“I think this is the most important part of any collaboration or practice: getting the chance to actually make friends. We are talking about how we bring people together in music. But I don’t feel like it’s the actual music — it is about music as a talking point to connect with people inside the space.”
Ty Bloomfield
Ty Bloomfield (b. 2000, Chicago) is a multimedia composer, educator, and administrator. Recognised for his “unpredictable” (Third Coast Review) sound, Ty’s work engages audiences in immersive experiences with intimate, yet electric soundscapes while exploring themes of memory and group dynamics. Working with a collaborative-first mindset, his projects are often combined with elements from across different mediums, including poetry, art, and dance. He is a graduate of Illinois State University (B.M.) and the University of Michigan (M.M.) where he earned the Dorothy Greenwald Graduate Fellowship. His music has been performed internationally by festivals and venues such as the DiMenna Center and the Avaloch Farm Music Institute by collaborators such as the JACK Quartet, Hypercube, Unheard-of//Ensemble, and many more. He is based in Ann Arbor, MI, and serves on the music faculty at Eastern Michigan University.
Marisse Cato caught up with Ty Bloomfield to discuss worldbuilding, notation, programme notes, and more…
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The first topic that kept popping up in my conversation with Ty was this notion of worldbuilding. It started from my listening to his work ‘excentric kinetics’, for electronics and ensemble. The electronics extend the acoustic sound into a completely different space, like a timbral shadow of sorts. It sounded like you were either in a really big room or deeply inside the centre of a sound.
Marisse/PRXLUDES: Can you talk a little bit about the listening experience you are working with in ‘excentric kinetics’?
Ty Bloomfield: I always imagine the listener to be in the centre and the sound is warping itself all around. Almost like standing at a stoplight and all the cars going by. All the sounds swirl around you and creep inside your mind. But I’m definitely new to working with electronics, so for now it is really about building around a person inside of a space.
That makes a lot of sense with the structure of ‘excentric kinetics’. It has this aspect of being in one mood, like building a portrait of one place. Do you think that singular room is the site of where you want to work — or do the electronics allow us to experience different types of spaces all within one piece?
You are asking a question that I have been thinking about a lot lately. Coming from the conservatory experience, there is often a pressure to make things contrasting and have all these different moods and emotions. But perhaps now being out of school, I feel more free to write pieces that exist within a singular space. Let me see how long I can stretch out a particular mood. This is also the case with my other piece, ‘on the interlocking of hands’. There are five separate movements, but each one is its own sound world. I think electronics is going to be a great way to keep practicing putting a listener in a singular sound world — even with my limited skills!
How else do you think about time and place in relation to the “sound world”?
I think when we use these terms “sound world”, you have to give them a much longer period of time to get really wrapped up in it. Like a short story or short film. It’s not like a novel where you get really attached to the characters. Or if you walk by someone on the street and say hi, you only have a surface level kinship with them. To really be with them you need to talk to them, ask about their background, see how their life unfolds — maybe for an hour.
Seven minutes is not really a world, and not enough time to really learn anything about anyone, much less a piece of music. It is hard to feel within an entire world when only being asked to pass by for a quick second. It’s like doing a layover in an airport. If you pass through Las Vegas airport, you are not going to say you went to Vegas. I think the same is true with music. You have to get out of the airport, be able to eat the food, walk around, experience everything — and you are not going to be able to do that in that short amount of time.
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As a saxophonist yourself, how did you find writing ‘shouting something vulgar’?
I think if I was a stronger oboist or sax player, I don’t know if I would be composing. There’s a part of me that always wanted to be a really strong instrumental virtuoso. I tried to go into performance during undergrad; I think there’s always a part of me that wanted to live that virtuosic experience. I think that’s one of the reasons I wrote ‘shouting something vulgar’. It’s very intense and note-y. I think it’s probably one of three pieces I have written in my life where I really got what I wanted. This was something I really wanted to write and a piece I felt incredibly proud of. Noah and I spent a lot of time working out fingerings and microtonal workings. But I think it just adds to a lot of the strong virtuosic experience of that piece — and I really wish over anything, that I could actually play it!
I was getting much more into new music at the end of my undergrad. This piece was the first time I was coming back into it. I had finally found pieces with microtones that I felt could relate to my own practice. Some of my favourite pieces are virtuosic ones like the Corigliano concerto [ed. ‘Triathlon’], the Steven Bryant Saxophone Concerto, and Marcos Balter’s ‘Wicker Park’ — which is very bubbly, moving, and soft, and draws the listener in. You have to sit on the edge of your seat to hear the nuance in all these pieces. I felt I had all these ideas and inspiration that I was thinking about, and I was able to synthesise that properly. I don’t feel like I am very good at communicating my ideas, and I haven’t really been feeling like I am writing the music I really want to; so this piece was one of the first times I felt really good about my work.
You wrote ‘shouting something vulgar’ in close collaboration with Noah. I understand he was your housemate, can you tell me about your collaborative process for this piece?
I had been thinking about the collaboration with Noah for like two years. I have a note of titles [ed. notes app] in my phone. Myself and Noah were going through them. He saw “shouting something vulgar” and he chose that as the one he was really feeling.
But like, I don’t feel as though I can force a piece out — or force myself to confront those emotions. It’s like when you plan to go to the gym and you say to yourself, “okay when March hits I’m going to promise myself to go”, but you can’t force it. It’s the same way with the piece. If I wrote it at another time it likely wouldn’t have been nearly the same either as a process or the music.
I literally wrote the piece in a week. I thought about it for, like, four months; but pen-to-paper, I wrote it in a week before we had a workshop. Music can really feel like a time and a place for me. I think it is really difficult to write music for more than like a month. The longer you wait, the more ideas and emotions pop up. Maybe I want more “splash” — or more of that vulgar part. Over four months I can get the ideas together, but it needs to happen very quickly, before I start to lose those feelings; or I start to mentally heal myself again and not have anything vulgar to shout anymore!
Working with Noah was really amazing. Getting the chance to workshop this piece and the chance to figure out how this would work was great — but also I had a really good friend come out of it! Since ‘shouting something vulgar’, we have done two more pieces together. I think this is the most important part of any collaboration or practice: getting the chance to actually make friends. We are talking about how we bring people together in music. But I don’t feel like it’s the actual music — it is about music as a talking point to connect with people inside the space.
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You have written many different kinds of pieces — what’s your relationship like with notation?
I’ve been thinking about my relationship with notation for a while. During the end of undergrad, I started to experiment a lot more with notation; but as I got into my masters, I think I started doing myself an artistic disservice by being very traditional with my notation. I started writing very tonally — knowing that I wanted to submit to x contest and y opportunity — taking a very safe approach and backing off from a lot of my work with creative notation.
Before, I was doing a lot of timeline scores. A piece I was really happy with was my string quartet ‘false light’. In the score video online I have pauses on the bar lines themselves and then immediately a new tempo. I backed away from that. I’ve been trying to find my way back to creating what I want to create rather than what people want to hear. In any case, the pieces I wrote with this in mind weren’t what people wanted to hear anyway; I think you can really feel when the emotion and tension of the piece is sucked out. But the pieces I really put my heart into are the ones people really end up enjoying.
What I’ve been thinking a lot about notationally is the integration of free time with fixed time. I really like this idea of everything over here happening aleatorically and everything over there fixed. It almost feels like having electronics within a piece with live musicians. But this is a total nightmare for performers! But I really love the effect that it creates. I am trying to get back to that approach of removing time from my music, and having more interesting notation — with boxes and squiggles and all that jazz…
I totally feel you. How the notation works with my intention has so many factors going into it; by the time the performer gets it, I’m not sure how useful all of that is anymore.
Totally. We study so many weird scores that sometimes things are just second nature to us, but not [to] performers. Sometimes I’ll put something in a box, and then a performer asks if they should be repeating it — and I didn’t even realise there was another interpretation possible! It’s honestly one of the least fun parts about composing. Like, I know exactly what is happening in my head, and I need to explain that to someone else. I’m not great with words, if I was I’d be a creative writer, not a composer. But instead I’m doing a little bit of both.
We have so many different hats on! I’m super impressed by your concise programme notes. For me, I rarely know what I am writing about at the beginning…
I think it is half and half. Like, I know a little bit about the piece before writing it and then a lot of it comes up later. Sometimes, my programme notes are just bullshit though — people want to see them so I give them something to latch on to. But a lot of the time there is no “meaning”. I just wanted to write a piece and I think these sounds are cool… Like, there will be something deeply personal embedded into the piece, but it’s really no one’s business — so here are some programme notes to think about whilst you listen! The meanings are always very internal, and they can come up before or after the piece is written. But honestly, I feel programme notes are terrible. I feel like they should be abolished. Everyone will create their own opinion of the piece so what does my opinion matter?
One of my favourite experiences was my very first piece that I ever had played — a band piece called ‘Train Ride Home’. Afterwards everyone came up to me and was saying things like “oh my gosh, I can really see you being on the train, looking across the city etcetc.”. The piece had nothing to do with trains. The piece was inspired by a lot of the old time-y band music that I was trying to study — which I was doing on the train — but I didn’t put any of the train ride into the piece. But people are going to make it up anyway, they are going to find their own meaning. So what did I write these programme notes for? I had the notes written but they just didn’t read them. They came up with their own interpretation which I love!
I don’t want to interfere with somebody else’s interpretation of the piece. I’d rather not [have] someone else tell me how I should enjoy a piece. There are some pieces which have a very vivid connection to part of my own life. It may take me back to something personal. In my own music, I am trying to find a nice middle ground in between the two.
A lot of my music has poetry to go along with it, or sometimes it is inspired by songs I enjoy. I just take some lyrics from the song that I enjoy, or some lines from a poem — and that’s the programme note. I think for me, the title is the main programme note. It should encompass the emotions from yourself and some of the inspiration. There are so many other ways we can engage with the audience with our work. We can lead them to certain ideas or memories, or ideas of themselves which doesn’t include writing three paragraphs about “well in the A section we do this and move here and we do this, and we go from G minor to G half sharp…”. I just don’t think those programme notes invite open listening and engagement from the audience. I think that is what we should be promoting — for people to find themselves in the music. In the same way that they do inside of a book, you find the character that you relate to most — and that’s your personal connection [to] the story. We have to allow the same freedom to our listeners in the same way.
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What does your upcoming work look like at the moment?
I am currently almost exclusively writing vocal music. It’s very odd as someone who can’t sing, and didn’t write a lot of vocal music in undergrad. I wrote one song in 2024 and it has led to a lot of opportunities for me. I think it is the biggest portion of music so far.
I am currently doing a piece for violin, voice and electronics for one of the professors at the University of Michigan — Matt Albert, one of the founding members of new music sextet Eighth Blackbird. I’m doing a song for George Shirley Vocal Competition, to be presented at their welcome concert. The last is a White Snake project incorporating the poetry of Lokosh (Joshua D. Hinson) from the Chickasaw Nation, historically situated in the southeastern United States. One of the pieces I am working on is for Bled Contemporary Music Week in Slovenia and a work for piano, electronics and dance. I have although a lot to think about regarding what blackness looks like in my music, and how I want to continue to engage in my culture in my work.
Now I want to talk about George Lewis and the book Composing While Black…
Yes! I am reading it at the moment. I have so many thoughts about George — what a sweet person!
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Learn more about Ty Bloomfield and his practice:
- https://www.tybloomfield.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/@tybloomfield1219
- https://soundcloud.com/tyler-bloomfield1219
- https://www.instagram.com/bloomfield.ty/
References/Links:
- John Corigliano – ‘Triathlon’ (2020/24)
- Steven Bryant – ‘Concerto for Alto Saxophone’ (2014)
- Marcos Balter – ‘Wicker Park’ (2009)
- Harald Kisiedu and George E. Lewis, Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today (Wolke Verlag, 2023)
