Efferent Verb Team:
Meet Max Eidinoff, the winner of Voices, Vol. I, a versatile musician and composer from New York, currently pursuing his Master of Music at the esteemed Peabody Institute. With roots in rock music, Max has since found his true calling in New Music, attracted by the boundless artistic expression it fosters.
His interests extend to the intersection of music and technology, leveraging various coding environments to blend acoustic and electronic mediums. On the entrepreneurial front, Max is the CEO of a startup aimed at developing notation software catered to avant-garde composition.
In addition to performing and composing, Max shares his passion and expertise through teaching. As an accomplished arts administrator, he strives to connect audiences with the vibrant world of performing arts. His diverse talents also include web development, adding another layer to his array of skills.
Interviewer: How did your experiences with avant-garde styles, Romanticism, and rock music influence the development of your unique musical voice?
Max: Rock music was the initial influence which shaped my musical values at an early age, and on a fundamental level it continues to be the essential driving force behind my music. There’s a raw exuberant and theatrical energy to bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Van Halen that I try to channel, evenwhile experimenting with avant-garde techniques. I see Romanticism as embodying similar emotional extremes but through a 19th century lens. Ultimately, it is my striving toward these extremes which I believe creates any semblance of a coherent musical voice. I like to start from a place of obvious musical gestures and dramatic beats which I later obscure through avant-garde soundworlds, ideally not so much that the initial essence is lost. It’s definitely a balancing act which I am continually learning how to negotiate. I don’t want to be too surface level obvious in my music so that deeper listening does not reveal anything new and interesting, but also not unintelligibly subtle where the overall effect is lost. I generally try to aim for a place in which musical affect is pretty immediately apparent, since that’s the kind of music I tend gravitate towards as a listener.
Interviewer: In what ways do you feel that absurdity serves as an effective method for narrative development in your compositions?
Max: Absurdity, for me, is unavoidable in my composing just as I have found that it’s unavoidable in life. There are infinite probabilities and chances thrown together in every moment, constantlycolliding and causing all sorts of incongruous events and ridiculous situations which we witness on a near daily basis. An aesthetic of absurdity is how I reconcile with the juxtaposition of beauty and the grotesque as well as the seemingly significant and the mundane in daily life. It allows me to infuse otherwise serious topics with a little bit of humor or playfulnessin order to reveal a level of complexity more genuine to the real world.I’ve found that absurdity’s ability to heighten engagement while being underlyingly relatable makes it the perfect tool to guide listeners through the narrative of a composition. In actual practice this ranges from orchestral music about peanut allergies, to triggering random Glitch sample playback with a toothbrush, or an opera scene portraying a couple arguing over the use of 2-in-1 shampoo which really revealsdeeper underlying problems in their relationship.
Interviewer: Can you describe a specific concert work, film score, or studio mix that you are particularly proud of and the process behind its creation?
Max: One of my favorite pieces I have written is called …and the conductor punched back!! The instrumentation resembles a jazz big band plus a string quartet and fixed electronics. The inspiration for the piece came to me when I was having lunch in my school’s dining hall in undergrad. They were playing a local news channel on the TV and I only heard the end of what the news anchor was saying: “…and the conductor punched back!” Being in a conservatory setting, my mind thought of an orchestra conductor before I looked to see footage of an NYC subway station. This seemed to me the perfect impetus for a piece critiquing TV news sensationalism and its model for retaining viewers which resembles the entertainment industry.When I began the process of writing the piece, I started byoutliningthe form,determining where the tension between conductor and ensemble would manifest itself in the musical material versus through pantomimed staging.During this time, I also collected and editedtogether a collage of soundbites from various local news broadcasts to be played live during a section of the piece while the ensemble underscores it. From there I worked out specific musical motives and orchestrated the piece in sections before smoothing out the transitions between these sections. Then my role shifted to conductor, and I had to learn all the music which I had written.
Interviewer: As someone who is passionate about opera, how do you approach the blending of vocal music, genre bending, and ironic elements to convey complex emotions and stories?
Max: I see genre bending and irony as tools which can be used for dramatic effect, just like any techniques one would learn in a music theory or orchestration class. I then blend these together to communicate concrete narratives, often through vocal music. In addition, lately I have allowed vocal music to have even more influence in my writing by using my own voice during the compositional process to internalize the musical lines I create (as a more reliable alternative to MIDI playback in feeling how sound will translate into physical space). I’m sure that this shift in my process, with its emphasis on vocalization, then affects various characteristics of the music I write, even in ways I do not consciously realize.But regarding how this all plays into conveying complex emotions and stories, I see vocal music as a humanizing element deeply rooted in both human physiology and pathos, irony as a way to obscure and provide emotional complexity, and genre bending as a referential element that can function for text painting or even play into irony.
Interviewer: How has your fascination with the union of music and text in vocal music shaped your creative journey in the world of opera?
Max: I have found that I am my most creative self when I am responding to another work of art or even a situation in my life. In my case, this other artwork tends to be a text because it’s something that can be put directly into the music and because it is already so heavily tied to drama. Also, the singing of actual words with their own semantic meanings invites the possibility for me to support those words, contradict them, or otherwise communicate my own interpretations through music. It is this series of complicated interactions between text and music which has been one of the main motivators that continues to inspire me.
My gravitation towards opera has as much to do with these text interactions as my desire to tell stories. I can’t remember when, but at some point I must have realized that my instrumental concert music kept having very similar qualities as dramatic staged productions. My friends and family would tell me that I should write for movies, but I prefer retaining copyright over what I create.And when I was in high school, I was exposed to a lot of musical theater and I really enjoyed it. But then I became disillusioned with the profit-driven nature of the industry and how creative output can really suffer under that influence. So when I was in college and I was first introduced to contemporary opera, I was completely enamored by the unlimited possibilities it holds.Being encouraged to challenge traditional operatic forms to tell the stories I wish to tell is incredibly inspiring to me.Going back to the question of my musical voice, storytelling is the other major commonality in my writing, even if the style I write in changes drastically.
Interviewer: What challenges did you face while pursuing your Bachelor of Music in classical composition, and how have those experiences influenced your current work?
Max: Like many of those who begin formal composition study while pursuing a bachelor’s degree, I faced the typical challenges of trying to find my compositional voice while simultaneously writing for instruments I had never written for. In addition, these early pieces were often played by performers who have never played, seen, or listened to contemporary classical music. But an even bigger challenge for me, which I am still navigating, is figuring out how instruments interact with acoustic spaces. Nearly all of my exposure to music before college was through popular music recordings in which timbre and reverb have been carefully manipulated in a recording studio. Early on in my pieces, I was trying to pull off quick musical changes similar to those found in progressive rock and metal which don’t quite translate in heavily reverberant concert halls.So in much of my current work I have been trying to maintain similar perceptual effects, but in such a way that they are physically feasible for acoustic and electronic mediums in concert hall spaces.
Interviewer: How have your studies with prominent composers such as Laura Kaminsky, Gregory Spears, and Kamala Sankaram impacted your personal approach to composition?
Max: First and foremost, studying with these composers has really fostered the idea, from an early stage, that there is so much variety in the new music community and that I shouldn’t feel like I have to write in any particular style. This idea also extends to general career pathways. While all three mentors are especially prominent now for writing operas, they have all had such different paths to get there and continue to occupy such different niches within contemporary opera and composition in general. They each offer very different perspectives yet always pushed me to challenge my initial compositional impulses. And as is often the case after being mentored by great teachers, I still hear little bits of advice from each of them when I am writing.
Interviewer: You are now working towards a Master of Music degree at Peabody Institute. How do you feel this experience is expanding your musical knowledge and skills, particularly while studying under Du Yun?
Max: Studying with Du Yun has been crucial for me in learning how to transition out of being a student. I will of course not have a composition teacher forever. So this time is really reinforcing my own skills of self-critique. How do I become my own teacher and challenge my compositional tendencies to the same extent, if not more than others will? I’m sure this is a life-long process, but I feel that I have made significant strides in this area, even in just the past year.Lessons with Du Yun have also been a great reminder that I need to write exactly what I want to hear, rejecting any lingering sense ofconvention or ease of digital notation. She’s really pushing me to my most extreme creative self, and I love it!
Interviewer: Participating in various music festivals and institutes has likely influenced your growth as a composer. Can you share a memorable learning experience or collaboration that occurred during one of those events?
Max: I think as a young composer when I was first participating in a festival experience, there was such high value placed on the recording. I felt like the performance had to be perfect because otherwise it would have been very difficult to build a portfolio. But now that I’ve heard quite a bit of my music and I have good recordings, I’ve been able to be a bit more relaxed in the rehearsal process. This made me realize, more than ever before, during one of the festivals I attended recently, that trust needs to be reciprocated between composer and performer for a successful performance to occur (however one may wish to define “success”). I was working with a couple of singers and instrumentalists on an admittedly rather challenging piece, with quite a bit of vocal acrobatics. By focusing on how to invite the performers into the drama of the piece, and encouraging confidence rather than dwelling on trying to fix hyper-specific details, there was excitement by the performers, which really showed in the performance. They fully embodied the music in a way I want to see in all performances of any kind. I’ve never before felt such captivated attention grab hold of an entire audience in response to my music. It was a thrilling experience which really clarified what I want to be doing as a composer. And ultimately, that all occurred through compassionate collaboration.
I am open to many different kinds of collaborations, especially those involving any sort of theatrical elements.
Contact details:
Email: meidinoff@gmail.com
Website: www.maxeidinoff.com