James McElwaine: Composer, Orchestrator, & Professor Emeritus

James McElwaine built a career across composition, orchestration, recording, and teaching, moving through New York’s music scene for more than forty years. He’s collaborated with artists as different as Randy Newman, Marvin Gaye, and Jim Henson. His focus is on how musicians move through time, how form behaves, and how reliability shifts once music is in motion. We talked about temporal craft, the structures listeners feel before they recognize them, and what becomes visible only after decades inside the art of time.

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You’ve worked across theatre, film, and composition. What’s something essential in your process that stays invisible to listeners but drives the entire result?

As musicians, we work in the art of time. Every single element in music, with a possible exception of lyrics, is an expression of time. Rhythmic pulses are obvious temporal elements. Melodies are composed of musical pitches, every one of them measured as discrete frequencies — vibrations per second. Their accompanying rhythms are usually measured in vibrations per minute. Accompanying chords are accumulations of pitches. Musical form is, itself, a structure of sections per minute: verses, choruses, other elements.

When internalized vibrations affect an audible tone, the result is timbre, or tone color. Every single musical expression is a function of time: rhythm, melody, timbre, and form.

After mentoring so many composers, what’s the most common thing young writers overlook about how people actually perceive music?

They tend to overlook the provocations and consistencies of musical form within their works, especially at points of nuance or interpretation, and that defeats paths to temporal excellence.

You’ve collaborated across genres and generations. What have you learned about the invisible habits that separate reliable musicians from extraordinary ones?

I’m having trouble parsing this sentence. It must be something about the clash of reliable with unreliable, and extraordinary with ordinary. As artists of time, musicians move through ordinarily reliable time much differently than others, especially while they’re making music. Audiences of those musicians can approach the temporal magic of good music.

Your work spans live performance and recorded media. How does the sense of “presence” change when the audience can’t see the source of the sound?

When sound recording started about 150 years ago, this became a cause célèbre between social scientists and (antisocial?) scientists. For me, it’s a non-starter. Two different magics. That’s all.

Looking back at your own evolution, what’s something you didn’t notice in your early work that you see clearly now?

I think I am typical of most artists here. Decades of working in multimedia and commercial recording studios changed me. I could say the same for those decades of teaching in universities. I learned to compose on many planes of music and essence. I still have no massive talent, very little innate sensitivity. But I have learned to make music on its many planes. It’s the temporal art, unfettered by gravity or color or shape.

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When James talks about music, he isn’t talking about notes or technique. He’s talking about the unseen decisions that shape how time itself is felt. For him, the invisible work is the part that turns sound into experience.

Learn more about James at:

• LinkedIn

• SUNY Purchase