“I’m fascinated with timbral complexity — with the expressivity you can’t necessarily get without generating it in an embodied way, in a spontaneous way. It’s much more difficult to achieve without actually improvising it.”
Lily Koslow
Lily Koslow is an American composer, pianist, and vocalist based in New Haven, CT. Lily’s recent work contrasts delicate subtleties of timbral interplay with a dark intensity inspired by surrealist literature and diverse electronic music genres; they are often motivated by extra-musical topics including post-capitalist political theory and the relationship between nature and technology. Lily’s music has been presented at festivals including Composers Conference, SoundSCAPE, and Domaine Forget International Festival, and performed by collaborators including members of Talea Ensemble, Attacca Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Paramirabo, and Nouvel Ensemble Moderne; they have pursued residencies with the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, the Cultural Centre of Ukraine in France, and Akademie der Künste in Berlin, among others. Lily studied composition at McGill University with Jean Lesage, electronics with Philippe Leroux and Sean Ferguson, and piano with Sara Laimon. They are currently pursuing a Master’s in Composition at Yale School of Music.
In July 2024, Lily’s large ensemble work ‘RADIO SILENCE’ was premiered at the 2024 Composers Conference at Avaloch Farm, New Hampshire. While at the Conference, we sat down with Lily to discuss their work with noise, energetic forms, political agitation, Marxism, and creating alternate universes…
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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Lily! Thanks so much for joining me today. We’re speaking following your presentation at the 2024 Composers Conference, where you mentioned that you’re currently working on an orchestral rendition of an improvised piece you created at Yale. Tell me a bit about how you’re approaching the orchestration?
Lily Koslow: I’m just at the beginning of it. -laughs- I’ve been adapting a texture that I did in an improv-based piece into an orchestral setting. I’m currently trying to figure out what that means; whether I want to reinterpret and reorchestrate things that were initially improvised and notate them, or whether I want to continue having improvised elements within the actual orchestra parts. I haven’t quite decided. I am interested in potentially using a technique like conduction1 to be able to get that free feeling — but I’m not sure how much will be notated, how much will be semi-notated, or graphically [scored] in some parts. It’s likely going to be a hybrid notation style — something I will work out with the conductor.
What is it about this kind of hybrid notation that inspires you — and were there any particular events or pieces that inspired this approach?
Very recently, I went to this festival called Long Play in Brooklyn, New York. I saw a really moving performance by Darius Jones, of [the] fLuXkit Vancouver sextet. This was a wonderful group of players. Ches Smith was on drums, I’ve seen him play in a fantastic set with John Zorn in Victoriaville, in Quebec, at this festival called ‘Festival de musique actuelle’ — it just means “current music” — but the festival is known to feature free improv and structured improv, and is quite culturally influential across Quebec. I now get to spend more time in New York — I’m living in New Haven, Connecticut — [and] it’s been great to be able to see people like Darius.
One thing I thought was compelling about the way his music works was that oftentimes, there would be a very rich, but relatively contained or repeating structure. Like repeating chords as a background layer, and then a crazy foreground. Or vice versa: the foreground will be one note repeating — potentially irregularly, but quite simple — with a wildly chaotic background. I loved how in that concert, Darius’s band was playing with background-foreground complexity and simplicity; the interconnection between those layers. I just find that so fascinating, [and] I wanna bring that into my orchestral thinking.
Was free improvisation something that’s always been a formative part of your practice?
More recently, I would say. I started improvising with people in university, and it has influenced my work so much because of the fact that I’m fascinated with timbral complexity — with the expressivity you can’t necessarily get without generating it in an embodied way, in a spontaneous way. It’s much more difficult to achieve without actually improvising it. I’m interested in highly energetic forms, how energy moves through music. I think that’s what made me drawn to improv, and experimental forms of improv; it really has to do with the energetic character of sound. It’s been very freeing. That’s part of the appeal.
Speaking of energetic forms: we’ve just heard the premiere of your large ensemble work ‘RADIO SILENCE’ at Avaloch Farm, as part of the 2024 Composers Conference. Can you tell me a bit about how these ideas of energy informed the piece?
I think a lot of the way I’ve been doing that, bringing out the most intense, and energetic, elements in the piece — I talked about this with Marcos [Balter] this week too — is the approach that, oftentimes, less is more. Avoiding over-notating, giving players exact pitches to nail and super fast [rhythms]… Sometimes it’s easier to leave the pitches up to them, and just ask them to do fast fingerings, for example. That’s something I do often in what I refer to as the “screamer” parts [of the piece]. The screamers are primarily the bassoon, the oboe, the flute, and the clarinet with the mouthpiece alone. It’s been particularly in the woodwinds that I’ve been finding this type of expressivity — allowing them to have freedom of interpretation, but giving a guideline: “I want this to really screech, I want this to really electrify.”
Screamers — that’s an awesome way of putting it. -laughs- Why that quality of sound, for you?
Honestly, this piece was a deeply personal one. It’s a reflection of how I’ve been thinking about my political work. I’ve been doing a lot of communist organising in New Haven; it’s been really great to be part of an organisation I believe in. But it’s also difficult. We’re facing the ugly, all the time; I feel like [we’re] positing ourselves in opposition to so many powerful things. Making the radical statement that we will become more powerful than these things — that we must, through solidarity, achieve the liberation of humanity. It takes a lot of internal strength from anybody involved in leftist politics today. We’re up against capital, we’re up against the status quo, we’re up against the way neoliberal thought has become political “common sense.” We’re up against many, many forces, and our generation has a lot of work to do.
So on a personal note, this piece was like an existential scream into the void, really. Particularly the bassoon solo — an extended passage of screaming against an unflinching surface of radio noise, an instrumentalised version of what radio noise sounds like. I was very interested in the idea of this individual struggling to put forth a message — that the media, the world, maybe isn’t listening to, or is ignoring. I think it might be oversimplifying it to say “the bassoon is actually me”… -laughs- But I do feel that [it] is and isn’t.
Elements of the musicality can represent the self in one way, but can be abstracted in anothers. I guess it’s a perspectival thing.
It’s like putting a magnifying glass on one element of how I feel about doing politics. On one hand, I feel extremely hopeful — Marxist theory and praxis offers hope for humanity and the environment — but political organising takes a lot of self-discipline. It’s tough, because we’re facing so many powerful things.
Is ‘RADIO SILENCE’ the first notated piece you’ve written that tackles these themes?
Yes, and I think that’s what honestly made it so difficult to compose — it was a very hard process. I wasn’t having a lot of technical struggles with getting it done. It was the biggest piece I’ve ever done by a lot — like, twice the amount of instruments that I’m used to — but it was much more the emotional side, the conceptual side, of the piece [that I struggled with]. Trying to express what I was going through in that period. We had the encampment movement popping up on campuses, including at Yale; being part of an organisation that was supporting the student movement. There was so much tension on campus, and police brutality. It was a really difficult time for students — and I was no exception to that.
Of course. At least for me, the composition process requires so much headspace — and if there’s so many external factors happening, it can be hard to focus.
Because it’s tangentially related to something that’s so difficult. It’s very raw. And I think it was a great learning experience, musically; I took a lot of risks on this piece, in order to incorporate noise elements into my notated practice. A lot of my pieces are more harmonic, or pitch-based — even melodic — and it’s really only over the past year and half that I’ve been focusing more on noise elements.
Let’s talk a bit about your focus on noise elements — what is it about noise, as a concept, that appeals to you? And how would you define noise?
I’ve been thinking a lot about noise and filters; the idea of noise as a filter on memory. Particularly, I’ve been interested in the sound of old recordings. I’ve been doing improv with this 1940s record cutter that I borrowed from Brian Kane and Martin Kersels — my sound art teachers at Yale. I’ve been very interested [in] the idea of surface noise, magnifying surface noise; how it’s sort of like a filter. I mentioned in the seminar2 Jeremy Dutcher, who sampled ancestral songs from the Wolastoqiyik Nation — the language that they speak, that’s only spoken by less than 200 people at this point — that’s being preserved by an album that they made called Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa. The album features these old wax cylinder recordings that get degraded each time you play them back; so it really sounds old. Like this noise is a window into the past, a sign of the past.
That particular album was a deep dive into ancestry, and tradition; it was something that Jeremy said that they made for their community. I’m also interested in conveying the feeling of memory, but perhaps in a more abstracted sense that doesn’t directly link to a collective cultural history.
You’ve mentioned you’ve started recently working with electronics. Does this recent development in your compositional practice also relate to noise?
I’ve been working [with] electronics more intensively for about two years now. But loosely speaking, about four years. I definitely think about the continuum between noise and pitch with electronics, and how that continuity can be used in poetic ways. Recently, I made a piece for tubist Jules Bastin-Fontaine — ‘Un Parc La Nuit’. His playing style on tuba is really intense and inspiring. He’s also a composer of electronic music — and also happens to be my partner. He is in a Balkan brass band called Domaći Trubači — shout out, go see their show in Montreal if you’re there… -laughs- I used field recordings of his band playing at [a] music festival, and I manipulated them in such a way that it was like the tuba soloist was witnessing their own memories of playing in a band pass by. Through the noises that were produced by the live tuba, and the melodic manipulation-quotation that I did from [the] original Balkan brass pieces — I ended up creating the piece as a reflection on memory, from the perspective of this tubist character I created in my head.
It ended up being a fantastical character, who was a combination of supremely confident, but also totally full of self-doubt at the same time. So [I used] the element of the pitched music I was sampling, versus the noises I was creating to evoke different kinds of virtual spaces. For instance, sitting by a crackling fire and watching the memories flicker in the flames — or crunching through autumn leaves in [a] park, the swaying of the trees. I wanted to create this musical character in a myriad of virtual spaces.
Talking about the conceptual side of your practice, for me, brings up a lot of ideas of speculative and ideal worlds — maybe utopia…
I would say not “ideal” worlds, but definitely fantastical ones, unusual ones. Strange ones. There’s a focus on [an] otherworldly sonic profile that I like to aim for. I do want people to feel like this is a combination of sounds, and sound types, that are in an ecosystem together, that I’ve never put together before in the same environment. It makes me think of what my teacher, Martin Bresnick, brought up in a lesson one time about how I work. He mentioned the painting ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’ by Edward Hicks. It is a cohesive painting, but it’s all these strange characters, animals, that in the wild would kill each other — but they’re sitting next to each other and chilling. They’re disproportionately sized.
I make a lot of recordings; with instruments, various sound-making devices — whether it’s a boxcutter that clicks, or a lamp, or a vinyl, even just crinkling up a paper bag and tossing it into a granular synthesizer. I think it really has to do with the fact that I tend to have a very heterogeneous approach at the beginning of the composition process. I try to leave things very open-ended aesthetically, until I feel like I’ve quote-unquote “done my research”; a.k.a. recorded a ton of stuff, played around with it in a DAW, or in MaxMSP. I would say that’s how it plays into my work — through the early stage of the process.
I don’t tend to have a singular vision right away. I tend to allow things to be very, very disparate at the beginning in terms of sources; and then it’s about bringing them together. Rather than starting from a singular image of what I want to achieve, and then getting the things I need to make that happen… It’s more like the opposite way. I have tons of different things, and I try to find an ecosystem — [a] way they can function together as one machine, as one environment.
I guess just like the ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ painting — bringing elements together that wouldn’t usually fit together naturally…
In real life. Like an alternative universe, almost. I’m creating alternative universes, I guess — which makes it sound really meta, and epic, but it’s really some weird stuff we do as composers. -laughs-
Earlier, we discussed your emerging interdisciplinary practice, with an improvised performance that you’re in the midst of orchestrating. I understand that this improvised performance also included electronics…
It was a half-music, half-poetry project; I did [it] at the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, as part of a Studio Fellowship. A lot of it was about words, and creating my own poetry; I also weaved in text by other poets, mainly French Symbolists. I just thought of it differently — as a theatrical sound art piece — than a composition. I was thinking of it in different terms. It’s twice as long as all my pieces for instrument[s] and electronics; it was a longer, more meandering form.
What kinds of freedoms did you find in performing the piece yourself?
I found it really liberating to not have to notate it. That was a nice element of the process. Putting myself in it, as a singer, doing my own makeup — I was collaborating with a costume designer called Jorgie Bruckman — I found it very, very satisfying.
One thing that was really different about that project… I wanted to make a piece that was more surreal, but in a very personal way. First off, I wanted to make it bilingual — mixing English and French poetry together. In a way, my life was very much in English and French for the past few years, [and] I didn’t want to correct my accent, or try to sound like this “perfect French,” as if that really exists. I wanted to do the piece in the way that I speak French; to leave it as authentic, even with all of the mistakes [and] slightly unique pronunciation that you get from being a non-native speaker.
I wanted it to be almost like a stream-of-consciousness whirlwind of my life at that particular point in time – like a fantastical snapshot. Kind of reflecting on myself; doing a piece that is actually about me, that is autobiographical. It’s kind of like a “portrait of the artist”, which I didn’t realise going into it — I was just improvising, [and] didn’t realise that was what I was doing — that was pointed out by Martin Bresnick. And I had to have a good think on it: is this just an expression of what’s coming out of me right now, or am I really trying to depict myself? And I decided, yes, sure, let’s call it [a] portrait… -laughs-
You’ve mentioned that ‘RADIO SILENCE’ also has an autobiographical element to it — is autobiography important to your compositional practice? Would you consider your work to be autobiographical?
I’m gonna say yes — as of quite recently. During my undergraduate studies at McGill University, I was working a lot on compositional technique — searching for sounds that I found beautiful, and ways to frame them in a beautiful way. Harmonies, sounds, noises — whatever it may be — it was definitely more about creating something beautiful, creating something striking, but in a way that I was a little bit detached from. I wasn’t necessarily thinking “this is the deepest possible expression of me”.
It was more when I got to my Masters. The profs at Yale emphasised to us [that] you should bring to the table what only you can bring; you should find out what it is that you can offer, and then highlight that, refine that. To be the most you possible. In that way, they want us to be really authentic; technique [and] those things are important, but they want us to be authentic artists. Not in a way that I felt so much pressure, necessarily, to “find my voice” — a lot of people hate that phrase, “find your voice”, they think it’s reductive — so it wasn’t in that sense, but more in the sense of be[ing] authentic in your art. And to not be afraid to be raw: what it is that you really want to create, you should search for it, refine it, and offer it to people. For me and my process, I interpreted that guidance as bringing in more personal elements.
Finally: one thing that’s struck me is that there seems to be an emerging theatricality in your approach to form. Is theatre and theatricality something that’s consciously important for you?
Yes — absolutely. Theatre is important. -laughs- It appears in a lot of my projects. In ‘Un Parc La Nuit’ — the tuba and electronics piece — there was a particular way I was working with Alex Friedman, who ended up performing it at Yale. I asked him exactly how he was gonna walk on stage. After the music starts, he kind of bursts out onstage, staring at the audience blankly; then sitting down and collapsing into the chair, letting out a deflated pedal tone… -laughs- In the middle of the piece, there’s a tacet section where there’s only electronics — just a fire crackling — and he puts his tuba down. In the score, I asked him to almost contemplate the fire — as if memories from his past are flickering in the flames. So I do use theatricality as a poetic tool in my compositions; not in every piece, but it’s become more and more of a thing.
I have a really old piece, from 2020 — it’s called ‘can you not?’ — and I’ve never heard it. It’s for flute, clarinet, piccolo, kazoo… They were performing this in Canada during the pandemic, and I was in the US. It’s an insane piece — kind of a jokey piece — where they’re playing musical pranks on each other, annoying each other in various ways. At the end, it descends into pure madness. They have to crumple up the music and throw it across the fucking room, kicking over a stand… I don’t think I had them screaming, but maybe I did. And then they take edible paper — which looks like it’s part of the music — and they start eating it; actually tearing it to shreds with their teeth. I mailed some edible paper up to Canada just for this.
And I never heard the piece! Apparently, it was filmed, but the people filming it ended up losing the video or something. And I almost feel like there’s a dramatic culmination to the piece in the fact that the recording will never be heard — like these screams, that are embedded in this file. It’s my most crazy piece, my most unhinged; and I will never hear it, nobody will ever hear it. It’s just an unheard work of art. And I find that kind of poetic — I don’t know if I sound completely crazy…
I don’t think that’s crazy at all — there really is a kind of poetry in something that has been experienced, but can’t be experienced again.
That nobody will ever hear it. That unhinged moment. In my life, in their lives, the performers, the people filming it, the people editing it — nobody has to know. It’s strange that it was so crazy but it’s really just for us.
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Learn more about Lily and their practice at:
- https://levivier.ca/en/le-vivier/individual-files/lily-koslow
- https://soundcloud.com/lilykoslow
- https://www.youtube.com/@lilykoslow1998
- https://www.instagram.com/electric.theory/
References/Links:
- Darius Jones – fLuXkit Vancouver (i̶t̶s̶ suite but sacred) (Northern Spy Records, 2023)
- Bryony Moore et al., ‘The pro-Palestinian US campus protests in maps, videos and photos’ (2024), The Guardian
- ‘Pro-Palestine protesters erect new encampment on Cross Campus’ (2024), Yale Daily News
- Jeremy Dutcher – Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa (Independent, 2018)
- Edward Hicks – Peaceable Kingdom (ca. 1830-32)
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