T: Where were you born?

H: Nuremburg, Germany in 1931

T: And were you raised there?

HP: Yes, immigrated to America in 1954. I studied music while I was there and after the war I was exposed to American Jazz, and American Music in general and became very interested in that and started a band over there and in Germany I worked for USO shows and Army special services and traveled all over Europe really playing for Americans. You know in those times it was a very good way to get my hands on copies of American records.. I remember sitting at my old piano then and transcribing every note of a George Shearing Piece or anything that was the dominating style of those days and that’s all we had to learn.

T: Was that a big change from the classical training or style that you were more familiar with going into it?

H: Well it wasn’t really a change it was really in addition to..I’ve always maintained or when I came here I had a scholarship to the University and studied composition in Piano and studied of course as one does in the formalized studies classical writing and classical piano. For me it was never really a matter of one or the other, it was always both together.

T: So when you came to America you came directly to Minnesota?

H:Yes


T: To the university of Minnesota?

H:Right. I went to school there and got my formal composition degree and what have you

T: And so how did that lead to your first commercial release in 1960?

H: Well along with going to school I was making a living playing nights. I had a Jazz Trio at first and then in 1958 or 1956 or so I had an opportunity to be apart of quite an interesting album with a Jazz octet. There was an effort at the time, you may be familiar with the days of East Coast Jazz and West Coast Jazz, but you know we were determined to put North Coast Jazz on the map and at the time there was a label financed by Gordy Hormel, the heir to the Hormel fortune and he was financing the whole project. So we had a very interesting octet and we were determined to sort of prove ourselves to the nation

T: did you have a distinct stylistic difference from say, what was happening on the east or on the west with the cool movement?

H:Well you know one always tries and I did a lot of my own compositions but it was probably sort of, in those days there were lots of groups that had this sort of sound and I was composing in a way that the saxophone trumpet and trombone were doubling on the woodwinds.

T: I could see how that would be an unusual pairing H: So we played with that for a while and at the same time I developed a real interest in the recording studios, you know I kind of became a jack-of-all-trades. It was kind of like a having a darkroom and developing your own product. So a bunch of us, well four us maybe, a couple of engineers we formed a company and started our own studio named Sound 80, and we did initially mostly my work but then later on it became a self contained recording studio.

T: So was that first release, the Argo disc recorded at what was then Sound 80?

H:Well the Argo record was really the second release, the first being the octet record, and you know the Argo release was more of a trio thing recorded in Chicago.

T: When did Sound 80 come to be then as a functioning studio

H: It started in the late 60s, first in my house and then it got its own space. You know there was a period where our first or biggest pride was our 4-Track and then it was our 8-Track and then you know we went to 24-Track

T: Around that time did you get interested in the equipment side of things as well?

H: Well you know I feel like I’m blessed with a lot of ignorance but I’m smart enough to always have good people around me who would know It all! So I don’t really have any of the deep technical knowledge. I did get into it to a degree once the first, I mean I remember going out and buying the first Moog synthesizer. And those things were a fortune and they take a working knowledge to of course use properly.

T: How did that come about, I know that you are featured in the artwork of Music That Works Volume 1, amongst other pictures, sitting at the Synthesizer composing.

T: Well I could see how it would be appealing to a fan of Library music, especially in the UK, and this music or these commercials really set themselves apart from a lot of the things that the US and British sound libraries were putting out for commercial use.

H:Well I know, for what it’s worth, that we were doing a very unique thing in the Chicago ? Minneapolis, Midwestern area in this field.

T: SO what was the impetus for actually pressing Music That Works vol. 1, you know with a gatefold cover and the artwork, it must have a been a fairly expensive project.

H:Well you know Sound 80 had also a mastering studio, and we had good relationships with the custom pressing plants. You know we always had choirs and school bands coming in to get things made, we would record and master it and help coordinate the pressing. For 500 or 1000 copies or whatever. And I thought, well you know it would be nice to have something to give to clients as a promotional product or way of saying, here’s what we do. And so we pressed a few hundred, but you know we wanted to make sure it was as high of quality as possible because it was showcasing what we were doing.

T: You can tell that from the record, the recording is impeccable, it is apparent when listening to the record that, for that time, Sound 80 was at the cutting edge of sound quality and recording.

H: Yes you know we were doing well then, we had just received a Grammy in that field, and we had great engineers and gear to match.

H: It was around the time of the late 60’s when we started the studio, I then stopped playing nights and I took up a job as music director for my own company, composing commercials and music as such which lasted about 10 years, and in the context I had a lot of opportunities to do a lot of synthesized music you know, to create different moods for different things. I had once to create 4 different pieces for a French play, all synthesized. So you know I called Bob Moog out and I got my first Synthesizer and then started to put stuff together. I recall a funny story was when we did the French Play and they were doing it in New York at the Lincoln Center, when we got there the musicians union had put up a big fuss, you know no way were the going to let pre-recorded music be used for a play at the Lincoln Center and that was a problem because you know the cast and the play and pretty much the whole thing is based around this synthesized music. So anyways the musicians union finally submitted a letter of approval and agreed to let us do this because in their reasoning “This wasn’t really music”

T: At that time, which is really around the beginnings of electronic music making an appearance in the mainstream culture, were people or clients resistant to the use of the Moog or other electronics?

H:Well I’m sure they were but for me, in the kind of musical stages I went through it never was an ‘either/or’ sort of approach but more of an ‘in addition to’ sort of thing. I was not into trying to duplicate the sound of, say an Oboe with a synthesizer but I was using it as it’s own instrument and exploring with it and it was great!

It was fun and exciting to hear the sort of things that you just can’t do with conventional instruments and you know so and then really did a lot of that. We would do things like create this elaborate surround sound electronic core and then have the instruments play over it live, and even at that the whole thing had a very organic mood, yet the overall dimension of the sound was so different because there’s a whole accent of prerecorded elements. It had a real reason to be as far as I was concerned. I eventually got very involved in composing and into this sort of stuff, I’m jumping ahead now to the late 1980’s, you know later on in my life and into the 90’s and more and more live stuff was dying out. It was matter of people and film producers and everyone using electronics as a substitute or a way out and after a while it really got to me. I reached a point of exasperation finally about 8 years ago when I just decided to get out of it and totally I got rid of every piece of electronic equipment I owned and went back to live. Live music, live playing. It was probably a sort of an overreaction, but I thought that I had gone to far in my own insides with this stuff.

T: Wow, so was it a liberating thing to let go of all of that and go back to live playing.

H:Yeah! You know about that same time I stopped. I just decided that I wasn’t going to try to make music for money anymore. I guess I also felt that I didn’t have to anymore as well. So anyways I went back and started a jazz quartet and started playing jazz again. I began practicing more on the piano again and we did a record that came out a while ago.

T: It was well received as well

H:yeah, you know if we had done it a year later we would have done more but yeah, we kind of had to get it done because Sony wanted to use it as a surround sound demo and I could have used more time on the piano (laughs)

T: I’d like to go back to what you said about making music for money. And the whole advertising concept. How did Sound 80 and you as a composer become an entity that was doing a lot of commercial music production.

H:Well, you know it was that Sound 80 was clearly the best all around studio in the area here. And the owners, we ran it from a business point of view with the idea that as long as we could make a living at it, we wanted to always have the best and finest people and equipment to work with so you know we ran it, not like an accountant would have told us to run it but, you know it was our toolbox! And in that sense you can’t just finance a studio doing recordings like, I mean we turned down Prince the first time he came around trying to make a record. You know later we felt pretty stupid but you have gear and engineers and, you know you have to pay for the building and you just can’t do all of that unless you have some amount of commercial clientele. The other side clearly was, and for me most importantly, was that I felt we had to maintain a high or the highest level of integrity in what we were making. I needed to do the best musical job I could always do regardless of what it was for. I personally hated the traditional sort of jingle stuff and stayed away from that. I mean I really didn’t like them, but later on I developed a certain reservation fro post scoring, you know the type of work a film composer would do, and I loved that. If I had a choice I would choose not to consider living in LA but I should’ve if I wanted to do more film music; that I really loved a lot. So we went out and we did quite a few films for Paramount and some other quite interesting things for directors who were anti-Hollywood and were willing to step out of the box a bit.

T: This was during the 70’s?

H: yes in the 70’s and early 80’s. And during that time we had wonderful creative opportunities. It was always the case that the most interesting exciting music didn’t pay much but the most generic ding-dong stuff did pay out a lot of money, well we bought time by doing the other stuff. I don’t think we ever totally sold out to absolute junk but I have to admit there is a lot of stuff, music that I don’t want to hear again. You know a few years ago when I kind of closed up shop in my personal studio, I had tons and tons of scores that I had written and I thought well what am I going to do with all this stuff. Well one night I had a couple of beers and I sat down and made two piles: one with stuff I wanted to keep and one of stuff I would just get rid of. And it was amazing you know you go back to 1967 and between now and then I could look at the first few bars and have an immediate reaction. And after all of that I only kept about ten percent of the things I had written and the rest I threw out.

T: Wow!

H:Yes but you see that’s OK because I’m really happy with that ten percent I kept.

T: Right. Well, you know the whole reason we are talking is because of the Music That Works record, well actually vol. 1 and vol. 2, which I had found laying around the twin cities areas in used record bins, and the feeling they gave me, or should I say how astonished I was at the quality of music that were put into the commercial compositions, how they weren’t just jingles, you know, and the fusion of electronics and conventional instruments

H: It’s so funny you are saying this because a few months ago I received an email from a guy in the UK who had a record label and wanted to reissue these records. And you know, to me, a lot of this was the ding-dong stuff I threw out. So I replied respectfully and told him no and suggested that there were far more interesting things I had done. Well, it’s funny because he assured me his audience would be into this sort of thing. Well, you know every record I’ve ever done, ever, I have never made a penny on. Never once. And you know the years of work for this small advance. It’s just funny to me.

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