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Philip Glass at the NEC Conference photo by Jeff Thiebauth

In early September New England Conservatory‘s Research Center for Learning Through Music hosted a three-day national conference entitled “Making Music Work in Public Education: Innovative Programs and Research — A National Perspective.” The conference was organized by NEC’s Larry Scripp, Director of the Research Center.

The public forum featured six presentations on a wide range of topics, including a presentation by David Dik of the Metropolitan Opera Guild on the “Creating Original Opera” program, and how it has been implemented in the Lynn, Massachusetts public schools. Larry Scripp described NEC’s “Learning Through Music” curriculum and how it functions in the Nahant and Lynn, MA public schools and the Conservatory Lab Charter School.

Contemporary music and music creation play an integral part in the Learning Through Music program as it has been implemented in the Charter School. Last spring, for instance, the students studied Philip Glass‘ opera Aknahten, learning rhythmic patterns and a portion of an aria. When Glass, who is on the Advisory Board for the Center, came to town for performances of the opera by Boston Lyric Opera, he visited with the students and discussed some of his compositional decisions.

“Students need live composers in front of them,” Scripp emphasized. “First-source experience is very important.” Glass was apparently “astonished” by the clarity of the students’ questions. For instance, in Aknahten, the title character, an Egyptian pharaoh, is cast as a countertenor. In a more traditional opera, perhaps, this role would have been assigned to a tenor or bass, and consequently the first not he sings comes as a great surprise. Scripps was amused by the directness of the children’s response: “Why is this guy singing like a girl?” Glass explained to them that he wanted this character to grab the audience’s attention from the very first note.

Scripps feels that this kind of information “is what [the Charter School] should be about, this real contact with the artistic process, this is learning through music.” Scripp plans to do this with other composers in the future: plans have already been made with Michael Gandolfi. Gandolfi has written an opera, Pinocchio’s Adventures in Funland, for eight or nine singers. These singers will work with the children on inventing their own music, and then they will perform Gandolfi’s opera.

Creating original music plays an important role in the Charter School’s curriculum. During each trimester, the students create an opera around an original theme. Last year, they created fairy-tale operas. They began by studying traditional fairy tales, then made up their own. The children then used their invented text for musical group improvisation. Not only did that help them memorize the words, it allowed them to explore issues surrounding the setting of text. Scripp observed from the children’s portfolios that many of them had discovered how music can heighten the emotion inherent in words.

The Conservatory Lab Charter School opened last year to children in kindergarten through third grade, and expanded this year to include the fourth grade. The School will continue to add a grade a year for the next two years. Students are admitted by lottery, with a total of twenty per grade level. Each student is given the opportunity to take free violin lessons, using an instrument provided by the school.

The NEC Research Center, established in April 1998, researches, develops, and manages Learning Through Music programs through partnerships with selected public schools. The curriculum is directly overseen by the Center at the Charter School, and in the Lynn and Nahant public schools. The Center is also indirectly involved with five other public schools. Scripp’s broad goal with Learning Through Music is to “stimulate varied forms of emotional, cognitive, physical, and artistic development” through “authentic and intensive musical study.” The program also includes professional development for NEC students on the college level.

The New England Conservatory Research Center has formed a consortium with some of the other organizations represented at the Conference: the Metropolitan Opera Guild’s “Creating Original Opera;” A+ Schools in North Carolina; Juilliard‘s Arts and Education Program; and the Ravinia Festival Music Outreach Program.

Zdenek Macal photo by Vidal

On September 28th at 8 p.m., Zdenek Macal conducted the Manhattan School of Music Symphony, marking his appointment as Director of Conducting Studies and Artistic Advisor for the School’s orchestral program. The concert featured Richard Danielpour‘s Celestial Night, alongside works by Mozart and Beethoven.

Mr. Macal has a longstanding working relationship with Mr. Danielpour, a fellow Manhattan School faculty member. He originally commissioned Celestial Night for the New Jersey Symphony, where Mr. Macal is Music Director, for their first concert at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in 1997. For this year’s opening concert, Macal programmed Danielpour’s Toward the Splendid City. The conductor has also recorded a CD of the composer’s music, featuring both of these works, with the Philharmonia Orchestra for Sony Classical.

The idea of a deep commitment to the works of a single composer is not new to Macal. During his tenure as Music Director of the Milwaukee Symphony, Macal championed the music of Roberto Sierra, inviting him to serve as Composer-In-Residence, and conducting some of his works thirty or forty times. Macal is very proud of the fact that he was influenced Sierra’s ability to secure a contract with a publishing house. "When publishers saw that [his works had received] a hundred performances from me, they got excited. That is [my] work, building the career of the composer, doing service to the music."

Macal first heard Danielpour’s music while he was still conducting in Milwaukee; the first piece he heard was the orchestra piece First Light. He likes Danielpour’s music because he finds it "very dramatic and rhythmical. There are lots of colors, but basically there is rhythmic energy." According to Macal, Danielpour has labeled him his "favorite conductor" because he, like the music, has "so much energy."

At the time of the interview, Maestro Macal had already led Manhattan School students in the first rehearsal of Celestial Night. He was very pleased that they could sit down and read it. "It is rhythmical stuff, very difficult," he commented. He credits this partly to the high level of technical proficiency now expected of incoming undergraduates. "The level is so high…this is not the first time I have done a contemporary piece and the students [have done] a great job." Macal also feels that contemporary repertoire is actually easier for students to grasp than, say, Mozart or Beethoven. "The stylistic things, the phrasing and articulation in Romantic and Classical music, that is what gives me the most work," Macal explained. "They are closer to Danielpour, they understand that, because [the music contains the sounds of] of New York, [and] they understand the streets of New York."

As Director of Conducting Studies at MSM, Macal will supervise the studies of two conductors at the post-graduate level. Macal feels that it is important for his students to learn contemporary scores, but that basically "if you can conduct Beethoven, you can conduct Stravinsky or Bartók." Macal appears to perceive the biggest difficulty in approaching contemporary music is complicated rhythms. He believes that for his young conductors, the ability to handle complicated rhythms is absorbed, to some extent, from the world around them, perhaps obviating the need for further development in the classroom. "The young generation has [such a] strong rhythmical sense. Young people hear rock, jazz, commercials on TV…there is much ‘beat’ in our lives, maybe too much."

Macal’s students seem to absorb contemporary music with ease, and he would like to see audiences behave similarly. At the same time, he understands the malaise of many listeners. He believes that the prodigious fragmentation of styles over the last one hundred fifty years is to blame. "If you go from Mozart to Beethoven to Berlioz and Wagner, the difference or turn-over is not so big. Beethoven had patterns of accents in his music that anticipate[d] Berlioz and Wagner. However, if you take from 1950 to 2000, the step ahead is huge." Then there is the proliferation of music sources in the twentieth century: TV, radio, recordings, the Internet. Macal feels that this has caused composers to desperately search for styles that are original. And unfortunately, "the audiences [can’t] absorb the amount of stuff coming at them." Macal described it this way: "If you liked a certain style, like a certain color of lipstick — in Beethoven’s time, there were just one or two colors! Now, there is a whole spectrum, [that may include] many colors that you don’t like."

As Music Director in New Jersey, Macal has also conducted premieres of pieces by George Walker and Anthony Newman. In March 2001, Macal will conduct the premiere of a new concerto for flute, Flauta Carioca, currently being written by Thomas Oboe Lee for Bart Feller, Principal Flute in the NJSO. Also in the spring of next year, Macal will guest conduct Philip Glass‘ new timpani concerto with timpanists Jonathan Haas and Richard Holmes and the St. Louis Symphony.

Eddie Marshall photo by Chela Shanti

Drummer and longtime Bay Area jazz leader Eddie Marshall is the recipient of the First Annual SFJAZZ Beacon Award presented by Stella Artois. The award will be given each year to a member of the Bay Area jazz community who has played a vital role in preserving the traditions and encouraging the growth of jazz in the Bay Area.

Marshall called the award "quite an honor." He claims the award was "totally unexpected." He had called Executive Director Randall Kline about hiring his quintet for this year’s SF Jazz Festival, and Kline told him "he had another idea." Marshall was surprised largely because he "considers himself a sideman. I’m just a drummer who has played with quite a lot of jazz celebrities," he explained.

In an interview, Kline responded by saying that he "never thought of him as not being prominent." He also contested Marshall’s description of himself as solely a sideman, pointing out that he co-led the seminal 1970s fusion band The Fourth Way and co-leads his current band, Holy Mischief.

Kline calls Marshall "a true local treasure," citing his "constant presence" on the San Francisco scene for the past three decades. When Kline first moved to San Francisco in 1975, he heard Eddie Marshall at Keystone Korner, where he was the house drummer, performing with musicians such as Bobby McFerrin and vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. In his long career, Marshall has also collaborated with jazz legends Stan Getz, Toshiko Akiyoshi, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, among many others.

Marshall’s involvement with the San Francisco scene is all the more remarkable when viewed in the context of the changes that have occurred during that time. In the early 1980s, the city lost Keystone Korner, and no major jazz club has taken its place. Instead, that space has been filled by Yoshi’s, "across the bay" in Oakland. Marshall also feels that the "dot-com generation" has been supporting many smaller clubs and jazz in restaurants. Kline explained that when he started the San Francisco Jazz Festival in 1983, he made a point of only using local musicians. He explained that with fewer people using San Francisco has a home base, "gradually the festival changed character, with more out-of-town players," although he still feels he maintains a "pretty good mix." Marshall has performed regularly at the Festival.

Marshall and his band recently released a new CD entitled Eddie Marshall and Holy Mischief. With the exception of one tune, the music was entirely written by Marshall. Listeners will have the opportunity to hear Marshall play not only drums, but also recorder, his unusual second instrument for many years. This instrument is strongly associated with the Baroque period, but Marshall had never heard any Baroque music when he bought a tenor recorder from Montgomery Ward at age 16. Now, he considers Baroque music to be "his favorite repertoire aside from jazz." He particularly enjoys the playing of Marion Verbruggen.

The new award is made possible by San Francisco Jazz Festival sponsor Stella Artois, which will make a $5,000 contribution to the SFJAZZ Education Program in the name of the Beacon Award honoree for the next three years or longer. Marshall is pleased that educational programs will benefit from the award. Marshall teaches at San Francisco State, at The Jazz School in Berkeley, and at home.

The SFJAZZ Beacon Award presented by Stella Artois will be given to Eddie Marshall on Thursday, November 2, at San Francisco’s Masonic Auditorium, in the San Francisco Jazz Festival concert “A Salute to Eddie Marshall.” Marshall will perform with Holy Mischief and in a historic reunion of The Fourth Way. Marshall will also be joined onstage by all-star special guests Bobby McFerrin, Bobby Hutcherson, and jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. Marshall has been put in charge of planning the program. He calls the task a "challenge," but he also explained that if he "show[ed] up for the award without playing" he "wouldn’t know what he was receiving it for."

The San Francisco Jazz Organization (SFJAZZ), founded in 1983, is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to preserving the traditions and encouraging the growth of jazz through presentation and education in the San Francisco Bay Area. SFJAZZ is the presenter of the annual San Francisco Jazz Festival, the SFJAZZ Spring Season, and multiple series of free outdoor concerts from June through October. The organization also produces a number of jazz education programs for youth and adults, as well as commissions for talented composers and an expanding array of other year-round events and programs.

Kevin Beavers photo by Lorin Burgess

Kevin Beavers, 29, was born in Colombia, grew up in West Virginia and holds degrees in composition from West Virginia University (B.M.) and the University of Michigan (M.M. and D.M.A. candidate). Currently, he is studying and working in Amsterdam on a grant from the Netherlands-America Foundation; he also teaches composition and theory at the Interlachen Summer Arts Academy. Mr. Beavers is the recipient of a commissioning grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lee Ettleson Prize, and four ASCAP Morton Gould Awards. He has received commissions from the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, the Detroit Civic Orchestra, and the Brooklyn Friends of Chamber Music.

Beaver’s Sinfonia, first performed by the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra in 1997, consists of three contrasting movements. The first movement, “Overture,” “starts big,” according to the composer, and features a “startling” country fiddle tune in the middle of an otherwise abstract texture. The second movement, “Winter Moon,” is based on the poem of the same name by Langston Hughes. Beavers compares the movement to a Mark Rothko painting, with “very little happen[ing].” It starts with some difficult, extremely high “icy” chords in the winds. Beaver named the last movement, “Chatterbox,” after a friend. Beaver describes the movement as a “big contrast” from the previous material. There is a “rap-like gesture” he gives to the winds, a steady drum beat, and a “very happy-go-lucky exciting finish” to this movement.

With Sinfonia, Beavers wanted to express “some of the shock and surprise of how life can twist and turn.” Beavers began work on the piece right around the time that his father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Sinfonia also betrays Beaver’s ongoing interest in American vernacular music. An earlier work of his, Native Tongue, matched “techno grooves” with “avant-garde music,” and “Duke Ellington jungle music” with “Reich textures.”

Beavers is looking forward to the competition, partly because it will allow him the opportunity “to be working with the best,” partly because it will give the audience “the chance to be active participants.” He sees this as an inspiring event for the orchestra players, as well, because they will “really have captive ears.” “The new music world needs to take a new shot in a new direction,” Beaver stated. “This is a good starting point.”

Upcoming projects for Beavers include the premiere of a new set of songs, based on the poetry of Erin Galligan, by mezzo-soprano Wilma Wever at Weill Recital Hall. He is also writing a piece for the Cassatt String Quartet and soprano Stephanie Houtzeel, based on the poetry of Andrew Sofer.

Keith Fitch photo by Deborah Lopez

Music Indiana native Keith Fitch, 33, studied at the Indiana University School of Music, where he completed his D.M. in 1995. Dr. Fitch currently resides in New York City, where he is the Assistant Director of the Mannes College of Music Preparatory Division and serves on the composition, music history and chamber music faculties. His works have been commissioned and performed by the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the American Composers Orchestra, the New York Youth Symphony (First Music 10), and the Christopher String Quartet. Among his many awards are three National Society of Arts and Letters awards, three ASCAP Young Composer Awards, and an Individual Artist Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission. He has been a resident fellow at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony.

Fitch wrote Totem on commission from the New York Youth Symphony’s FirstMusic program in 1993. The piece is in one movement of approximately ten minutes. Fitch describes the piece as an a “big arch,” divided into three sections: a slow opening; a longer and faster middle section comprising a series of accelerandi; and a slow, coda-like section that refers back to the music of the opening. Totem was “loosely influenced,” according to Fitch, by the 1947 painting by Jackson Pollock entitled “Full Fathom Five.” “The piece doesn’t refer to the painting,” Fitch explains, “but often with my music, a painting or a line of poetry will create a musical image, and then the musical image will take off on its own.”

Fitch thinks that Totem will be easy for the Orchestra audience to follow. An “alternating Major and minor third figure” generates much of the material in the piece, and collides in a “loud climax” with a faster, repeated note motive. Fitch devotes significant time to orchestration, a concern developed from “fifteen years playing in an orchestra.” He calls the piece “dark, ritualistic, and lyrical.”

Being selected as a finalist in the Competition came as a “complete surprise” to Fitch. He thinks that the “audience participation could be really exciting.” “The more that we can do to get the audience connected to new music, [to feel like they are a] part of the whole thing, that they have a stake in it, [the better],” Fitch elaborated. He hopes that this project will “open the ears” of audience members to other pieces of new music, as well.

Fitch’s new set of songs, “The Imagined Garden,” based on texts by Hart Crane, will be premiered by soprano Annalise Eberhart at Mannes in October. He is “putting finishing touches” on a set of cello and piano pieces for cellist Barbara Steinmallow entitled “Come Soon, Come Soon.” Two large commissions are also sitting on Fitch’s desk: a piece for the Jubal Trio (soprano, harp, and flute), and a piece for the “Trout” instrumentation (violin, viola, cello, bass, piano) for Swarthmore College.

Huang Ruo photo by Nuiko Wadden

Huang Ruo, 23, is working with Chistopher Rouse on his Master’s Degree at The Juilliard School, having recently completed his undergraduate work at Oberlin. The Chinese-born American composer wrote his first symphonic work at the age of 15, which was performed by the Shanghai Youth Orchestra. In 1995, he was awarded the Henry Mancini Award at the International Film and Music Festival. Huang’s music has been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra and Contemporary Music Ensemble, and the University of Michigan Contemporary Directions Ensemble. A CD of his work, If To Live, To…, has been released by Shortleash Productions, Inc., and in 2000 his work, “BEING ….,” will be released on the AUR label.

Lovers of practicality in art will appreciate Ruo’s approach to his Three Pieces. “The general idea is [for the pieces to function as] “three very different kinds of openings” for an orchestral program. The pieces can stand alone, together, in any combination or order.” The first piece, “Prelude,” premiered at Oberlin in 1999, is “slow and simple,” according to Ruo. “Fanfare,” also premiered at Oberlin, is “fast and loud.” “Announcement, ” which has the distinction of being the only premiere on the Philadelphia Orchestra program, is a “ceremonious statement” laden with “passionate emotion.”

Ruo describes his music as “very close to the natural world.” “Music is like a journey, starting from nowhere, and going nowhere,” Ruo explained. This is the philosophical motivation behind his free rhythms, times signatures functioning merely as a rehearsal convention. Ruo likes the idea of obtaining contrast through mixing styles in a composition, a technique he finds in the works of Beethoven, Bruckner and Mahler.

Ruo calls the competition “a great chance for young composers to present themselves to the public.” Like Beavers and Fitch, Ruo is thrilled to be working with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and happy to get the audience involved in the decision-making process. Ruo sees this democratic approach as a natural extension of his work, in fact. “We write music not just for ourselves,” Ruo commented, “and people liking my music is the best reward.”

Ruo is about to start a piece for the Juilliard Composer and Choreographer Project. He will be paired up with a young choreographer from Juilliard’s Dance Division, and they will create a work to be performed by fellow students at Alice Tully Hall next January. Ruo “really enjoy[s] the idea of different artists working together,” because, this way, “it’s not like you are [always] driving your own car!”

Simon Woods hopes these pieces will be programmed again in future Orchestra seasons, and that they will have the opportunity to commission one or more of the young composers for a new piece. He is also open to the possibility of a recording of the three finalists’ works.

The audience will have an additional opportunity to involve themselves with this new music: Woods will mediate a brief pre-concert talk with the composers, from 6:45 to 7:15. When asked about the possibility of repeating this competition in the future, Woods sounded optimistic. He hopes that a future event would incorporate Internet voting, and added that the new internet agreement with the AFM could allow the Orchestra to post the pieces ahead of time for users to download.

Following the intermission voting, the Orchestra will play the Brahms Violin Concerto with soloist Hilary Hahn.