minor in constitutional law, and that felt like a more appropriate way of engaging with something like a classroom. 

Janna Sailor: But trying to distill down creativity into a classroom setting…

Mark Limacher: That feels totally contrived. Also, I think it sets up a really false understanding. I think front loading a person with technique, especially when we’re talking about writing music, is quite honestly useless. The technique has to come after some initiating event or project or something. You can show a person how to make rows and things, but that doesn’t really work unless there’s some interest in how I could associate pitches next to each other. There has to be something first and then you learn the technique. That may or may not be helpful, but that’s the problem. Front-loading a person, and treating composition like a collection of tools, I think is very stupid: it has to go the other way. You develop them out of whatever material you’re working on, and in doing so, you develop unique approaches to that rather than just being “technically versatile” or something. It has to go after you have some initial curiosity of wanting to do something a certain way. That might sound convoluted, but I would also say that’s true of learning orchestration. You can teach a person all the ranges and all of the registral/timbre differences, but it doesn’t mean anything until you have some sense of what it is you’re trying to do in a particular moment. And in those moments, that’s where all the beautiful exceptions emerge. But you don’t know that, and you would rule those out if you just thought about it as according to the textbook example. You don’t write thirds in the trombones below “E” because that’s what the book says, but then you think “no, I need it here because it sounds horrible and it’s wonderful”. It’s grotesque and true exactly what it’s called for. But so it has to be the other way, which is not a satisfying thing to say, because that involves a lot of aimless wandering and work.

Creating Quiet, Slow, Boring

Janna Sailor: I want to dive into in depth, and the concept behind your project Quiet, Slow, Boring, to which the title brought me so much delight. 

Mark Limacher: The title comes from the CJSW radio show, “Unprocessed”. Shout out to the deceased program! People would say that about my taste in especially modern chamber music, and I think it was meant to be pejorative and to hurt my feelings.

Janna Sailor: Nothing can hurt your feelings.

Mark Limacher: I got a kick out of that, and then, it became a joke that expanded in scope. It’s amusing, while also describing certain things I think are of value, which is the wonderful thing about it.

For starters, Quiet.  Yeah, loud music is occasionally fine, but when I say quiet,  I mean something that invites listening, which if I’m pressed on it, yeah, it’s a lower amplitude probably in some sense or another.

Slow: things that don’t go that fast, and that I think that’s just because I feel like that’s above a certain pace. It seems to me that and I should be very specific here, I am talking a lot about composed chamber music. When this was an idea from those years ago above a certain pace, it’s like it starts to sound full of filigree. I’m always reminded of a phrase by Scandinavian filmmaker Roy Andersson, where he said he wanted to make films where “no frame was indifferent”. He felt that so much of modern filmmaking involves collections of sequences, where the frames are indifferent to what is going on, because it’s about just getting through it as quickly as possible to the next beat of some kind. I would say that is a passion of mine: to write music where you take into account each frame. The problem is that slows down your ability to do very much, right? Because then, fast filigree, scales and things, which you could say are part of a texture or something, but the individual material kind of melts and becomes less specific where you can’t notice it as much. 

The boring part is just I get so damn sick of being pushed to entertain people. And I think we should just stop trying to be entertaining. Entertainment is cheap and it’s everywhere.

I’ve learned, and it amuses me to no end, that when I refer to my music as boring, it really upsets people. It’s amazing. People are so wounded by that word. It’s also just a catchy phrase that confuses people, and I like that too.

Janna Sailor: But it is fascinating how terrified we are of boredom. 

Mark Limacher: I think people resist boredom, because they’re resisting introspection. I think they’re resisting having to sit quietly for a minute and not be entertained. I think they’re having to sit quietly and maybe confront the emptiness of their existence, the absolute meaninglessness of our lives, but we ought to think about those things. We ought to be haunted by those things. We don’t have the right to check out, and I love that as an idea. Maybe that’s not only done with my music, should you hate it and find it boring, but you should also bore yourself and sit on a train for a while with no earbuds. Or just sit in your apartment, don’t turn anything on and just freak out for a second. You know that, that’s very good, I think that’s very healthy. That’s very good.

Exploring Personal and Collaborative Music Creation

Janna Sailor:  This is so interesting to me to have this conversation, and like something that’s obviously so personal to you, and that’s fine if you’re writing stuff for yourself, it can be a little boring. How does that translate to your collaborations with Caity Gyorgy, Kensington Sinfonia or other ensembles? How do you get that across to your collaborators?

Mark Limacher: Let’s say I’m arranging a piece that Caity and I have written together or something. The demands of what that can do and what it wants, will be different from me exploring six pitches for five minutes right? That being said, what connects them comes back to that thing of what can I do to find some timbre, I want to say melodic shape, some sense of counterpoint, that’s all the same. So I tend to often shy away from really heavily blended timbres, because I just find they become boring to me. They’re gauzy and indistinct and I like starker sounds, so that’s always the same. It’s also maybe a little bit more about framing the voice. So that’s a fun activity. 

Janna Sailor: Framing the voice. I love how that sounds. 

Mark Limacher: How much can it tolerate, before I’m clearly not being supportive anymore, or what is the appropriate amount of stuff to happen here? And maybe nothing is the answer, right? Or if I put nothing here and I put something there, what is, when do I bring nothing back? Does nothing come back? Does something become even more of something or does it change? And in that sense. I think about a lot of the same things, honestly.

 The other connection between those practices, be it the chamber music for myself, or arranging, is that I have a deep kind of meditating curiosity about variation. Less to do with, again, boilerplate technical understanding of just increased ornamentation of a melody or something. I think human beings are very transfixed by our memory, and this serves us in the world in obvious ways, but also damages us in equally obvious ways. Nostalgia is a kind of obsessive memory that holds us prisoner to certain sorts of realities. And when I think about the traditional musical forms that are about variation or memory, it always seems related to this idea of a desperation to repeat something, while often not being able to do it, because we can’t repeat anything. You think of something like a rondo form, where the idea is something keeps coming back. But for me, the interest there is yes, but each time it comes back, it can’t be the same because that would be such a lie, and so synthetic. How does it start to fall apart or mutate into something grotesque while still being fundamentally recognizable? That paradox is interesting. Or a more grounded form, like a chaconne, where you have an idea that’s repeating constantly underneath, while a bunch of random new things keep appearing over top. That again, maybe that warps over time and before you know it, you’re lost. Believe it or not that kind of curiosity about varying material, what sounds similar to something that just happened, enough to be recognizable while not being that, because that would be fatuous, that would be completely contrived and a lie to you, the listener. Things that evolve over time, even little, brass figures or something in a big band chart. How do they not remain the same? 

Collaborative Dynamics with Caity Gyorgy

Janna Sailor: So much of your work is collaborative in nature. We’ve mentioned multi-Juno Award winner Caity Gyorgy, who’s wonderfully accomplished, right from the get-go, and you are an integral part of Caity’s sound. As her orchestrator, arranger and pianist, what goes into a successful collaboration such as that? 

Mark Limacher: With Caity, what’s so nice is that she and I share a lot of very similar subliminal instincts about things. When we’re performing, very spooky things will happen, where she might sing the exact same line I’m playing suddenly. To me that’s not supernatural, but it’s a sense of shared instinct about what is appropriate at a certain moment in time.

Beyond that, we have similar tastes in some ways. We both come to the table with a shared deep knowledge of those recordings and their orchestrations already. But then we also have very, different, often complimentary, but often just completely novel input. She can quote for you, virtually every solo Sonny Stitt ever performed on record. I certainly cannot do that, but I can play most of Puccini’s output for her if she’s of any interest in that mood, which is obviously not frequently, but those two things then collide in creative and interesting ways. So those are what I would call the backdrop to a strong collaborative experience. I  did a project a long time ago with one of my friends, where we discussed collaboration as a form of disruption or a form of obfuscation of the others’ desires. We tried to completely invert it to make it sound just terrible. But what emerges from that kind of experience is, I think, a better understanding that collaboration involves trusting the other people involved, be it one or more, and being willing to bulldoze your own ego most of the time. Not that they’re going to demand that, but that the right path forward will probably not resemble the thing you thought initially. If you’re really doing it well, you’re going to find a way forward. That’s unexpected, and I hate saying it’s correct, but it certainly feels that way. Doing songwriting with Caity has been a lot of fun in the last year or two, where we’ll give each other little fragments and before you know it, something comes out of it that’s really interesting, but absolutely not what I thought, could have been, and vice versa. Also, not only having those shared senses of instinct, but also understanding that making a thing, requires allowing it to dictate its own path.

So collaboration, to me, it’s the best way of doing anything really, because you are not the only one who has to make any decisions, and you can share that credit.

 Upcoming Projects

Janna Sailor: So what is next for you, as you evolve as an artist? 

Mark Limacher: I’m astonished that this continues to be possible, every day that I’m alive. I hope I’m able to keep writing something or another. Coming up on June 1st, is a performance, again, a collaboration. So between my dear pianist friend Chloe Westin from Ontario and Kensington Sinfonia, with a slightly expanded instrumentation. The term that we’ve come up with just to discuss this for the last year has been the piano concerto, but that doesn’t really describe the thing. I’m calling it variations for the piano and chamber orchestra just out of simplicity. There’s big passages where only one note at a time is being delicately played, because that’s, in those moments, the appropriate thing.  And then the middle section is very bashy, and lots of clusters and things, and that felt appropriate. But, I’m just finishing the orchestration of that now this summer. Hopefully I have some time to reconsider, but there’s a lot of arranging things next season, including some more big band music. 

Janna Sailor: You have an amazing album coming out that you’ve arranged with Caity Gyorgy.

Mark Limacher: That’s with a 40 piece orchestra that we recorded. I’m very excited about that. That’ll be good, and hopefully that could lead to another such album in a year or two. Obviously the expensive sorts of albums makes that challenging. Writing short chamber pieces still matters to me. It’s just that it happens. If I’m lucky, I can do one, two, or three of those a year. This past season was two, and that’s fine. I’m not complaining about that. I always think you have to have something to write about in that very ephemeral sense. I don’t think you should just be churning pieces out. I think that’s missing the point. 

Janna Sailor: They take time to cook. 

Mark Limacher: That’s right! Even if it’s a four minute piece, you should be pretty sure you mean all of that. 

You can listen to the full conversation HERE on the MUSING podcast!