If orchestras
are families and concert halls are their homes, then living composers
are too often strangers who show up briefly just before everyone's
ready to dig into a meaty meal of Brahms. A few composers are like
distant relatives who never appear in person, but send some hard,
indigestible musical fruitcake at which everybody dutifully hacks
away for a week. Most composers, though, wouldn't mind dropping
by and settling in for a little while, and few musicians would turn
down a chance to spend time with someone new who has something potentially
interesting to say.
More composers
can come knocking now through the Music Alive program administered
by Meet the Composer and the American Symphony Orchestra League. Music
Alive supports orchestral residencies, although they're short
enough that perhaps we should think of the composers less as residents
than as houseguests–the sort who come in and shake up the household
for a couple of weeks, leaving everyone tired but excited and wanting
to do it again.
Jonathan
Spitz, principal cellist of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, found
himself providing a classical foil to a solo pipa, the plucked Chinese
instrument, in the concerto Song of the Pipa, which Bun-Ching
Lam wrote during his Music Alive residency in New Jersey. And it's
not just the composers who do the composing. When Derek Bermel descended
upon the Albany Symphony Orchestra, violinist Elizabeth Silver wrote
and performed with one of her students a duet inspired by Cape Breton
fiddling, while bassist Luke Baker collaborated with one of his students
on a large work that riffed on both Bach and the theme from Star
Wars.
"There's
a tendency for people to think of
new music as a generic, monolithic body of work, which it is not,"
says Jesse Rosen, chief program officer of the American Symphony Orchestra
League. "So this gives orchestras, their staffs, their trustees,
and their audiences a much more immediate, direct sense of a particular
composer and that person's music, so they can all talk to each
other about new music more effectively."
Music Alive
is about more than showcasing an individual composer's work.
That's one component, of course, often with composers writing
pieces to be premiered during their residencies. But they also advise
music directors on programming works by other living composers, and
venture into the community to get students and nonmusicians more involved
with contemporary music.
Drawing on
an annual budget of about $150,000, Music Alive funds residencies
nationwide with orchestras large and small for two to eight weeks.
Composers receive $2,500 a week, and orchestras get $1,000 per residency
week, which can be used for anything from hiring extra musicians to
buying newspaper ads. The program pays for the composers' travel
and hotel costs and provides a per diem. It also pays for the composers
and each orchestra's residency director (often the music director,
but sometimes an administrative staffer) to attend a group planning
and orientation session in New York City.
"Because
of that big orientation meeting, we think of this less as a grant-based
program and more as access to a network," says Heather Hitchens,
president of Meet the Composer. "People talk to each other about
what they're doing in their orchestras, and at the end of the
day they wind up with more ideas than they came with, and more contacts
in the field."
Some of the
past residencies have paired Michael Abels with the Richmond Symphony,
Osvaldo Golijov with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Michael Daugherty
with the Colorado Symphony, Adolphus Hailstork with the Albany Symphony,
Tod Machover and P.Q. Phan with the American Composers Orchestra,
Robert Sierra with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Tomas Svoboda with
the Helena Symphony.
This season—the
program's third—finds ten American composers matched to
seven orchestras, ranging from the Greater Twin Cities Youth Orchestra
in Minnesota to the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, D.C.
Composers include old hands like Ingram Marshall and Tobias Picker,
but also such newcomers as John Mackey and Jeremy Gill. Six of the
composers are 35 or younger, but there's no campaign to phase
out the gray eminences.
"Meet
the Composer is about the widest spectrum aesthetically and age-wise,"
says Hitchens. "We say (to the Music Alive selection panel),
'Vote with your heart, and if we don't have the proper diversity
we'll go back and take another look,' and it just so happens
that these are the composers we've wound up with. These proposals
had the best hope for doing something new and different."
Perfect
Pairs
Music Alive
does not match composers to orchestras; the participants come already
paired. Dan Coleman, for example, was well acquainted with the Tucson
Symphony Orchestra when his Music Alive residency was approved. Coleman,
born in 1972, is an adjunct professor of composition at the University
of Arizona. A Juilliard alum who has studied with such composers as
Stephen Albert, Robert Beaser, George Crumb, and William Bolcom, Coleman
writes music that is accessible but not pops-pandering. More than
once, his style has been compared to that of Benjamin Britten, and
he has enjoyed a surprising number of performances and commissions
for somebody who is barely 30.
"When
I was finishing graduate school, I joined the roster of a kind of
boutique management/concert presenter called Young Concert Artists,"
Coleman says. "I was their first composer, and the association
did a lot to identify me with chamber music." He received three
commissions in 1995–96 through Young Concert Artists, and has
created works for the likes of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln
Center, the Ahn Trio, the Cypress String Quartet, and the Seattle
Chamber Music Society. Since 1994, he has also been composer-in-association
with the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and has had work performed by the Dallas Symphony, the American Composers
Orchestra, and a number of regional orchestras.
So Coleman
is hardly a beginner, and he easily impressed Tucson Symphony music
director George Hanson with a batch of his scores and CDs—particularly
his Chamber Symphony, which Hanson performed in February. "It
struck me as a work that was very sincere," Hanson says, "and
for me that's the key to a truly gifted composer—somebody
who is not just a craftsman, somebody who knows how to put together
the structure and how to utilize the instruments. The kind of composer
I enjoy working with is someone who has something to express and knows
how to express it."
And expresses
it in a way that the Tucson Symphony can handle. This is a solid orchestra
that has acquitted itself well in recent seasons with such works as
John Corigliano's Symphony No. 1 and Stephen Paulus' Violin
Concerto. The orchestra has no experience, though, with the oppressively
difficult scores of composers like Milton Babbitt, who has brought
even Philadelphia Orchestra string players to their knees. According
to Meet the Composer's Hitchens, the Music Alive panel would
nix a partnership it felt was unbalanced in terms of technique.
Once Coleman
and the Tucson Symphony proved to be a good fit and got the go-ahead
late last year, the residency's details gradually started coming
together. The first act was to get Coleman started on two commissions:
Focoso, a concert opener to be played this November, and The
Swing of Things, designed to fit into a program swirling around
a waltz theme. Coleman says both works should be easily exportable,
but he is writing them with the Tucson Symphony specifically in mind.
"I certainly
learned a lot from working with them on my Chamber Symphony, and I
have their sound in my ear," he says. He felt free to incorporate
jazz and swing elements into The Swing of Things, for example,
because of his friendship with one of the orchestra's percussionists
and the expertise some of the principals have shown in jazz playing.
And he calls Focoso, which means "fire," a "desert
overture" written during Tucson's summer, which would have
been hot enough already even without the region's huge wildfires.
A
Direct Benefit
Jesse Rosen
of the American Symphony Orchestra League says these residencies offer
a direct benefit to an orchestra's rank-and-file musicians. He
recalls the relationship Osvaldo Golijov established with the members
of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. At a luncheon for the composer and
musicians, according to Rosen, "Players came up to him and said
they were glad they got to know who he was and what the piece meant
to him; they said, 'We can play your music better now because
we know what it means to you.' And I suspect in one form or another
that happens throughout these residencies."
Working on
subscription concerts will just be the most public side of Coleman's
scattered three-week Tucson Symphony residency. "I want to show
I can not just write music that will be useful to the orchestra, but
I also want to be useful behind the scenes," he says. Coleman
and the orchestra's outreach and education director are devising
ways he can serve as the orchestra's ambassador to the community.
That means going to local schools to talk about composing and playing
music, "generating interest in classical music at a grassroots
level and introducing students to the idea that this is something
they can aspire to and participate in," he says. He's also
helping middle- and high-school students through the orchestra's
already-established young composers program, which culminates in the
orchestra reading the kids' original scores.
He'll
probably also accompany the orchestra's string quartet on visits
to schools, where he hopes to "speak with some authority and
real impact about music as a world of ideas. As a composer I've
got some practical experience in a concert context as well as an academic
background that allows me to speak about music in cultural and contemporary
and historical contexts. As music education becomes more and more
devalued, it helps for students and their teachers to be reminded
that classical music has a long intellectual history, and it can amplify
a lot of areas of study in history and literature and visual arts."
Coleman may
also get involved in a wine-and-cheese gathering for adult audience
members who can chat with him, members of the orchestra, and possibly
guest artists and local intellectuals about the concert's music
and its context.
Mix
and Mingle
Mingling
with current subscribers, though, is a fairly small part of these
residencies. Many composers are working hard to help diversify classical
music's audience. Coleman, who still looks like a college student,
is reaching out to young people. Osvaldo Golijov made significant
inroads into Los Angeles' Latino sector, and Robert Sierra spent
much of his time cultivating Philadelphia's Puerto Rican community—and
reminding the Philadelphia Orchestra administration that it would
have to adjust some of its policies, including ticket pricing, to
get these people into the concert hall on a regular basis. During
his stay with the New Jersey Symphony, Bun-Ching Lam gave a lecture
and demonstration on the pipa to about 120 children and their parents
at the New Jersey Chinese Language School. Bright Sheng and Zhou Long
helped shape the Seattle Symphony's existing Pacific Rim Festival,
swimming with styles and performers far from the European classical
mainstream.
In Seattle,
living composers are hardly a novelty, so Music Alive has amplified
their usual involvement in the orchestra and community. "The
difference with this residency," says Seattle Symphony executive
director Deborah Card, "is that it gave us funding to be able
to have a longer-term and deeper relationship with a composer. I think
that they've done a good job of creating a program that isn't
just, 'Here's some money, go do what you like with it.'
These composers have been able to come in around specific programming,
young-composer training, and very targeted education programs, and
have a higher, more visible impact during their time here."
In contrast,
one of Stephen Paulus' biggest challenges at the Annapolis Symphony
Orchestra was to persuade the board that living
composers are not dangerous exotic animals.
"Annapolis
had done very little new music before, and they had major issues on
the board about this," says Meet the Composer's Hitchens.
"So one of their goals was for Stephen to meet with the board,
talk about new music, and bust some of the myths about what new music
was; they thought it would all be hard and sound the same way. Stephen
really changed their perception of what new music can be, and at the
end of the residency these same board members were traveling to Carnegie
Hall to hear Stephen Paulus pieces, and they were saying, 'Wow,
who's our next composer going to be?'"
What Paulus
seems proudest of, though, is his collaboration with seven kids from
the Chesapeake Youth Symphony Orchestra. Paulus initially resisted
a suggestion that he have youngsters assist him in writing a new work.
"I thought, how are we gonna do that? This is my piece,"
Paulus says.
He did organize
some sessions with nine- to 16-year-olds working on their own pieces,
though, and liked what he heard so much that he eventually incorporated
one theme by each participant into his commissioned work Dialogues.
"I called it that because we were talking to each other musically,
and part of my business there was to have conversations with people
about what the music is about and what we should be doing with it,"
he explains. "So this piece was able to be genuinely my music
and my style, but it had these other things worked in there more or
less seamlessly."
At the end
of his residency, Paulus organized an afternoon salon in which orchestra
musicians played and discussed the students' original compositions,
and then at the premiere of Dialogues he had the kids come
up on stage and take a bow with him. "After all, in a way, it
was their piece, too," he says.
Resident
composers have also helped orchestras bond with other organizations
in their communities. In Annapolis, when Paulus wasn't sweet-talking
the board, says ASOL's Rosen, "He seems to have connected
with every group in the city: a local dance company and a dance school,
and with music students in the public schools. He seemed to be just
about everywhere.
"In
Los Angeles, one of the things Golijov did was participate in a public
seminar on Latino artists in America. An actor, an opera singer, and
another artist participated in a community dialog where maybe 200
people attended. It was organized by the L.A. Philharmonic in partnership
with the Latin American Museum, so it really opened up a relationship
between the Philharmonic and the Latin-American community."
Taking
it to a New Level
Meanwhile,
back at the concert hall, Music Alive composers aren't just sitting
back while their orchestras play one or two of their new pieces. Most
offer advice on programming new music in general; Dan Coleman managed
to get a piece by George Tsontakis, one of his former teachers, onto
this season's Tucson Symphony schedule. Derek Bermel cocurated
a Dutch-American festival for Dogs of Desire, the Albany Symphony's
18-piece, new-music ensemble; the program commissioned works from
eight composers.
Bermel had
a particularly hectic five-week residency in Albany, broken into three
stints. He soloed in his own clarinet concerto, organized a clarinet
summit for 75 high school players, ran a workshop for third-graders
who made and played their own Brazilian shakers called caxixis, and
created the "Dynamic Duos" program, in which orchestra members
collaborated with students on composing and performing new duets.
"I love
this idea," Bemal says. "It used what already existed within
the ensemble to generate a terrific concert and new pieces and perhaps
new composers. Sometimes it's difficult for a teacher who has
an outstandingly creative student to figure out what to do with them
next; this is the type of thing that brings that teacher-student relationship
to a new level."
Although
he's an experienced composer, Bermel was something of a residency
novice. "This is like baptism by fire, but I learned a whole
lot about how to do a residency with an orchestra," he says.
"I worked with just about every age group possible, I worked
with members of the orchestra on creative projects, I worked with
the conductor, I worked with the whole management side of the orchestra,
I played as a soloist, I was involved in curating, commissioning .
. . I went through the wringer with this residency."
"I wish
that the residency could be a bit longer so there would be some more
breathing room, more time to follow through, and to really get to
know the musicians," says Bun-Ching Lam of his New Jersey experience.
"However, I think we accomplished what we set out to do quite
adequately."
So it's
grueling, but can a brief residency leave a lasting impression? "That's
something we have to track; how far that contribution extends only
time will tell," admits Meet the Composer's Hitchens. "A
lot of orchestras have used this as their first-time involvement with
a composer, so we'll have to see what happens next."
Composer
Derek Bermel certainly has no complaints. "It's great when
you can get the energy that exists already in a group, and harness
it to bring forth something unexpected and wonderful like this,"
he says of his experience. "It's a wonderful combination
of education, creation of new material, performance, and community."
WELL CONNECTED
Dan Coleman,
awarded a three-week Music Alive residency with the Tucson Symphony
this season, is also a highly accomplished composer of chamber music
for strings. "I get a positive vibe from his music," says violinist
Ida Kavafian, who got to know it well in 1995 when Coleman was composer-in-residence
at her Music from Angel Fire festival in New Mexico. "There's something
uplifting about it; it comes from a place that is not negative and
brooding. And it's very well crafted."
"Dan understands
stringed instruments very well," says Tom Stone, second violinist
of the Cypress String Quartet, which in 1999 commissioned and recorded
Coleman's Quartetto Ricercare. "He used to date a really incredible
violinist, and he has the sound in his head and he knows what the
instrument can do."
"I'd had
an association with Metamorphosen, a string orchestra in Boston, since
I was 21, so I was very comfortable with the stringed instruments
technically," Coleman says of preparing for his quartet. "A lot of
people's first string quartets can be self-conscious and nervous,
because they think they have a lot to prove. But I tried to be as
un-self-conscious as I could and just wrote music I wanted to hear
in the medium and didn't care if people took it seriously or not."
People are
taking his music seriously, indeed. Reviewing the quartet in the Tucson
Citizen, Dan Buckley wrote, "From the top, one was impressed with
his ability to create, chip away at, and reassemble tonal materials
with ease. He teetered on the romantic only to create paradox and
ultimately transfigure lines in unexpected and appealing ways. Even
the most lyrical passing of thematic material was dappled with spiky
little diversions of personality. In one section he had the quartet
sliding between chordal and monophonic material, shuffling the tonal
deck in ways that recalled a viol consort on serious drugs."
Recreational
pharmaceuticals aren't required, though, to play Coleman's chamber
music. Here's a list of music he has produced so far that includes
stringed instruments; you can find more information, hear samples,
and purchase scores at www.dancoleman.com:
