nd I got a scholarship saying that if I could be in New York by the beginning of the next school year, I would be welcome to study with George Szell.  So I left my parents who were still in Ecuador but didn’t have the affidavit that you needed.  I was very fanatical about studying music and becoming a composer.

BD:    What exactly did you study with Szell?  He was, of course, a conductor.

UM:    Yes, he was a conductor and had been invited to conduct Toscanini’s NBC Symphony.  Because of the war he couldn’t return to Europe, so he decided to take a little extra job as a composition teacher.  He was the one that taught George Rochberg, myself and Martin Boykan.  We were his three private students.

BD:    You later studied with people who were composers.  Was the conductor’s style of teaching composition different from a composer’s style of teaching composition?

UM:    Yes.  George Szell was a very conservative musician; he conducted Stravinsky as contemporary music, but he didn’t like Schoenberg, Webern and so on.  What he gave me was a solid background

did he ever eventually conduct any of your works?

UM:    No, unfortunately.  Well, [laughs] this was very funny.  At Mannes, I wrote a string quartet with him, and he went down to the auditorium and got together four string players and conducted them to show me how the piece really goes!  He was an exceptional pianist!  He could play anything at tempo!  He was just a fabulous musician!

BD:    I’m glad you had a good experience with him.  You then later studied with composers and you, yourself, taught composition.

UM:    Yes, yes.  I still do.

BD:    Do you incorporate some of their techniques and their theories, or have you moved beyond all of that?

UM:    My own music still adheres very much to classical forms.  I feel more comfortable with something where you have themes and things that were used in the so-called Classical Era.  But I later on moved and have been interested to study Schoenberg and twelve-tone music, and studying with Ralph Shapey also was a great thing for me.  Some of those techniques, plus something that I cooked up myself, I use in my own teaching.  I usually let the student start where he is at to improve what he is doing.  But I also like to give a student something to think about that he may not have thought about on his own.

BD:    Are you encouraged by what you see on the pages of your students?

UM:    Yes, very often I have good students that really wrote expressive music.  And it’s very intriguing.  This year I’m teaching at the Bennett School in New York, and I’m getting a young woman from Russia.  I haven’t met her yet, but she signed up with me and that will be interesting.

BD:    Has she signed up with you because he has heard your music, or because she has heard of your reputation as a teacher?

UM:    She was Tania León’s student.  Tania was a student of mine and recommended her. 

BD:    There really is a lineage that has been passed on from generation to generation, from teacher to student throughout the history of music.

UM:    Yes.

BD:    Do you feel you’re part of this long lineage?

UM:    I do, yes.  I am coming from what is sometimes called the Middle European School, or the German School, and from Schoenberg and Webern as the end of nineteenth century but beginning of twentieth century composers.  I probably am a follower there, although my music sounds quite different from Schoenberg’s music.  And I’m passing that on to the next generation who will incorporate it with what they are hearing, and other influences that they are coming across.

BD:    So where is music going today?

UM:    I don’t know!  Nobody knows.  Music history goes in waves.  There’s always a very complex idea of composers.  Take Bach, followed by composers who write more homophonic music, like Haydn and Mozart.  Then it gets more complex again in Beethoven and Brahms and Wagner.  Operetta music started as a simplified classical music.  Now we have had maybe sixty or seventy years of twelve tone influenced music, and while some of us still adhere to this, others have found this too complex; the total negation of this would be a minimalist approach.  So these phases go in and out, and we don’t know what the next century will bring us.  It probably will be much influenced by electronic music and many composers.  Unfortunately I have no connection to it.  I’ve written one electronic piece.  I put it together in the studio at Columbia in New York, but it took too long.  I said, “I can’t do this.”  I’d rather use the pencil.  Of course the computer music is the thing that will probably be developed much further.

BD:    But I assume it was a good thing for you to experiment with the electronics, at least even briefly.

UM:    Oh, yes, yes!  Absolutely!  The piece came out quite well, and I sometimes use it when people ask me if I have any electronic music.  This one piece has been performed at a festival in Santa Cruz and even got a very good review!  But it stands alone because I’d rather be a composer the old-fashioned way, with pencil and eraser!

BD:    When you have the pencil in your hand, are you controlling where it goes, or does it lead your hand across the page?

UM:    No, I’m controlling.  I am controlling, although what comes out sometimes will lead me a different way than where I thought I would go.  This happens.  Now I’m in the midst of writing a string quartet for the Cassatt Quartet made up of four young women.  They’re evidently well-known; they have some records out, and they play a lot in modern music concerts.  What happens is that I set out with an idea, and then suddenly I see something or it does something.  That’s a kind of miracle, maybe; one doesn’t know quite where it comes from, and it will have to be developed differently.  Or it could be developed in so many different ways and you have to make choices.  So perhaps the choice of that particular phrase of music is quite different than from what you first wanted it to do.  So there’s control, and non-control.

BD:    When you’re working on it, are you also erasing and retooling it?

UM:    Yes, yes, rewriting a lot.  The main job is really editing.  I sometimes say I start editing before I even write a note! [Laughs]

BD:    Sure!  So my question is, how do you know when you’re finished?

UM:     I play it.  I use the piano in composing; I’m not ashamed to say it, although some people think that’s no good and you should absolutely compose at the desk only.  But I know when I’m finished by playing through and hearing through and reading the pages again.  When it feels complete and when I can’t change it, I

is not the same on every organ.  That can be a mishap, you know!

BD:    Of the pieces that you have heard of yours over the years, have you basically been pleased with the performances?

UM:    Yes and no.  I have had very good performances and also not good performances.  It depends very much how much time people give, and whether it’s a very experienced group to play difficult music.  In general, yes.  I’ve had an all-Mamlok concert with some of my music and those were all good groups; they were the best groups in New York that played and I got some very nice performances.  Also when something is recorded, usually you get a better performance because the people edit it and really prepare it better than if it’s just the concert.

BD:    It sounds like really you just need to take more care.

UM:    Yes, absolutely.  You have to.  Unfortunately especially in New York the performers are so busy that they give it three rehearsals.  No matter how difficult a piece is, three rehearsals are not enough!  Recently I had a quartet for a performance in New York, and they had to pull in David Gilbert to conduct.  He’s a fabulous conductor, but you certainly would not conduct a Schubert or Beethoven quartet, or would have ever thought of that.  But today even small ensembles get conducted.  It’s simply faster to get it on its feet.

BD:    To be taught, rather than to learn it?

UM:    Yes, yes! [Both laugh]

BD:    Your music is at least a little bit difficult.  Do you write it to be difficult, or do you write it just the way it has to come out?

UM:    Just the way it has to come out.  My music has also gone through its own history.  I started as a tonal composer and I wrote pieces there that were not too difficult to perform.  Then I got interested in different kinds of phraseology and rhythms that were not square.  At first I wrote very predictably rhythmically, and especially with Ralph Shapey I was learning a lot about asymmetrical rhythms.  The music became more difficult for the performer because it was new.  The performers in the sixties were not as used to this type of music as they are now.

BD:    Are they getting more used to it?

UM:    They are getting more used to it.  In my own case, my music gets simpler.  Why is this?  I don’t know.  I just feel I don’t need some of the very mathematically complicated combinations to express what I want to express.  So I write music that maybe goes back in my own history to former musics.

BD:    This is not to say you disown any of your earlier pieces?

UM:    No, no!  Well yes, some I do.  I usually start with my Woodwind Quintet which I wrote when I was a student at the Manhattan School.  It’s my longest piece that is recorded; it is on a record

hat is the purpose of music?

UM:    Ah!  That’s a good question.  The purpose of music is probably that if you are gifted in music, to express yourself as somebody else would be in writing stories or poetry.  The purpose is to not entertain, but to give people something that could be either uplifting or disturbing; something for people’s emotional life.  Perhaps there is also an intellectual purpose, depending on what kind of music.

BD:    Is there no entertainment value at all in it?

UM:    Yes, there should be, but the word entertainment often is coupled with show music or light music, although that isn’t necessary because certainly a scherzo in a Mozart or Beethoven symphony is something that can be lighthearted and therefore entertaining.  In my music, I feel I have a lot of contrasts and often a kind of humor.  People tell me that’s what they are getting from places in my music.  So entertainment is an important aspect of my music.  Also an important thing is educational music, of which I have written quite a lot.  Piano music or orchestra music for children.  This should be not talking down to young people, but rather give them something that has the sound of our time but still is geared toward a younger mind.  Children can really accept much more than you sometimes give them credit for because they are not inhibited and prejudiced against so many things that adults, and some of the so-called music lovers, are.

BD:    Is there any way that we can encourage more listening to new music and more audiences from various places to come to new music concerts?

UM:    Yes.  We are always trying.  Various new music groups are trying to play music in different styles, since we have many styles of music nowadays.  I believe that new music should be played within a concert of not only new music, but ones that include music that people will know.  They might get the message and want to hear more of this type of music, so then there are the special concerts that feature mostly new music.

BD:    But you would rather be on a mixed program?

UM:    I would, yes.  I had a wonderful time with the San Francisco Symphony when I composed a piece for them with a commission, and Herbert Bloomstedt was conducting.  [See my Interview with Herbert Blomstedt.]  It was on a program with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, and Bartók’s Violin Concerto.

BD:    You were in good company!

UM:    I was in good company, and the violinist was Midori, so the house was filled to capacity!

BD:    This didn’t hold any terrors for you, did it?

UM:    No, no.  I got good reviews and comments, and people seemed to enjoy it.

BD:    How can we get more conductors, then, to champion this kind of thing?

UM:    That’s very, very difficult.  If a piece is played once, it’s often very difficult to have another orchestra or conductor do it.  The conductors who do new music always want to have a premiere.  

BD:    There’s something prestigious about that?

UM:    Yeah.  It’s very difficult to get that second or dozens of performances of a new piece.  But it can be done.  I had two performances of this piece so far.  The promotion is a very important aspect.  Most composers, like myself, have no agents.  You’re busy composing the piece, making the deadline, copying, being at rehearsals and doing all the things necessary, so you have no time — at least I have no time — to call up conductors.  It’s also an embarrassing kind of element to advertise your own music.

BD:    “Hi, I gotta piece.  You want to play it?”

UM:    [Laughs] Yeah, that’s right, you know!  People do it, and do it successfully, but I am not that way, unfortunately.  It’s very difficult, but the publisher will.  I’m published by C.F. Peters, and he’s a very reputable publisher, but not for promotion so much.  The music is there and the people who know about the catalogue of C.F. Peters will find it.  But one does actually need a promoter to do with any kind of art and commercial things that do need advertising.  It’s very costly.

BD:    It seems that there are a number of composers who are very good at promotion, but their music is not really work promoting.

UM:    Right, that happens!  Yes, yes!  That happens as in all other ways of life.  Sometimes a good car is not promoted as much as an inferior one.  It’s a lifetime struggle, and yet we do it.

BD:    I assume that you shouldn’t think of music as a commodity.

UM:    No, you should not.  But in a way, certain music is, of course, a commodity; it has mass appeal and is sort of anonymous.  Much of a popular kind of music has this.  But you do not reach more than an elite group of other composers to listen to your music if it doesn’t get publicized.  Not that it’s a commodity, but as something that would be worthwhile to get among people which are not only your own colleagues.

BD:    A number of your pieces have been recorded, so that gives them a little more universality.

UM:    Yes.  That is very important.  Today a recording is more important than publication because everybody can purchase it... although the music of composers like myself is often hidden in the record shops.  Or you have to ask for it, and then it will appear in the computer, and the clerk says, “Ah, yes, this does exist, and can maybe be ordered!” [Both laugh]  The radio does a lot of service for the composer because you have the recordings there and you advertise us by announcing it.

BD:    This is, of course, what I do with my programs!

UM:    Yes, yes, that’s very important.  We haven’t enough good [commercial] radio stations, and maybe a few university stations.

BD:    Right, exactly.  Well, I try to do my part.

UM:    Yes, you do!  I know!

BD:    One last question:  is composing fun?

UM:    Ah, that is a mixed question!  [Laughs]  I find that once I’m at it and do it, it’s fun and it’s interesting and challenging.  But sometimes you feel, my goodness, this is such a difficult problem I’m now having to overcome in this certain piece.  You don’t dare to get at it and you do all sorts of other things first before getting to the work!  So it’s a mixed blessing, for me at least.  Of course it’s wonderful once a piece is finished, and you look at it and it caps off and sounds good.  It gets performances and you feel the work has been worthwhile.  But I often feel I won’t be able to finish this piece or be able to go ahead!  I guess many composers have that kind of problem.

BD:    But it always manages to be completed?

UM:    Yes, hopefully!

BD:    Do you have any advice for the young composers coming along?

UM:    I feel the young composer should always study the history of music and be very well acquainted with the music of all ages and all types, and then make choices where they want to hook in.  Nobody composes in a vacuum, and you have to have your influences partly from the country that you’re coming from, the musical surroundings and the teaching.  I feel one should have always an open mind to absorb as much as possible.  I always say to the young composers, “You must hear a lot of concerts.  Don’t rely only on recordings because that is quite different.  Music is also an art to be seen.”  It’s very interesting and great fun to observe a pianist or a chamber group or an orchestra.  Rehearsals are most important, I think, for a composer.

BD:    I appreciate your taking the time from your visit to San Francisco to chat with me tonight.

UM:    Oh, well, you’re very welcome.  That has been great fun!

This interview was recorded on the telephone on July 25, 1996.  Portions were used (along with recordings) on WNIB in 1998.  The transcription was made and posted on this website in 2009.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award-winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.