Interview with composer Tom Peters

Thanks so much for bringing your music to Opulent Mobility!

It was such a delightful surprise to have Tom Peters reach out to me and ask to compose a piece for Opulent Mobility. He wanted to create music that could be experienced and enjoyed by Deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing folks alike. I was thrilled. Live music is one of my favorite things, and in the past I’d built playliists to go along with the exhibits, but this was new, and it was exciting to bring in music that could not only be heard but felt.

As it turned out, Tom was a wonderful choice for Opulent Mobility. In his own words:

“In 2010, the world finally made sense to me. That was when, at the age of 47, I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Until that time, life had always felt mystifying, like it was governed by a secret rule book that everyone had a copy of except me. As it turned out, my struggles in navigating a neurotypical world had a logical explanation: my brain simply works differently.   It was my neurodiversity that led me to discover the double bass in elementary school. While my fellow fourth-graders were crowding around the violins, the double bass sat alone in a corner. I didn’t want the bass to feel bad, so I brought it home and used it to make scary sounds for a Halloween tape. This pivotal experience taught me that the overlooked double bass had an extraordinary range of expression.” 

This interview has American Sign Language interpretation by Joe Roger Rivera Perez. The transcript is edited for clarity.

Interview with Tom Peters

Tom My instrument is a double bass meant to be bowed and it is electric. It's amplified so there's no body to it. It's just a stick and it has six strings, which gives it the range of two thirds of a piano. When you start putting the speakers and yeah, it’s actually a lot more complicated than the acoustic one.

Laura The equipment is always the problem, right?

Tom When I started getting into doing electronic music, I really had no idea how much of my life would be spent wrapping cables.

Laura So how did you find out about Opulent Mobility?

Tom It's actually through LA Culture Net. That's the list service from the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture. And I saw the opportunity calling for artworks for disabled artists and artists with disabilities and because I'm a person on the autism spectrum, I thought this is something that could be really interesting. And also, as I've progressed in my rather odd career, I want to do more installation work. This is only the second bit of installation work I've done. The first was an online installation work I did for the National Park Service as part of the Terminus Project at Olympic National Park. It was an interesting project because they wanted us to memorialize a dying glacier. And so a whole bunch of different artists signed a different glacier in the park. And so I used 100 years with the climate data for the eel glacier on Mount Anderson, if you know Olympic National Park, to depict climate change and the rise of ambient temperature and the shrinking of the glacier.

Laura Wow, what an interesting project. So how did you use the data to create your music?

Tom It's funny; I wanted to do sonification, which is basically turning data into sound. And so my thought was to use the bass line is the mountain itself and that just continues. Then there is a pad of chords that I used six different voices and each one, my original idea was that each six month period would depict the rise in temperature as it goes up. And it turns out the climate data didn't actually cooperate. So I had to do—

Laura Oh, that.

Tom I had to kind of do an aggregate with it going up exponentially and I was able to use the coral rise there. And then for to depict the glacier, I used the intro from the Requiem Mass. Each time that loops get shorter and shorter until it's down to a single note. (Beep)

Laura Wow. So it's a requiem for a glacier.

Tom That's the name of the piece, actually; it's a Requiem for a Glacier.

Laura Well, perfect, then. (Laughing) So what made you decide to do music that can be experienced by deaf people or hard of hearing people? 'Cause that is so exciting and we haven't done it before.

Tom This comes from one of my former teachers, Jeff Bradetich, who was teaching at Northwestern University when I was there. He had released a series of albums on a label he created called Music for All to Hear. And the first album was playing Christmas carols, but what he was doing was playing them on the bass in the lower register so that people who have hearing difficulties could hear it. Because most often people with hearing difficulties can either sense the vibration of bass frequencies or they can actually hear up to, I think it's about 80 hertz, is where most people who are considered deaf or who are hard of hearing can hear those tones. So as you and I had our discussions, I decided to try something like that, so the music that I've written for Opulent Mobility is all ambient. Most people are not gonna hear the entire piece, it's supposed to just stay in the background, but people who have hearing difficulties will experience a piece differently because it's driven melodically by the bass. So the bass frequencies are something that people who have hearing difficulties can actually experience. And people who don't have hearing difficulties will experience something actually quite different because they'll hear the other sounds. So it's kind of like a hidden code for people.

Laura Interesting. Yeah, I've actually seen people do things for example, exhibits or designs that were created for people with certain forms of colorblindness. So what you would see, if you had a certain type of color blindness, would be a completely different thing if you had a different type, or that if you didn't experience that. It's always fascinating to me how individual our experiences are. I think it's flattened, you know, the way that most people try to make it so that everybody's feeling the same way, and that's never going to be true. I think this is wonderful. I'm also really excited that you're going to be doing it live for the opening.

Tom Yes, that's going to be really fun. So the bass that is behind me here would be using with looping and interactive electronics.

Laura Neat. You were just talking before we started about how many pieces of musical instruments you have in your home.

Tom That's really hard to guess. Well, I've got this, I've also got my acoustic bass, which is, you know, that's a big one there, I've got two banjos, one from each grandfather, mandolin, I've got about six ukuleles, and I have a box that up in the closet that is labeled noisy toys, because anytime I go somewhere where there are toys I always try to find some kind of noise making thing and they invariably find their way into my pieces in some way or another.

Laura What got you into music to begin with?

Tom My parents were very musical; my father played stride piano, which is the old style of hitting a bass note with your left hand and then airplaning over about two octets. It's extremely difficult but my dad learned to play stride piano, he was actually really good at it. So my mom was an accordion virtuoso and music was just always playing in the house. My dad played classical music and I knew classical music would always be part of my life from the time my father played a recording of Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture when I was five years old, and I loved it. He gave me the record, God bless him, and I wore the grooves out on that thing and the transistor with the cannons.

Laura Well it's very exciting. Was that one of the first pieces of music that you really just bonded with?

Tom It was, and I actually got to the point that after about a year of playing at when I was about six years old, I no longer needed the album. I could play it in my head and I can still reconstruct it.

Laura That's really cool.

Tom So yeah, but that kind of started me down the path and so yeah, I've had kind of a meandering career, as I'm trained as an orchestral double bassist and I've done solo work and I have a Grammy nomination for the music of John Cage. Solo work, I've done chamber music and at the tender age of 50, I started composing and I got kind of dragged backward kicking and screaming into it.

Laura Oh, wow. What happened?

Tom I had a regular concert series at the Theater of Boston Court in Pasadena. I was doing a residency, and I would do three contemporary music recitals per year. So I was doing all new music and at one point I bought the electric instrument and I was trying to figure out what to do with it. I thought, you know, this would work really well as an accompaniment for silent films. So I asked them if I could do a silent film score to Der Golem, the 1920 horror films that we did. They liked it and asked me to do it again. And 18 silent film scores later, I started doing that and eventually I started improvising and it then got to the point where I had to start writing things down. I think about the way my career has gone and I think I am a composer, how?

Laura Because you had to be.

Tom I guess so.

Laura Sometimes that's what happens. I know that's happened to me with art. So sometimes it grabs you kicking and screaming and says this is what needs to be made. Have you found that autism has had an effect on your work? Is that something you found out earlier on or later in life?

Tom I was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum disorder at the age of 47. So it may have just explained a lot of things. As far as the work for Opulent Mobility and a lot of the more recent compositions I've been doing, there is a need when one is on the autism spectrum to find calming spaces. And that is extremely difficult to find in LA County.

Laura It's a challenge.

Tom And so I began wanting to create places where people could heal and respond. And so I started doing that sort of work. First thing during the pandemic, I created an album of music to help people fall asleep. And using range sounds and sounds of crickets and so forth with music that changes- it's something I call process music. There's probably a better term for it out there. And the music that I've written for the Opulent Mobility show is, it has different musical elements and different threads, but it's what I call collisions and collisions music. It's sort of, sometimes they go together and sometimes they don't. But the way things are written, none of them will actually line up the same way for many, many, many hours. So it is music that has a certain cohesiveness to it, because it's all based on the same scales and the same tones. But the music that you're hearing won't be repeated while you're there.

Laura Nice. Do you mind if I play a brief sample of that? (Music) I can feel how this will be a really great background to what we're going to be experiencing at the moment in the show.

Tom One of the things I decided to do on this is I have cut out the frequencies between about 80 hertz and about 100 hertz and about 250 hertz. That is the zone of human conversation. I'm hoping with this that the music can be heard and felt and yet people can still converse.

Laura Yeah, because that can be tricky too. And for some people that's too distracting.

Tom Yeah. But a certain lower level can be okay.

Laura Right. Have you found that that sometimes having too many noises in different areas can be really distracting for you?

Tom Oh my gosh. Constantly. This is where being on the autism spectrum can be a challenge. There's just too much stimulus going on at one time.

Laura Do you find it's easier when you're performing though because of the focus?

Tom It depends. I have something to focus on but if there are other things happening in the space I can sometimes have a... It depends, really. I mean a lot of times I've done a lot of work with contact improvisation dancers and... I find in doing that and if I'm playing in a space, well for example, at the opening of the Opulent Mobility what I will do is watch people and listen to them and almost like create a soundtrack of the energy of the people in the room.

Laura Neat. And does that make it easier for you to work with it?

Tom Much easier, yeah.

Laura I would think because you're responding to what is in front of you instead of trying to ignore it. And that just makes, I think it makes it much better for everyone, hopefully.

Tom I think so too. So I'm really excited to try this out.

Laura Is there anything else that you would like to share, other projects you've got coming up?

Tom I've had a lot going on. The next project I'm working on is for a friend of mine who teaches double bass at UC Irvine and he's doing a concert celebrating the 150th birth of bassist Sergey Kusevitsky. I'm working on a piece for bass and interactive electronics for him. So that's my next goal.

We're working on, my wife is a writer, and so we're working on our second opera together. So that's our next.

Laura That's amazing. What is the topic? Do you mind me asking? Is it too soon?

Tom It's still cooking.

Laura Okay. What is the first one?

Tom The first one we did, we wrote on spec and unfortunately it didn't get accepted, but we just loved the process so much. We decided to launch in the second one. The first one is a group therapy and each person talks about what their experience in the pandemic was.

Laura Oh, interesting.

Tom Because we both feel that the damage that we all sustained in the pandemic has not been dealt with. There seems to be a forgetting that we all went through something really traumatic. And regardless of where one falls on the spectrum of that, it was an extraordinarily traumatic event for all of us. And we're hoping it'll help people sort of understand that we're going to, have been through something and we need-- yeah, we've not taken the time to process it and that at some point we'll have to pay the piper for that.

Laura Yeah, and to a large extent it is still going on. I think that's another thing, that there's that whole froth of denial.

Tom Yes. I'm an avid mask wearer.

Laura Yeah, because it's rough-- Sometimes that's the way people deal with trauma. But pretending that there isn't a trauma will bite you in the butt later.

Tom It's guaranteed. You can only do so much of whistling past the graveyard, at some point you're gonna have to stop and read the tombstones.

Laura It's true. I'm so glad that you can be part of this. I'm so excited about this and was so glad you reached out. Tom reached out to me and said is it okay if I do this, is that something you're interested in? Yes, please. This will be amazing. We haven't been using music in the exhibits, and I think that it is such an important thing to include.

Tom Wonderful, I'm honored to be part of it.