Embracing the Unfamiliar and the Uncomfortable: Spotlight on Composer Lainie Fefferman

by ALEX WEISER

“What’s the wildest riskiest weirdo shit that I can do?”

Lainie Fefferman is a Jewish American composer who grew up in Princeton New Jersey to a “very nerdy Jewish couple.” Her father is a math professor and her mother is a violinist turned political consultant. As a child, Fefferman was a serious piano student. She began composing at age sixteen when a back brace she had to wear because of scoliosis made practicing piano difficult.

“It was a very math/science household,” Fefferman recalls. “Toward faith there was a somewhat negative attitude… but tradition and Jewish culture were widely represented in my house, the movies we saw, the music we listened to, the books that were in the house… and the history of my family. I had a very, very strong Jewish identity… but no real relationship to the sacred texts of Judaism.”

When Fefferman was in high school one of the teachers, Randall Bauer, led Friday afternoon twentieth-century classical music listening sessions as an after school activity. Starting with Stravinsky and Schoenberg, and going through Philip Glass, one session included a visit from composer and Princeton professor Steve Mackey, who would end up being one of Fefferman’s teachers years later. Inspired by these sessions and her musical studies, Fefferman wrote a number of piano works and choral works during this time.

From 2000 to 2004, Fefferman attended Yale University. She initially majored in math and later switched to a dual focus on music and Near Eastern languages (Hebrew and Arabic). Her composition teachers during this time were John Halle, Kathryn Alexander, and Matthew Suttor. By the time she went to Yale she had developed a fascination with Bang on a Can (the musical collective founded by Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe in 1987) and the simplicity, raw power, and entrancing beauty of “downtown” music. During one of her summers at Yale, Fefferman attended Bang on a Can’s music festival at MASS MoCA, which she described as “awesome” and “life changing.” But during her time at Yale, inspired by the motley interests of her fellow students in styles including modernism, microtonality, and fluxus, she spent much of that time writing “thorny, very rhythmically complex ensemble pieces.”

While at Yale Fefferman also became more interested in her Jewish identity. For her thesis in Near Eastern languages she compared the Torah’s and the Koran’s treatments of the binding of Isaac and Ishmael. She also became involved in the Hillel on campus, and made aliyah for the adult bar mitzvah of a friend – an experience and ritual she decided to imbue with personal meaning:

“I felt a lot of feelings… somehow at that point I started feeling a responsibility to know more about the texts. I got more irritated describing myself as a secular Jew. I just, more and more, hated that term because it felt like it had inherent in it, a disrespect toward faith.”

When Fefferman later married, she explains, the experience of the ritual of a Jewish wedding “renewed how I wanted to have a strong relationship to the liturgical part of this identity.”

After her time at Yale, she moved to NYC and got a job as a math teacher at St. Ann’s School. During this time she had occasional lessons with composers in NYC such as Fred Lerdhal, George Lewis, and Julia Wolfe, and she sat in on the Columbia composition seminar from time to time, which she describes as “occasionally brutal – they hated a lot of music over there at that time!”

After a few years she continued her education, earning a doctorate from Princeton, which she describes as “more like a residency than a grad school,” with “very little structure but lots of support.” One of the amazing things about Princeton, is that each year they hire a handful of professional ensembles to come and play the students’ works, she recalls.

“I think some people treated that as, okay, I’m going to make these amazing pieces so I can go out in the world with these perfectly crafted awesome pieces… I did such the opposite. I treated every piece like, what’s the wildest riskiest weirdo shit that I can do? ... In my mind it was such low risk and I had these amazing players who could do anything, which is great because I got to see: oh, this thing works, I’m going to do it! And these things really don’t... so don’t do them.”

As a result of this approach, Fefferman left Princeton with a “small repertoire of functional pieces,” but a lot of new musical experiences. At Princeton, she also became deeply interested in theatricality in music, working with Meredith Monk, and she expanded her interest and expertise in electronic music performing with an offshoot of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLork) which she co-founded, called “Sideband.”

Fefferman’s dissertation work at Princeton was “Here I Am,” a nine-movement evening-length piece, sung with text from parts of the Torah. Fefferman explains:

“[I chose texts that]I had always felt squidgy about or that I needed a deeper understanding of, or that I felt really uncomfortable owning as a part of the identity that I had formed and the tradition that I felt – so I just decided to sit with [these texts]… It was a meditation where I was writing music to these texts that made me uncomfortable. … At the end of three years, boy, had I thought about it… It’s so rich and there’s so much emotional resonance in that text…I pride myself in thinking I really wasn’t out to use the emotional juiciness of the Torah… it was a personal project of, like, I want to do this, I care about this text.”

We will be featuring music by Lainie Fefferman in our upcoming Young Jewish American Composers concert on November 2nd.

Based on an oral history interview with Lainie Fefferman conducted by Alex Weiser on September 19th, 2016 in New York City. Quotes have been adapted from the conversation in consultation with Ms. Fefferman. The complete audio recording of the interview is now a part of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s Sound Archive.

Alex Weiser is YIVO’s Programs Manager.