Toni Reece: Hi there. This is Toni Reece, and welcome to the Get Inspired! Project for Berks County Living magazine. Today I have Jesse Clark with me. Welcome, Jesse.
Jesse Clark: Hi.
Toni: How are you?
Jesse: I’m very well. How are you?
Toni: I am great. Jesse, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Jesse: My name is Jesse Clark. I’ve been teaching at Albright College for about five years now. I teach music classes there. I’m also a composer. I’ve done some films and some commercials and that type of thing. Currently I’m also getting my Ph.D. in Music Composition at Temple.
Toni: Great. Thank you for showing up in that busy schedule for the Get Inspired! Project. Let’s go into the Project. What does inspiration mean to you?
Jesse: I was thinking about this question. I think the best way to do it would be in actually the style that I teach. If there are any students of mine, there’s one thing that they always recognize with me, and that is that I use a lot of food metaphors and cooking. If you don’t mind me going on a little digression here, I’m going to go for the whole creative process. I was trying to think of how inspiration isn't just that, but it’s also that and how you include those things.
If you’re cooking, if you have a skillet, ingredients, heat, and all that stuff… now, I lived with a guy named Jimmy, and he had his cast iron skillet. He swore that you’re not supposed to clean it with soap and water. He called it seasoning. You’re basically leaving whatever remnants of food festering and rotting in it leftover for the next time you cook to “season it.” I will never eat anything from that pan, but supposedly that’s what you’re supposed to do.
In this metaphor then, that seasoning – well, my personal style, I don’t mean to make it sound so putrid and repulsive – but that seasoning would be my personal style. The ingredients then, whether that’s shrimp, diced onions, or altos and sopranos, they are the constraints of the medium I’m working in then. The heat would be more or less the ambition to create. Anything like that. The desire to create. Sometimes I don’t have enough of it. It cooks slowly.
Innovation then comes at any of those different spots, I believe. It’s this idea to create something new or to do something different. When I first started composing, like when I first started cooking, I just took the peppers and put them right on the grill, and they were actually kind of good. I don’t think my early compositions were that good, but they were pretty good.
As I got into it, I realized it when some professors and teachers said, “Maybe you should try to say something. Really take your voice and do something with it.” I looked at that whole process and figured out where I could change it – come up with a plan, come up with an idea. Something like a vision that I would work towards. Or, the style with what I was making.
I was thinking again where innovation is, and it can happen with the heat process with how fast I’m going to work or improvising; maybe I’m doing less editing, or maybe it’s with the medium. Maybe I’m putting in different ingredients of some sort. Or, it can be changing my style in some way. I think innovation can work in any of those ways.
Toni: Innovation – does that equate to inspiration for you? Because it’s, “What does inspiration mean to you?”
Jesse: I think they work differently.
Toni: Okay. In the whole process you have to have an idea of something you’re going to create, so you have to be inspired by those ingredients you have found in order to innovate with them.
Jesse: It works hand in hand.
Toni: Yes.
Jesse: Innovation and inspiration for sure. I’m sorry, I meant to say inspiration this whole time.
Toni: That’s okay.
Jesse: They are working hand in hand. It’s that idea of what you’re working with, what the energy is moving forward in that. If I don’t have anything to say, I’m not going to say anything. Unlike cooking, obviously, I have to have a sandwich, so maybe I’ll just make a peanut butter and jelly. When I’m inspired, when I need to make something, these are the places that I alter or I approach.
This is how I approach my creative process to work with music, to work with any project. These are the different places where inspiration can happen. I’m sorry I kept saying “innovation” earlier, but they are very hand in hand in the way they work.
Toni: They really are. It’s a great description of inspiration. I love it. How do you put that creativity and innovation when you’re inspired into practice here in Berks County?
Jesse: Speaking of diced onions and sopranos – they both do make you cry when you work with them – I am working with the Berks County Opera Company, and they are definitely not making me cry. In fact, they are amazing people. One of other questions was, “Who inspires you?” I met with Francine Black many times. She’s the creative director behind Berks County Opera. She’s really an amazing woman. The passion that she’s approaching her projects, it is inspiring. It’s driving me to create. It’s turning that heat up. It’s putting more ingredients into that pan. I feel like I’m going on full burners when I’m working with her projects.
Toni: So you’re inspired by her, and you put that into practice then as an example with Berks Opera Company?
Jesse: Yes. For example, we’re doing a project right now, Faust. There’s a ballet sequence where they hired me to create an electronic musical supplement for it. In this case, the frying pan, I’m inspired to work with this. I’m working with oscillators – electronic tonalities and sonic character things. I’m working with musique concrete, which is natural sounds. Then I’m working with the Faust opera, and I’m putting them all together in a frying pan, and I put them all with my own style. I work with it then.
It was very inspiring to work with this project where we’re doing something new with an old opera from the 19th Century. It’s the newest Faust, and it’s a great opera. It’s an opera. I’ve seen it how many times. Let’s do something different with it. The way that Francine … her energy, her smile, and the way she was working with it, it’s just very inspiring. I wanted to work with that. Like I said, it just turns up the heat.
Toni: That’s amazing; and it’s taking again your food analogy. It’s taking an old recipe and putting a new twist to it so that it’s creative and fresh. That’s what it sounds like you’re doing.
Jesse: Sure.
Toni: Who else in Berks County inspires you?
Jesse: For teaching, I was really impressed by Rebecca Butler when I first started teaching at Albright college. She was amazing. It wasn’t just a job teaching. She was really caring about what she was doing. She was caring about the department, the program. Her whole philosophy, the way she approached it was very inspiring. It made me want to bring my style of teaching up to that level. It’s seemingly impossible to get to that level, but I really am trying. Yes, she was very inspiring.
Toni: That’s fantastic. What a great testimony for someone’s teaching style to make you want to be the best that you can be.
Jesse: Absolutely.
Toni: So, Jesse, what would you like your legacy to be?
Jesse: I was thinking about this, and it makes me really uncomfortable. It takes a slice of you. If I want to think about accomplishments or moments of things I’ve accomplished or things like that that would be worth a legacy, anytime that I’m thinking of myself as static I feel like I’m not really moving forward. It’s kind of like the uncertainty principal when you’re studying electrons. You can either see how fast it’s moving or know exactly where it is. You can either know what you’re doing and what you’ve accomplished, or you can keep moving forward.
I really don’t want to reflect on what I’m doing or what I’ve accomplished. I want to keep moving forward. I’m working on this opera. I’m working on these projects, and I give that my full attention. This idea of legacy, it’s like …
Toni: Can I help you out with that? Most people when they think of legacy, they think of a static legacy – something that people think of you when they’re no longer here; but there’s a living legacy. It’s something that we do every single day that someone would say, “This is how I think of you.” That’s your legacy. It’s how people think of you. How do people think of you today?
Jesse: Oh gosh … I guess it depends if you’re asking my students, or … I think the Berks Opera Company likes me. I’ve been invited to dinner a couple times. That would be good. But a legacy, though – I still … maybe by my laugh.
Toni: So a sense of humor?
Jesse: I guess. I think that has a lot to do with it. That is definitely an essential part of my existence.
Toni: Are you a cook?
Jesse: I am.
Toni: I would imagine. Have you cooked some people some really great meals?
Jesse: Yes. I cook all the time. I cook every day.
Toni: There you go, too. You provide for people and you’re kind, and you have a sense of humor, right?
Jesse: Sure.
Toni: We’ll have other people that will want to chime in to know what Jesse Clark’s living legacy is.
Jesse: Living legacy. I still don’t know how I feel about that. That’s not for me to decide. You see musicians throughout time, whenever someone’s putting a label or some kind of thing or some kind of descriptor onto the artist, whether it’s music or not, the artist has always rejected it and said, “No. Don’t sum me up like that.”
Anytime you sum someone up – a legacy – you’re really kind of making it generic. You’re saying, “We’re going to remember this person as a composer,” yet as you mentioned, I also cooked. There are many facets to me, and if I were to pick one that makes me a two-dimensional character rather than what I hopefully am.
Toni: I think during this interview everybody really gets that idea, that you are more than a two-dimensional character. I thank you so very much, Jesse, for showing up for the Get Inspired! Project.
Jesse: Thank you, Toni.
Toni: You’re welcome.
