Chris Thile. Photo: Cassandra Jenkins.

During its long run, Nickel Creek was no stranger to Birmingham, and the newgrass band’s members have continued that tradition this week. Sara Watkins played her first Birmingham solo show at Vulcan Park on Sunday, and her brother Sean Watkins joined her on guitar. On Thursday, mandolin player Chris Thile will join the Alabama Symphony Orchestra at the Alys Stephens Center as a guest composer and soloist, kicking off its 2009-2010 Symphony 7 series. Together, they’ll play Thile’s Mandolin Concerto as well as a selection of other works.

Thile has played here in the past with Nickel Creek, solo and with his current band, Punch Brothers. Birmingham Box Set spoke to him about writing music for these different projects and the challenges of composing for a symphony.

Birmingham Box Set: You’ve played in Birmingham many times in many different contexts, and we’re excited to have you back.

Chris Thile: I’m very excited. I’m very pleased.

It’s definitely going to be a different thing. I’m thrilled that the symphony decided to take a chance and program the piece. I’m particularly excited because this is the only program in which the concerto appears that I will have had a hand in conceiving. Justin Brown, the conductor, called me and we sorted of plotted things out together as far as the other music that will appear. So I think it’s even more of a legitimate collaboration than normal between a soloist and orchestra.

We got to talk about things that might help illuminate where the piece is coming from. There’s going to be some Bartok, who I’m just thoroughly obsessed with, and a little bit of Radiohead and some Bach.

BBS: Tell me more about the Mandolin Concerto and what we’ll hear when you play with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra.

CT: I’ve long craved the opportunity to make music with an orchestra, and particularly to write music for an orchestra. … I love music. Let’s start there. I love music. I love any form that it happens to take when in the hands of able musician. I think it can take the form of a symphony, it can take the form of a great record like [Radiohead's] OK Computer. Or it can take short forms. To me they’re all the same.

Great music is very, very much … it presents a fairly united front. I like to think of it in the following terms: A great symphony, for instance, is more like a great fiddle tune than it is a bad symphony.

So I think it was inevitable that I would try to write something for an orchestra just because that’s one of the options. I just love music so much that I just really want to exhaust the possibilities that are available to me. The more I studied orchestral music, the more I felt like I really wanted to try my hand at it. But I felt like it was probably a bad idea to jump into something that was purely symphonic. So the idea of a mandolin concerto was presented to me by my manager, so I laughed a little bit and decided it was the perfect balance of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Mandolin I’m quite familiar with and symphony I’m not comfortable with at all.

It was an intense experience for me but I had a great time. Those are the kind of experiences I like the most, the nerve-wracking kind. The whole thing, it was very instructive for me. I feel like I’m a better musician for it. I’m particularly excited, now that I’ve played it a couple times, I’m just excited with the collaborative opportunities that this kind of work presents. There’s 50 musicians on stage. We’re all in it together. We’re working toward this common goal, which is to make some good music.

It’s a lot of responsibility for me, as the soloist and the composer, to work with the orchestra and to work with the conductor, and to make it in a very short time so people can take ownership of it. That’s a very important thing for me.

BBS: How is composing for an orchestra different than writing a bluegrass tune?

CT: I would stress again that I never consider the music I make to be this or that or the other. It’s all the same to me. I’m older now and I feel that I’m a much better musician than I once was. I’m not anywhere near where I want to be, but I’m trying my damndest, I assure you.

The basic principles of music making are the same. It needs to be good. It needs to have a strong sense of melody. In my opinion, you’re always conjuring up a sense of inevitability. I hate it when music sounds arbitrary. I want it to be inevitable but surprising. You start there.

Certainly the nuts and bolts of it, of a symphonic piece, are very different in a sort of superficial way. There are bassoons and things to account for. That’s of course different than if I’m writing a banjo part. The chief difference is not in writing music for a bluegrass band and writing music for a symphony, the chief difference is writing music down at all. As in writing down music and teaching it to other people.

In that sense, it’s not that different. It takes more time. It takes more energy. Because I don’t know these particularly woodwinds and percussion for instance, I don’t particularly know those instruments like the back of my hand. … I know [bluegrass] instruments very well. I have to be very engaged and aware, particularly aware of my faults as a musician, to be keenly aware of all of the things that I have the potential to screw up, and guard against that and try to keep the big picture in mind, which is a little bigger when you’re dealing with a symphony.

BBS: Is it challenging to work with these different symphony orchestras across the country?

CT: So far, it’s just been a really stimulating opportunity to interact with a lot of different people who are very good at what they do. Everyone’s good at different things, so you want to kind of find a way to make use of those things. It’s like a certain part of this piece was great with this symphony because of this one little thing they do really well. Then the next orchestra … you just kind of have to go with it.

I’ve just seen so much with music that’s through composed, it seems like it’s become a little bit tyrannical, that a composer is really a dictator and the musicians are sort of forced to do his or her bidding. It seems like it undermines the spirit of music making. Part of what makes being a musician amazing is the opportunity to sort of collaborate in the abstract or to express yourself with others in the abstract. I don’t know of any other art form where that’s the norm. I love that.

Not that you should be a pushover by any means or settle for less. But rather, every musician has areas of proficiency and deficiency, and a large group of musicians will reflect that in lots of different little ways. So I think it’s important to be aware of that and embrace it rather than try to sweep it under the rug.

Because the piece is ultimately a representation of my proficiencies and deficiencies. It’s a celebration of those. I think that spirit needs to carry on into the reproduction of it.

… It’s really fun for me. What I would again love to express is that I think people need to humanize the orchestra, to humanize the entire setting. … It’s such an incredible music-making tool, and it does all of us a disservice to think of it as this sort of very formal entity. I think that aspect of the performance convention is fairly antiquated. I don’t think it’s relevant to our society. I think that’s why orchestras all over the world have been suffering … It’s nobody’s fault, but there’s just a stigma I think attached to orchestra concerts, that it’s going to be sort of buttoned up and kind of something for old rich people to get into.

It’s not. It’s not that. It’s something for anyone to get into, whether they’re old and rich or young and poor. It’s a spectacular sound to hear, and the music at this concert, Bartok’s …. That piece is spectacular. It’s so different and yet so similar to the Bach double and to the Radiohead, and my piece is made in the spirit that says all of these things are the same. They are made by people with common goals, which is to produce good music. They come up with ways that are different on the outside, perhaps, but very, very similar on the inside. What makes them great is very similar.

It’s absurd that that experience wouldn’t be on everyone’s radar. And it works both ways. Regular symphony goers, they should go out to the rock room and hear Andrew Bird and hear Grizzly Bear.

I hear a lot of people in the symphony world grousing about how young people aren’t coming to their shows, but they’re not exactly going to the other shows. They’re ultimately guilty of the same close-mindedness. It works both ways. It’s really up to the people who have realized that there’s a problem to start making it happen. I think the idea that the symphony is not just a bunch of old dead guy music, and even the music that did happen to be written by old dead guys … that music is very much alive if performed well. That’s the point, in fact, that great music can’t die. It’s hard to get younger people somewhere if they don’t know that there’s somewhere to be.

It’s a very round about way of saying it works both ways. People who are used to going to the cushy symphony hall, if they’re wondering why it’s having so much trouble, perhaps they should go see what’s not having trouble and see that there is something very unique about that concert experience, something very vibrant and participatory. As late as the late 1800s, people were hooting and hollering at symphony performances.

That’s why it works both ways. You have a lot of performing arts presented and things wanting young people to come, but are they going to where the young people are? It really goes both ways. Good music comes from everywhere. That’s my biggest point. It’s coming from everywhere, and it’s coming from everywhere because there’s nothing to distinguish where everywhere is. It regrettably gets siphoned off into all these different elements. I would love to be a very small part of beginning to tear down those dividers.

BBS: What’s ahead for you?

CT: Lots more Punch Brothers stuff. We are currently working on our next record. I’m very, very excited about this. In fact we’re on the road right now. We’re in Sewanee, Tenn. We’re just now starting to perform some of these new songs for the first time. I’m starting to see [the songs grow] legs. It’s just so much fun. These songs are growing by leaps and bounds nightly.

The Punch Brothers are the focus, for the foreseeable future, that’s going to be my outlet. I’m working with Edgar Meyer, always, in various ways. Jon Brion and I are planning on doing something. I’m going to make a Bach record eventually.

It’s a joy. Pure joy.

Chris Thile plays with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra at the Alys Stephens Center on Thursday evening.  The event begins with cocktails at 6 p.m. and is followed by the concert at 7 p.m. and an on-site after party at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 to $25 and are available at alabamasymphony.org or by calling 251-7727. Listen to the ASO’s podcast previewing the concert on the Symphony 7 website.