Feature Story

Progressions

In the world of New Music, professor Amy Williams is an in-demand composer and pianist. As a 2015-16 Guggenheim Fellow, she is speeding up her allegro pace
Photography courtesy of
John Mazlish

Amy Williams, a pianist and composer, is watching Run Lola Run, an action-suspense thriller from Germany. The 1998 foreign film shows three different scenarios in which its main character has to run, literally, to collect 100,000 Deutsch marks to save her boyfriend’s life. Each scenario takes a drastically different turn. Can she find the money? Will she be killed? Will her boyfriend survive?

As Williams watches, she isn’t hearing the movie’s actual soundtrack. Instead, her own brain is running wild, taking the movie’s structure and applying it to her own compositional techniques. She is thinking of a solo piano piece in three sections that can be played in any order. She is thinking of how to embody the feeling of Lola’ perpetual motion, her breathlessness, her intensity. She is watching how each new development in the story affects the minor characters around Lola, thinking about how those subtler undercurrents could be expressed musically. Williams—a Pitt music professor—is in the midst of composing her own collection of film music, which she calls Cineshapes. It’s a work in progress that began about a decade ago, interrupted by the increasing demands of her rising career. She has thought about the mood and melodies of Run Lola Run for eight years. Meanwhile, she has created other musical works inspired by films for Cineshapes, recorded a CD of her own music, Crossings: Music for Piano and Strings, toured the country with her Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo, and premiered her full orchestral work Flood Lines with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

This year, thanks to many of those accomplishments, Williams was named a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, an international award that recognizes those “who have demonstrated exceptional creativity in the arts or exceptional capacity for productive scholarship,” says the Guggenheim Foundation’s web site.

Williams’ award of the Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the premier benchmark achievements that a composer can earn. And for her, it comes with an invaluable prize—the time to finish more compositions and record them.

“It’s a joy to see someone receive an honor like that,” says Frank Oteri, a senior editor with NewMusicBox, a publication that focuses on contemporary composers and music. “The field is very competitive. It makes more people aware of the music, and it affords her the opportunity to write the extraordinary music that she does.”

Williams’ process for composing is simple: Work every day. Writing music for her is like sculpting. She begins with an idea of what she wants the piece to be, but she waits for the materials to develop. Often they push her in new directions. Her ideal work day begins with composing for a few hours in the morning. When she needs a break, she pivots to practicing piano.

Her career as a pianist feeds off of her career as a composer, and vice versa. Recently, when she and her piano-duo collaborator, Hellena Bugallo, were researching Igor Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, the two were confronted with creating a performance from four different historical versions of the piece. They visited the Stravinsky archives in Switzerland to help with their interpretational choices. In May, the duo recorded the Stravinsky album. All of that Stravinsky, says Williams, started to seep into her own compositions.

“There’s this very synergic relationship between my composing and my performing. They influence each other constantly,” she says.

NewMusicBox’s Frank Oteri is familiar with Williams’s piano recordings and her work as a composer. “It’s always interesting to hear people who are active as composers and as interpreters. Usually you’ll hear a keen idiomatic sense of the instrument they’re writing for, and Amy’s piano music is really fluid. However, what’s extraordinary is she also writes so well for strings and creates richer textures,” he says.

Oteri, a composer himself, is also inspired by the nonmusical content of a piece. Williams’s First Lines captured his attention because of the way she interpreted the text musically. The piece is written for flute and piano, inspired by the first line of text in works from 11 women poets.  Often, when poetry influences music, composers will write a vocal setting of the text itself, says Oteri. But Williams’s works are all instrumental, which he says can be very effective. “It’s simply a reference to the work, and it brings an audience in more. It’s rarefied and abstract; it’s like having an open window,” he says.

This year, thanks to many of those accomplishments, Williams was named a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, an international award that recognizes those "who have demonstrated exceptional creativity in the arts or exceptional capacity for productive scholarship,” says the Guggenheim Foundation’s web site.

It’s not surprising that Williams landed a career in music.  She simply ended up in the family business, she says. Growing up in Buffalo, New York, she would wake up on a Saturday morning to the sounds of a string quartet rehearsing Mozart chamber music in the family’s living room. Her mother, Diane, played viola with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.  Later, her father, Jan, a percussionist and professor, might take her to a percussion ensemble concert, followed by a big party back at their house full of composers and musicians. She met some of the most influential modern composers that way, including John Cage, George Crumb, and Eliot Carter.

In this childhood milieu, she began playing piano at age 4 and added flute lessons at age 8 with famed contemporary flutist, Robert Dick, who cemented her love for modern music. She has written that Dick encouraged her to learn “Chopsticks” in multiphonics, meaning she was using flute techniques to produce multiple tones at once from this simple melody.

Those adventurous lessons would keep Williams composing for the flute through the years, as in her well-regarded First Lines, which she composed while teaching music at Northwestern University. When she was experimenting with the beginning of the piece, she came across flutist Lindsey Goodman, who was a graduate student at the time. Goodman was immediately intrigued by Williams’s ear for the flute’s possibilities.

“Her ear is astutely attuned to color and sound, allowing her to use extended techniques as fluidly as some composers use traditional harmony. Pairing that with her knowledge of the flute, again from a distinctly avante-garde perspective, Amy’s flute writing is extremely organic to the listener, even when it stretches the ear,” says Goodman, who is now a collaborator and friend of Williams. She will join the Pitt composer next spring to record Williams’ second CD of compositions.

Williams’s ability to toggle between the dual careers of both pianist and composer came from careful culling of what her career would look like. She knew she wanted to perform modern music, but not travel endlessly as a featured soloist with orchestras performing concerti. “I would need to practice six hours a day to do that,” she says wryly. She takes commissions sparingly, calculating whether she’ll have enough time to write the piece well. But she is firm in wanting the career breadth of both regularly composing and performing.

“I feel as though, personally, I need to have both sides to feed each other. If I stopped playing, I would be a worse composer. If I stopped composing, I would be a worse performer,” she says.

Given the dazzling facets of Amy Williams’ talent, it’s not surprising that she is among the latest set of prestigious Guggenheim Fellows. Earlier honors include the Wayne Peterson Composition Prize, the Thayer Award for the Arts, and an ASCAP Award for Young Composers. She will use her 2015-16 fellowship year to finish her composition inspired by Run Lola Run, which will complete her Cineshapes collection.

Her compositions have been performed in renowned venues by leading symphonies, ensembles, and solo artists at music festivals nationally and abroad, including Tanglewood in the United States, Ars Musica in Belgium, and Festival Musica Nova in Brazil.

There is yet another important piece to Williams’ working life—her teaching and mentoring of student composers. After earning a master’s degree in piano performance and a PhD in composition at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Williams went on to teach at her undergraduate alma mater, Bennington College, and at Northwestern University before joining the University of Pittsburgh in 2005.  The Pitt job, she says, is particularly well balanced in enabling professors to have careers as working artists while sharing their knowledge and expertise with students through teaching and mentoring.

“It’s wonderful to interact with students,” she says, noting the joy and challenge of encountering their diverse individual compositional styles. “I’ll have an electronic soundscape, and next a full orchestra score, and next an installation piece,” Williams says.

One of Williams’s former students, James Ogburn, is now an assistant professor of composition and theory at Columbus State University. He continues to be inspired by her teaching techniques, some of which he said he’s working to emulate.

“She’s so fast. She can look at a score and hear a recording and immediately come up with different ways of thinking about passages that would make the piece stronger. That’s really rare,” says Ogburn.

Another of Williams’s former students, composer Matt Heap, recalls her guidance in working through the “whys” of musical composition. If he wrote a melody line for an oboe that was suddenly taken over by the clarinet, Williams would push him: What in the music made it inevitable that the clarinet had to pick up the line there?

“This really resonated with me,” says Heap, “because I have spent many years working in the theater world, and this concept of action and reaction in music allowed me to more closely combine my interests. Now, I rarely write any big change in a piece without following this concrete musical logic.”

Given the dazzling facets of Amy Williams’ talent, it’s not surprising that she is among the latest set of prestigious Guggenheim Fellows. Earlier honors include the Wayne Peterson Composition Prize, the Thayer Award for the Arts, and an ASCAP Award for Young Composers. She will use her 2015-16 fellowship year to finish her composition inspired by Run Lola Run, which will complete her Cineshapes collection.

During this time, she will also collaborate with Aaron Henderson, a video artist and Pitt assistant professor of film studies, to push this creativity into new territory. Henderson will generate five entirely new short films based on her Cineshapes music. Then, Williams will write five new pieces to underscore each of his short films.

“It’s this infinity loop of collaboration and artistic creation,” Williams says, which is also characteristic of New Music’s energy and evolution.

In the months ahead, when Williams needs a break from finishing the Run Lola Run piano piece, she’ll rehearse for upcoming piano-duo concerts with Bugallo, whom she met when both were graduate students in Buffalo. She is also composing a new work for wind ensemble, which will be performed in April 2016. She will also use her fellowship year to record a second CD of her chamber music, which will include a few of the Cineshapes compositions as well as pieces for string quartet, piano, and flute. Her former student and ongoing collaborator Lindsey Goodman will be among those partnering in the music-making.

“There’s never any artifice to Amy musically or personally,” says Goodman. “She’s simply who she is: a fiercely intelligent and inspiring force who’s intensely curious about the music world she loves and the people in it,” says Goodman.

The year ahead will likely prove to be Amy Williams’ own action thriller, continuing her rise as a leading lady in the world of New Music.