Rostam Batmanglij’s lilting, classical string arrangements are one the hallmarks of Vampire Weekend. The composer performs tonight at the Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz with the Tosca String Quartet, which premieres new works by Golden Hornet Project’s Graham Reynolds and Peter Stopschinski, along with Sam Arnold and Will Taylor.
Off the Record: What exactly is happening at the Ritz?
Rostam Batmanglij: I’ll be performing three songs with the Tosca Strings Quartet. One is an instrumental, the other two I’ll be singing and playing a little bit of guitar. I guess the idea is for me to write music that can only be played in this acoustic environment, an intimate setting. It takes of advantages of strings and what you can do with them.
OTR: How so?
RB: I have a strange relationship with that whole realm of contemporary classical music. It’s something that I feel very disconnected from, but at the same time there’s a kind of magic that can happen when you write for strings and hear the parts interacting with each other. Stravinsky said towards the end of his life that he was wary of strings because they could sound so much like a human voice. Strings have that quality but also many other qualities. They can be whispery or percussive. I’m interested in exploring that spectrum.
OTR: When you write for Vampire Weekend, is it normally for a string quartet?
RB: I don’t think so. I usually approach the writing of string parts as part of the recording, as whatever would suit the song best. Later, I’ll adapt whatever I’ve written for a string quartet for our performances. If it means three violins or two cellos, which is not something that you would get in a string quartet, and it would sound better on the recording, I’ll go for that and worry about the performance later on.
OTR: Speaking of live performance, I caught your recent set at Stubb’s and I was really taken back by the energy of it all.
RB: I think we all felt like that was one of our best shows from the tour and probably one of our best shows, period. This tour started in the cold of western Canada, and we went through a blizzard in Denver. We experienced a lot of inclement weather. This was our first outdoor show of the tour, and I think that gave us a lot of energy, and the crowd was great.
OTR: I remember Vampire Weekend working with the Tosca String Quartet at ACL in 2008. Is that where this new collaboration really started?
RB: Yeah. Their management got in contact with our management. I’ve been excited about what I’ve been working on and wanted to test it out in a performance setting. One of the pieces I’ll be playing, “Welcoming the Betrayers,” I haven’t finished recording. It’s kind of a work in progress. I’m excited by that.
OTR: Why do you feel disconnected from contemporary classical music?
RB: When I was at Columbia, I studied music and thought about going to grad school for music. I witnessed a lot of the graduate school seminars and got a sense of that the whole culture of it, and I was repulsed by it. The idea of interacting with the music being made around you seemed so foreign to them. I want to make music in a world where everything is connected.
OTR: Do you envision these compositions working their way into either Vampire Weekend or Discovery?
RB: I do think they’ll released down the line, but I’m not exactly sure what it would be. I don’t know if it would be a 7-inch single, an EP, or an album. The premise would be these songs that are taking advantage of strings in the same way that the Discovery project was about fuzzy synths and synthetic handclaps as the focal point. That’s a way I like to work, giving myself some kind of limitation. If all the colors are available to you, it’s easier to make a painting that ends up being brown.
This article appears in April 23 • 2010.