wejetset - magazine - SOUND & ENERGY

SOUND & ENERGY

Travel Chronicles is an editorial feature for wejetset’s online magazine. Through an open and casual conversation it highlights how travel has shaped the talents, perspectives and experiences of creative and business professionals worldwide. This edition features Troy Herion.

Based in Philadelphia, Troy works as a composer, performer, improviser, musical director and sound designer. His music brings together interests in fields relating to biology, metaphysics, traditional cultures, drama, and improvisation. Troy’s compositions include two Italian operas premiered in Italy, symphonic and chamber works, and improvised scores. His theater collaborations have also included music for Pig Iron Theatre, The Wilma Theater, The Arden Theatre, and Azuka Theater. Most recently he accepted the Roger Sessions Fellowship to attend Princeton University where he will earn a Ph.D. in music composition. We recently caught up with Troy in his home in South Philadelphia to discuss sound, energy and his travels. Click Read More for the full article.

I graduated from college with a degree in composition. So I’m a musician. It’s one of those strange things because there aren’t a lot of people my age who are getting degrees in classical music or composition. But I should say that I’m not a freak; it’s not like I listen to Mozart and that’s the only thing, I listen to all sorts of stuff. I grew up with rock bands and played in rock bands, so a lot of these elements that are common to all of us are in music that I write today and a lot of other modern composers’ music. Anything from electronic music to dance music to hip hop to all sorts of things, all sorts of influences.

When you work in something like classical music that has such a long history, you’re answering to all these great masterpieces that have been done in the past. You know, I love Beethoven or whatever but what am I going to do? Write a symphony and are people going to actually listen to it instead of listening to Beethoven? Is an orchestra going to practice my piece instead of practicing Beethoven? So there’s this kind of search that people go through to find relevant parts of your culture that you want to express that’s not necessarily in the form of a symphony or something like that. I guess this is what ties into travel for me.

In college I took a world music class and I’ll admit to being really skeptical of it. I wasn’t that interested in traditional African music or traditional Japanese music but after I heard it I think I sensed the sincerity of the music that we miss out on. Growing up in suburban United States of America, everything kind of has a corporate tinge to it. It’s pared down to three minutes and only all the catchy stuff. So listening to traditional music that goes back hundreds of years, sometimes thousands of years, caught my interest. I would study music like that and it is influencing the music I write. I’m trying to find clear and honest representations or expressions.

I have friends that’ll say music sucks now, you can’t find good stuff anywhere. I think that it’s more the case that the stuff that’s easy to come by is obviously supported by corporations and mainstream culture tends to be the stuff that’s formulaic. But there is so much diversity even in the United States. And I think that even though it’s strange to say this, taking a world music class in college and opening my ears to things that I really wrote off – I even consider myself an open minded listener, I listened to Bach when I thought Bach was all the same – I finally figured it out that it had something to offer me.

I think that’s the same thing in the Untied States, so when I travel you know you do see the same thing but I think because of not being able to speak the language – for instance when I went to Bali I barely spoke Balinese. Because I didn’t understand what the signs said and I didn’t listen to the radio, I was very much tuned into the stuff that is folk. So it’s not to say that they don’t have that mainstream culture that’s formulaic, they do. I learned about that especially in Bali – it threatens their traditions – but you know it might be that because you are witnessing it as a traveler and are not tied into mainstream culture, they haven’t found a way to plug you in yet because you’re a temporary visitor. You’re a little bit more open to those folk elements and the real diversity. That diversity is present in the United States. Right on the street, I’m sure that there are plenty of people doing crazy things in their basement on synthesizers that would never make it on the radio but might be really cool.

When I went to college I wanted to be a physics major, and the reason I wanted to be a physics major is because I looked at college as a magical place. I just go there and tell them what I want them to teach me and I’m going to come out knowing it. It’s just a matter of time. I did the same thing when I transferred from physics to composition, I thought “I’m going to be able to write for an entire orchestra by spending four years doing this. And they’re gonna teach me how to do it.” It’s an ideal, obviously. You strengthen your muscles, your ear muscles, and you can start to hear two things at a time, three things at at a time and maybe four but it’s not as though a composer is able to calculate far more than the average person. It’s still matter of technique. That’s how you create complex things. You do it little by little and you figure out how to combine the elements and after a while, probably as in almost any other profession, you can learn by osmosis. I just listened and listened and listened and listened as much as I could to the point that yeah, it would play back completely.

As a kid I’d be at the playground or something, maybe waiting for my mom to pick me up, and I’d be bored and I’d be thinking about music. A thought would go through my head; “How accurately can I replicate the song that I’m listening to?” In elementary school I remember thinking that I could only hear part of songs, I couldn’t fully hear how the drums and the bass sounded. After studying music for a long time you can hear more detail and sometimes you can hear the whole thing at once, depending on how complicated it is.

In Bali there was a cremation that I saw of the old world king. The last time they had a cremation, which is the biggest ceremony you can have in Bali, was in the 60s. People from all over Indonesia came to see this and of course tourists and it was the biggest spectacle that I’ve ever seen but it had that element of folksy-ness to it. It had an honesty and an element of danger. They didn’t know anything about crowd control, it was just some guy with a whistle and a million people running down the street. And you basically had to jump in, it was like running with the bulls. Anyway, it was a pretty intense experience. It was a connection with people that I’ve never really felt before. And a spectacle. They have these wooden towers built with the body of the King inside, they burn these towers at the end of the ceremony. You see these 80 or 90 foot towers tear down a village street with tens of thousands of people running in front of them trying not to be trampled and you’re in the middle of the whole thing. That sticks with you.