Christopher Cerrone and Tim Munro, credit: Jacob Blickenstaff and Joe Mazza | Classical Post

Pulitzer Prize finalist composer Christopher Cerrone and triple-Grammy-winning flutist Tim Munro discuss collaborating on Cerrone’s latest work, Liminal Highway.

Rebuilding The Flute

Christopher Cerrone: My first memory of you was on a conference call, and you said “I’m sorry for whomever has to write for the flute.” So how did we get from there to here, with the recording of a 17-minute solo piece?

Tim Munro: My then-ensemble, Eighth Blackbird, worked with your then-composer collective, Sleeping Giant, on a big project. I like all of those blokes, but I was particularly drawn to your sound-world: it’s kind of complex and simple all at the same time. It brings up big emotions for me, it plays with sound in fun ways. You take every instrument, and sort of rebuild it from the ground up. I was like, “THAT guy. He will make the flute live in a totally new way.” Then two opportunities came along: a New Music USA grant, and an invitation for me to play at Miller Theatre.

Christopher Cerrone | Tim Munro: Liminal Highway

Tim Munro: Ok, so you said yes to writing the piece, and you’ve got the flute, which is both a font of new music cliches and also really hard to write convincingly for. How did you go about it?

Christopher Cerrone: Well, the first thing I did was take a flute lesson with you. After about 10 minutes I nearly passed out, but I slowly got a handle on it. I had purchased a cheap flute off of Amazon and managed to pick up the basics. It also allowed me to really get a sense of how the instrument works from the ground up. There is something child-like about composing, you try to imagine the instrument as if no one had ever played it before. That’s how I began Liminal Highway, clicking on keys, blowing air noises etc. Slowly but surely it came together.

Flute time with Chris

On Preparing Liminal Highway

CC: I feel like Liminal Highway is not hard, in the sense of runs or other kinds of conventional challenges, but regardless the challenges are real. I always feel like the difficulty of my pieces has to do with both stamina and consistency. Can you talk about that?

TM: Yeah, you’re totally right. It’s a totally different way of preparing music than I am used to. Typically, when I get a new score I spend the most amount of time learning notes, learning rhythms. Gradually piecing it all together, one section at a time, starting slowly and speeding up. Your piece has very few challenges of, like, learning runs of fast notes. What it does have is two things: very quiet, fragile sounds that are hard to control; and lonnnnnng sections that require stability and consistency. From very early on I was playing through whole movements with the electronics, trying to build up different (brain) muscles. It is the closest I’ve come to what it must be like to train as an athlete.

TM: There was this one day that you sent me a link to this like 70-second reverb. The longest reverb in the world. What drew you to that sound, and how did you use it in the piece?

CC: I’ve been obsessed with reverb for a long time (pun intended). I always have this sense that it has the ability to show you how music plays with emotions through time: and how, like memory, it’s flawed. The flute is run through this sample using a process called convolution. A single note then sustains for 70 seconds. What I loved about it is that it actually loses pitch and starts to distort over time, which is how I find my memory of past events: unreliable.

Compositional Amnesia

TM: I’m always interested in the actual MAKING of the thing. How much of your creative time is spent dreaming the piece, how much is spent playing with different sounds, how much is spent actually putting electronic dots on the page?

CC: There’s something akin to amnesia when it comes to composing. I know I sat in a studio for countless hours working on it, but I only have a few specific memories, including writing the opening of the piece while nursing a brutal hangover. In general, the canard of 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration is true. Ideas are easy, but making them work smoothly is hard and an endless process of microedits. I think the hardest thing is creating a work that feels internally consistent.

Composing As A Form Of Communication

TM: You are a stress-ball the week of any new premiere. (I am too, of course.) You are playing with the materials, refining, cutting until the very last second. What are you searching for?

CC: I’m rather brutal with myself; I think all artists should be. It’s so rare and such a gift to get people to pay attention to your work. It’s a privilege, not a right. So I guess I’m obsessively worrying about that—about how people took their time to listen to me, and trying to give them the maximally meaningful experience. Composing, like all art, is a form of communication. I’m just trying to be clear.

CC: The nice thing for me about a recording project is that it finally feels DONE, in a way that it never could before. It’s obviously not done; the whole joy of what we do is that it’s just beginning. But for me, there’s a sense that there is now a guide-post in the world, saying to all future flutists, “This is the correct way to play the piece, now go do your thing.” Do you share this as a performer, or am I out of my mind?

TM: I hate the idea of “definitive performances.” That feels so fixed and uncreative. Some pieces that have been written for me have had this wildly (and joyfully) unpredictable life, completely reinvented by each new player. But in a piece like Liminal Highway, so much of me is baked into the piece itself: the sound of my playing is present in the electronics, my different abilities appear in every nook and cranny of the piece. And you have also fixed the proportions of the piece quite strongly in place. So players after me do have to sort of fit themselves into our shadows. Which is a little sad, since maybe the piece can’t grow quite as far as other pieces might grow by themselves. But it is also a beautiful snapshot of a collaborative process that I think was pretty wonderful.

Watch Liminal Highway

Christopher Cerrone

Christopher Cerrone is internationally acclaimed for compositions characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations. Recent commissions include a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony, a spatialized brass concerto for the Cincinnati Symphony, a percussion concerto for Third Coast Percussion, and three works for the LA Philharmonic. His new piano concerto for Shai Wosner, The Air Suspended, was heard in six cities this season. His opera, Invisible Cities, based on Italo Calvino’s novel, was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize and his sophomore album, The Pieces That Fall to Earth, was released on New Amsterdam Records in July 2019 to critical acclaim and a GRAMMY nomination. He is the winner of the 2015-2016 Samuel Barber Rome Prize holds degrees from Yale and the Manhattan School of Music, is published by Schott NY, and joined the composition faculty of the Peabody Conservatory for 2019–2020.

Tim Munro

Tim Munro is a Chicago-based, triple-Grammy-winning musician. As a flutist, writer, broadcaster, and teacher, he treats audiences as equals, welcoming them into musical worlds with passion, intelligence, and humor. Tim is the St Louis Symphony Orchestra’s Creative Partner, the flutist for the University of Chicago’s Grossman Ensemble, and Principal Flute of the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra. Recent highlights include performances with Wu Man, Ensemble Signal, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, directing Alice Chance’s immersive Comfort Music, and transcribing for live instruments a work by Turner Prize-winning artist Susan Phillipsz. As a soloist, Tim is a “captivating”, “bravura”, and “charismatic” performer (New York Times) who can deliver “a virtuosic tour de force” (Chicago Tribune). Tim was flutist and co-artistic director of Eighth Blackbird from 2006-2015. He toured the US and seven other countries with the band, premiering more than one hundred works, co-curating several festivals, working with musical heros, and winning three Grammy Awards.