Interview with Anthony McGill
by Bethany Tillerson (photo credit: Todd Rosenberg)

This week, Curtis Institute graduate and Juilliard faculty member Anthony McGill appears for Preview. McGill served as principal clarinet of the Metropolitan Opera, performed alongside Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, and Gabriela Montero at the 2009 presidential inauguration, received the 2020 Avery Fisher Prize, and recently released American Stories with the GRAMMY Award-winning Pacifica Quartet. Rob Kennedy speaks with him about what inspired the stories behind each piece on the album.

KENNEDY: I’ve been a fan of Richard Danielpour’s work for several years. He’s remarkably adept at creating evocative soundscapes. Can you tell us about learning and performing Four Angels? 

MCGILL: Richard Danielpour has been a friend and a mentor of mine for many years. I met him when I was a student at the Curtis Institute of Music many years ago. We’ve had a great relationship since then. He wrote a concerto for me about 15 years ago called From the Mountaintop, which is a beautiful work. This most recent work is along similar lines, but dedicated to the four girls who were killed in the Birmingham Bombing in 1963. His work is so amazing, I believe, because he manages to write with such beauty and care and sometimes about really challenging subjects. In this case, he juxtaposes the beauty of the writing with the pain of the memory of this incident. Like a lot of great composers, he’s able to do that with the beautiful language that he uses to write with the strings and the clarinet. Working on this piece was especially meaningful for me and for the Pacifica Quartet. 

KENNEDY: I’m not familiar with James Lee’s music. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about him and this quintet inspired by historical aspects of indigenous Americans? 

MCGILL: James Lee III has been a friend of mine for quite a few years now. He contacted me years ago when I was teaching at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore; he is a professor of composition at Morgan State University. At the time I didn’t know his music, but he sent me different things. Over the last 10 or 15 years, his music has been performed by so many different orchestras. At the beginning of the pandemic, I discovered a beautiful work for clarinet and piano by him called Ad Anah. His music is gorgeous, it’s picturesque, it’s exciting. He’s one of America’s great composers now. He, as a black American, as I thought a lot about his identity as an American. In this work, he started thinking about the history of black Americans in this country and how a lot of them can trace some of their roots to Native Americans and indigenous populations. This concept of identity and where we come from and what we call ourselves is something that he explores in this beautiful work that takes you on a journey of identifying who we are and where we’re from. You have sounds that sound that they could be part of some indigenous celebration, and you have sounds from some of the great composers that descended from African slaves in America, and how they use the language of music to express those identities is something that James explores in this piece. So he has his own language as a composer, which, as I mentioned before, is at times stunningly, hauntingly beautiful and yet incorporates this storytelling throughout the piece. You can see yourselves on the plains of America many years ago as a part of a different tribe or something like that. So it’s a really colorful piece that explores all of these concepts.

KENNEDY: Benjamin Shirley tells his own very compelling personal story as an unhoused person through the medium of a Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet. Tell us about this work, which to me often sounds confused and adrift, as I’m sure Shirley’s life must have been. 

MCGILL: I think this work is very interesting because as Shirley’s life went through a journey, where at different times he didn’t know where he was or who he was, it explores that concept of where we are in the world. Being displaced is something that not all of us understand in that way, so I imagine this work kind of like a collage of sound where at any given moment we can show up at this location. We’re in the mountains in the High Sierras, and from there we’re in the streets of L.A. At times I hear sounds like I’m in Ireland, listening to some sort of jig or something like that. We’re improvising at times. He also makes sounds of nature, of wind blowing through the instruments and strings just floating along without any real vibration. We also hear the sound of nature and its wild character. At times the piece can be confused and challenging and at times at peace with itself. I like to think that’s Ben finding his voice through music. 

KENNEDY: Anthony, tell our listeners about Valerie Coleman’s Shotgun Houses for Clarinet and Strings and what inspired its creation. 

MCGILL: Valerie Coleman is one of America’s great composers. She was born in Louisville. In the neighborhood she grew up in, the houses are known as shotgun houses. Another famous figure was born there as well–Muhammad Ali. Their families, I believe, knew each other, and this piece is dedicated to his life, It actually depicts particular places and events in his life. So this is really a coming home, I believe, for Valerie. At times, I can imagine that I’m in a church somewhere in Kentucky listening to soulful singing. At times, we’re in a ring with Muhammad Ali, fighting and going through each ring and all the batting that goes back and forth, the strategy, the percussive rhythms. She’s taking us on this journey where we don’t need to know what’s happening in order to enjoy the music, but as an added bonus, we have this plot of Kentucky, of her life, of Muhammad Ali’s story and what that involves. It’s a really exciting piece that I think people will enjoy hearing. 

KENNEDY: Anthony McGill, thank you so much for your artistry, your musicianship and this wonderful recording, American Stories. 

Join us on Sunday, June 25th, to hear the full interview. Listen on TheClassicalStation.org, 89.7 FM, or our app!