Rachel's - Rachel's - Chamber music for young rockers

Interview with Rachel Grimes (in collaboration with Aktivirus)

For once it's the Italian audience getting the special treatment: Rachel's have chosen to devote a good part of their European tour dates to our country, crossing the peninsula from end to end, from Cuneo to Palermo. The American ensemble, which in the past has counted as many as twenty members among its ranks, is on this occasion stripped down to its bare essentials. Christian Frederickson (viola), Rachel Grimes (piano) and Eve Miller (cello) perform in its entirety the album "Music for Egon Schiele," originally composed for a dance-theatre production staged in May 1995 at the University of Illinois in Chicago: twelve pieces tracing the personal and artistic evolution of the Austrian expressionist painter. Free from the pressure of a large audience and with an essential lineup, Rachel's can devote themselves entirely to their main passion, refined and cultured chamber music. The style is austere, with piano and viola painting a restless backdrop against which the violin's melody unfolds. While slides of Schiele's principal paintings are projected onto a screen, the Chiesa di Mirandola (Modena) is pervaded by a fascinating belle époque atmosphere that at times turns into an anguished sense of impending tragedy.

Why did you choose to play as many as seven dates in Italy while neglecting other European countries?

The answer is right in front of your eyes. There are a lot of people here who come to see us and get passionately involved in what we do. Every time we've played around here I've always come away really satisfied, and I've always felt a strong response from the audience. And then Giovanna from Uzeda is a dear friend of ours. She and her husband act as our tour managers and always organize great shows for us here in Italy, giving us a lot more attention than any other European agent would.

Tonight you played in a church, as you have on other dates of this tour. Is there a particular reason for that choice?

We'd never been here before. There's no main reason why we chose this place. We asked the local promoters to pick venues suited to acoustic music, and churches often turn out to give the best results in that sense. Also, in Italy there are far more churches than elsewhere, so we have a wide range to choose from. We do play some theatres too — sometimes a church's acoustics are actually too strong for our music and end up making it sound muddled.

You've recorded two albums recently, "Selenography" (1999) and "Full on Night" (2000) — so why did you choose to bring back "Music for Egon Schiele," which dates back five years, instead of playing your new material?

Mainly because, even though it came out in 1996, we never actually toured that album. Right now our guitarist is busy with another project for about a month, so since we couldn't do a full tour, we took the chance to play "Music for Egon Schiele" live. Also, the group we normally travel with has nine members, and it's really costly and difficult to travel with that many people. Touring as just a trio is also a way to explore areas and venues we've never played before and might come back to later.

You've probably been asked this many times: do you consider yourselves more a classical music group or a rock band?

I'm not really interested in establishing what kind of music we're playing, that doesn't concern me at all. I think our audience is made up of young people who listen to a lot of different music, mainly indie rock, and that's our background too, after all. We record for a rock label, the way we tour, the way we make records, the way we write music is very similar to indie rock. But tonight's show is definitely a chamber music concert, played with instruments from a 300-year-old tradition, so I'd say both aspects are present, one way or another, in our music.

How important is improvisation to your style?

It's very important for composition. The best way for me to write music is to sit at the piano and play, and keep playing, until I find a solution that satisfies me. But once I want to fix an idea in place, I write it down on the score. Then it also depends on the type of music and on what the other members will do.

In fact, Rachel's often play with different lineups. Who are the main composers?

Cristian Frederickson, Jason Noble and I are the main authors of the music. Each of us writes things on our own and then brings them to the others. A lot of the material comes about this way. But one way or another, every musician who plays with us has their own space, adds their own parts and contributes to shaping the final result.

"Music for Egon Schiele" is dedicated to a painter, "The Sea and the Bells" is dedicated to the poet Neruda, and some of your tracks have been used as film soundtracks. What relationship exists between your music and the other arts?

The relationship between our music and the sources of inspiration you mentioned is, for us, something not clearly defined. In many cases we simply want to think of someone or something while we play, so as to recreate through music the same feelings expressed by a particular work or artist. Tonight's music is much more of a soundtrack than a description of a particular painting. Conversely, in "The Sea and the Bells", even though that album wasn't conceived to be literary, I think there's a very integrated relationship between the music and Neruda's poetry. In general, I believe all the arts can complement one another: having something to look at while you're listening to something else is an excellent way to produce meaning.

Aside from "The Sea and the Bells", I seem to recall that your first album featured a series of literary quotations. That makes me think you're fond of literature. It seems like a contradiction, then, that your music is mostly instrumental.

It's possible that one day we'll decide to write lyrics and sing them over the music. That kind of move depends above all on how inspired one of us might feel. The reason we mainly play instrumental music is that this way we feel much freer with regard to any particular meaning or feeling. It's certainly possible to associate words with music, and that's one of the reasons we include pieces of literature in the CD booklets. But that's different from assigning a specific word to a specific note. We'd rather let the listener decide what reading to associate with the music.

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