Interview

[Donny Hathaway]
When I think of music, I think of music in totality, complete, you know, like, uh, from the lowest blues to the highest symphony, you know. So, like, what I'd like to do is to exemplify each style of as many periods as I can possibly do. So I'm studying Contemporary Composition with Yusef Latif in order to increase or expand my, um, melodic ability so that I'll have enough melodies for tunes, you know, that I'll probably do for movies or excerpts that I'll have to write for, uh, for the movies. I'm taking Orchestral Conducting to get into more sonorities of symphonies for the next symphony I havе. I have a symphony entitled "Lifе." I wrote it January 1, 1972, and, uh, it deals with the different aspects of life, you know, the good, the bad, the positive, the negative, the dull, the exciting, you know, the whole thing, the tension, the calm. Everything that is being done now is just a combination of other periods grouped and changed around, adding rhythm and various things. I was listening to a thing I'm studying in my Orchestral Conducting class, a Stravinsky soldier of history—"History of a Soldier." He uses the timpanis like a primitive person would use the timpanis. That was one of the things that Coltrane added to his music from studying people like Ravel, who had written symphonies, who had exhausted music, you know, to the point of just writing chords that were atonal, that didn't have any harmony at all, you know, just, just colors, clusters

I like to do blues as a reflection on a period or a period past and present in Black people's lives, you know, because it is the complete negative or the other side, the secular side of the religious music that we had in our church. Well, I'm a country and western freak *laughs* You know, so, you know, I'm reflecting back on my cowboy days, you know. Plus, I dig the simplicity, which is the white side of the Black heritage where they branched off from us. The main this is to seek as much education as you can get. Form your goals, decide what you wanna be, and work toward that. But even if you don't have in mind what you wanna be, study that education, read. I like to have experiences, you know. I don't have any set hobbies, like, I'm getting into exercising, you know, trying to keep myself fit, you know, for the next eighty years, I hope, you know. I wanna go into photography, I like to take pictures. I'm still trying to make up my mind what I'm doing. I just got me an apartment in New York, you know, and I want to grasp more of the New York concept of life, because I feel if you can make it in the capital of the world, you can make it anywhere in the world