"Music is easy. Sound is hard": A conversation with Richard Einhorn

Conductor Marin Alsop and composer Richard Einhorn at rehearsal with the
London Symphony for the London Premiere of Voices of Light on 5 November 2011.
Photo: Robert Garbolinski.

I first came to know the composer Richard Einhorn when he was beginning research on The Origin, an oratorio crafted from the life and work of Charles Darwin. We met professionally but bonded over an unlikely set of shared enthusiasms: early polyphony, early analog synthesizers, Indian cooking, and church-state politics. We fell out of touch in 2010 and it was not until last week that I opened up a New York Times story and learned, to my great shock, of his severe hearing loss.

When we reconnected in late October I asked Richard if I could we do an interview for The Ethical Ear about his extraordinary experience of hearing loss, its impact on his work as a composer, and his advocacy for better assistive listening devices, which was the subject of the Times piece. What he had to say was so interesting that I decided to share it here in two parts with minimal editing.

Richard explained that his hearing loss happened suddenly and without warning. He had just arrived at an artist retreat, eager to explore some new directions for his music. But when he rose in his hotel room the next day to begin his work, he first noticed a loud, piercing ringing in his ears: tinnitus. Then, he discovered that his right ear had gone totally deaf. With the room swimming, he collapsed from vertigo.

Since that time, hearing has not returned to Richard's right ear, but sound has. It is extremely distorted, a warped audio track of robots from a "bad science fiction movie" as he put it. The left ear has lost 70% of its hearing and experiences tinnitus and slight distortion as well. These three forms of damage combined, he said, are "extremely exhausting and extremely disorienting in ways that are very difficult to describe."


Everything comes to me from my left, so that if a sound comes from somebody standing to my right and I don't see them, I immediately turn to my left. I can turn completely in a circle before I finally realize that they've been standing on my right side. I have no sense of up or down either, in terms of sounds. Once I heard geese and couldn't see them. I looked everywhere. They were up in the sky and I had no concept that they were up there.

I also have a condition in my right ear called hyperacusis. Not only is everything distorted but normal sounds are unbelievably loud--louder than a rock concert at full tilt, louder than a jet plane taking off. As a result, I have to wear an earplug in my ear at all times otherwise the normal sounds of a quiet room become so loud and so exhausting that I want to run. My fight-or-flight reflex kicks in. It's extremely strange.

The only thing that you can do is to use whatever technology is around, and the other thing you can do is take breaks. It is so tiring on such a deep level that you have to go away, shut down, be quiet, and collect yourself just in order to get through a day. Often sound is very, very painful for me.

I've been working in music and sound my entire life. Nobody told me that any of these things were possible: that you could suddenly lose your hearing, that you could develop this condition. The only place I'd ever heard of this condition was in a Poe short story, the Fall of the House of Usher, in which Roderick Usher can't tolerate loud sounds. In my case, I can't even tolerate soft sounds.

How has this affected your work?

I can easily compose, especially for acoustical instruments, but there are a few things I can no longer hear. I have to imagine them.

When I was fifteen years old, I used to write electronic pieces for four channels. The sounds would be flying around the room, flying around the auditorium. it was really a blast. This was very, very primitive equipment, but I just loved figuring it out and I loved figuring out how sounds moved through space.

Just before my hearing loss, I was planning to go back to this idea. I was going to set my up my studio not in four channels but in five or possibly even eight channels and create electronic music that literally swam around the space and moved in all sorts of very cool ways. I wanted to study algorithms for panning music around and moving recorded sounds in space and making it seem realistic. That would be very difficult to do now.

Fortunately there are other things that I also wanted to work on. I had been studying Sol LeWitt's paintings and techniques. He takes extremely simple mathematical permutations, augmentations and diminishments and carefully and systematically applies them to constructing a painting. If you are as careful as Sol LeWitt in doing this, what occurs are these overwhelmingly emotionally compelling as well as formally beautiful works.

I was very excited about the possibility of bringing these kinds of simple, clear, and clean permutations into music. What I've done since the hearing loss is I've focused a lot on the formal ideas but not the spatial ideas that I can no longer hear. I've written about 30 études using various techniques that are adopted from LeWitt's vocabulary, trying to find a musical analogue to them.

In some sense, the hearing loss hasn't affected my direction at all. In another sense, it has limited certain things. But that's okay. Space is something that I can still imagine, and its not a primary aspect of a musical experience for me. What's primary for me are form, melody, counterpoint and rhythm of course. Rhythm is basic, and these other things--melody, counterpoint, and structure are secondary to rhythm and I have no problem hearing and imaging all of them.

Space for music is very interesting, its very exciting. Its a fundamental part of sound, but sound isn't music. With all due respect to John Cage, they're very different things. Sound is very hard for me right now. Music on the other hand remains very easy, and very easy to perceive.

In fact, the only part of my life that's not been affected by my hearing loss is my ability to compose. Every other aspect of my life that involves hearing has been severely damaged but not my ability to compose. That's very interesting to me.

What about your ability to enjoy live music?

Right after my hearing loss I wanted to hear concerts anyway. I wasn't going to let something stupid like the loss of an ear stop me from enjoying live music. Or so I thought.

We've all gone to theaters and passed by a bunch of what are called assistive listening devices, which are these really strange looking head pieces that old guys wear in order to hear at a Broadway show or concert. And since I don't have any embarrassment about sticking things in my ear in public places, I went to the counter of an opera house, a very fine opera house, handed my credit card over as collateral, got one of these stupid earpieces, put it on, and the sound was so awful, I can't even begin to describe it. Every aspect of the sound was awful. The mix was awful. The quality of the wireless reception was terrible and in fact dangerous, it was crackling and breaking up and slamming my left ear. The headphone didn't fit and was very uncomfortable and in addition to that it was of very bad quality.

I must have gone to 30 different places--concert halls, theaters for drama, movie houses--and always the same thing. It sounded terrible. Absolutely terrible in all sorts of ways. I just can't describe to you how depressing it was to be sitting in the third row watching a great performance of, say, Richard III, and not be able to hear the actors. No matter what you do, you cannot hear it and cannot understand the words.

I started to take along with me a rig that I figured out by using some recording apps on an iPhone. I put together a portable microphone, basically a hearing assistance device. I would go to concerts with this iPhone, a very high quality ear phone. sit as close as I can and point the iPhone's microphone at the stage and I can almost hear. And that is far better quality than all of these assistive listening systems that are being used all over the country. For the most part, They just don't work that well.


In the next installment, Richard talks about alternative assistive listening systems.