Q&A with Greg Sandow ’74MM
After a 45+ year career as a music critic, educator, and consultant on classical music’s future, Greg Sandow ’74MM turned to his deepest artistic calling: composition. This August, the Acis label will release his Three Quartets, a new album with the Terra String Quartet, YSM’s 2024–2026 fellowship quartet-in-residence. The recording brings together three string quartets written at different points in his life and realized through a close collaboration with the ensemble.
In this Q&A, Sandow discusses career transition, collaborating with the Terra String Quartet, the role of instinct in his creative process, and the value of embracing fear.
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What drew you back to composition full time?
Greg Sandow: Composing was always part of my life. After I left Yale with my degree in composition, I composed fairly intensely for a few years, but in 1980 I began writing criticism for The Village Voice, and that carried me in a different direction. I went on to do consulting work, taught at Juilliard for 26 years, and for a while at Eastman and Peabody, all the while composing intermittently. Eventually, I realized I didn’t want to be traveling every week to teach anymore. I loved teaching and certainly loved my students, but it no longer felt like the most important thing for me. It felt like a distraction from what I most wanted to be doing.
You made this transition to full-time composing later in life, after decades of an established career. That kind of leap can be intimidating. What would you say to people — maybe your students — who feel afraid of making a similar move?
GS: I get it — for decades I was afraid of composing. I might tell them that the strength of our fear might be an indication of how much we want to do something. If they’re that afraid of doing something the emotions about doing it and the need to do it might run very deep. They should respect the fear, but they should also embrace it. They can say this fear is a part of me. It tells me how much I want this thing. You can let the fear in as part of you, and do the thing anyway. You can speak to the fear, invite it in, tell it, “Watch me do this.”
Coincidentally, around the same time you were making this transition, your wife, music critic Anne Midgette, was also making a creative shift of her own, moving from criticism to writing novels. How did you navigate that together?
GS: I think it struck us both individually, but it resonated as a couple. When we got together 27 years ago, we were both journalists, but we knew deep down that I was really a composer and she was really a novelist.
The moment came for both of us at around the same time. Now we are very much a team — I read what she writes, and she ears my music on my computer when it’s done, and sometimes while it’s still in progress. Her comments are extremely useful. I’ve changed things because she’s said, “You know what, this isn’t working, and here’s why.” So we have a very close bond.
What made the collaboration with the Terra String Quartet so meaningful?
GS: The quartet’s violinists, Harriet [Langley] and Amelia [Dietrich], had taken a course with me years earlier, and we reconnected at a memorial concert in New York, where they introduced me to the cellist Audrey [Chen] and the violist Chih-Ta [Chen]. I went online to listen to them and was immediately struck by the intelligence, force, and liveliness of their playing, so I wrote and asked if I could engage them on a professional basis to record my three string quartets. It turned out to be one of the loveliest collaborations I’ve experienced.
I told them early on that I looked forward to the moment when they made the music their own. That’s a special thing, when performers stop just playing what’s on the page and start to own it. There are places — I could point them out in the scores — where they do things I never envisioned: small details, phrasings, the length of a pause. Always beautiful. Always theirs.
But just as remarkable was how exactly they rendered what I did imagine, things that would be difficult for many musicians to find at all. Take Chih-Ta’s playing at the edge of silence, at the beginning of the quartet called The Remembered Song, or the way Audrey, at the edge of audibility, momentarily joins him there, creating fleeting dissonances. I could imagine some quartets never getting the feeling of that. They got it exactly. Or Harriet and Amelia in the high counterpoint in the final section of that same piece — how perfectly and quietly beautiful their sound is. There’s no way to coach that. They just felt it.
By the end, they had made the quartets sound more beautiful and radiant than I had imagined, and the professional relationship had grown into a friendship.
How would you describe your composition process? Is it driven more by instinct or by formal technique?
GS: The odd answer is 100% of both. I use formal techniques all the time. The longest of the quartets, Mahler Variations, is a set of variations, and some of them use twelve-tone procedures as tributes to Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. But that doesn’t tell me how the music will actually sound. The process itself is very instinctive. I don’t know where things are going to go, and sometimes I wonder if they’re ever going to go anywhere. But since I began composing every day, I’ve learned to trust myself. I may write something, listen to it, and think, “This is junk” But I know it’s a step toward what I want.
You’ve experienced the classical music world from many vantage points — as a critic, educator, consultant, and now full-time composer. From that perspective, where do you think the field is headed, or what’s the biggest challenge it faces?
GS: I think the biggest challenge the field has right now is understanding where the outside culture is — what people care about, where they find art. This is true throughout the arts. It’s easy to believe that the arts, classical music especially, offer something special, something more deeply nourishing than anything else.
I don’t feel that. For me, and I think most people in our culture, art has migrated outside the arts, in an evolution that started decades ago. For most people — including educated, cultured people — there’s artistic expression on a very high level in film, TV series, graphic design, fashion, pop music, cuisine, and other things not traditionally counted among the arts.
I’d think that the best way to expand the audience for classical music and the other legacy arts is to not think we’re deeper, but just to happily swim in the same vast waters of varied, fresh, and penetrating art that the rest of the world does.
Though — and this is important — I don’t think about any of that when I compose! I’m not on any crusade, not trying to prove any point, not trying to change classical music. I’m just doing what I love.
