Half way through "Geulah Papyrus,"
a straight-ahead Phish song about a spider and a fly, the music
breaks into a short theme and variation in which counterpoint
melodies weave in and out like silk strands in a web. The piece,
"The Asse Festival", was written
by lead guitarist Trey Anastasio and dedicated to his friend and
mentor, Cornwall composer Ernie Stires. By the end of this year,
Anastasio hopes to release a CD of Stires' all too rarely heard
work. While most people associate modern classical compositions
with minimalist monotony or conceptual cacophony, Stires serves
up his decidedly 20th-century dishes with enough boogie-woogie
rhythms and beautiful, mind-bending harmonies to satisfy body
and soul. "It amazed me that more and more people were hearing
my music, and no one was hearing his," Anastasio says. "It's
amazing music, incredible."
Stires and his wife Judith share a rambling,
add-on farmhouse outside Middlebury. The composer is a friendly,
opinionated, slightly disheveled 71-year-old whose Virginia roots
can still be heard in the mellow lilt of his voice. "My muse
is a combination of Tallulah Bankhead and Bette Davis," he
drawls. "She smokes and she drinks and she's sore because
she has me."
Stires' pedigree includes Grandpa Sidney Homer,
a composer; Grandma Louise Homer, a leading contralto with the
Metropolitan Opera from 1900 until 1931; and Cousin Samuel Barber,
one of the major American composers of the 20th century. Cousin
Sam's complex tonalities and unabashed lyricism were major influences
in Stires' aesthetic development. Stires' mother also sang opera,
but her career ended when she married his father, an Episcopal
minister. (In those days, he explains, it was considered unseemly
for a man of the cloth to be married to a woman who appeared on
the stage.)
With so much music in the family, it was only
natural that young Ernie be given piano lessons. But they didn't
work out. "I was a rattle-brained kid," he claims. "But
I could play hot piano licks by ear." Freed from the constraints
of formal training, he continued to soak up sounds on his own,
especially big band jazz. "I loved the artistry, elegance
and genius of swing," he says. To demonstrate, he cranks
up an old gramophone (a gift from Phish), and pops on the B side
of a 78: the Benny Goodman Quartet tearing through "I'm a
Ding Dong Daddy." Stires does a lsideprojects.htmlhake, getting
into the rhythm. "This came out when I was 10 years old and
I can't get rid of it! It ruins you for life," he declares,
grinning mischievousideprojects.htmlCompare that with Bobby Dylan!"
It took Stires a while to move from listening
to writing his own music. First he joined the Navy, then he married
his first wife, had three children, and worked at various jobs
in media sales. By the late Õ50s, he says, he got "fed up"
and moved to Boston, where he met Judith and gave himself over
to his music. At age 32, he tells me, "I decided to grab
hold of my so-called talent." Stires' composition teachers
included Nicholas Slonimsky, an absurdist composer and tonal explorer.
(Slonimsky later appeared in concert with Frank Zappa, who introduced
him as "our national treasure.")
The Stires have lived in Vermont since the early
1970s. While Judith works as vice president of a Burlington investment
counseling firm, Ernie composes jazz-infused numbers for solo
voice, chorus, solo instruments, chamber ensembles, symphony orchestra
and theater. He works at a Steinway grand with an ashtray the
size of a fruit bowl perched beside the manuscript-littered music
stand. Besides examples of his beloved swing, LPs and cassettes
of Barber, Bach, Nelson Riddle, David Rakson movie scores, 1950s
a cappella pop, and other favorite recordings are close at hand.
The composer eagerly shares his eclectic archive,
as well as his own inventions, with the dozens of hopeful musicians
who have been finding their way to his door for the past 15 years.
Stires isn't formally associated with any music program, and he
doesn't teach for the money. He says "kids" like Anastasio
and Jamie Masefield of the Jazz Mandolin Project get his name
"on the street" and work out individual payment arrangements.
One student painted the hull of Stires' vintage power boat in
exchange for his counsel.
The style of Stires' counsel harkens back to
his early experience as an incorrigible piano student. Composition
can't be taught, he believes. Instead, he tries to help his students
acquire the necessary tools and to open their ears to new sounds,
then help them find their own voice. He begins by telling a student,
"Write me some music. Then we'll go over it." For Anastasio,
who met Stires as a University of Vermont student feeling stifled
by the school's traditional music courses, this unorthodox approach
was an inspiration. "He believed in me," the guitarist
says.
But Stires balances his faith in his students
with an equal measure of rigor. Anastasio recalls the time he
knocked himself out writing a two-part composition with a big-band
arrangement. Then he proudly brought the piece to his teacher,
only to be told, "You've stuck your head out of the muck
at the bottom of the mountain and now you can see that there's
a mountain there to climb."
"Trey makes a big thing about my contribution
to his music," Stires demurs. "I just opened the doors
for him and he ran through them."
Even after Phish had signed with Elektra and
was touring nationally, Anastasio remained intent on living up
to his teacher's standards. Up through the release of Rift, he
says, "I played everything for him first. His influence is
felt over the whole direction the band has gone in. I was always
playing them Ernie's music, saying, "How can we sound more
like this?'"
The sound Anastasio sets as his ideal will be
represented well on the CD. Though exact release details are still
forthcoming, Stires has selected the recordings that will make
up the collection. They include New York organist Gerre Hancock
playing "Prelude and Fugue," a piece inspired in part
by a phrase from George Benson's "The Two Of Us" and
recorded in 1990 by Vermont pianist Michael Arnowitt on his album,
Alive and Well. Stires himself will play "Minor Footnotes,"
a series of new piano pieces whose name derives from a fellow
musician who once told him that if he was lucky, one day he'd
merit a minor footnote in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Pianist Stephanie Rogers and her father, a violinist, will play
a piece called "12 x 12." And Anastasio will team up
with Stires on a danceable little jam number called "Samson
Riff," the only straight jazz cut on the album.
But the centerpiece of the collection will be
Rogers' performance of Stires' Sonata in C major for Piano, a
jazzy, 20-minute excursion that is both mesmerizing and infectious.
Recorded in concert at Middlebury College in 1988, the piece opens
with systematic waves of dappled notes, then progresses to a theatrical
conclusion with syncopated subjects entering and exiting in endless
variations, like characters tap-dancing across a stage. With its
carefully composed air of effortlessness, its intrepid exploration
of recurring themes, and its ability to both elevate and entertain
the listener, Stires' Sonata is a showcase of his compositional
tastes and talent.
Even for the composer, an achievement like this
can be somewhat awe-inspiring. "You look hopefully for an
idea and then you're humble when you find it and you wish your
skills were better," he says. "To have even a half-baked
touch of creativity is an honor. You husband the gift and you
do what you can with it. It's wonderful, but it's work."
Stires' work has already paid out amply in the impact he's had
on Anastasio and his other students. And now, thanks to the forthcoming
CD, the rest of us will be able the reap the rich rewards of his
efforts as well.
- PQ possibilities: "Trey makes a big thing
about my contribution to his music. I just opened the doors
for him and he ran through them." -- Ernie Stires, composer.
- "I played everything for him first. His
influence is felt over the whole direction the band has gone
in. I was always playing them Ernie's music, saying, "How
can we sound more like this?'" -- Trey Anastasio, Phish
- "You look hopefully for an idea and then
you're humble when you find it and you wish your skills were
better. To have even a half-baked touch of creativity is an
honor." -- Ernie Stires, composer
Thanks also to James Lockridge and Matt Procyk.
FAQ
