An interview with Jude Navari...

The 2009-2010 season marks Jude Navari`s eleventh year as Artistic Director of Voci.  To learn more about Jude, Voci singer and Board president Susan Sands sat down with him on September 9, 2009 for the following wide-ranging conversation.

Susan: Jude, you are such a consummate musician. When did you first know that you wanted to go into music?

Jude: I actually didn`t know that I`d go into music professionally until high school. I started teaching myself piano around age eight. I didn`t know how to notate music, so I would compose pieces by writing out the letter names  on colored slips of paper that my Dad would bring home from work. I would spend many hours at the piano plunking out music that was too hard for me to sight-read.

Susan: Self-taught on the piano… You were very determined! Do you come from a musical family?

Jude: Not really [laugh]. I have one sister who has the aptitude for it but never really developed it. My aunt Adele plays piano and some guitar, and taught music at an elementary school. Then there`s, let`s see, a maternal great-uncle who was an amateur  show tunes composer and an Italian great-aunt on my father`s side who composed parlor music! But no one in my immediate family went into music. You know, I think the truth is that no one really knew what to do with me!

Susan: So then how did you make your way into music?

Jude: Well, we didn`t have much money for lessons while I was growing up… I`m the oldest of 4 kids born within 5 years. In the third grade I had some guitar lessons with a jazz/pop guitarist, and starting in the fifth grade, I started having lessons with the community piano teacher. After 2 years she said to my mother "I can`t help him anymore. You need to find a more serious teacher." I got into a performing arts high school [The Academy of Performing Arts in Chicago], but I found the academics so boring I transferred to a public high school, where I participated in theatrical productions. I mostly acted in these productions, but I did co-write a one-act musical called "Welcome Home" in my senior year. I wrote the music and accompanied from the pit. A lot of  my high school classmates and teachers thought I would go into theater. I was also in the dance troupe there - one of 2 guys out of about 40 - and I was in various choirs.  I continued to take  private lessons with Bertha Bush, whom I`d started with at the performing arts high school, and she became a major influence in my musical career. She was really demanding and insisted on our getting a decent grand piano for me to practice on. My first piano was a hand-me-down spinet that had no key resistance and was probably about eighty years old. She was the first person who had really high expectations for me. She was so upset that I was acting in plays and not just focusing on piano.  But I was always terrified when I had to perform - I was much more interested in composition.

Susan: Was there a major turning point - when you knew you wanted to do music professionally?

Jude: Yes, the big turning point came when I was accepted as an undergraduate by Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York [one of the best conservatories in the country]. When I first arrived at Eastman, I was shell-shocked. Suddenly I was thrown in with all these kids who had been going to performing arts schools and summer camps their entire childhood. For me, it was like going into a monastery - no socializing, just eating, practicing, and composing. But I got a great education. Only about 7 or 8 students are accepted each year in the composition program, so a lot is expected of you. I did do a lot of different things at Eastman, including different kinds of movement analysis - Alexander technique and Feldenkreis - and film scoring classes. For fun, I studied modern dance with Elizabeth Clark whose studio - a converted chapel with very tall gothic ceilings and stained-glass windows - was down the street from my dorm. I briefly flirted with writing music for film, but decided to pursue music teaching instead. After Eastman, I went straight to Cal, first getting an M.A. then a PhD in composition.

Susan: What made you decide not to do film scores?

Jude: Well, I looked around and saw that if you do that as a career, your schedule is very difficult with all the deadlines. Since music is the very last thing added to a film before it`s released, the music composing, recording and editing needs to be done in a very short period of time. This can lead to very long and stressful hours.

Susan: But I happen to know that you didn`t give it up entirely, because just a few years ago I saw a stunning film that you had scored!

Jude: Right. I`m part of "Playworks Productions," a multidisciplinary arts group which was originally formed in October 1999. The group consists of artist/playwright Lisi DeHaas, performer/choreographer Deborah Hull, and me. That film I scored was called "Undone," and it was conceived and directed by  Deborah Hull. Scenes were filmed at the Flood Mansion in San Francisco [that now houses the Hamlin School where Deborah teaches dance] before it was renovated back in 2000.

Susan: After Eastman, you went on to Cal for a PhD in composition. How was that?

Jude: I taught from my second year on, and that`s where I learned to teach. My fellow students were amazingly bright and encouraging, and there were some high-powered musicologists on the faculty. I was almost through my PhD program before I ever even thought of conducting! I found it wasn`t too hard - probably because of all the movement and  music theory training I had had. But conducting is very physically taxing; I wouldn`t want to be conducting more than 2 groups. One of the high points there was studying with Richard Crocker, a musicologist specializing in Medieval music [author of An Introduction to Gregorian Chant].

Susan: Medieval music is particularly near and dear to your heart, right? Why do you love this music in particular?

Jude: I was introduced to it at Eastman in a Medieval-Renaissance Music History Survey taught by Professor Patrick Macey. The first time I heard it, I was blown away. I love the sonorities in the later polyphony - the open fourths and fifths, the surface dissonance and the many intertwining, overlapping melodic lines. When you`re talking about Medieval music, you`re talking about 1,000 years of music with a huge variety of styles and the birth of polyphony half way through.

I`m especially attracted to the dazzling rhythmic complexity of the Ars Subtilior - the late 14th century musical style featuring rhythmic and notational complexity.  Voci will be singing a piece from this period on our upcoming winter concert - "Belle Bonne Sage" by  Baude Cordier. Occasionally, these pieces were notated in fantastic shapes and used red colored ink in addition to black. The Cordier is one of these. It was notated in the shape of a heart.

In Crocker`s Medieval seminar I  worked on the compositional structure of Solage ballades that appear in the Chantilly manuscript.  I was also lucky to be among a group of singers that he worked with to try out some of his rhythm interpretation of plainchant neumes. My chant  interpretations are influenced by that work and by Crocker`s belief  that, at the end of the day, one has to do what works musically.

Susan: Looking back over your musical history, who do you think were the most important influences on you musically?

Jude:  The composer Samuel Adler for one. He  was the chair of the Composition Department at Eastman, and he was the person who interviewed me when I came to audition. He must have been the one who saw something in me. I studied composition with him during my first year there. He was demanding but also kind and encouraging. And then there was Bertha Bush, my high school piano teacher, who was the first person to hold me to really high musical standards.

Susan: Have there been particularly memorable musical moment or moments?

Jude:  I think of co-founding Vox Populi with friends at Cal - a conductor-less renaissance music ensemble. A CD that we recorded with proceeds from our concerts  continues to do well online. I also think of singing in the Eastman Chorale, especially performing the Britten Requiem and the St. Matthew Passion.

Susan: Moving to the present, tell me about your day job teaching and conducting at Skyline College in San Bruno.

Jude: It`s very taxing, because of the schedule and the lack of resources. I teach five classes per semester - music appreciation, voice classes, music theory or musicianship (depending on the semester), and I conduct the concert choir.

Susan: Then there`s Voci. What do you enjoy about being artistic director of Voci?

Jude: Well, Voci is a small ensemble, which makes it rewarding because everyone knows each other. Voci`s devotion to musical excellence is very important to me. Putting together an interesting program for Voci is a challenge due to the more limited repertoire for treble voices, but I like the challenge. I really enjoy "solving" the puzzle.

Susan: Mary Berg of KPFA has lauded you for your brilliant programming. How do you think about programming and, more specifically, how did you think about programming this season`s concert, "The Greenest Branch."

Jude: I  start with larger works—chestnuts or longer pieces, and I build the concert around these pieces. For this winter`s concert I started with the Poulenc "Litanies" and the Britten "Missa Brevis." Their  bracing harmonies, angular  melodies and formal quality reminded me of Medieval music. I`ve wanted to program more Medieval polyphony for a Voci concert, and this seemed a good fit. I then started looking around for Medieval polyphony on a Marian theme. As I was researching, I found several Marian pieces with the imagery of greening and spring time - for example, in Hildegard`s "O Virga Viridissima" ("O Greenest Branch" in English), Mary is portrayed as the spring tree during winter. In the text, Eve herself is envious of Mary`s "greening" power. The texts suggested a view of Mary as a surrogate fertility goddess. This led to Emma Lou Diemer`s "O Virga Virdissima," a setting of Hildegard`s text for women`s voices and organ.  Mary was also the model in the Middle Ages for the beloved "lady on the pedestal" that the knightly class rhapsodized about in courtly love poetry. With this thread, I was able to fold in some secular French chanson, including the exquisite and unique "Rose, liz" by late Medieval master composer Guillaume de Machaut. 

Susan: So programming for you is very intuitive!

Jude: Yes, my process for putting together a concert program is quite organic and non-linear. This winter`s concert was no exception. Because the two "anchor" pieces involved an organist, I began to look for other pieces for women`s choir and organ that would work together with the developing program "stew." I wanted to feature our guest organist Matthew Walsh in more than a few pieces. This led me to the superbly-crafted organ masses by Josef Rheinberger. His works exhibit long, blossoming Romantic melodies and lush harmonies. While Rheinberger was writing his lovely "Mass in G Minor," his friend Johannes Brahms died and he dedicated the work to Brahms`s memory. The work seems to have affinities to the music of Brahms, in which I`ve always heard a bit of his love of nature. He often went on long walks in the countryside around Vienna. With this connection I was able to add Brahms`s radiant "Ave Maria" setting to the melange. I was pleasantly surprised myself when the program theme seemed to be coming full circle. Hildegard of Bingen lived, worked and composed in the lush Rhine valley of Germany not unlike Brahms` Austrian landscape. She was deeply influenced by the lush greenness of her surrounding countryside there, and her melodies, like Brahms`s and Rheinberger`s, unfold like branches, continuously developing small bits of motivic material.

Susan: What directions are you pursuing now in your composing?

Jude:  I`m currently working on a piece for Voci in honor of my 10th anniversary with Voci - a setting of fragments of Hermann Hesse`s "Siddhartha." The fragments are all about the river - the river is like another character in the book, the river of time. In addition to the purity of Voci`s vocal timbre, this piece will have an extended piano part to feature the outstanding musicianship and virtuosity of our piano accompanist Sharon Lee. The piece uses several special piano effects, including bowed piano to imitate the tambura, the Indian drone instrument, and plucking or striking the strings inside the piano evoke the sound of the sitar (an Indian guitar-like instrument) and tabla (an Indian drum). 

Susan: When you`re sitting down to begin a composition, how do you approach this task?

Jude: Well, it depends, but I usually do a great deal of "pre-composition." This process involves working out pitch structures, plotting harmonies, and generating rhythm ideas. When I am working with a text, I contemplate it for a long time before even setting a single word. I turn it over and speak it in my mind using different rhythms and inflections. I try to figure out what kind of musical setting will best capture what I think the text is trying to express. In this way, my musical settings of text are very subjective. I`m simultaneously interpreting and projecting new meanings through the musical setting. I strive to create musical setting of text that, upon hearing, will have my audience think of the words in a new way, or make a connection that they wouldn`t have made with only the spoken or written words.

Susan: And when you`re not doing music...are there other things do you really like to do?

Jude: I love crossword puzzles - especially ones by Merl Reagle. I occasionally dabble with watercolors, and I`m a bit of a "foodie."

Susan: In closing, can you say something about the importance of music in our lives?

Jude: I think music is one of the activities in our life that provides us with "flow." This is not really a technical term, but I`ve heard it used to describe the experience of transcending clock time. You could define "flow" as the awareness one has when an hour has just passed but it seems like just a few seconds. I`m not an expert in the psychology or neuroscience behind this - my observations are all empirical - but some believe it is a type of relaxation response that produces chemical changes in the brain. I don`t know if it ever was any different in human history, but I think our modern lives are filled with so many "bumps" and "glitches" - stops and starts and false starts and false stops – that we rarely experience "flow" and crave it. Music provides some of this. I`m only partially successful at achieving this sensation when I listen to music (perhaps because of my endless music schooling!), but when I perform music, I almost always achieve this "flow." When I don`t have some of this on a regular basis, I get cranky and world-weary. I think that certain types of movement, meditation and other artistic endeavors also lead to "flow."

I also think that music provides us with the opportunity to feel emotions in a relatively safe way, and because of this, music is cathartic.  All the arts do this in some way to some degree, but music is perhaps the most abstract artistic medium, compared to visual art, literature, theater and dance which all have a visual component. For many people, music is the artistic medium that most immediately and deeply connects to them to their emotions.

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Jude Navari has prepared choruses and conducted performances for Berkeley Opera, arranged folk music and coached rehearsals for Westwind International Folk Ensemble`s chorus Westwind Voices, conducted premieres of new works by UC Berkeley graduate student composers for the Berkeley New Music Project, and served as Artistic Director of the Sacramento Men`s Chorus. In 2001, Jude prepared the vocal ensemble for the West Coast Premiere of Philip Glass`s The Photographer at the Cabrillo Music Festival. Currently, Jude teaches at Skyline College in San Bruno. Jude received his PhD in Music Composition from the University of California, Berkeley, where he also studied conducting with Marika Kuzma and Jung Ho Pak.