Slovenian compositions created by Ketty Nez, a composer and professor at Boston University, blend contemporary and historical musical artistry in her new album “Only the Path Remains.” Nez joins GBH s All Things Considered Host Arun Rath to dive into the way her Slovenian family roots inspired her to use research of Southern East European music and turn it into thrilling, storytelling pieces. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: So, as we listen to this beautiful music, I wonder if we could start by having you tell us a bit about Slovenian music. I know enough to know that it’s hard to describe because it has so many influences.
Ketty Nez: Oh yes, and in fact, my research of Slovenian and Croatian music is more recent. It actually began with my research of more [Southeastern] European music; for example, Romanian music, Bulgarian music, Macedonian music, especially inspired by the work of Béla Bartók. The Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist. Most people know him as the famous composer, but many don’t know that he spent most of his time researching, transcribing and analyzing thousands of melodies. And I ran into his publication called Yugoslav Folk Music. There is no Yugoslavia anymore, but my family is Yugoslav. My father’s side is from Ljubljana, Slovenia, and my mother’s side is from Bitola, Skopje, in the south, actually where I was born in Macedonia. So, I couldn’t ignore that book, and I started looking into it. I only ran into it about several years ago — 2008, I think. And from then on [it] became this love affair with all these meticulously notated and transcribed melodies of the region. In that case, it was Bosnian and Herzegovinian melodies of the south. So, long story short, I’ve been working on his research, and other music of the area became a big folk opera that I wrote, “Fiddler and the Old Woman of Rumelia,” which was performed at B.U. [Boston University] and staged by the Juventas Ensemble in 2012, where I looked at lots of folk music of the Balkans and folk stories.
But only more recently, I’m starting to look at the Slovenian and the Croatian side of my family. So, this is what this piece, “Only the Path Remains,” foregrounds in that way, and the big Slovenian chorale comes at the very end, actually. You can’t miss it. Toward the very, very end. Part of the thing of working with all this material is you start imagining music in that way. Which happens a lot. I mean, if you look at Bartók’s music, it does refer to kind of the folk melodies, the small registers, the tessitura of his motifs, which are sometimes not folk-based at all. So I’m not Bartók; we’re very different people. He’s a genius and a god in my pantheon. But at any rate, this piece, “Mountain,” begins with a folk-like melody, but at the very end comes in this huge Slovenian chorale.
Rath: It’s amazing hearing you talk about this because hearing the whole thing, all three pieces together, it’s not like you have any sense of the seams where the old and new are meshing together.
Nez: Thank you. Yes, it comes from treating found objects kind of like an oyster — it’s a stimulus. It’s a little piece of musical sand in my memory. Then I start thinking around these motives, these materials. Usually I don’t even quote the whole theme. I’ll do fragments of themes; sometimes I’ll really chop it up in many ways. I’ll do the gestures, the rhythms. They become really abstracted in many ways. So, yes, that’s where my creative mind starts getting interested and generative, as it were. Every once in a while, I’ll let the folk melody come to the fore, kind of float up on the top.
Rath: Tell us about what inspired this music specifically. Looking at the timeline, it looks like you were writing this during the pandemic.
Nez: Exactly. Yes. Well, that was a great time for all people, composers included. And I had some wonderful colleagues at Boston University. We had a trio going, so we didn’t ever know if we were going to get together at that point. But I just kept plowing away, and I said let’s write a trio. And this is my second trio; the first was written years ago. So, I started looking at online resources, whatever I could find of Slovenian melodies and Croatian melodies and then, as you know, in the second movement, I looked at some of the Croatian ojkanje singing, which is very tight, small intervals together.
Rath: Tell us how you’re rendering the singing in the instruments.
Nez: Well, the violin and cello are wonderfully flexible, so the voices trill with harmonics. If you hear some of the original singers, it’s quite amazing. I couldn’t quite describe it, but it’s an interesting kind of vocal trill that they do. And so, I replicated it, or abstractly replicated it, using harmonic trills in the violin and in the cello. So, the very beginning of that movement is actually a quotation of the melody, which has been so covered up by all the harmonic trills; only fragments start to appear.
Rath: Are they [in] any way related to the Bulgarian women choirs?
Nez: Gosh, there are so many styles in the Balkans — yes and no. Kind of a nasal singing in a way, and very tight harmonies, and you get a lot of dissonances that the Bulgarian choirs feature. That comes to the fore in the third movement, where there’s an island, Krk, off the coast of Croatia, where the music is incredibly dissonant to our ears. And I found an old recording. Usually this is what I do; I listen to a lot of old folk recordings from the '50s and the '60s, and something really catches my ear. So, this was a wedding march for two oboes — sopiles, that’s what they’re called — which I quoted almost exactly at the very beginning. Again, the violin and the cello, and they’re in dissonant seconds and sevenths. And that got my mind going because I thought, “Wow, that’s a whole new sense of harmony. What sounds consonant, what sounds dissonant in that way.” So, the piece starts off to the north and starts to wind south a little bit, and then it goes offshore, as it were.
