Ray Lustig has taught composition at The Juilliard School, New York City. In 2020 he co-founded the rock band, Manicburg with Luigi Porto. The album for Lustig's music theater work, Semmelweis, will be released in 2025.
For Manicburg, I guess I would say I wasn’t consciously looking to bring together classical and rock worlds, just to make a rock project, knowing that the sensibilities I’m bringing to it are coming through the filter of my own experience and emphases of attention up to this point. I was actually most excited about getting outside of the classical world’s priorities to be able to better open my mind to the very different and very fascinating priorities of the rock world. It took, and continues to take, a lot of effort for me to get over worrying about certain things so that I can focus on listening and feeling music in this very different way.
For example, voice leading and counterpoint are so central in classical training, and it's certainly not unimportant in rock, extremely important as well, but it's often subjugated to other priorities like color, frequency spectrum, mass, drive, energy, propulsion, groove--the things they don't talk much about in classical conservatory. Groove is not a word I heard much around Juilliard, haha.
And rock bands pay a lot of attention to the frequency spectrum, balancing different components of arrangements EQ profile carefully to craft an overall color, sometimes to give clarity to each instrument, sometimes to do the opposite and hide individual identities. Classical musicians also pay a lot of attention to colors and blend, but they use a different language for it, and often abbreviate by resorting to certain tried and true color combinations—precedents—like given ensemble formations, traditionally-recognized "good combinations," etc.. Whereas rock musicians listen very consciously to the particular profile of frequency presence and absence throughout the entire harmonic series, and shape each arrange element’s (instrument, voice, etc.) frequency spectrum so that all elements work together, from a frequency point of view specifically, like puzzle pieces.
And there is something similar with rhythm and groove—rhythmic puzzle pieces carefully shaped to complement in a way that lays out the emotional feel and genre signatures of a song. Of course classical musicians are doing this too, but it doesn’t seem to be as conscious an emphasis, nor as complex.
For all the rebellion associated with rock, rock musicians tend to be very conservative about song forms—verse/chorus/bridge and AABA are almost ubiquitous. Whereas many new classical musicians place an emphasis on trying to get away from “formulas.” My attitude is that either way it’s experimentation, and just a matter of whether you’re experimenting with new combinations of the familiar grammatical elements of form or trying to create new forms from scratch, which gets to the question of what does the term “form” mean. Can you have a form if there’s no familiarity, for isn’t form the arrangement of things, which is only meaningful if those things can be identified?
So for me, making an ambitious rock project required a huge expansion, a huge effort to learn a new sonic point of view that sometimes felt like having to forget old ways of hearing. But I think it’s all still there.
So I never set out to bring together rock and classical sounds, but I know where I came from and that it leaves its unconscious traces.
Lustig’s compositions have been featured in venues ranging from New York City clubs and galleries to major concert halls and festivals worldwide. The album for his music theater work, Semmelweis, will be released in 2025. Listen to Latency Canons (2013) in its performance during the pandemic, where audiences and performers were dispersed and networked together in real time. The work gives the sensation of a sonification of the energies of communication technologies. It premiered simultaneously at Carnegie Hall in New York and the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, UK, and was described by The New York Times as “entrancing…surreally beautiful…ecstatic…rapturous." Performed by American Composers Orchestra at the DiMenna Center, NYC, conducted by Peter Askim; the Bergamot Quartet in the Murray Hill Groupmuse location, NYC; Ligeti Quartet and Alexandra Quartet from the United Kingdom.