Bobby Ge is a Composer Looking Beyond Music
By Gray Harrison
When asked about his new ensemble composition which he is preparing to debut at the Bang on a Can summer festival in two days, composer Bobby Ge gives a quick rundown of the inspiration for the piece, titled “Of a Feather.” He then begins describing his love for the movies of Wong Kar-wai, and especially his favorite movie, In the Mood for Love.
“There’s a kind of esoteric specificity to his style that plays with people’s expectations of what’s normal, but it still feels, at least to me, tremendously affecting and very emotionally powerful. If I could do anything that evokes so much emotion while also feeling so uniquely personal, that’d be great.”
Bobby Ge, born 1996, is a Chinese-American composer currently pursuing his Ph.D in Composition at Princeton. He has received an impressively long list of commissions in cities across the United States, and most recently debuted several new compositions at the Bang on a Can summer music festival at MASS MoCA, including “Of a Feather.” He says the piece looks at the way musicians come together to create music– “it reminded me of how flocks of birds move, where there’s this unspoken communication… Somehow, these massive flocks can sort of follow each other.”
Dramatic storytelling was foundational to Bobby’s musical education. “When I first started composing,” he says, “all I really wanted to do was sound like John Williams, you know? I loved Star Wars, I loved Harry Potter, all that stuff.” He draws an analogy to his brother’s aspirations to be a writer: “I'm sure as a lot of writers begin, you start because you've read Lord of the Rings or something, and at first it's all you want to write. Some things are just simple, old fashioned, grandiose and exciting storytelling.” These foundations linger in interesting ways as Bobby has explored a multitude of styles and mediums, gradually discovering his current sound.
His first music memory was his mom playing a recording of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto “when I was a wee lad… I would’ve been three or four.” Though he was born in the United States, his family moved to Shanghai when he was five, where he stayed through grade school. He started classical piano lessons at about the same age, and later quit lessons in eighth grade. In high school, he didn’t listen to classical music, so in college at U.C. Berkeley, he tried to catch up on what he had missed.
At Berkeley, he was exposed to the world of CNMAT, Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, a program influenced by IRCAM, the legendary French electronic music institute. As someone who didn’t have a music program in grade or high school, he describes the sound at CNMAT as, “to my ears, super, super experimental…like, vicious kind of noise.” Though he took music classes all through undergrad, he initially majored in physics, only adding a music major in his senior year. This hesitation to pursue music was in part due to a feeling that his musical interests were irrelevant. “It seemed like they were saying, ‘this is the only kind of music people are making today,’” he explains. “Melody and traditional harmonies…sometimes, the way that composers talk and the discourse today, those can feel like kind of old hat ideas.”
As an undergrad, he composed in private, for himself and for fun. He then continued his studies in conservatory at the Peabody Institute, where he found a more pluralistic environment, with composers such as Kevin Puts drawing more directly from the Mozartian “unabashedly flowy and lyrical” tradition, alongside Du Yun and Oscar Bettison working in the more abrasive post-rock soundscape. Now, as he pursues a doctoral degree at Princeton, he has experimented plenty with the harsher sounds of new music. But he feels he is gradually being pulled back towards pleasing melodies and chords. “At this point, I've completely ceased to innovate harmonically. It's just triads, you know?” he says, laughing.
Though drawn to harmony, Bobby likes to play with traditional structures in unusual ways. He still believes the orchestra to be a “fecund, powerful artistic medium,” but finds there are limits to the images it can conjure. “Instrumental music is not inherently representational, you know?” he says. “And I think that there is something really powerful and beautiful about that. The fact that abstract or instrumental music invites people into a place of like, listening to themselves.”
That open-ended quality doesn’t always work for someone hoping to tell specific stories in music. “I wrote this one piece about me growing up in Shanghai, about a friendship that sort of slowly decayed over time, and it’s like, if I want to tell a story like that, with a purely instrumental piece, if you played it to someone, they would never guess, ‘Oh, that’s what that’s about!’ Right?”
He is increasingly excited by multimedia work, particularly bridging orchestral music with text, video, and electronic music. He’s been using the electronic music softwares Logic and Ableton. He references his partner as an influence as well– she’s an electronic musician who utilizes field recordings of the natural world in her work. In terms of text, he says he’s been starting to use his own writing in his compositions, which is “a little scary and frightening,” as well as incorporating pre-existing texts from others.
He churns out work fast– the writing process for any piece usually takes a month, two at the most, and he has multiple projects in the works most of the time. He likes to write on trains. Also, uncomfortable chairs really help– “if it’s not comfortable, then I can’t relax, and so I’m more attentive,” he says. He also can’t listen to music while he’s writing.
So what does Bobby Ge listen to when he’s not composing? His new music peers, for sure, but mostly non-classical music. Mitski. Wet Leg. A lot of Stevie Wonder. A friend recently told him, “I think you’re an alt girl, Bobby.” He admits that he’s become more self-conscious talking about his music taste in recent years, largely due to a fear that others will make an assumption about the kind of person he is based on what he listens to. He believes this might partially explain his refusal to commit to one genre.
Among the projects Bobby is currently working on is a commission for Virginia Tech called “ To St. Augustine,” a piece for soprano voice, electronics, and a “wonky ensemble” that includes flute and saxophone. It is based on a poem by Chinese critic and dissident Liu Xiaobo, who applied an equally critical lens to both Western and Eastern thought through his distinctly witty writing. Bobby describes Liu’s poem To St. Augustine as “this kind of rambly, kind of incoherent collection of responses” to the Christian theologian and writer of Confessions. He was interested in the concept of “this person engaging with this titan of Western thought, but with so much characteristic acerbic wit.” Bobby comes from a Christian background, but recently stepped away, and so for him, “To St. Augustine” is “an examination of what it is to me, what it isn’t to me, and how it’s sort of collapsed or frayed over the years for myself.” The electronic portion samples his friend reading the poem in Chinese, while the singing is in English. “It’ll be a weird piece,” he says, with audible excitement.