Reprinted from the AWC News/Forum, newsletter of the American Women Composers, Inc., vol. 5, nos. 5/6 (May/September 1985), p. 4-5. Used by permission of the International Alliance for Women in Music, formerly American Women Composers, Inc. – the contents were communicated by the composer herself.
Introduction by AWC News editor : Composer Ruth Wylie studied with Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson at the Eastman School of Music, where she earned her doctorate, and with Arthur Honegger, Samuel Barber, and Aaron Copland at Tanglewood. After six years on the faculty at the University of Missouri, she returned to her home town of Detroit and to Wayne State University, where she received her earlier degrees. She taught there for 20 years, retiring in 1969 with the rank of Professor Emerita.
At Wayne State Dr. Wylie had served as head of the composition department for 11 years as well as chairman of the music department. She also founded, directed, and performed flute and piano in the Wayne State University Improvisation Chamber Ensemble giving concerts throughout the Midwest.
Dr. Wylie was a resident fellow at the Huntington Hartford Foundation in 1952-53 and at the MacDowell Colony in 1954 and 1956. Both the University of Missouri and Wayne State University have awarded her creative research grants, and she received a Bicentennial Celebration grant/commission from the Michigan Council for the Arts for The Long Look Home written for the Michigan Chamber Orchestra.
Dr. Wylie’s compositions have garnered awards from the Arizona Cello Society, Baylor University, the Colorado Council on the Arts, The Friends of Harvey Gaul, Mu Phi Epsilon, and Phi Mu Alpha. She has won the ASCAP Standard Awards, 1975 through 1983, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for Views from Beyond, 1978, and the Sigma Alpha Iota Inter-American Award, 1984. Her Psychogram for piano is recorded on the CRI label.
She is currently working on a Concerto for Flute and Strings commissioned by Doriot Anthony Dwyer, principal flutist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and enjoying the peace and quiet of her mountain home in Estes Park, Colorado.
ADDITIONAL NOTE: Dr. Wylie was pleased with this account, which was based on what she thought were casual conversations with the editor. She did not expect such length and comprehensiveness. The only change she would have made was to mention, besides chess, her love of golf, bowling, and some other sports. [—Deborah Hayes, August 2006]
About her work as a composer Ruth Shaw Wylie comments:
My decision to become a composer goes way back to my earliest years when I was first introduced to good music through the New York Philharmonic radio broadcasts, my parents’ love of music, and their fine collection of phonograph records and piano rolls for our electric player piano. Among the latter were recordings of the finest piano music done by the finest concert pianists of the day. When I was 14 my parents bought me a season ticket to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra concerts, and my father would drive me downtown to Orchestra Hall from Grosse Pointe, go all the way back home, and then come down again to bring me home. This kept on every year until I finished college and was by that time driving myself to and from the concerts.
These concerts had me absolutely transfixed with wonder. I heard and saw the greatest conductors and performers of the time and was engulfed with hero worship for Ossip Gabrilovich and all the others. I determined that to be a composer and to be able to write music that would affect listeners the way all this music affected me would be the highest attainment in life to which I could aspire.
For many years this was but a dream and I continued my development along other lines of interest: painting, sports, foreign languages, and chess. When it came time to enter college, I was so in awe of music and so unsure of my own ability that I was afraid to major in music. So instead I majored in French and Spanish, finishing with a degree in Romance languages. Then I decided to make the big plunge and switched to music, taking two years to make up the pitifully few undergraduate music courses offered there and ending up with an M.A. in music. Like a sheep to the slaughter, I then entered the Ph.D. program at the Eastman School of Music and managed after much make-up work to receive the degree. Two subsequent summer stints of private work with Bernard Rogers in his home were absolutely invaluable to me, and I shall be eternally grateful to him.
Throughout all this travail, my original dream and its attendant vows to myself remained intact: I would write music that could affect people as earlier music had effected me — expressive, understandable, beautiful, aesthetically valid, entrancing maybe, yet always honest and sincere. For quite a while I resisted many of the directions twentieth-century music was taking. Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Bartok were the biggies then, and I came to accept and understand and be influenced by these three in whose music aural syntax and structure could still be perceived.
I have learned the sensitive poignancy of combined planes of sixths, for example, and have let them become an important part of my harmonic language, generating connective counterpoint with and within them. My main dissonances contain the minor ninth (augmented octave) and major sevenths — preferring all my life to avoid the tritone and its effect within the larger sonorities. I always, form the beginning, disliked Wagner and other late-nineteenth-century romanticists — ergo, I hated, and still do, the tritone. So in my Flute Concerto I hope to succeed with these means, which I hope also can be more Wylie than anything or anyone else.
I shunted Schonberg and Webern to the side the longest, and although I have used the twelve-tone technique from time to time, it has never become my metier. I let electronic music pass me by — fascinating, but not for me; I had no electronic studio or instruction available and, in addition, was afraid of electricity and wouldn’t even run my phonograph without rubber-soled shoes on my feet!
I think of myself as a consolidator. That is, I try to study and evaluate all the new musical trends as they arise — twelve-tone, electronic, aleatory, computer, tonal modifications, microtones — whatever. Then I may use, at least to a limited extent, what in all of these trends I find to be aesthetically sound and creatively honest. I am rarely, if ever, interested in being enigmatic or esoteric.
I have used some degree of aleatory a number of times with some success, for example Imagi and False Fires from the orchestral suite Views of Beyond. I have written two works that are in exact retrograde from a center point: Involution for chamber orchestra and the first movement from Three Inscapes. I have written two chamber works in which all performers play from score without barlines, visual alignment the only coordinating factor: Incubus and Five Occurrences for woodwind quintet. I use “klangfarben melodien” and pointillism fairly frequently, as in Snow from the orchestral suite The Long Look Home. But even in these works, though all were successful, I have felt a little traitorous to my early vows. Have I relinquished my complete aural and creative control over what the end result will be? Have I ventured into gimmickry? Not quite — because, as in a complicated chess game, I have tested in my mind’s ear all the possible results, changing and revising my materials to insure a result I can predict will be valid.
What else? I have always felt a desire and need and curiosity to find out how much I could achieve with the potential given me with my mind and body. To me that was why I was created. That was what I was supposed to find out. How fast could I learn to run? To jump or aim? To throw or hit a target? To make maximum use of my strength? To notice, compare, see, and hear the most I possibly could? To think and evaluate? To speak significantly and well? This driving need led me to engage in a great variety of sports and games, writing, lecturing, painting, and chess — resulting in much satisfaction ancillary to my chosen profession and, too, frequent frustrations. I hike and ski and canoe, although my advancing age and the onset of emphysema (from smoking for so many years) have curtailed some of my more vigorous and physically demanding sports. I play in about six nationally rated chess tournaments in Colorado each year and am usually the only woman participating among 120-or-so men. I have also painted a good deal throughout the years and have exhibited in shows occasionally.
I am an ardent conservationist and have a great love for wilderness, wild animals, mountains, trees, rocks (I have a big mineral collection, too), sky, water, streams, rivers, even insects. This is why I came to Estes Park — right next to the National Park — and gave up living near or in cities where performance opportunities were so much more available and I could know about contests, prizes, awards, commissions, and so forth before the deadlines were passed. I deplore what man is doing to the environment, and I have expressed my feelings in my music a number of times: the two large orchestral suites, The Long Look Home and Views from Beyond (Ancient Wisdom, False Fires, Lament for Wilderness and Memories of Birds); Incubus; The White Raven; and Toward Sirius.
As I listen to works by many other younger contemporary composers, including women composers (of whom I am very proud and often envious), I often feel very old-fashioned and unenlightened. So much attention is focused on timbre, tonal modifications, asymmetrically complex rhythms, juxtapositions rather than derivative continuities, and the absence of concern for the emotional meaning and affect of one single vertical sonority — how it was generated or made inevitable in that particular place. I am a conservative, I guess, always determined to remain faithful to those early vows I made to myself — to be honest and always to write with creative integrity music over which my ear has full and final control. - RSW