An interview for Open Space CD 60
About Group Variations: a conversation with Benjamin Boretz.
Ben’s description of the piece, and the significance of the new recording.
recorded and transcribed by jody diamond
Red Hook, New York
11 September 2026
BEN: The piece was commissioned and performed by the Group for Contemporary Music at Columbia University; Charles Wourinen was the conductor. I started writing it in 1964. It was performed in 1967, and again in 1968 by the same group.
JODY: How would you characterize it? Why would it have been difficult for people to play?
BEN: The complexity of time is internal, and it has to do with threading and overlapping and intersecting of parts over the whole composition, which is variable from place to place. The time values were unusual and they had to be coordinated between instruments in a complex way, especially in certain parts of the piece. It would have been hard for people at that time to perform because the parts had to coincide. They had to be very precise in counting time. The coordination required an unusual amount of precision for any performers’ capacity. They rehearsed for 40 hours. They put a lot of time into it. They tried very hard.They were the best contemporary music players in New York at that time.
It was an approximate performance. If you compare it with the score it wasn’t accurate, but for a performance of new music at that time, it was average—it was just harder than most pieces. I think the general sense of the piece was not quite clear in either performance.
JODY: So it wasn’t the performance that you had imagined. Did you do the computer version so you could hear the things you wanted to hear?
BEN: I wanted to produce something that would would project the sense of the piece. I also wanted to work with computers. This gave me a chance to make a new piece. I used the score but re-composed the piece. Orchestrating it for computer instruments gave a much clearer trajectory of the piece.
Group Variations II was a performance of the piece, but it was also a new composition—my exploration of the resources of computing for music generation. It was played at the ISCM festival in Boston in 1977, and several other times and places. There were no live performances after that—I had no particular reason to expect that a group of people was going to do a perfect performance.
JODY: What led up to this new recording being made? How did that come about?
BEN: I decided that what I would like for my 90th birthday was to finally get an instrumental recording of Group Variations in its correct form.
JODY: So you commissioned a recording of a piece you wrote 60 years ago? That’s kind of amazing!
BEN: It’s always been a very foundational part of my musical thinking. Meta Variations spells it out in words, but this recording encapsulates it in a much more authentic musical form.
JODY: How did you find the NOMAD Ensemble?
BEN: I have heard them play music by Craig Pepples and Jo Kondo and other people. They were great. It seemed an obvious group for a new type of performance: to play very complex music by doing it as recording session, rather than a live theater performance. Their nine-hour recording session created a “recorded performance.”
JODY: What did you feel when you finally heard the NOMAD Ensemble‘s recording?
BEN: It knocked my socks off!
JODY: It sounded like the piece you wrote that you waited 60 years to hear?
BEN: I could always hear it in my head. This is a great ensemble—great players, very serious conscientious virtuosos. They really got it.
JODY: It comes in a beautiful box with a cover designed by Russell Richardson. It has gold letters on the cover with real gold.
BEN: Just like the White House. It’s already on Bandcamp as Open Space CD60.
JODY: Is there anything you would want people to know before they listen to it? How would you like it introduced?
BEN: I was the music critic for The Nation magazine all during the ’60s. My observation of a lot of contemporary music left me thinking that my musical instincts were for music that is an accumulation of musical time rather than episodes of individual structures. I was really interested in composing something that was continuously unfolding and and continuously creating accumulative musical time; where the sense of variations would be itself a kind of subject of internal structure, and the theme would be extended constantly through the first part of the piece. Everything would happen, not as an episode following the beginning, but as a continuation of the beginning, as an extension of it all the way through to the middle of the piece.
It’s an accumulated theme. The first eight measures are a theme that are also contained in the first 16 measures—it’s recursive. Every following section comes from the beginning of the piece and extends from there. Then in the middle it reverts: the coloration changes to a very different harmonic color, and it begins to go backwards, to the end.
JODY: Does it end with the same note it started with?
BEN: It ends with a chord that contains the theme. Then the notes peel off, and until it ends with a dyad: a-e.
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* Part five of Ben's book Meta-Variations is called “Compositional Postscript.” It is all about Group Variations.
** Ben was the co-founder, in 1962, of the journal Perspectives of New Music, and served as the editor for decades.