Normally, here’s the space where I begin to wax poetically about an album I wish others would take the time to discover. Hiltzik & Greenwald’s Views From A Distance is one of these albums I wished I had copious amounts of history to draw from. It’s one of those albums I hoped someone else had given me a breadcrumb of information to start with. However, whatever I could piece together never seemed enough.
What I could suss out was that on this, their sole debut, Scott Hiltzik and Ted Greenwald expanded upon on the idea hinted at by a track I heard of theirs on a Windham Hill compilation. The aptly titled Soul Of The Machine (The Windham Hill Sampler Of New Electronic Music) was a collection of original music that seemed to want to move further from the “acoustic” confines of the stereotypical Windham Hill sound. Tucked somewhere in between two interesting tracks, by performers who’d go on to other things in the music biz, was “Chorale” by that duo.
“Chorale” simply floored me. Unlike most American New Age music, this sounded foreign. “Chorale” sounded like it belonged in another hemisphere of musical thought. In it I heard music with a lineage of Eno-esque descent. In it I thought: “Finally, here’s a sound that matches the sonic architecture of Eastern minimalism (like Hiroshi Yoshimura and the like).” It felt weird to listen to an American group that captured such a feeling.
Digging deep, no pun intended, I discovered they had released a full-length LP together. Digging deeper, I realized that I recognized one of those names: Ted Greenwald. Years ago I had read his The Musician’s Home Recording Book. Thumbing through old copies of Keyboard Magazine, I’d run across various articles written by Ted. I knew he had a lineage of knowing his stuff but I was genuinely surprised he’d do something like Views From A Distance. It’s obvious he knew his stuff but usually technical proficiency doesn’t correlate with musical quality.
When you buy an album like Views From A Distance you’re ready to be disappointed. Not incredibly hard to find, surprisingly inexpensive (found at cut rate prices, prices used to move old “forgotten” CDs) and with little to no critical acclaim, I braced myself for disappointment. What I heard flipped everything around.
“Thinking Of Kira” reminded me of something from Interior or Eno. Aesthetically their music was crisp and “Semblance” and “The Color Of Memory” reminded me of askew minimalism found on those early Mark Isham records. This music floated.
On other records from this era you’d hear the sonic ethos spill into the “spiritual” New Age (complete with crystal bowls, whale sound, and bird sound) or as bludgeons as heard on Berlin School music (insert your favorite arpeggiator preset, run infinitum here). No, here the music was tasteful, contemporary-sounding, even. “Perpetual Acts” cemented something for me: this was a masterpiece. Taking obvious cues from a different musical world it seemed to belong to an ambient music canon that seemed to have forgotten of its existence.
Rather than tell my own story, as theirs. I was rather fortunate to ask them both to answer some questions, shedding some light where I couldn’t find any. Eternally grateful for having heard back, now I share with you Scott and Ted’s thoughts on Views From A Distance:
Interview with Scott Hiltzik and Ted Greenwald
How was this band formed?
We met when we both attended the film scoring program at University of Southern California, where we discovered our mutual appreciation for music of substance, depth, and daring. We became friends and after graduating decided to look for opportunities to collaborate. We started out recording a number of commissions Scott received to score dance and theater productions; Scott composed the music, and then he would spend a few days with Ted arranging and recording it. That led to a more formal collaboration on the music that appeared on Soul of the Machine and Views from a Distance.
Can you give us some background into what was going on behind the recording of Views From A Distance?
After graduating from the USC program, Scott was composing, performing, and teaching in Los Angeles while Ted was working as an editor at Keyboard Magazine in the San Francisco Bay Area. Windham Hlll put out a call for electronic music so we decided to submit some new works. The company liked “Chorale” enough to include it on the Soul of the Machine compilation. That gave us the momentum and incentive to submit a full album’s worth of demos, recorded in Ted’s living room in San Jose in the same manner we had been recording Scott’s compositions for dance and theater. Windham Hill passed but Sonic Atmospheres gave us a recording contract. We had intended to rerecord the music in a pro studio but Sonic Atmospheres wanted to release the demos. The exception was “December Warmth,” which we re-recorded in the studio owned by Craig Huxley, owner of Sonic Atmospheres.
Were there artists you were influenced by or you felt simpatico to, during this time?
On Ted’s side, his college composition professor at Brown, Gerald Shapiro, formed his understanding of electronic music composition and laid the foundation for his approach to synthesizer programming, and his stint as an assistant engineer at the Power Station recording studio in New York shaped his approach to mixing. Brian Eno was a big influence on the approach to melding synthesizer tones. Ted hadn’t listened much to Mark Isham, but Isham’s Windham Hill records probably influenced Ted’s concept of the overall mood we were trying to convey. “American Living Room” was a tribute to the Pat Metheny Group. “The Color of Memory” no doubt was influenced by Steve Reich.
Scott was more influenced by the great classical and jazz composers. His musical world was created with an acoustic palette so the Hiltzik & Greenwald collaboration was a great opportunity to utilize different timbres. Scott’s approach was to discover the specific musical language which would best express each piece’s intention. For example, “From A Distance”, which started out as a dance score for the Rudy Perez dance ensemble, was about imagining the sounds and sensations of being on a mountaintop while listening to live music far below. We utilized the twelve chromatic tones and lots of studio techniques to make that happen.
Why wasn’t there a followup release or were there any further albums with Ted?
We went on to produce a second album’s worth of demos. Sonic Atmospheres never released it. We both were putting more attention into our separate careers by that point — and Ted had moved to New York to work on music for commercials and produce artists in a more rock-oriented vein — and we didn’t try to shop the demos elsewhere. We have recently discussed the possibility of releasing some of this material.
What became of your relationship with Windham Hill and/or Sonic Atmospheres record labels? A lot of your S.A. label mates like Don Harriss, Georgia Kelly, and Michael Sterns, seemed to be on the cusp of a different kind of New Age music.
They simply petered out. We didn’t listen to other “New Age” artists and didn’t know them personally. Our aesthetic vision was more in line with other musical values.
How was the technology then driving your creativity? It seemed that Ted’s experience as part of Keyboard magazine might have fed some of the sonics of this album.
Technology didn’t drive our creativity. We were inspired more by the great compositional thinkers, especially orchestral composers. We scored virtually every note ahead of recording performances of the score — mostly Scott’s performances — just as a classical ensemble would. In fact, when we mused on the notion of touring the record, we imagined having an ensemble including players of acoustic instruments to perform it. Nonetheless, Ted’s experience at Keyboard was central.
He was reviewing new synthesizers, sequencers, and effects, so he was familiar with the latest sounds and techniques, and he was able to borrow instruments from Keyboard’s collection to supplement the instruments in his own studio. That gave us the firepower we needed to give the arrangements a full, lifelike sound.
He was editing interviews with and columns by great keyboard players, absorbing their knowledge and perspective, and applying that to the production. There was one spot where the technology drove the creative process: In the middle of “The Color of Memory,” there’s a passage in which the harmonic structure evolves away from the prevailing static tonality.
That arose directly from a feature of the Opcode sequencer that would let you shift a recorded sequence wholesale by playing one note at a time. It gave the composition the variety it needed, so we kept it.
The sudden introduction of the sharp synthesizer tone that follows also could be viewed as a case of technology driving creativity; the ability to layer any number of synthesizers simultaneously playing the same notes led to arrangement choices like that.
P.S. For those interested: Scott Hiltzik’s current music can be found at www.scotthiltzik.com.