Category: Commentary

Pamela Z Photo by Lori Eanes

Technology (whether “high” or “low”) has always had an effect on my work, and I have no reason to believe that will change in the next 25 years. I think that all artists are to some extent influenced by the tools they use to make their art. In my case, those tools have included digital processors, Macintosh computers, software, samplers, a wearable MIDI controller, and (perhaps the most technically sophisticated of all) the human voice. Each time I have introduced a new tool into my arsenal, it has resulted in new ideas and added new colors to my palate. Recent forays into composing for ensembles using conventional acoustic instruments have sent me off in new directions, and my current attempts to create performance works that use MAX MSP software have initiated new ideas as well. For the past sixteen or so years, I have been creating a body of electroacoustic work. Not only do these works require the combination of electronics and voice (and/or other acoustic instruments) but the works would have never developed in the same way had I been using a different set of tools.

Paul Lansky Photo courtesy New Albion

I’d like to reply by first rephrasing the question: how do you think your music will change as a result of technology?

I haven’t the faintest idea.

All I know is that technology has already had, and will continue to have a radical effect on the music I write and the processes I use to write it. Very little I’ve done would have been possible without the radically different perspectives and working methods offered by computing technology.

But just as we no longer notice that the bends, bobs and weaves of some electric guitar playing are the result of a technology that allows the use of a lighter gauge string, for example, or that the construction of the modern flute was facilitated by the industrial revolution, I would hope that the music I write will ultimately hide the technology used to create it and that its technological underpinnings will consequently be uninteresting. I hope that new technologies will continue to influence the music I write, but I will do my best to write music which succeeds in hiding them, or at least making them worthy of a footnote at best. My feeling is that music succeeds only when it transcends its machinery.

Frank J. Oteri Photo by Melissa Richard

Is the orchestra a viable contemporary American institution? That’s a question that’s been on a lot of people’s minds both within and outside the orchestral music community as well as within the new music community which all too frequently has been treated like an opposition political party.

There are two schools of thought about the function that the orchestra should serve in a community. One camp contends that the orchestra is a sonic museum that preserves the timeless classics of our musical heritage, presenting them again and again in a live setting so new audiences can discover them and that audiences already familiar with them can gain new insights with each rehearing. The other camp contends that the orchestra must take a pro-active role in our society, performing and commissioning new works, doing extensive community outreach and being at the cutting edge of new technologies. Opponents of the museum approach say the orchestra is outmoded and irrelevant to contemporary society, a throwback to the old boy system, a torchbearer of “Dead White European Male” culture to the exclusion of the achievements of all other people. Opponents of the pro-active model contend that orchestras should do what they do best, which is to play great music, and might rightly point to such horrific models as the expunging of “degenerate art” in Nazi regime’s rewriting of the canon or the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China as proof that dictating artistic choices based on so-called “politically correct” grounds yields a tepidly satisfying aesthetic experience at best.

Much can be gained by looking at both sides of this argument and seeing how to preserve the great legacy of orchestral music of the past while at the same time building a new and vibrant orchestral experience which may indeed be tomorrow’s great legacy. We invited you to take a stand in this great debate in our interactive forum

This month, we have chosen to enter the NewMusicBoxing ring with four members of the staff of the Philadelphia Orchestra: artistic administrator Simon Woods, president Joseph H. Kluger, marketing director Ed Cambron and assistant communications director Brian Atwood. The Philadelphia Orchestra, considered by most music aficionados to be one of our greatest orchestras but rarely perceived of as a maverick in the orchestral music community, has taken an unusual step for their 1999-2000 season. Every work played in a subscription concert this season was composed in the 20th century. And while contemporary music fans may balk at a “20th century” season filled with Ravel and Rachmaninoff but missing Carter and Messiaen, it’s a more-than-welcome change of pace from the bottomless sea of Basically Beethoven, Totally Tchaikovsky or Masochistically Mozart. Andrew Druckenbrod’s hyper-history surveys the commissioning and premiering legacies of 18 additional American orchestras in an attempt to determine how American and contemporary contemporary American orchestras actually are. We have supplemented both the Philadelphia Orchestra interview and the orchestral hyper-history with a variety of documents ranging from press releases to lists of commissions and premieres spanning the entire century to try to paint as complete a picture as we possibly can. In fact, we have also supplemented our leading news story this month — an announcement of two premieres by the New York Philharmonic financed by the Walt Disney Company — with the complete transcript of the press conference led by Disney CEO Michael Eisner.

We decided to contrast this serious probing by having a little fun with people’s memories of premieres. We’ve asked composers John Corigliano and David Del Tredici, flutist Laurel Ann Maurer, and former music critic Tim Page to tell us their best and worst memories of premieres from the varying viewpoints of composer, performer and audience member. Unfortunately, orchestral music was not the focus of a large percent of either our listings of concerts featuring American repertoire or our online exploration center for new recordings of American music. But there are many fascinating items to be found there nonetheless.

We hope that through presenting all this material we can inspire further dialog and help energize the playing field of American orchestras, a community which, in size and geographic distribution, is on par with America’s other great team sports and which, if the conditions are right, can create an evening as memorable as a shut-out game in a World Series!

John Corigliano Photo by Julian Kreeger courtesy G. Schirmer

The best premiere I can remember is that of my CLARINET CONCERTO with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic and Stanley Drucker as the soloist. My father, who died in 1975 — two years before the premiere — was the concertmaster of the Philharmonic, and they had never played a piece of mine, so the concert had a very special meaning to me. It was a blazing performance — one a composer usually only dreams about.

My worst premiere was in the 1960’s when a mezzo-soprano, who had won the prestigious JOY OF SINGING award, gave the first performance of THE CLOISTERS, a cycle of four songs with text by William M. Hoffman.

The problem was that the singer didn’t want to use the music (which was admirable), but also didn’t know the songs (which wasn’t). The result was a Gertrude Stein text set to a John Cage score. The New York Times loved it. I’ve always wondered what they would have thought of the piece we actually wrote.”

Tim Page Photo courtesy St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

I’ll have to choose the world premiere of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians — April 3, 1976 at Town Hall in New York — as the most influential concert I ever attended. It opened new sonic worlds to me and literally pushed me into criticism: I HAD to react to this music somehow and I wrote about it all night, never expecting anything would be published. And I’d choose the first performance of the orchestral version of Reich’s Tehillim in 1981 as the “worst” premiere. The score was terrific — I already knew it in the original chamber version — but Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic were not at all used to this sort of music and everything fell apart. (P.S. It was much better the second night.)

David Del Tredici Photo by Robin Holland courtesy Boosey & Hawkes

Best:
1976 premiere of FINAL ALICE in Chicago with Solti conducting and Barbara Hendricks, soprano soloist. Because the piece was so tonal — long stretches in the purest D Major — I was terrified the piece would be ridiculed by the public, press and players. As well, the performance apparatus was huge and unorthodox: winds/brass in 4, a siren, a theremin, complex soprano amplification, orchestral players asked to whisper.

What happened? The audience cheered and stood up, the reviews were ecstatic. I was on my way.

Worst:
Premiere of POP-POURRI for soprano solo, rock group, chorus and orchestra at La Jolla, California in 1968. This was the first piece I’d written with orchestra. The orchestration was a mess and the small orchestra unequal to the task. The conservative audience hearing electric guitars and saxes in a concert hall at this time (1968) were horrified. I felt as though I had just farted in church and then had to bow in recognition.

Judith Lang Zaimont Photo courtesy Judith Lang Zaimont

What is ‘American music’?

1. It reflects the vital, energized, young and action-oriented nation we are.
   In general it’s color-sensitive, edgy and, more often than not, pulsed — wickedly pulsed. It likes to take chances, and, as befits our polyglot national character, sometimes incorporates a staggering variety of modes of expression.
2. In a very real sense, it is the lifeblood of our country expressed in sound.
3. Any/all music written or improvised by Americans.

Howard Mandel Photo courtesy Howard Mandel

America’s music is wide and wild, fed by hundreds of old and new musical strains. It starts with Native American chants, flutes, rhythms, North American colonies of the Spanish and French and Germans as well as the Pilgrims, in the community functions, dilletante artistry and diverse forms of entertainment, becomes a free-flowing “folk” music and simultaneously a “commercial” music around the Civil War — when black and white gospel, blues, ballad and later instrumental (“jazz”) impulses mix with immigrant Hispanic, Irish, Jewish, Asian and European traditional and art musics in the city and marketplace. Dissemination of American music through American technology has led to the powerful, polyglot pop and art musics America exports today. American music celebrates the individual — the composer, the visionary, the improvising artist, the “star”: so American music sounds like a multitude.