Deena T. Grossman’s music is characterized by two qualities: improvisation and immersion in nature. Both qualities are informed by a deep personal listening history drenched in all kinds of music, most of it falling under one “folk music” heading or another. There’s American folk music, from Pete Seeger to Rhiannon Giddens. There’s Japanese shakuhachi music; Balinese gamelan; Indian raga and dance; the Eastern European Jewish cultural/religious/musical tradition. There’s flute and banjo and even tin whistle. And plenty more, all of it either experienced directly in the multiculti hotbed of Berkeley, California, where Grossman grew up, or via her extensive collection of vinyl LPs. You can hear all of this clearly in her music, which doesn’t sound like any of that but bears the mark of it all.

As for the immersion in nature, Grossman’s vision statement expresses it well:

My experience of nature, community and music are all woven into one fabric. My music springs from observations, experience and perceived connections with our natural world and the beings who inhabit it.

All life, all of us and our planet are interconnected and entirely interdependent. From the smallest pebble, lichen or salamander to our largest forests, rivers and oceans, we are made of the same miraculous matter. Whether we acknowledge it or not, our actions, in-actions and way of living on the earth have profound repercussions for good or for ill.

From this awareness I am using my time and energy to do my part to create and sustain beauty, both the beauty of our musical world and the beauty of our natural world.

It is up to each of us to take responsibility for our part in cherishing, protecting and restoring our communities and our environment.

My work as Composer-in-Residence with Columbia Riverkeeper is central to how I take responsibility to connect to our natural environment as an artist and a member of the community of the Pacific Northwest.

You can hear all that in her music too, from the rushing waters to the all-consuming fires to the regenerative power of active listening.

Yet it’s not quite that simple. Driving the music is a deep creative urge, an innate compositional energy that flows into these ecological and multicultural sonic experiences, filling them and illuminating them. Grossman’s music thus emerges from the tension between these various qualities. The improvisations and the natural responses form the banks of a river, with the creative energy its current – an unstoppable force flowing down from the majestic wellsprings of … well, ultimately we don’t really know, do we?

The river itself is (to continue this extended metaphor) Grossman’s ouvre, which for our purposes means three excellent albums released just in the last few years: Wildfires and Waterways, Becoming Durga, and Thrice Burned Forest. That they are excellent albums – filled with excellent music, and excellently recorded – is a secondary but no less important point, because whereas live performances (even ones that get reviewed and/or appear on YouTube) tend to vanish down the far reaches of all-consuming time, a recorded album becomes a part of a durable tradition.

This is why we invented writing in the first place, to give our stories an external reality that would outlive us, like the proverbial tree that outlives the person who plants it. And so we write down music, the old dots-and-lines routine, and that helps, sort of, because it gave us Bach and Beethoven and all the rest. But ever since the invention of microphones and phonographs and speakers and whatnot in the late 19th century, we’ve lived in a world where sound itself – and thus music – can be captured and preserved and handed down in a form which is both ephemeral and permanent. Even if we should enter a post-Industrial age without electricity, we’ll probably still find a way to spin our records.

Grossman’s music is music that should be recorded, and listened to as recorded music, because it has that perfect combination of ephemerality and permanence – of specificity and transcendence, of contingency and necessity, of the local and the universal – that defines all good recorded music.

This probably requires some explaining. On the one hand you have, say, Bach’s Prelude in C Major. It will always and only be that sequence of notes, regardless of who plays it or on which instrument (or in which key, in which tuning system – but let’s not go down that rabbit hole). Bach Himself may have played it one way, Gounod heard it another way, Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma performed it yet another way, and so on. Always different, but always the same. You can step into that river over and over, and it’s never the same river twice, sure; but in fact it actually also is the same river – that’s the nature of the paradox.

Way over on the other end of the spectrum from Bach you have an album by someone like Japanese pop singer Yumi “Yuming” Matsutoya (say, her 1983 album Voyager). You could cover any of the songs on any of her albums (plenty have), but the music is entirely reliant upon the specific sound of the composer’s unique voice and her specific production style, and upon the time and place which gave rise to them. This is something Yuming has in common with many such singer-songwriter-auteur types (David Bowie, Kate Bush, and Peter Gabriel all come to mind), and musicians like this could not exist without the recorded traditions that inform their music. We listen to records, we make records, this is the modern way.

Here’s why I say Grossman’s music sits halfway between the ends of this spectrum. On the one hand, you could not simply take her Thrice Burned Forest–scored for six flutes–and transfer it to, I don’t know, six Moog synthesizers and say it’s the same music. It would be awesome, for sure (now I want to try that) but it wouldn’t be the same. Not the same in the sense that an all-Moog version of the Bach Prelude in C Major would be the same (just ask Wendy Carlos).

But neither could you sit any six flutists down with the sheet music and get the same result. You need these six flutists – Tara Boyle, Zach Galatis, Amelia Lukas, Elaine Martir, John C. Savage, Natalie Van Slyke – in Bill Oskay’s Big Red Studio in Corbett, Oregon, playing into special vintage microphones designed and managed by Klaus Heyne, mixed and mastered and delivered to your speakers or headphones via CD or Bandcamp or Whatever.

Because this is music written in and for a specific time and place, and to have it recorded and shared this way means that not only the music but also its context is preserved. What we have here is a durable, shareable impression of what it means to make music as an Oregonian in the Anthropocene.

We wanted to talk about all this with Grossman, so we got her on a Zoom call and asked about her earliest history as a composer, her studies with Thea Musgrave and Lou Harrison, her path to Oregon, her relationship with nature, her record collection, her work with Columbia Riverkeeper, and everything else we could think of.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.

Oregon ArtsWatch: Tell us about your a-ha moment.

Deena T. Grossman: I can think of a number of things. I’m not sure if I can pinpoint one. When I was nine my mother had a dance group that met in the basement of our house in Berkeley. We had a big basement room with a wood floor, and one of the women in the group invited a musician to come and improvise while they were dancing. The musician’s name was Robin Goodfellow. She was only maybe twenty at the time and played recorder, flute, and tin whistle. Robin improvised while this interesting group of women were dancing in our basement. I was never part of Robin’s music-making at that time, but I would sit and listen and watch, and shortly after that I started taking tin whistle lessons, then recorder lessons, then flute lessons with Robin. I was one of her first students, and at the lessons we would improvise. Even at whatever level I was playing then, those sessions improvising music with Robin Goodfellow were so much fun. She would write little pieces of music for me to play, and I started writing music for her to play, or for the two of us to play. Even before that I was always interested in improvising. We had a piano, and I would sit at the piano and play for hours.

Sometimes I wonder if composers are born and not made. Because there’s a certain innate energy, which for me has always meant creating music in one way or another, either improvising or writing, and I’m not sure that’s something that can be taught. Being a composer, it has to spring from some need to express the world around you musically, and I’ve had that ever since I was a kid.

When I was–I guess I was still in elementary school, maybe middle school–my folks took me to a Pete Seeger concert at the Greek Theater at UC Berkeley campus, and there must have been four or five thousand people in that amphitheater. And Pete Seeger got all of us, all four or five thousand people singing together. It was a transcendent experience. I’ll never forget it. Certainly having gone to that concert, having experienced singing as a central part of growing up, were important experiences for me as a kid.

OAW: Let’s talk about coming to Oregon. How long have you been in Oregon? And how do you like it here? How does Oregon feel to you as a composer?

DTG: We moved here in 1994 when our daughter was four years old. The reason we moved to Portland was a kind of chance. I met Larry Tyrrell, who I later married, in San Francisco. Shortly after we met, I went to Houston and did my master’s degree in composition at Rice University. I studied there with Paul Cooper, a wonderful composer and a fabulous teacher. At the same time Larry went to Japan to study the Japanese flute, the shakuhachi, and learn the Japanese language and study Japanese traditional music for shakuhachi and koto. We later settled for a number of years in Japan.

When we came back to the States I had assumed we’d move back to the Bay Area. We’d been living in San Francisco but I quickly realized that the Bay Area and San Francisco area in general had simply grown in ways that I wasn’t comfortable with anymore.

Larry had been to Portland and we happened to have friends who owned a house in Portland that needed renters, and we moved up there. I’d never been to Portland, Larry said, “Let’s go,” I said, “Okay.” So we rented a U-Haul, put our daughter, Leia in the middle of the front seat with us and drove to Portland. My first ever glimpse of Portland was coming north on I-5 where you go around the curves and then you see downtown Portland. It looked beautiful to me. We moved into the Buckman neighborhood, rented a house, made friends and Leia went to school here. And now it’s been thirty years.

I love the Pacific Northwest, I’m very much a West Coast person. I’ve always loved the mountains and the forests and the ocean and living in a place with trees and a place where people care about the environment. It’s very much home at this point, and I feel lucky to be here.

OAW: You’ve studied with two composers our readers may know, Thea Musgrave and Lou Harrison. Could you talk about how you came to study with them, and what you took away from the experiences?

DTG: I met Thea Musgrave at UC Santa Barbara. She was teaching there, teaching composition to a small group of students in the College of Creative Studies. There were about ten of us in the program, all undergrads, and she was doing a composition seminar. Thea Musgrave grew up in Scotland, went to school in Edinburgh, studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and then has made her whole career primarily in the US–although her music’s played all over the world. She was a fantastic composition teacher, in some ways in the old school style. She had us doing exercises that she told us Nadia Boulanger had her doing, like singing one line of a Bach chorale and playing the other three. She did wonderful things for us. She invited various musicians to come in and play. For instance, we wrote a solo viola work and then Peter Mark, her husband, came in and played our pieces and commented on them, “this works, this doesn’t work, and here’s why, try this, experiment with something else, this is the kind of thing you can experiment with.”

Shortly after I graduated from UC Santa Barbara–I was working at a music shop in San Francisco and wrote her a letter, basically saying, “What shall I do with my life?” She wrote back, saying, “Compose only if you must. It’s not an easy life, and only choose it if you absolutely must do it.” She was a great teacher and a wonderful composer to get to know during my college years.

The summer after my first year of college, I went back home to Berkeley, and at the time there was a festival of world music going on at a place called the Center for World Music. It was held at a beautiful old Julia Morgan building in Berkeley, all old-growth redwood with stained glass windows and beautiful light coming in. This particular festival was funded by Sam and Louise Scripps, who were a fascinating family. Sam Scripps’ family founded the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego. Their kids were patients of my dad, who was a pediatrician, which is how we got to know them. Louise Scripps went to India and studied Bharatanatyam, one of the great traditional classical dance forms of Southern India. They used to have parties at their house, and they invited the greatest musicians from India to come and stay with them and give presentations. When I was ten we went to their Christmas party and the great Balasaraswati was dancing with musicians who were her accompanists. I was sitting on the floor ten feet away, listening and watching.

This is a background story to the Center for World Music, which is where I met Lou Harrison.

I loved getting to know Lou Harrison, what a sweet and generous and warm man! He was actually playing in the Javanese gamelan that summer, he was studying Javanese gamelan and Bill Colvig was building a set of instruments for the two of them, their American gamelan. Subsequently I was able to take some private lessons with Lou. Kind of slipped in through the side door when he was teaching at San Jose State. I wasn’t an enrolled student, but I asked him if I could have a few lessons, and he said, “Sure, just come.” So I would take the train once every week or two and go to his office at San Jose State. Studying with him was such a lovely process. One time, he said, “You know, the amount of time it takes to write a piece has nothing to do with how good the piece is. It could take a very short time and be a very great piece of music, or it could be the opposite.” I think that’s true. You can labor forever over something that’s not very good, or you can write rather quickly, or create rather quickly and come up with something that’s spectacular. So, mostly studying with Lou Harrison had to do with simply spending some time with him. It was a real joy.

OAW: So let’s talk about musical materials. How do you approach a new composition, and how would you describe your method overall?

DTG: How I compose varies widely from piece to piece. For instance, Davening–the trio for alto flute which doubles c flute, viola, and cello–started with an improvisation which I did on my flute, thinking about my papa davening early in the morning, and my memories of that. I started with an improvisation and simply wrote down the material that I came up with. The main kernel of that material is a descending scale that goes down to the fundamental and then winds back again. From that one phrase I developed the rest of the piece. It just simply, organically grew from that material. But it’s more mysterious than that–it has to do with really listening.

For instance, in the last movement of the piece I started out with a viola solo, and I was thinking about a cantor in a synagogue singing a solo prayer. And at that point I really just heard the melody and wrote it down. For me a lot of composing for me has to do with listening. What is it that I’m listening to? I’m not sure exactly.

I have to have a very quiet environment. I usually compose in this room, our dining room and living room. There’s a piano over there. I have my electronic keyboard and this computer. I use pencil and paper. I’ll sit at the table that’s here behind me. Sketch out ideas. The musical material for any given piece draws from roots that are deep in my family’s past, in my own experience in the world, or draws from nature. In terms of Davening, the music really springs from all of the music that I heard and sang while I was growing up in a Jewish family, singing and experiencing the music of the Eastern European Jewish tradition. For me composing is a kind of listening. I want to hear what it is that I’m composing.

One of the other pieces on the new album, Thrice Burned Forest, was inspired by actual sounds that I heard walking on Mount Adams with a friend near the wilderness area, way up on the shoulder of the mountain one summer. We heard sounds like women’s voices sighing, singing, and very particular dissonant (but not completely dissonant) harmonies. I decided I wanted to write something inspired by those particular sounds and sat at the piano until I found those harmonies. Once I found them, the challenge was how to craft a piece of music based on that harmonic content, which also translated to a melodic content that sounds so fluid and so surprising and so non-metered–as were those sounds in the wind in the mountains.

Sometimes I’ll get musical material from something in nature. For instance, in the Waterways piece for flutes, viola, and cello, it was 2020 and I spent a lot of time walking by myself starting in Crystal Springs Canyon at Reed College. I’d get there around five or six in the morning and take a walk and listen to the birds and the water, and do some photography, but mostly I just observed and listened and walked. At a certain point I can ask myself to bring forth the music that I’m hearing in that environment. Sometimes it’s very specific. I’ll hear a very specific melody or group of pitches. I’ve always had a deep connection to the natural world and my musical world. If I want, I can be in a place and I can simply open my mind to a question. The question is, “What is the music here?” And I’ll hear a melody or specific harmonies, or specific rhythms, or all three. The musical material is simply present with me in that environment, and I’ll make some notes, take the notes home, and that becomes the musical material.

In one case with the Waterways piece I drove over to Sauvie Island, and I was out at the edge of Sauvie Island Beach, where you’re on the Columbia. And I simply opened my ears to what it was I was hearing, and I heard a very particular melody and rhythm. I’d already decided on the ensemble of two flutes, viola and cello, and I had my pencil and my music paper, and I wrote that down, and that became that part of the piece.

So how is it that I can see a painting, or be in a place near a river, or in the forest, and simply listen and hear musical material? I don’t know. It’s just simply part of who I am. It’s a great mystery.

OAW: How did you get involved with Columbia Riverkeeper, and what does it mean for you now?

DTG: I heard about Columbia Riverkeeper a number of years ago when they were fighting an enormous fossil fuel development that was being proposed at the edge of the Columbia River, in the small town of Kalama. I heard about this monstrous proposal, and decided that I needed to participate in the fight against it. I went to meetings in Kalama with the people in the town who were opposing it, and met the people who were running the meetings, who were the grassroots organizers for Columbia Riverkeeper. I worked opposing that project, going to hearings, writing postcards.

Over the course of a couple of years I worked as a volunteer to support Columbia Riverkeeper and had an impulse to somehow use my music to support their work. I talked to the executive director at the time, Brett VandenHeuvel, and proposed that we do an online concert of a new piece of mine called Wildfires as a benefit. This was in early 2021 when there were no live concerts. He liked the idea. I asked Rory Cowal, a pianist who later recorded the piece–a terrific musician and a fellow activist–to present it online. Then they did a webinar broadcast, and people were encouraged to donate money online as part of the webinar. We raised an unbelievable amount of money. I think it was almost $40,000. I’ve never had a concert since then that raised so much money for Columbia Riverkeeper. It demonstrated in a very concrete way that it was possible to use my music to raise awareness and funds and money for Columbia Riverkeeper.

My role as Composer-in-Residence is to help bring in a wider audience for Columbia Riverkeeper, to reach people who might not necessarily be part of the environmental community but might be part of a larger cultural community in the Pacific Northwest. At this point I’ve had three concerts which have benefited Columbia Riverkeeper–and in each case publicity or reviews will often mention Columbia Riverkeeper. Obviously it benefits me as a composer as well, because I have a platform, I have a reason to present my music that’s extra musical. Although the music is the music.

OAW: What do you listen to for pleasure?

DTG: Rhiannon Giddens’ albums are at the top of my list. Having lived in Japan for quite a while there are a couple of Japanese singer-songwriters whose music I love. Yumi Matsutoya, aka Yuming, is one of them. Harada Tomoyo is another.

I’ve worked with Billy Oskay, who runs Big Red Studios out in the Columbia Gorge. He played with a band called Nightnoise for years, and I love their albums.

OAW: Speaking of Oskay, could you tell us about the vintage microphones, and his studio in Corbett, and the experience of recording there?

DTG: The particular vintage microphones which we used for recording Thrice Burned Forest came about through a wonderful fortuitous combination of events. I was rehearsing the piece with the flutists at Leach Botanical Garden, in the living room of the Manor House –a beautiful old building with a high wooden ceiling, wooden walls, great acoustics. We had two days of rehearsals before the recording sessions, which were in January, and on the second afternoon we were going to do an informal performance of both pieces, Thrice Burned Forest and The Circular Bridge, for the staff at the garden. It occurred to me just the night before to send Billy an email saying, “Listen, if you want to hear these pieces before we come to the studio to record them, we’ll be playing them tomorrow afternoon.”

He loved what he was hearing with Thrice Burned Forest. He went home that night and called a friend of his, Klaus Heyne, who is a neighbor. He called Klaus, and said, “This is amazing. You gotta hear it.” So the next morning all the flutists show up. I show up with Larry, my husband, who is the producer. Billy’s there with Klaus, and they have it all set up. Klaus brought his specially engineered vintage microphones, which he sends out all over the world on loan for people to use. For instance when the Berlin Philharmonic records chamber ensemble works they rent his microphones. He came and volunteered to set them up in the recording studio with Billy, and stayed for most of the session both days, adjusting the mics, working with Billy and getting just the right sound. It was a wonderful experience.

I think one of the hardest things about recording Thrice Burned Forest was recording the piccolo. It’s very tricky to record a piccolo, to get a beautiful sound and not a sound that’s like a shriek. Klaus and Billy working together with those remarkable customized vintage microphones got an absolutely sweet, full, rich sound–not only for the piccolo, but for the whole ensemble of flutes. I’ve recorded so many different kinds of ensembles at Billy Oskay’s studio at this point, and he’s so much fun to work with, so flexible, and creative. That particular opportunity to have Klaus Heyne working with Billy and letting us use those microphones was a lot of fun. Very, very lucky.

OAW: What would you ask Deena Grossman?

DTG: I might say, “Tell me about Bench Music, and tell me about the set of pieces that you’re working on with Monica Marcenaro.” Bench Music is a percussion piece, two movements for two vibraphones and two movements for five- octave marimbas with two players each. It was inspired by four sculptural benches at Leach Botanical Garden. The benches look a little bit like marimbas, and each one has its own shape. They have wonderful names: “Rooted,” “Twist,” “Meander,” “Bend.” A couple of years ago I went to the garden early in the morning with a friend, and brought a bunch of mallets and tried playing these benches. They didn’t sound very good! They didn’t sound like marimbas. I decided to write a set of pieces inspired by these benches. My dream for this piece is to have it performed live at Leach Botanical Garden, working with a choreographer and dancers, because each bench has its own shape and form that definitely evokes movement.

An artist friend of mine lives in Sestri Levante, a small town on the Italian coast, not far from Genoa. Her name is Monica Marcenaro. My husband and I spent a month there last spring. I brought my banjo and went to her studio twice a week in the mornings, and played a set of pieces, each one based on a place in Oregon, a couple of them based on places on the coast. One is called “Sitka Spruce,” it’s about an 800-year-old year old Sitka Spruce tree, which is in the Old Growth Forest at Cape Meares, west of Tillamook.

Monica Marcenaro has never been to the West Coast. I described the places that these banjo pieces were based on. She proceeded to look some of them up on her phone and created watercolor paintings for the pieces while I was playing them. She’s very facile, so within an hour I would play two pieces and she’d have two watercolors. I love this kind of collaboration. This is for me the most fun, working with another artist in another medium, and collaborating, creating something that’s even richer with the combined media, in this case watercolors and banjo. I have a set of pieces for banjo, plus some other instruments that I’m working on right now. And who knows? I might get Monica Marcenaro to come and somehow be part of a live performance with watercolors.