Five Questions for Matthew Lyon Hazzard

Matthew Lyon Hazzard

When did you realize you wanted to be a composer?

I was always interested in writing music when I was younger. While I was a total choral nerd the entirety of my schooling, I only flirted with the idea of writing for choir.

That changed during my first year in college. There was a volunteer choir that grad students conducted, and each year, they would perform a concert of student-composed works. When I learned about this opportunity, I was floored. I had to try it. I spent the next several weeks writing my very first choral piece, and soon after, we were rehearsing it with the group. While it's funny to see where my writing was then, it was so special to hear something I wrote performed live for the first time.

Who or what inspires your composing?

While the inspiration for my writing changes from piece to piece, I think everything about us makes its way into our music-making. It’s hard to separate my voice as a writer from who I am, what I’ve experienced, or the music I enjoy. For instance, I’m an openly emotional person so I think my music is emotionally charged as a result. I also love the works of Jake Runestad, Michael McGlynn, and Eric Whitacre, so I think they’re in my music too.

In the case of The Ocean Between Us, the motivation behind the piece came from grief. My father had passed just before writing the commissioned work, so when I started looking at Jon’s Ocean Poems, they helped me process the emotional windfall. The first movement I wrote in the set, There Is No Sea, was like setting my grief to music. It just poured out of me. Every time I hear it, it sounds exactly like the sorrow that comes with loss, distilled into a song. When I was working on the next movement, The Prow, I was trying to reconnect with joy again. Then came So Much to Seek, which was all about accepting what had happened, how it changed me, and moving on. It was healing to write each movement like that. Not every piece I write is based on capturing an emotion like that, but with every piece I write I find myself asking at least once, “What is the emotion I’m trying to channel here?” Emotional honesty in music is important to me. I also think that’s why I turn to writing whenever I’m trying to process something I’m feeling.

What made you want to include tuned wine glasses in your composition of "The Ocean Between Us?"

In the case of "The Ocean Between Us," the motivation behind the piece came from grief. My father had passed just before writing the commission, so when I started looking at Jon Talberg's Ocean Poems, my collegiate choral conductor, they helped me process the emotional windfall.

In my experience, I've found that grief is personal and private. When we're in the midst of it, I think the last thing we want to do is go out or share it with others. We seclude ourselves. We keep everyone else at arm's distance, and it's in that space that we allow ourselves to process what we're feeling. That's what the shimmering sound of those tuned wine glasses are. It's the noise and the distance that allows us to be vulnerable.

When I listen to "There Is No Sea," the sound of the crystal glasses lets me enter the space of grief. Throughout the course of the piece, it's really there to drown out our sorrow. When we're hurt, we try to hold it all in, but it bubbles up and overflows regardless of how hard we try to push it back.

A friend of mine told me after the premiere that, to them, the glasses gave him the feeling of being underwater, unable to breathe. I think that's why it had to be in there. It was the very first sound I wrote in the piece, and it helped me be honest in what I was feeling.

If you weren’t a composer, conductor, singer, and educator, what would you be?

If I never discovered the joy of choral music then I probably would have started writing music for video games! I know it’s cheating the question a little bit, but I see everything I currently do—composing included—as a means of engaging with choral music, so video game composition seems like a completely different field.

I’ve been playing video games since as far back as I can remember, and growing up, they contained some of my most pivotal musical experiences. I was listening to video game composers like David Wise and Yasunori Mitsuda long before I started writing choral music. Fun fact: in The Prow, the motif that the soloists sing is actually a reference to a track David Wise wrote in Donkey Kong Country, appropriately titled “Aquatic Ambience.” I also listened to Mitsuda’s string writing in the Chrono Cross just before writing the string parts in So Much to Seek, so a trace of his spirit is in there as well. Needless to say, they are a huge influence!

If any kind of composing was off-limits, though, then I probably would have worked in technology at some point or another. Fixing, tinkering, and building computers have always been hobbies of mine.

Excluding your own work, what is your favorite musical composition and why?

If we're talking about choral music, then that would be Jake Runestad's "Come to the Woods." It's based on one of John Muir's accounts of his travels through the Sierras when he climbed a tree in the middle of a storm. Jake's setting is tremendously vivid and is filled with a genuine love of life that I've never encountered before in a piece of music. Also, like every other Jake Runestad piece, it has a beautiful, tear-jerking ending that crushes your soul.

I also have a bit of a sentimental connection with it, too. I first heard it when I was visiting California to attend a performance in Irvine. My entire visit, I was blown away with the choral music scene in the area, but that piece alone convinced me that there was so much more to learn as a composer, conductor, and choral musician. Within a year, I packed my bags in North Carolina and drove across the country to Long Beach to start graduate school.

If we're talking about any single piece of music, though, then my favorite would be "Death With Dignity" by Sufjan Stevens. It's the opening track from his album, Carrie & Lowell, which he wrote after losing his mother. The first time I heard it, I was traveling to see my dad in Idaho during that cross-country voyage to California, which was the last time I saw him in person. I fell in love with the song originally because of how honest and beautiful it was, but it stayed with me because how wrapped in it is with all those final moments. It was significant before I knew it was.