Category: Ledes

Augusta Read Thomas Photo by Jerome de Perlinghi

G. Schirmer, Inc. has announced the signing of Augusta Read Thomas to an exclusive five-year composer contract, in which the company will represent the music formerly in Thomas’s own company ART Musings, as well as her future compositions.

“We are thrilled to welcome Augusta Read Thomas to G. Schirmer and the affiliated companies of the Music Sales Group worldwide,” states vice president Susan Feder. “A tremendously gifted composer, Thomas has had a meteoric rise to success on an international level and has been championed by musicians as diverse as Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Mariss Jansons, Seiji Ozawa, Mstislav Rostropovich, John Nelson, Christian Lindberg, David Finckel, Chanticleer, and the Avalon Quartet. Her music has also frequently been heard at the Aspen Music Festival, Cleveland Orchestra, and the Chicago Symphony, where she is composer-in-residence.” Feder continues, “Thomas’s music is at once intelligent and intense, urgent and impassioned, structurally complex and immediately accessible. With seemingly limitless energy, she is also a dedicated teacher at the Eastman School and a passionate advocate for new music through her position in Chicago. We hope to give Augusta more time to compose, and we look forward to working closely with her to further her career and disseminate her music to the widest possible audience of performers and listeners.”

In a phone interview, Thomas commented: “I consider it a huge honor because Schirmer is a company that has been devoted to contemporary music for a long time.” She explained that dropping the self-publishing activities out of her schedule comes as “a huge massive relief.” “I have spent too many hours at Kinko’s and FedEx – every night before I went home.” Thomas is pleased to have someone else making her music accessible, as well as promoting it. “I literally have been keeping music under my bed. The thought of having it in an office where someone can call it and get it is very reassuring.” She is also pleased that Schirmer will be helping her build her own archive over the coming years. Thomas hopes that over the coming years, she and the staff at Schirmer “can build something really interesting. My goal is to write music,” she concluded, “and I am so grateful to find another bunch of human beings to directly help me.”

In the past 12 months alone, Thomas has had six major premieres: Aurora: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, co-commissioned and premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony (with Daniel Barenboim as soloist); Invocations, performed by the Miami String Quartet at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival; Fugitive Star, performed by the Avalon String Quartet at the Caramoor Festival; Ring Out Wild Bells to the Wild Sky (with texts by Tennyson) for the Washington Choral Arts Society at the Kennedy Center; Song in Sorrow for soprano, chorus and orchestra commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra, and the orchestral work Ceremonial for the Chicago Symphony, led by Barenboim.

Thomas’s upcoming premieres include a work for Mariss Jansons and the Pittsburgh Symphony, to be presented in May, and Daylight Divine for soprano, children’s chorus and orchestra commissioned by John Nelson and Soli Deo Gloria, which will be premiered at the Festival Saint-Denis in Paris in June. She will also write a new work for Germany‘s NDR Orchestra and Christoph Eschenbach for a premiere in November 2002.

Thomas began her musical career with studies at Northwestern University, Yale University, and at the Royal Academy of Music. She has received prizes from ASCAP and BMI; the NEA; the Naumburg, Fromm, Guggenheim, and Koussevitzky Foundations, and was awarded this year’s Siemens Foundation Prize in Munich.

G. Schirmer is one the oldest publishing houses in America, having been founded in 1861. Having acquired Associated Music Publishers in 1964, today G. Schirmer counts among its roster of living composers such elder statesmen as Elliott Carter, Karel Husa, Leon Kirchner, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Gunther Schuller; contemporary leaders like John Adams, John Corigliano, John Harbison
, Peter Lieberson, André Previn, and Joan Tower; as well as younger figures such as Richard Danielpour, Anthony Davis, Aaron Jay Kernis, Bright Sheng, and Tan Dun.</p

While we wait to see if “Dubya” manages to unite Donkey and Elephant, we will have to content ourselves with music in which there is some kind of tentative “coalition” between styles. Two discs jumped out at me as superlative examples of such blending: Mark Kuss’s chamber music, on Gasparo, and Martin Bresnick’s two-volume Opere Della Musica Povere, on CRI. The title of Kuss’s “American Tryptich,” for string quartet and tape, recalls Schuman’s “New England Tryptich,” but the comparison ends there: this is the cynical, commercialized America of Generation X. Martin Bresnick’s approach is far less in-your-face. Instead, he weaves together minimalism, neo-romanticism, serialism, references to early American hymn tunes and Baroque practices in twelve interrelated pieces. Also interesting is the electronic music of Larry Kucharz, which represents, in his own words, a marriage between “austere minimalism” and “consonant harmonies and gestures from the Western Choral Classical Music Tradition.” Nine of his pieces can be found on a new self-produced disc entitled ComputerChoral Green Prints.

The use of multiple musics within the context of a single work is nothing new, of course, but I was nonetheless surprised to find an Alaskan Inuit melody in the Quartet for Strings in One Movement of Amy Beach. Native American music can also be heard in the techno-influenced “variations” of Phil James. Bright Sheng is well-known for his combination of Chinese and Western sensibilities, and three of his orchestral pieces can be heard on a new recording by the Shanghai Symphony. The Abstract and the Ethnic is a disc of Leonardo Balada’s music, both some blunt-edged avant-garde pieces from the 1960s and then some more explicitly Spanish works dating from later that are more melodic. Three cultures meet in the music of Pran, a group comprised of two American musicians who play Indian ragas on European and Australian instruments (trombone and didjeridu).

Roughly contemporary with the Amy Beach quartet is William Grant Still’s “Afro-American Symphony” with its alternately rich and playful representation of African-American blues and jazz. Gary Eskow’s piano and chamber music reveals diverse influences: not only jazz, but also rock, Latin music and the refined Romanticism of a composer like Rorem.

Six albums that I listened to this month struck me as polystylistic in terms of their overall conception. Jenny Lin’s Chinoiserie, for instance, is a fascinating collection of pieces from the past hundred years that are all influenced in some way by the Far East, real and imaginary. Water Colors is a different sort of “east meets west” project, featuring seven pieces for koto written by composers from the Pacific Northwest. Jed Distler’s group Composers Collaborative has put out a compilation of some of the best and brightest moments of their Solo Flights festival, including a hilarious piece David Del Tredici wrote for Distler himself. American Mosaic features the works of ten composers who have written pieces for flute and harp, stretching from an arrangement of “To a Wild Rose” to two new pieces by composers born in the 1970s.

Three discs represent the work of “polystylistic artists” – amazing musicians who cross the (real/imaginary) fence between genres with ease. My personal favorite (but then I’m going through a “martini phase”) is the Intergalactic Contemporary Ensemble’s disc called I Dig, recorded live at the Fineline in Minneapolis. This is an example of a group of “serious” contemporary music players jumping gleefully onto a different stylistic bandwagon, reviving with great flair such neglected 1950s exotica as Moises Vivanco’s “Malambo No.1.” Willis Delony is a pianist who keeps one foot in the jazz world, and one foot in the classical world, as he demonstrates on his new CD of largely “written-out” jazz. Haskell Small is another pianist whose work crosses genres: his writing for the instrument harks back to the American Romantic tradition of Barber, certainly, but also like Barber, there are distinct hints of jazz in the music, as well.

I had some fun grouping discs that, taken together, form a polystylistic commentary on a single idea. (Warning: try this at home.) Take, for example, the idea of American musical traditions. You could listen to Stefania De Kenessey’s Shades of Light/Shades of Dark, music solidly grounded in tonality – think Horatio Parker. Then, you could listen to Chas Smith’s Nikko Wolverine, which includes four pieces written for Smith’s own instruments – think Harry Partch. To finish, you could listen to David Basse’s Strike When the Iron is Hot, a collection of mainstream-style jazz tunes written by the likes of Duke Ellington, Stanley Turrentine, Mike Melvoin, and even Billy Joel.

Stefania DeKenessey isn’t the only composer whose work manifests European influence, of course. There are George Antheil’s fourth and fifth symphonies, which eerily “echo” contemporary works of Shostakovitch and Prokoviev, though he was unfamiliar with them at the time. Lowell Liebermann’s second symphony, on the other hand, is a combination of the sweet choral style of Brahms and orchestral writing lush enough to suggest Hollywood.

Brian Schober’s music is Baroque in conception, though his language is decidedly modern. His “Te Deum” is scored for the sonically wild combination of mixed chorus and prepared piano. Schober is also an organist, and his “Toccatas and Fantasias” are worth hearing just for the fine playing. Steven Stucky’s lyrical double concerto is scored for another Bach-like combination: violin, oboe, and chamber orchestra. And David Maslanka’s alto saxophone concerto is cast in five movements, the third of which quotes the Crucifixus from the Catholic Mass: could this be a reference to the chiastic form that Bach occasionally employed for its religious symbolism?

Science is the meeting-point for the music of Jim Fox and Anne LeBaron. Jim Fox’s “The Copy of the Drawing” is an extended meditative work that features an excerpt from Sarah Simons’ letters to the Mt. Wilson Observatory. LeBaron’s “Telluris Theoria Sacra” is named after the cosmological work written by Thomas Burnet in 1681. LeBaron’s chamber work portrays the course of the earth from “chaos” to “holocaust and implosion.” The piece itself is polystylistic, with references to the 17th-century passacaglia, the Italian devotional lauda, the waltz, and to jazz.

A sense of place binds together the music of David Bindman and Samuel Jones. Jones’s Suite “Roundings” is a programmatic work based on New Deal murals throughout Texas. Bindman’s “Pier Sketch,” written for his Brooklyn Sax Quartet, depicts the Hudson Ri
ver waterfront, a place, in his words that “suggests the struggle between raw natural beauty [and] the fleeting yet awesome ability of humans to construct an alternate reality.”

Finally, you might trying listening to the music of Michael Byron and Tony Malaby in order to compare their different uses of rhythmic energy. Byron’s minimalist “Entrances,” for three pianos (one pianist), makes use of the percussive qualities of the piano to create a seething rhythmic texture. Tony Malaby and his sidemen also use rhythm as a binding element in their work, as a driving force that holds together some dramatically-varied free jazz improvisations.

Jenny Undercofler

James Legg Photo courtesy Michael Torke

Composer James Legg died suddenly on November 20, 2000.

Mr. Legg began his training in music composition at the Juilliard School of Music while still a teenager and went on to receive a Bachelor of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music and an M.A. from Duke University where he worked with Robert Ward.

Among the many awards he received were: the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Hayes grant for study in Italy with Hans Werner Henze, a National Institute for Music Theater grant for an internship with Thea Musgrave and the Virginia Opera Association, a grant from Meet the Composer, and three awards from BMI, among others.

Legg has been a composition fellow at Tanglewood‘s Berkshire Music Center, the Aspen Music Festival, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Bellagio Center (run by the Rockefeller Foundation), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and at Edward Albee‘s artist colony, The William Flanagan Memorial Center.

He was commissioned by Joseph Papp of the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Houston Grand Opera, and the New York Youth Symphony which premiered his “Manhattan Overtures” in Carnegie Hall.

He wrote six one-act operas for the stage, one of which was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera and is based on a play by Bertolt Brecht. At the time of his death, he was also working on his first full-length opera, based on Arthur Miller‘s play All My Sons.

In addition, Legg worked as a musical assistant on the Broadway shows The Phantom of the Opera, City of Angels, Will Roger’s Follies, Jelly’s Last Jam, Five Guys Named Moe, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Jekyll and Hyde, The Life and Rent, among others.

Mr. Legg composed scores for several feature films, including Dirty Laundry, starring Tess Harper and Jay Thomas, and A Texas Funeral starring Martin Sheen. Legg also composed the scores for almost a dozen independent films, and was assistant composer on several studio films such as The Butcher’s Wife, Defending Your Life and Mr. Wonderful.

A memorial service for James Legg will be held on February 12, 2001 at Lincoln Center‘s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.

Please click here for Michael Torke’s tribute to James Legg.

Cantata Singers Photo by David Tucker

The National Foundation for Jewish Culture has awarded a Susan Rose Recording Fund grant to the Boston-based Cantata Singers and Ensemble for their recent recording of John Harbison‘s Four Psalms. The Susan Rose Recording Fund for Contemporary Jewish Music is a new grants program of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture that seeks to make available original works by contemporary composers exploring the Jewish experience. Established in 1999 to address the difficulty faced by many composers and performers in having commissioned works performed beyond the premiere performance, the Susan Rose Fund provides a subsidy for the recording of new works in order to facilitate their circulation among performers and to provide greater access to the public.

In its initial year, one grant of $10,000 was awarded to Alla Borzova to record, with tenor Paul Sperry and the New York Virtuosi Chamber Symphony, her song cycle Mother Said, based on Hal Sirowitz‘s collection of poetry of the same name. Due to the success of the initial year of the grant, the fund increased its award to $20,000.

Proposals were evaluated by an artistic advisory panel chaired by Omus Hirshbein, Executive Vice President of the New York Chamber Symphony. Hirshbein considers the grant “exceedingly valuable,” and devoted eight or nine hours winnowing down the applications before the panel first met. “It was a tiring experience, but I feel richer for it,” Hirshbein stated. “The whole issue of what is Jewish music, and what is not, and how they overlap, I find fascinating,” he went on. “As chair of the panel, I wrestle with questions about the mission of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture in going forward with such a program. Is it for Jews only? Is it for anyone who writes music that is connected with Jewish history?”

“The reward of receiving a grant like this is not limited to the sum of money itself, but also the affirmation that it offers,” explained the Cantata Singer’s Music Director, David Hoose. The grant serves as a “formal affirmation of both the strength of the piece and the strength of the performing forces,” something that becomes particularly important as they negotiate with a record company. “Recording is a scary proposition for any company,” Hoose admitted. “It involves risk-taking, and it is in a certain sense charity. So where they put their money and effort is something that they have to consider very carefully.”

Harbison’s association with the Cantata Singers dates back twenty years, when he served briefly as music director. Hoose’s personal association with Harbison dates back to his days as a horn player, when he played under Harbison as a conductor. It was in his wind quintet that Hoose got to know Harbison’s well-known work for that instrumentation, performing it “forty or fifty times.” Since then, Hoose has conducted many of Harbison’s works, including the violin and piano concertos, Emerson and Diotima. The Cantata Singers commissioned Harbison in 1986 for Flight into Egypt and later recorded it on New World Records under Hoose’s direction. Flight won Harbison the 1987 Pulitzer Prize. Hoose has also conducted a number of area premieres of Harbison’s music, including the Boston premiere of Four Psalms in November 2000.

“I have always found his music extraordinarily compelling,” Hoose commented. “The music is powerful — it doesn’t fade after a few hearings.” Hoose considers Four Psalms to be Harbison’s greatest work to date. “It contains some very radical ideas, both in his juxtaposition of the texts, and in his approach to the performing forces. He takes a step in a [new] direction that was motivated by the real challenge of addressing issues of modern and ancient Israel.”

Four Psalms was commissioned by the Israeli Consulate of Chicago to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel; the work was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1999. In Four Psalms, Harbison applies fragments of conversations and “journalistic” commentary by Israelis and Americans (in Hebrew and English) about daily life and current conditions in Israel to traditional Psalm texts.

“It is remarkable how skillful John is at writing in such a way that singers and instrumentalists alike believe that he was born to write for them. That’s a unique kind of position – nobody says that about Bach!” Before the Cantata Singers and Ensemble had even performed the piece, Harbison himself identified the possibility that they might be eligible for the Susan Rose grant. The grant helped to substantially cut the cost of making the recording.

“We chose a piece that we thought would have a future,” Hirshbein concluded. “We rewarded the idea of a Jewish text being set, so that it would receive a wider dissemination. It was the most skilled piece of work, and I think the piece is going to have legs.”

The Jazz Composers Alliance recently announced the recipients of the 2000 Julius Hemphill Composition Awards. A total of $2500 was awarded.

In the Jazz Orchestra Category, first prize went to Kari Ikonen of Helsinki, for a piece entitled Luoto. Tied for second place were two Americans: Adam Lane, of Oakland, with his Blues for Richard Davis, and Deborah Weisz of New York City. Other finalists were Jurgen Friedrich of Germany, Hazel Leach of the Netherlands, and Jeff Raheb of Brooklyn. The music of Kari Ikonen and Adam Lane will be performed by the Jazz Composers Alliance Orchestra in 2001.

In the Small Group category, three awards of $416 were given to Fred Hess of Erie, Colorado for Journey to Sentosa; George Schuller of Brooklyn for Mosh Pit, and Tom Varner of New York for Strident. Other finalists were Mark Helias of New York, Kari Ikonen, and Mark Nodwell of Boulder, Colorado.

George Schuller Photo by Joanne Krivin

George Schuller is a drummer, composer, arranger and producer. In 1984, he co-founded the twelve-piece ensemble Orange Then Blue which has recorded several acclaimed albums, including the most recent release: Hold The Elevator on GM Recordings.  A new recording of Schuller’s music, Tenor Tantrums, was released in August 1999 on New World Records with the Schulldogs featuring George Garzone, Tony Malaby and George’s brother, Ed Schuller. His compositions and arrangements have been recorded by Orange Then Blue, Ed Schuller, Mike Metheny, Your Neighborhood Sax Quartet, the Wilder/Woodman/LaPorta Sextet, Mili Bermejo and Lisa Thorson.

“I know that some heady musicians submitted their tapes to this competition,” mused George Schuller in a phone interview. “I am very honored to have come away with something.” Mosh Pit is a reduction for 8-piece band of the original 12-piece version he composed for his band Orange Then Blue. “The whole idea of people coming to a mosh pit, a punk kind of concert, very chaotic, with people being passed over you – you can imagine that the piece is pretty crazy,” Schuller commented. The piece is written in three sections that get “progressively more intense.” “The only punkish element is that there is a barrage of sound – it’s very ‘in your face,’ Schuller went on. “There is no heavy rock beat, and it’s not a punk tune.” To give the effect of the piece getting faster and faster, Schuller has built metric modulations into the composition, although much of it is freely improvised. “There are backgrounds to keep the intensity up,” Schuller noted, “to keep the soloist trapped in the feeling that he can’t go anywhere, that he has to come back to the tune.”

Tom Varner Photo by Frank Tafuri

Tom Varner is considered one of the pioneers of jazz French horn. He has recorded nine CDs as leader on the OmniTone, New World, and New Note and Soul Note labels. A DownBeat and JazzTimes poll winner, he has performed as a leader at the Vienna Konzerthaus and the Moers, Groningen, and Rotterdam Jazz Festivals, as well as countless appearances in the New York area. Tom wrote the music for the feature film Saints and Sinners, and has played on over 60 additional CDs.

Varner’s composition Strident was written for his CD Swimming, released in October 1999 on the OmniTone label. It is scored for a sextet of trumpet, French horn (played by Varner), alto and tenor saxophones, bass, and drum set. “Strident explores shifting time signatures, free harmonic counterpoint, and a searching, swirling, group dynamic,” he writes. “The piece aims for a rhythmic urgent insistence, with a feeling of anticipation, perhaps better expressed as an ‘in your face’ joyful directness.”

“I am very happy to receive the Julius Hemphill Award,” Varner noted in an email. “This was my first award for an individual composition.” Varner feels indebted to the Blue Mountain Center, where he had “four weeks of quiet in a beautiful setting” to compose the piece, and to his sidemen Steve Wilson, Tony Malaby, Dave Ballou, Cameron Brown, and Tom Rainey. Varner thinks that the actual award money went to “studio rehearsal rentals, a Finale upgrade, and a couple of dinners. It was much appreciated!”

This year, the JCA received 150 applications featuring music from twenty-four states and eleven countries. Scores and recordings were reviewed by Laura Andel, Dana Brayton, Darrell Katz, Dave Harris, Warren Senders and Rebecca Shrimpton.

“I’m amazed just by the diversity of the styles represented, and the high quality,” commented Katz, who is Director of the Jazz Composers Alliance. “We’re looking for music that stakes out what it’s doing and accomplishes. We’re looking for music that does something new – anything that you could easily put a label on, well, that’s less likely to win,” he explained. “On top of being fine compositions, these were really good performances,” Katz continued. “With some jazz pieces, it’s tricky, because the composition can be weak but the performance really good – but these were instances of both being strong.”

The Jazz Composers Alliance is a composer’s collective that, in the words of Katz, “mainly exists to put together ensembles and concerts.” The JCA has both an Orchestra and a Sax Quartet. Eight years ago, they started a composition contest, and four years later changed the name to honor the alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill, one of the founders of the World Saxophone Quartet. The Jazz Composers Alliance is funded in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts announced awards of nearly $400,000 on December 5, 2000. The $50,000 John Cage Award for Music, given biennially, went to Gordon Mumma. Eleven grants of $25,000 each were awarded to artists in the United States and abroad. $59,500 was distributed among 20 arts organizations.

Selected by the Foundation Directors from recommendations submitted by nominators who are distinguished artists and arts professionals, this year’s music recipients are György Kurtág, Laetitia Sonami and Julia Wolfe.

Julia Wolfe Photo by Eliot Caplan

“This is the first time I have received an award of such magnitude, not for a specific project, just as a recognition of past activities,” Wolfe responded in an email. “I am mixed with pride and the feeling that I did not actually deserve it, that so many great artists have been working even longer than me, with so little recognition. The pride came from receiving it from people whom I greatly admire (David Behrman for example), who have influenced me all these years — to receive recognition from them was a great honor. Also, I have always felt very close to New York, because this is where I first started performing twenty years ago, so to receive this award from a New York institution was very rewarding. Sonami reminisced: “Phill Niblock‘s loft was always open for trying new ideas and as a place to receive encouragement.” Sonami now lives in Oakland, but tries to return at least once a year to perform in New York at venues like The Kitchen, Roulette, and Engine 27.

Laetitia Sonami Photo by Mark Estes

Sonami claims that she will use the grant money first and foremost “to live,” but that the grant is sizeable enough to finance some other projects, as well. “It will allow me to build a new controller for performance,” she explained, “my lady’s glove is aging ungracefully. It will also allow me to investigate some areas like the live control of video imagery and lights in performance and the live control of miscellaneous objects through the use of motors.” Sonami also plans to share some of the award with Melody Sumner Carnahan, the author with whom she has collaborated since 1980.

Julia Wolfe exclaimed that an award such as this “always comes as a shock!” Wolfe recently wrote the first section a piece for Lionheart featuring a tape of their speaking voices that is combined, in performance, with their live singing. (This first section is entitled Keeper; Wolfe has not yet decided on a title for the entire work.) “That piece cost a bundle to make, because there are a lot of technical requirements.” Wolfe will use the grant money to help fund the “realization” of a new section of the piece that will be performed at a concert at The Performing Garage that she will be sharing with composer Scott Johnson in March 2001.

The John Cage Award for Music, established in 1992 in honor of the late composer, is awarded in recognition of outstanding achievement in contemporary music. Born in 1935, Mr. Mumma spent his early career in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was co-founder of both the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music, perhaps the first electronic music facility in the United States, and the now-historic ONCE Festivals of Contemporary Music. He was among the first composers to employ circuitry of his own design in compositions and performance. From 1966 to 1974, he was, with John Cage and David Tudor, a composer-musician with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Since 1966 he has performed with the Sonic Arts Union. His artistic collaborations include work with Anthony Braxton, Marcel Duchamp, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yvonne Rainer, and Frederic Rzewski. A prolific composer and a virtuoso performer (French horn), Mr. Mumma has taught at universities in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America and is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Since the Foundation’s inception in 1963, hundreds of artists have donated work to raise funds for these grants. Their continuing support is evident in the “Drawings and Photographs” benefit exhibition being held at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City from December 8 to 23, 2000.

The current Directors of the Foundation are: Brooke Alexander, Carolyn Brown, Jasper Johns, Julian Lethbridge, Elizabeth Murray, Phill Niblock, and John Silberman. This year David Behrman joined the Directors in selecting grant recipients in Mr. Niblock’s absence.

On December 6, 2000, the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers announced the winners of the 33rd annual ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for outstanding print and media coverage of music in 1999. The winners were honored at a special reception hosted by ASCAP President and Chairman Marilyn Bergman at Lincoln Center‘s Kaplan Penthouse in New York City. Over the years, tens of thousands of dollars have been distributed in cash prizes to winning authors, journalists and broadcast producers and personalities.

David Gunn and Dennis Bathóry-Kitsz Photo by R.J. Capak

Multiple awards went to broadcasts and publications dealing with new American music. One of the two Internet Awards, for instance, went to Kalvos and Damian’s New Music Bazaar, created and hosted by David Gunn and Dennis Bathóry-Kitsz.

“The award is quite heavy, but I like the colors a lot,” Bathóry-Kitsz stated in a phone interview. “We certainly didn’t expect it. Five and a half years ago, we had no expectation that anyone was going to notice.” Kalvos and Damian started their radio show in May of 1995 and went online in September, making them pioneers in the use of online audio. “Composers got interested, so we bought cheap plane tickets, and went off and interviewed composers.” The duo has recorded 142 interviews since 1995.

A formidable challenge for Kalvos and Damian, however, has been lack of funding. Bathóry-Kitsz and Gunn, who are both composers in their own right, have thrown $30,000 of their own money into the show, but aside from an unexpected $5000 gift from the Argosy Foundation in October of 2000, all they have received is “a few random contributions.” The show is hosted, both on the air and online, by WGDR-FM, a community station that is “half-supported” by Goddard College in Northfield, VT. “The station relies on community fund-raising and community programmers,” Bathóry-Kitsz explained. “It’s a very good little station, but there is a lot of difficulty raising money.” As a result, Bathóry-Kitsz and Gunn wear many hats: producers, hosts, engineers, and web designers.

“We don’t have plans, because plans depend on money. We have goals.” The Argosy Foundation gift has started them on “the next plan that is actually a plan,” traveling to the West Coast to tape some interviews with composers unable to travel to their studio in Vermont. There are “about twenty” composers who are “official,” people like Maggie Payne, Carl Stone, David Jaffe, Paul Reale, Pauline Oliveros (their second), and Nancy Bloomer Deussen. Another plan, but one that would require both funding and volunteers, is to transcribe the interviews. Of the 142, only two have ever been transcribed. Bathóry-Kitsz feels that downloadable transcriptions are essential to making their site “100% accessible.”

“Maybe we’re not astute, ” Bathóry-Kitsz concludes, “but we really believe that composition is out there and alive. So far it has been successful.” Bathóry-Kitsz feels that “composers got a bad name in the 20th century. Say ‘composer’ to anyone and their skin cracks.” So they try to take a fresh approach. “We don’t do the old ‘Milton Cross Saturday Afternoon at the Opera‘ routine – these are fun interviews,” Bathóry-Kitsz assured me. “We don’t ask people to philosophize about their compositional approach – that is deadly dull radio.”

Kalvos and Damian have also organized an online mentoring project that allowed composers like Nick Didkovsky, Rhys Chatham, and Pauline Oliveros to give junior high and high school students immediate feedback on their work. They are currently seeking funding for another year of the project. Bathóry-Kitsz hopes that the Deems Taylor Award will help make them more visible to audience members enthusiastic enough about their work that they will help financially support some of their initiatives.

Heidi Von Gunden withgranddaughter (l) and daughter (r) of Vivian Fine Photo by R.J. Capak

Heidi Von Gunden was honored for her new book, The Music of Vivian Fine (Scarecrow Press). Von Gunden, who is Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, first met Fine when she was a student at University of California San Diego. Fine was teaching at Bennington, and had been invited to UCSD as a guest. “I was entranced by her attitude towards music,” Von Gunden explained.

Before starting research on the book, Von Gunden invited Fine to visit one of the composer forums regularly held at Champaign-Urbana. “At the time, the forums could be quite vicious,” Von Gunden explained. “But Vivian’s presentation was wonderful, and everyone was impressed. It was a great event. I kept saying to myself, I really want to study her music.”

During the four-year research process, Von Gunden communicated with Fine via telephone every other week. Von Gunden described the work as “pure pleasure.” “Vivian had an incredible gift,” she commented. “Her music was her life, and she learned from music.” (Fine never completed high school, in fact.) “She was also an incredible pianist, and she could sight-read anything – that’s how she learned.” Von Gunden likened Fine to Mozart. “She did not belong to any camp, she simply wrote what she heard and wasn’t ashamed of it.
” Also like Mozart, “she never listened to her music, because she heard it in her head. “Von Gunden’s favorite composition by Fine is her Mass. “It is so experimental and lyrical – Vivian to the core, it mixed all her interests.”

The Music of Vivian Fine is the only book available about the composer’s life and music, and it contains an extensive bibliography and discography. “I tried to show the scope of how she evolved as a composer,” Von Gunden explained. Fine was able to see the book before she died in a car accident in March 2000, and gave it her warm approval. “I hope the Deems Taylor Award will help bring the book some notice,” Von Gunden confessed, “and that people will start to pay more attention to her music.”

Howard Pollack was honored for his new book, Aaron Copland: the Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (Henry Holt), and James B. Sinclair was given a Special Recognition Award for his Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives, published by Yale University Press.

Of the authors and publishers honored for short written works, particularly notable were Chip Stern, for his article on Paquito D’Rivera for JazzTimes, and Richard Stim, for his article “From Piano Rolls to MP3’s: The Legal Perspective,” published in NARAS Journal. A Special Recognition Award was presented to John Michel and Tom Voegeli for the daily syndicated radio program Composers Datebook.

Michel, Executive Producer of Composers Datebook, called the Deems Taylor Award “the surprising but oh-so-gratifying culmination of my many years ‘in the galleys’ of public radio, trying to do some good for the cause of the old AND new music I find so fascinating and compelling.”

Michel worked at Minnesota Public Radio for 18 years (1977-1995) before joining the staff of the American Composers Forum. “In 1995, I really thought my radio days were over, but I was assigned by the Forum to tackle the Composers Datebook radio project in 1999.”

The Forum interested the James Irvine Foundation in this concept, and their funding enabled him to assemble a seasoned production team that included Tom Voegeli as the project’s studio producer. “We were lucky to interest Tom in the project,” Michel commented, “he’s a very busy boy these days!”

Composers Datebook was launched on thirty stations in March 2000, and has received positive feedback from both composers and listeners. “From the start, we did not want to ‘preach to the converted,’ Michel explained. “That’s easy to do. The greater challenge was involved bringing our message across in the increasingly conservative programming market of classical music radio stations. We wanted to somehow link composers of the present and recent past into the continuum of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, to show what more recent composers have in common with their more familiar predecessors.”

Michel describes the tone of Datebook as that of “sidewalk preacher who, rather than ranting at people about what they should do, is actually entertaining them so they stop for a bit to listen. The preacher still manages to get his core message across but a non-threatening way, so that people might say to themselves ‘Yeah, he’s got a point there.’ Catching the classical music audience on radio for 3 minutes, 5 times a week is a little like that: if we can link Wagner and Stockhausen or

Terry Riley and Richard Strauss in an entertaining and ear-catching manner, we may just pique someone’s curiosity, pass on some information that will “stick” and even — occasionally — start to break down their prejudice and preconceptions about ‘new’ music.”

The show’s premise seems to be working: Composers Datebook now airs on over 170 stations in large and small markets in 32 states and Puerto Rico. There is also a Composers Datebook Web site containing sound files of all the shows that have aired since July. “I like the fact that we’re on a spectrum of stations: from the very smallest college stations, where the announcers and programmers of the next generation may get some exposure to the work of newer composers, to large-market public and commercial classical stations.”

An ASCAP Deems Taylor Special Recognition Award was given to Billboard‘s Deputy Editor, Irv Lichtman. Lichtman, who recently announced his retirement at the end of 2000, was cited for 45 years of outstanding work as a music industry reporter and editor for Billboard and other trade publications.

The ASCAP-Deems Taylor Broadcast Award in Television honored the 23-hour jazz cable programming service BET on Jazz. The Radio Award went to the Fordham University station WFUV Radio, New York, for its programs City Folk, The Big Broadcast and Swing Time. An Internet Award was also presented to MTVi News.

The authors and publishers of six additional books received awards. Henry Sapoznik and Schirmer Books were honored for his new book Klezmer! Other award-winning authors were: Joel Lester, for Bach’s Works for Solo Violin; Thomas J. Mathiesen, for Apollo’s Lyre; James Miller, for Flowers in the Dustbin; Tony Scherman
for Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story; and Charles K. Wolfe for A Good-Natured Riot.

The six additional writers and honored for shorter music-related works were Billy Altman, Audra D.S. Burch, Jim Farber, Johanna Keller, Guy Lesser, and Bruce Watson. Special Recognition Awards were also presented to James F. Bollman and Philip Gura, Maureen Callahan and Dave Moodie, Joe Levy, and Richard Sudhalter.

Tracey Sterne Photo by Gene Maggio

The record producer Teresa Sterne died on December 10th at her Manhattan home. Ms. Sterne had been suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. She was 73.

A pioneer of classical recording, one of her most notable successes was with the small budget label Nonesuch, which she ran from 1965 through 1979. Ms. Sterne turned a small budget label into one of the most adventurous companies in the recording business. When she was invited to take charge of Nonesuch, the label was a subsidiary of the pop-oriented and profitable Elektra Records. Nonesuch’s business had consisted mostly of acquiring the rights to existing recordings of Baroque music by European ensembles and reissuing them at budget prices in the United States.

Ms. Sterne, called Tracey by her friends and colleagues, brought a vision to the job born of her long experience in music. She had been a piano prodigy, and though she gave up public performance as an adult, she maintained close ties with the composers and performers of her day.

At Nonesuch she brought attention to areas of music neglected by the major labels, particularly contemporary music and American vernacular music. She championed American composers like George Crumb, Elliott Carter, and Donald Martino. She commissioned Morton Subotnick for his well-known Silver Apples of the Moon in 1967, marking the first time an original large-scale composition had been created specifically for the disc medium, and Charles Wuorninen for his Pulitzer Prize-winning Time Encomium. She also issued important recordings of lesser-known works by Schoenberg, Busoni, Stravinsky and other major figures.

“The Nonesuch commission was the start of my recognition as a composer,” Subotnick commented. “It was an exciting moment for everybody.” Sterne was not involved in the composition of the piece – he had complete freedom, even over the title – but she was responsible for “getting the record off the ground.” She was also responsible for Subotnick’s second commission from Nonesuch, for The Wild Bull, the following year. “She was a very exacting person,” Subotnick remembers. “I think that she made all the artistic decisions (at Nonesuch). Her choices were pretty uncompromising. She knew what she thought were important things to do, and she did them.”

She nurtured relationships with several excellent performers not widely known at the time. Many of the artists she discovered were first recognized for their work in contemporary music. Ms. Sterne encouraged them to record past works that interested them as well.

Pianist Gilbert Kalish first met Sterne when he was playing with the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble in the late 1960s. “It was typical of her that she doing things that nobody else was doing. She was giving unknown artists and music a chance to be heard. She had a fierce belief in the things that she cared about, and strong opinions about who did what well.” Kalish described her work at Nonesuch as “fanatic. When she was on a project, everything had to be focused on that project. She tended to every detail, the artwork, the liner notes, the editing. She attended every session. In that way, she could be difficult, because she was very demanding of your time and energy.”

“She believed in people,” Kalish remembered. After the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble recordings, Sterne asked the mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani to record some Wolf songs with Kalish. “Jan was known only as a new music person,” Kalish explained. “For a young American artist to do great German repertoire was considered outrageous.” Sterne then approached Kalish about doing some solo recording. She asked him what he would like to record, and Kalish decided to commit the entire repertoire of Haydn piano sonatas to disc.

Sterne also took an interest in the playing of Paul Jacobs, who made the now-legendary recording of the Debussy Etudes for Nonesuch, and she “discovered” William Bolcom and Joan Morris, who made some popular Nonesuch recordings of vernacular American songs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And Ms. Sterne sparked a nationwide craze for ragtime with a series of Scott Joplin piano works played by Joshua Rifkin. She was also in the forefront of the early instrument movement in Baroque and Renaissance repertory. And under her leadership, Nonesuch’s Explorer series introduced music from Bali, India, Peru and other countries to a wider audience.

But in late 1979 she was dismissed from Nonesuch. Early in her tenure the record label had been acquired by Warner Communications, and by the mid-1970s, it was grouped under a parent company, Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch, headed by Joe Smith. Warner officials asserted that Nonesuch was losing money. Ms. Sterne argued that the losses were mostly caused by the parent company’s poor marketing and distribution.

“Tracey was always striving for her image of what was important and valuable,” Kalish reminisced. “She wasn’t afraid to do things that weren’t particularly commercial. She was also unafraid to tell anyone that they were bad, that they were inefficient. And she wasn’t particularly diplomatic, because she couldn’t understand not being committed to the product 100 percent. [The record company executives] got tired of that.”

A letter condemning her dismissal, written by 10 Pulitzer Prize-winning composers, including Mr. Carter and Aaron Copland, was sent to the vice president of Warner Communications and widely circulated in the press, to no avail.

Norma Hurlburt, Executive Director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, also at
tests to Ms Sterne’s “intensity, her unyielding support of things she believed in, her utter lack of ambivalence about anything.” Hurlburt first became friends with Sterne in the early 1970s. “Curiously, Tracey seemed unaware of the impact she made. On a more personal level, I knew her as a deeply generous person, despite her very modest means, and someone who was tremendously loyal.”

Ms. Sterne never anticipated becoming a record producer. She was born in Brooklyn on March 29, 1927. Her mother was a cellist who gave up her career to nurture her musical daughter. Ms. Sterne’s father, a violinist, deserted the family when she was 14. Her paternal uncle, Robert Sterne, a professional violinist, became an important mentor.

From the age of 10, she was educated at home by private tutors. In 1939, when she was 12, she made her professional debut as a pianist playing Grieg‘s piano concerto with the NBC Symphony Orchestra at Madison Square Garden. The next year she played Tchaikovsky‘s piano concerto with the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium, winning cheers from the audience and glowing reviews from critics. Her career as a prodigy flourished.

But after such a rarefied and isolated upbringing, Ms. Sterne felt that she lacked the pragmatism and confidence to pursue a professional career. Wanting experience in the real world, she became a secretary, soon winding up in the offices of the powerful manager Sol Hurok, where she nurtured the careers of other young artists. A series of administrative jobs, including assistant to the director at Vanguard Records, led to her hiring by Nonesuch.

Ms. Sterne, who never married, leaves no immediate survivors. After her dismissal from Nonesuch, the company went through many changes. Earlier this year, Robert Hurwitz, its director since 1984 and a great admirer of Ms. Sterne, issued a two-disc recording in tribute to her, containing highlights from favorite albums she had produced and live recordings of performances she gave in her early years as a piano prodigy. Kalish applauded Hurwitz for initiating the project, calling it a “beautiful, magnanimous gesture.”

Virginia Danielson of the Archive of World Music at Harvard Photo by Jim Hardin

Hundreds of thousands of historic ethnographic audio recordings are in serious danger, according to a recent survey conducted by the Library of Congress. Of the 300 respondents to the Library of Congress national survey, more than three-fourths reported that 25 to 50 percent of their collections are “seriously deteriorated.”

Problems associated with audio collections include: inadequate storage conditions, cracked wax cylinders, decomposing acetate coatings of discs that “exude” a white powder, “sticky-shed” syndrome on audio tape manufactured in the late ’70s and early ’80s, “drop outs” on DAT tapes, and possible delaminating of CDs.

In response to the challenges faced by ethnographic archives across the country, the American Folklife Center, in collaboration with the American Folklore Society, hosted a two-day invitational conference, “Folklife Collections in Crisis,” on December 1 and 2, 2000, at the Library of Congress.

For the first time, 50 experts – archivists, audio engineers, preservation specialists, scholars, entertainment lawyers, and recording company executives – gathered to discuss sound preservation, access, and intellectual property issues as they relate to ethnographic collections and make recommendations to assure long-term preservation. Participants included representatives from the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Council for the Traditional Arts, the National Society of Audio Engineers, BMI, the Association of Recorded Sound Collections, the International Association of Sound Archives, the Society of American Archivists and others. The conference was supported by the Council on Library and Information Resources, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Peggy Bulger, Director of the American Folklife Center, called it a “great meeting.” The first day of the conference, three keynote speakers addressed the main issues of the conference. Virginia Danielson, of the Archive of World Music at Harvard, spoke about new modes of access made possible by digital technology; Elizabeth Cohen, of Cohen Acoustical, Inc., spoke about digitization and sound preservation; and Anthony Seeger, Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA and the former head of Folkways Recordings, spoke on issues of intellectual property rights. Two people were asked to respond to each keynote speaker. The second day, conference participants were divided up into different working groups to discuss potential solutions to the problems at hand. “They all did a bang-up job, coming up with needs and assessments for each of the main issues,” commented Kelly Fetault, the independent folklorist/oral historian who coordinated the conference.

One issue that kept coming up throughout the conference, according to Fetault, was the need for more extensive education and training. “In the chain of creating original ethnographic recordings, from the field worker to the librarian or archivist to the users of the materials–there needs to be education and training along the whole process,” Fetault explained.

Part of any such training would inevitably concern copyright laws, a subject that has become considerably more complicated lately, with the new possibility of online access to digitized archival material. “A lot of people are already trying to put things on the Web, but the property rights are very entangling, unless the steps have been done right.”

The very idea of putting materials online has caused considerable controversy, however. “There is a lot of disagreement about whether or not to digitize everything,” Fetault confessed. “There are many who dissent – there are communities with very different notions about who should have this knowledge, and we have to respect that. There are communities who would rather have their materials die than allow people to have access who haven’t been initiated ‘into the fold.'”

An intermediate solution to the online problem would involve electronic databases, allowing researchers to do preliminary research before traveling to a library to actually use the materials. But this raises other problems. “The idea of a database sounds simple, but there are no standardized subject headings,” Fetault explained. “If a researcher wanted to find materials on African-American shout bands, for instance, they might find that every database would have them listed under a different heading.” The Library of Congress’ initial survey, in fact, turned up six or seven different cataloging mechanisms currently in use. At the same time, the survey showed that somewhere between 80 and 85 percent of all respondents would like to standardize their headings. One benefit of such a change is that databases, once online, could “talk to each other.”

Another potential glitch in the online database solution, however, is that many collections are so small and under-funded that no database has ever been created. “The survey really got the broadest sweep of the types of collections, and a lot of them don’t have databases at all,” Fetault stated. “A lot of them have one person working with the entire collection. When your infrastructure isn’t strong, then there is no support for digitizing, and no support for putting anything on the Web. There are a lot of great materials out there that people are really struggling to maintain.”

A ‘white paper’ will be published in March 2001 containing the final version of the keynote speeches, as well as the action steps and recommendations formulated by the working groups. The white paper will be published by the Council on Library and Information Resources. Fetault hopes that archivists in charge of the smaller collections can use the paper in making demands for funding to implement change. “We want them to be able to get the institutional support that they need,” Fetault explained.

Fetault is also in the process of developing a Web site that will provide access to the proceedings from the first day of the conference. The new site, which will be an offshoot of the current American Folklife Center site, will go up in Febr
uary.

William Butler Yeats, one of the richest and deepest poets to ever write in the English language, is said to have requested only three words for his tombstone, “Horseman, ride by!” His odd request, I believe, was meant to indicate that though a human life is rich and deep, once gone, it is a disservice to sentimentalize it, sanctify it, or to project personal gains through its interpretation. Life itself is very fragile and fleeting, Yeats seems to tell us– it might be best to ride by; continue on with life, for that is what the dead wish us to do.

One of the many things my friend Jim Legg and I shared through our 20 years of friendship (which began orientation week for the freshman class at the Eastman School of Music) was a refusal to sentimentalize anything, in the pursuit of searching for the essence of things. Jim, through his artistry and as a human being was very sensitive, but his intelligence was impatient. He had no time for those who would impose their self-interest or petty romanticism into a given situation. Jim was brutally honest with life, and he searched for the truth in who he was as a man and as an artist. Jim never followed what he should do, but what he must do. To answer the question “Why?” was necessary, and not in the least bit indulgent. That very word, “indulgent” is an anathema to Jim’s character, as he always chose to be generous and supportive to others rather then dwell on personal discomforts.

Jim, in the last year of his life was entering into the cusp of joy, success, and fulfillment. Vectors of good fortune were smiling down on him. He was writing an opera based on Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, soon to be produced. He wrote a stunning song cycle, perhaps the best music he has ever written, on twelve poems of Emily Dickinson. He was preparing music for the new Tom Stoppard play that will open this season at Lincoln Center Theater. Incidental music to productions at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego were just realized. His film collaborations were bearing fruit as loyal directors were demanding that he be the composer for larger budget films. He was in love. It is the odd stroke of chance that he was so unexpectedly struck down.

For Jim’s integrity, honesty, generosity, warmth, and accomplishment I feel proud and privileged to call myself his friend.

Michael Torke
New York City
December 2000