Category: Field Reports

Zachary M. Lewis Photo by Nowell York

Normally, Cleveland’s Old Arcade, an ornate, Victorian-style shopping mall downtown, is dead quiet during non-business hours. So quiet, in fact, that it can safely house part of the Hyatt Regency Hotel that’s adjacent to it.

But for one memorable night during Labor Day weekend, this beautiful, underused venue rang out with a screeching musical depiction of war loud enough to wake all the neighbors.

The occasion was Cleveland’s first Ingenuity Festival during which a string quartet from the Cleveland Institute of Music performed George Crumb’s 1970 masterpiece Black Angels.

Curious festival patrons on their way through the Arcade stopped to watch and listen as violinists Andrew Sords and Maisie Swanson, violist Michelle Paczut, and cellist Charles Tyler wailed on their amplified instruments, shook maracas, and ran their bows along the rims of tuned water glasses. Hotel guests, presumably disturbed by the strange sounds, emerged onto their upper-level balconies and remained there.

A program note and a pre-concert speech clearly explained the connection between Black Angels and the Vietnam War. They drew attention to its structure, its numerological symbolism, and its musical references to the Dies Irae chant and Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden.” The musicians, competent in all respects, delivered a deliciously abrasive performance.

Strangely, though, no one mentioned the work’s powerful relevance to the year 2005. Just as when Crumb wrote Black Angels 35 years ago, people are dying every day in an endless land war in Asia and the political establishment is trying unsuccessfully to claim everything’s fine.

In other words, Crumb’s original justification for the piece still applies: “Things were turned upside down,” he said. “There were terrifying things in the air.” Meanwhile, we’re still reeling from one of worst natural disasters to ever hit the nation.

Maybe this point didn’t need to be made verbally. Maybe every listener was thinking it. Maybe that’s why the music literally stopped so many of people in their tracks.

At the far opposite end of the emotional spectrum—and across Euclid Avenue—was Phil Kline’s Symphony for 21 iPods, a musical installation which had its debut during the Ingenuity Festival at Cleveland’s ArtMetro gallery. In this case, however, the charm was mostly atmospheric.

Think of it as an updated, indoor version of Kline’s Unsilent Night for 12 (or more) boomboxes. Twenty-one incredibly tiny iPod Shuffles, devices known for their random-play feature, hung from the gallery ceiling by small lengths of wire. Attached to each was an equally minute speaker. Kline programmed the players with dozens of short, original MP3 files then set them all to “random.”

What resulted was a pleasant cacophony of fairy-like sounds. Melodic wisps flew through the air and rhythms crossed paths unpredictably. Silence reigned briefly in corner of the room after another, creating the effect of electronic crickets chirping at each other across some enchanted field.

It wasn’t the first Kline work to be mounted in Cleveland. Earlier this year, Kline and his colleagues in the Ethel string quartet premiered his Meditations in an Emergency with Red {an orchestra} and its director, Jonathan Sheffer. Compared to that rocking, high-energy piece, the Symphony is a delicate lullaby.

As it happens, Sheffer, too, took part in the Ingenuity Festival, presiding that same evening over a mini-concert at the Cleveland Trust Rotunda that essentially served as a sampler of Red’s eclectic programming. It didn’t include any world premieres but there was at least one hors d’oeuvre from 20th century America.

Seven musicians—a string quartet plus oboe, flute, and Sheffer on synthesizer, all amplified—performed Sheffer’s orchestration of a Contrapunctus from Bach’s Art of the Fugue, a few minutes of Morton Feldman’s Ixion, “Eleanor Rigby,” and the unaltered version of an Allegro from Mozart’s Oboe Quartet.

The concert involved giant video screens, a digital film collage, microphones, funky lighting, and computerized sound effects. It wasn’t the most musically rewarding concert that weekend but it had to have involved the most cables and electricity. Perfect for a festival subtitled “A Fusion of Art and Technology.”

Roddy Schrock Photo by Hideki Kubota

The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival’s Friday night event was packed. Two consecutively empty seats in the whole SomArts center couldn’t be found, forcing us to stand for the whole event. If an evening of experimental electronic music could draw this many people on a Friday night then there may be future for this type of uncompromising and nearly unmarketable music.

First on the bill was Victoria Jordanova, an American composer born in the former Yugoslavia, tonight presenting the premiere of her piece Suspended, for amplified pedal harp, live electronics, and something called a futuristic Fukuoku glove with five “vibes” embedded in the fingertips. At first I thought it must be some kind of musical device she made herself while in residency in the city of Fukuoka, Japan, maybe just misspelling the town’s name by one letter. Or possibly she has an affinity for Japanese electronic music, building the instrument from the country’s inspiration. It seems that is not quite the case. The glove does have five “vibes” but they’re more commonly used in non-musical applications. I doubt that promoting its effectiveness in amplified harp performance would do much to increase sales. I wonder if anyone has found a musical use for the Fukuoku Power Pack yet?

Back to the music, Suspended was a lovely piece presented through a delicate and subtle performance. Jordanova beautifully captured a mood that she is known for, a kind of contemplative, simple, and powerful aural motif combining minimal harp sounds and pitch-shifted percussive noise. It’s all suggestive of a kind of sound blueprint for a structure yet to be built. She has a tightly controlled focus to her work, a singularity of vision. I must admit however, I am quite glad that I did not read the program notes until after her performance was finished, at which time I found out that she was trying to sonically conjure the ideas of Hindi mystics through her sounds. Why it would require a Fukuoku glove and an amplified harp to create a mystically Hindu experience is beyond me. But the results, true to their spiritual origins or not, were lovely.

gal*in_dog performing Cruise 4ide Photo by Peter B. Kaars

Next was Guillermo Galindo performing under the pseudonym gal*in_dog, presumably a partial anagram of his surname. He gave a performance that was comprised of approximately three sonic timbres: low industrial rumble, high industrial whine, and a kind of purely electronic gray noise. In addition he was wearing a space helmet and was using a modified crucifix to manipulate and control the sound. By modified, I mean it looked like a cross, about a foot high and 6″ wide, but it was made of metal and had wires attached. So while performing he could, for example, move the sound from a low industrial rumble noise to a gray noise by physically moving the cross closer to or further away from a seemingly random metal object, in this case they were an old fan and some power tools. The breadth of the piece was limited to about that, three different types of noise, one at a time, seemingly without purpose or precision, depending on how close he was to a metal object. It is possible that everyone in the audience got the aural and visual joke or even found deeply significant insights in Galindo’s piece Cruise 4ide. As far as I was concerned, it was during this long piece that I began to just wish I had found a comfortable seat.

Next, Subotnick was joined onstage by Miguel Frasconi, the duo performing Until Spring Revisited, diffused through a four loudspeaker arrangement. The original Until Spring was composed, as Subotnick explains “about 10 years after Silver Apples…I had evolved a whole concept and a technique, but I had gone as far as I could go with it. I could do everything I wanted to do, but I couldn’t do it in real time. So I actually stopped after that and gave all my equipment to Vladimir Ussachevsky.” With the advent of portable digital technology in laptop computers Subotnick was able to, as it were, revisit his earlier work adapting it for live performance. The piece controlled by the performers using finger and voice gestures, input through the computer keyboard and a microphone respectively, to control the slope and timing of the rhythms and timbres. The performative impact was evocative, both musicians seemingly speaking aggressively into their microphones, the audience unable to hear their live voice and never quite sure if they were being sampled for sounds later heard in the music. The resulting textures leaned a bit toward the academic side of the spectrum but were a welcome reprieve from the aggressively obtuse nature of Cruise 4ide.

The evening’s wide range of eclecticism presented a telling glimpse into the current state of electronic music in California. The event showcased the rich ecosystem of electronic sound arts in this area and posited a future that was not clearly in focus. In fact the evening seemed to be a resounding confirmation that the future of this genre is an exciting one and still completely up for grabs. And if the audience this evening was any indication, there may even be people listening.

Alyssa Timin Photo by Ross Hoffman

Eleven months of the year, Abington Art Center, nestled in the northerly Philadelphia suburb of Jenkintown, hosts contemporary art exhibits in its welcoming and airy space. August, however, is given over to displays of children’s art. On the evening I went to the Art Center, they were showing The Spongebob Squarepants Movie, catering to the tastes of over a hundred youngsters gathered on the verdant lawn.

Such family-friendly summer programming played a breezy counterpoint to the cerebral and intense installation I was there to witness: The Lost Meeting, a collaborative project between J. Morgan Puett, spurse (a nebulous collective), Philadelphia-based curator Julie Courtney, and Bang on a Can’s David Lang. Down a hill and into the thin woods, I followed a short cedar chip trail to a small building where, for something like a century, a group of Quakers came to worship silently.

The installation takes as its point of departure a Quaker theological dispute tied to the history of this meetinghouse, a dispute on the role of “mediators” in religious worship: the Bible, primarily. The Lost Meeting seizes on the concept of the mediator and its importance to human meaning-making, and, via some algorithms fashioned from data sets based on the Quakers themselves, arrives at a reinvention of the space so radical that many people who have come to see the installation (so I hear), have hated it. New music lovers with some affection for highly mathematical and conceptual approaches may find this visual work right up their alley.

David Lang’s contribution to the project takes a different, though in a sense no less unconventional tack. He’s written a round called No Pain, to be performed outside the meetinghouse, to the meetinghouse, by anyone who happens to be around—any musical ability, any instrument—on September 11 at 2 p.m. Brochures for the installation include a scanned copy of the music, but the instructions include, “All performers are encouraged to adapt, arrange, improvise upon, ignore or transcend this score.”

The words to this work are by William Penn and read, “No pain, no palm, no thorns, no throne, no gall, no glory, no cross, no crown.” This iconoclastic view stands to balance the interpretive riot within the meetinghouse. It’s a chance to participate in a peculiarly democratic chorus. Go sing.

Less than a week after the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, John Adams and Peter Sellars gave a brief sneak preview of their new A-bomb-creation-themed opera Dr. Atomic to a group of journalists and other music industry professionals in Manhattan. (Perhaps appropriate despite the opera’s San Francisco premiere since the A-bomb grew out of the Manhattan Project.) The SF Opera’s musical administrator Kip Cranna and general director Pamela Rosenberg, who first initiated the project, were also on hand for the discussion at Avery Fisher Hall’s Helen Hull Room, which was filled to maximum capacity.

The opera, scheduled for a ten-performance run in San Francisco beginning October 1, 2005, followed by subsequent performances at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and De Nederlandse Opera, has been one of the most anticipated premieres of the 2005-06 concert season, and the sense of countdown was imminent. Rehearsals have only begun two days ago and not even John Adams has been able to attend them yet.

Adams’s third opera, which has been in the making for five years, is his first return to the medium 14 years after achieving worldwide notoriety with two provocative and now seminal works, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. According to Ms. Rosenberg, it took a bit of persuading to lure Adams, whom she described as “the greatest composer alive today,” back to the world of opera. But ultimately the saga of the bomb’s conflicted inventor J. Robert Oppenheimer, which Rosenberg proposed to Adams, proved too operatic to turn down.

Sellars described recently declassified government documents, incorporated into the libretto, which might fundamentally change everyone’s perception of this world-changing event. At one point during the presentation, Adams read a passage from a 1946 book about atomic weapons quickly taken out of circulation by the FBI, gleefully adding that he had used the text for a chorus in the opera.

What is perhaps most exciting about Dr. Atomic, however, is the music, which explores some unusual sonic terrain for the opera house.

“I always need some kind of guardian angel when I write a piece,” said Adams, who described how he was only able to tackle a project as emotionally charged as the 9/11 New York Philharmonic commission On the Transmigration of Souls by thinking of Charles Ives. For Dr. Atomic, Adams’s angel was Edgard Varèse, whom he described as the “original post-nuclear composer.” And Varèse’s unique soundworld of dense angular harmonies pervaded the MIDI-generated excerpt of the overture Adams shared with the audience.

Even more startling, however, is Adams’s use of musique concrète (although he reminded me afterwards that this technique had been in the musical vocabulary of his earliest work). Here, however, the technique resurfaces, albeit through digital sampling software rather than good old reel-to-reel cut and splice, in a remarkably authentic-sounding simulacrum of early electronic music experiments such as those by Varèse and composers of ’50s sci-fi movie scores. Adams, in fact, acknowledged that the scores of classic sci-fi films such as Them were also an important musical influence for this opera even though the narrative takes place in the 1940s. Adams said that he “wanted to honor the sensibilities of the ’50s” admitting, as someone born two years after the dropping of the bomb, that was when he was first conscious of these events as a child growing up during the Cold War.

In addition to these experiments there’s also plenty of Adams’s trademark energy as well as some traditional orchestral tone painting associated with opera. “I had more fun than Berlioz writing storm music,” he admitted with a smile.

Of course, opera, more than any other musical form, is the product of a multiplicity of creative voices as Sellars pointed out quite eloquently in his opening remarks. “It is always more than one person’s point of view and no one voice prevails.” As such, he likened it to democracy making this work as much a political statement about our own time as a reflection of events more than half a century ago. Sellars argued for the power of opera to present audiences with contradictory views.

The narrative’s metamorphosis from documentary history to the larger-than-life mythology of the operatic stage will probably be heightened by the San Francisco Opera’s decision to avoid finding look-alikes to see the roles of Oppenheimer and the other real-life characters featured in the story. In fact, Sellars went further in describing Dunya Ramicova’s costume designs, in which no two uniforms are the same for any of the military officers featured in the cast, and some of which look quite contemporary.

The events of our own time are certainly on the mind of Adams as well who pointed out that the atomic bomb was the first “weapon of mass destruction.”

A web site for Dr. Atomic features further information about the production as well as a few MIDI excerpts from the score.

Alyssa Timin Photo by Ross Hoffman

In the dead of Philadelphia’s summer, when even the haze is too lazy to lift, there’s at least one venue still cranking out cool concerts every Friday afternoon. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s popular Art After 5 series hosts local jazz artists all summer long, this week with pianist Mark Kramer, lauded by Nate Chinen as “an unheralded Philly jazz institution,” and Eddie Gomez, longtime bassist for the Bill Evans Trio.

Kramer grew up taking violin lessons from members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, transitioned to bass and saxophone, then eventually settled on jazz piano. All About Jazz credits jam sessions at Kramer’s apartment on Ridge Avenue as the locus of “an unwritten portion of jazz history.” And while Kramer served as jazz director at Ye Olde Temperance House in the Bucks County suburbs—winning Philadelphia Magazine‘s “Best of Philly” Jazz Award in 1999—Kramer was simultaneously holding it down as the head of psychopharmacology at Merck Research Laboratories. Around 2001, Kramer moved on from both gigs and began playing more in Center City Philadelphia, as well as “recording a lot of music” with Gomez, as Gomez himself put it.

The Art After 5 performances are held in the museum’s Great Stair Hall—early birds get seats at cafe-style tables and can order dinner and drinks. Latecomers perch on the wide, cool stone of the Stair, which rises amphitheater-style from the stage and affords an excellent opportunity for people-watching as curious museum-goers wander into the hall. Indeed, these concerts are ideal for the relaxed Friday evening when you’re looking for great live performance but don’t mind the low effervescence of ambient conversation. On the “portico,” the entrance facing the famous Rocky steps, and, as advertised, the best view of downtown Philadelphia, your first martini is a dollar off. I watched a wedding party sweat through some photos while their stretch Hummer limousine waited to be on its way. Another shoot was occupying a nearby bench, and some kids, outsmarting us all, were splashing around in the courtyard fountain.

Back inside, Kramer and Gomez seemed pleased to entertain the crowd, were chatty themselves, and offered context for most of their songs. Their duets were lively and expressive, Gomez’s strings slapping eagerly while Kramer’s touch leaned toward the emotional. To me, the sound was somehow naked, vulnerable in the echoing hall, despite the substantial audience. And though Gomez gave an amiable warning to crowd about a piece being “kind of challenging,” the duets retained an appropriate lightness, floating up among the branches of the Calder above, into the wings of the museum. I followed it back past the stained glass windows and the Indian temple, then lost track of time at the Japanese tea house.

Julia Werntz Photo by Michele Macrakis

First, the good news for composers and friends of contemporary music: the Brandeis University graduate program in composition and theory is alive and well after surviving a proposal for its elimination announced last year. The program, created by composer Irving Fine at the University’s inception in 1948, has contributed the following figures to the new music world: graduates Elaine Barkin, Sheila Silver, Peter Child, Ross Bauer, Alvin Lucier, Peter Lieberson, Steven Mackey, Marjorie Merryman, and Scott Wheeler, to name a few, and now the program will continue to contribute. Its faculty has included Irving Fine, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Berger, Seymour Shifrin, Alvin Lucier, Harold Shapero, Yehudi Wyner, and, currently, Martin Boykan, Eric Chasalow, and David Rakowski, and now that lineage will continue as well.

Now, the bad news: small groups of composers poring over the details of this art form evidently seem as obscure and puzzling to the rest of the population as ever, and this can affect “life-or-death” choices at some universities, even at liberal arts schools such as Brandeis. And so, having made my complaint here in NewMusicBox in mid-May about the academic ambience of the new music scene here in Boston, it’s time to speak out in defense of the university musician: without university support, American contemporary music would lose its primary, nurturing home.

In October of 2004, Brandeis Dean of Arts and Sciences (and economist) Adam Jaffe announced his proposal to eliminate the graduate program in composition and theory—along with undergraduate linguistics and ancient Greek—as part of a plan to reallocate funds within the School of Arts and Sciences. In his proposal, Jaffe cited the need at Brandeis to “globalize and diversify our curriculum and faculty,” a sentiment closely tied to the University’s mission to address issues of social justice. Although sympathies elsewhere in the administration fell in favor of the music department, whose record for excellence is widely known, Jaffe had great support on this point. In the end, the graduate composition and theory program was saved—though admissions will be trimmed down somewhat—and in exchange, the dean and the administration won a promise from the music department to add more undergraduate courses on topics in world music and popular music, even to add a “cultural studies” track to the undergraduate music major.

Composer Eric Chasalow, who was chair of the music department until this past year, when he went on sabbatical, sees in all this a danger that some American universities are adopting a sort of “cultural tourism” in the name of diversity, at the expense of art music. He takes care to distinguish this sort of requisite, lip-service-paying survey course from genuine, in-depth ethnomusicology of the sort that some universities offer.

My own take would be this: if today’s college students graduate with even a superficial knowledge of music from other cultures, this will certainly enhance their understanding of the world, and for the better. The music majors among them will inhabit a richer musical world, as well. (I can attest to this based on my own experience taking non-Western music courses as an undergraduate at the New England Conservatory.) Classroom study of American popular music also may help students to understand themselves better, for what it’s worth.

On the other hand, if schools choose to replace in-depth training in the craft of musical composition and analysis with these sorts of undergraduate survey courses, which are of a less musical, more sociological or anthropological nature, as Chasalow suggests they are doing, then where will future generations of composers learn to compose? And where will they learn to teach?

New music is in big trouble as long most of the world sees it as an unnecessary and obsolete indulgence. In the end, I return to the same theme I wrote about in May: the profession suffers from its lack of connection to the general population. The burden is on us, the practitioners—not to change the music we are writing (as some would argue), but to work to make the field as a whole more relevant to the rest of society.

M.E. and Brett Campbell

The audience strolled in a little hesitantly. After all, instead of settling into plush concert hall seats, they were sitting in plastic folding chairs in the basement of a multi-story hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon. A single violist stood at a music stand in front of three 10-foot video screens. He began to play an insistent repeating pattern. Then a life size image of the violist, Brian Quincey, appeared on one of the screens next to him, playing a countermelody while the real Quincey continued playing the initial pattern. A new, identically dressed Quincey appeared on each screen in turn, playing a different melody and forming a virtual viola quartet.

Thus began the year’s final concert for Portland’s Third Angle New Music Ensemble—for a third of the audience anyway. For its season-ending examination of the parallels between architecture and music, the group split its audience in thirds and sent each in turn to one of three nearby downtown venues. For a performance in the lobby of the neoclassical US National Bank building, members of the group played neoclassical 20th century works by Igor Stravinsky and Francis Poulenc, as the audience arrayed themselves in front of teller’s windows and desks. In the modern Fox Tower, a different subgroup of the ensemble played John Adams’s rollicking Road Movies (in tribute to the spot’s former tenant, a movie theater) and a jaunty 2003 work by Portland’s own Kevin Walczyk called BlueVox, accompanied by the award-winning Jefferson Dancers, outfitted in orange and yellow costumes.

The group envisioned the third space, the Hilton Hotel basement, as a “raw space” that could be enhanced with video and computer music technology to create a futuristic “virtual” space. Following Quincey’s split personality performance there, the group enlisted the help of video artist Brad Johnson and projectionist Danny Rosenberg to transform the grey basement into an underwater wonder-world. As Quincey’s viola played a meandering tune, the triptych of video screens displayed an image of the basement walls. Then, as composer Brede Rorstad’s pulsating, computer-generated accompaniment bubbled up under the viola line, the view shifted—around the corner, through a vault door, down a flooded corridor, finally emerging into what appeared to be a vast, sunken cathedral, its virtual architecture modeled on the Hilton basement. As the “camera” view drifted through arches and around corners, sparkling geometric figures bobbed up and drifted away, making the enchanted viewers feel as though they were scuba diving through a hidden world beneath Portland’s streets—much like Alice’s journey through the looking glass or the wardrobe that led to C.S. Lewis’s Narnia. The fantastic virtual voyage ended with a return through the vault door to the actual images of the basement walls.

A panel discussion (featuring Third Angle violinist and artistic director Ron Blessinger, composer Walczyk, and Los Angeles architect Steven Erlich) that tried to explore connections between music and architecture was a bit anti-climactic after this magical journey—but that was quickly replaced by excitement over the announcement of Third Angle’s upcoming 20th season. The group has recorded three CDs (of music by Aaron Copland, Portland composer David Schiff, and a live performance in a local glass factory), played dozens of works by Northwest composers as well as the West Coast premiere of John Cage and Kenneth Patchen’s long-lost radio drama The City Wears a Slouch Hat, hosted composers such as Steve Reich and Lou Harrison, increasingly attracted grants and support from businesses and music lovers, and has given Northwest audiences a reliable source of contemporary, accessible, avant-garde music. Next year’s schedule includes the return of acclaimed Chinese composers Zhou Long and Chen Yi, exploring the new music of China, a jazz-contemporary classical concert, and a 20th anniversary retrospective concert/celebration featuring the ensemble’s greatest hits. But this year’s inventive tripartite concert suggests that the ensemble’s most exciting days lie ahead of it.

Amy D. Rubin

Gerard Schwarz has championed American symphonic music of a specific style. He has brought attention to the voices of Hanson, Diamond, Hovhaness, Piston, Creston, and Lazarof through high quality performances and recordings on the Naxos label. In addition, the Seattle Symphony has premiered over fifty new works since 1986. This year he brought us the Made In America Festival: Part 1 (1925-1960). Next year, Part 2 will focus on American works from the second half of the 20th century to the present time.

In May, the orchestra presented five concerts featuring the music of Riegger, Piston, Sessions, Hanson, Mennin, Fine, Thompson, Diamond, and Schuman, as well as the more familiar American icons, Bernstein and Copland. Schwartz marked these individuals as the “masters of the American symphonic repertoire.” Honorary composer-in-residence David Diamond, who was to celebrate his 90th birthday this year, attended certain events just weeks before his death in his hometown of Rochester, New York.

How does one select the works that speak the most about America’s past and present, and represent American orchestral music as a unique and equal presence in a milieu which originated and evolved across the Atlantic? Making the choice is not an enviable task and Schwartz omitted many important composers: Barber, Ellington, Gershwin, Foss, Schuller, and the rugged Ruggles, just to name a few. Creating a festival and planning a wedding reception have something in common. The actual event may be joyous but the names left off the list may become a serious subject for scrutiny and can potentially overshadow the celebration.

A number of us met the gracious and engaging David Diamond at an intimate cocktail reception hosted by the Symphony. I asked his reaction to a former teacher of mine, Robert Palmer, composer of a promising string quartet in the 1950s. Diamond suggested that Palmer’s career did not blossom because he lacked his own voice. Composers take note!

Diamond was accompanied by his life-long friend and former neighbor Sam Elliott, who met Diamond in Rochester. Sam’s mother had issued a warning to her boys that the composer needed quiet for his musings, so they had better “keep the lid” on the noise level. Nine-year-old Sam paid Diamond a visit to placate him, the two became instant friends, and Sam, though not a musician, has attended most of Diamond’s events for forty-some years. He is even protectively watchful over Diamond’s ASCAP earnings.

During the May 17th event, Diamond’s words echoed in my mind. Did the works being played have something individual and personal to say that was distinctly American? Virgil Thomson’s Second Symphony seems a sentimental waltz-driven journey of whimsy, filled with “American sounding” open 4ths, and his unadorned triadic harmonic language. Mennin’s nautical Moby Dick is colorfully orchestrated but for me suffers from Diamond’s issue of “lack of voice.” Bernstein’s biblical Symphony No. 1 “Jeremiah,” shows clues to where he will go a decade later with melodic phrases about to burst into “Maria.” Whereas his works for opera and theater are consistently well shaped, this early work fizzles out, leaving the soprano standing on stage a bit helplessly as the music fades and the audience wonders if indeed, the piece is over. I looked around and saw a sea of respectful but detached listeners. The audience perked up with actual “Bravos!” to the Ives/Schuman Variations on “America.” Jocular, buoyant, romping through the land of the familiar, it evoked patriotic engagement and clearly a strong identification on the part of the average listener. Good or bad, this was American, and played with flair and dazzle by this excellent American orchestra under the baton of Maestro Schwarz.

As a partner in the festival, Huw Edwards conducted his final concert with the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra, which was founded in 1942 and is the largest youth symphony organization in the United States. Wow! What a great string sound, the brass section rocks, and the woodwinds meet any challenge! His fine work speaks for itself and he will be sorely missed. Benaroya Hall was packed and the orchestra was joined by a major presence in our musical scene, clarinetist Laura DeLuca. This collaboration produced a wonderful performance of the Copland Clarinet Concerto—captivating, bold, teasing, lyrically expressive, and stylistically on the mark. DeLuca was at home mixing a warm classical sound with jazzy note bending. The other highlight of the program was resident composer John Mackey’s Antiphonal Dances, which connected nicely to the Copland rhythmically and harmonically, and clearly delighted both players and audience.

The festival’s final concert included Copland’s bold and terse Symphonic Ode, Schuman’s Symphony No.3, with gorgeous playing by the brass, and the percussion-driven Symphony No.2 by Chavez which, like Copland, delights in transmuting short rhythmic riffs. No, there isn’t time to speculate on who influenced whom. Last was Hanson’s almost over the top Symphony No.2, “Romantic.” The players smiled broadly through tremolos and sweeping melodies reminiscent of 1940s movie scores. Schwarz’s performances were clean and commanding.

Like I said before, not everyone can be invited to the wedding and those who are left out, for whatever reason, usually stir controversy. So what sorts of things should a festival like this take into consideration? Feel free to chime in and answer any of the following:

What should be the goals of a festival like this one? To revisit important works? Showcase the new and innovative? Show the linear connections between composers of one sensibility or, by juxtaposition, show the range of language and style that goes under the heading “American Music?” Should works performed have the capacity to recruit new American audiences? Should they help to brand and identify our profile abroad? What about American women? They were invisible in the first part of the century and the second half brought the orchestral works of Tower, Zwillich, León and others to public attention. Should we give them extra space to make up for lost time? Should local composers be featured? Seattle looks out to the Pacific Rim, and some composers create out of this experience. The 2005 festival bypassed the works of Cowell, Harrison, and Cage who composed American music inspired by cross-cultural connections. Is there time to include them next year? Probably not. Next year’s festival has a lot of ground to cover. Reich, Adams, Glass, Corigliano, and the afore mentioned women are senior statesman in the composition world. How will we find the time and space to not only look back but also provide ourselves and the larger world a taste of what is new and American right now? Who will be listening and what will we want them to hear?

I invite NewMusicBox readers to send me their responses (my email is [email protected]), which I will read and forward to the symphony.

Mark Gresham Photo by Angela Lee

Video games are only one of the new media being explored by composers, but this year has seen the advent of a new twist: the first-ever live symphonic concert tour of music from a video game series. Dear Friends, an evening-length concert featuring Japanese composer Nabuo Uematsu‘s music from the Square Enix Final Fantasy games, has been played across North America after the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as part of a May 2004 videogame conference, performed a stunningly successful one-time event which sold out in three days. That got promoters hyped about creating a tour.

One of the concerts, conducted by Arnie Roth, hit Atlanta on June 24 and 25 as a summer special performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. It included a total of five video screens (three large projection screens overhead and two home theater screens on the stage wings) showing digital animation sequences mixed with live cam shots inside the orchestra.

Except for some empty seats on the first night (rumored to have been a mishap with a block of seating originally assigned to Ticketmaster), both concerts were full of both dyed-in-the-wool Final Fantasy fans and the merely curious. In any case, this was a disproportionately young audience for a typical ASO concert. They knew the music by name (Roth announced selections from stage) and responded as if at a rock concert. One audience member by the name of Phil Yu is so much a fan he had been to all of the U.S. performances so far except one in Hartford, Connecticut. Another couple was overheard afterwards to say, “This was so totally worth the 147 mile drive.” Roth took a voice poll during the concert, indicating a large number had come from outside Georgia just to hear it.

More Friends, a second concert of additional music from Final Fantasy, has already been developed and test-driven in Los Angeles, in anticipation of a tour in 2006.

Opera that Runs with Scissors

Very few of Atlanta’s composers are exploring the genre of traditional dramatic grand opera, primarily due of the scarcity and expense of resources for developing and mounting a production.

However, the Harrower Summer Opera Workshop gave composer Curtis Bryant the opportunity on June 26 to try out the solitary competed scene from his opera in progress, The Anarchists. The libretto, by New York author and forensic psychiatrist Allen Reichman, is based on Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent. Reichman had selected Bryant out of a list of seven potential composers provided to him by New York City Opera, and proposed the project.

Based in London, England, Scene 1 of Act III involves a confrontation between two characters: Adolf Verloc (Kyle Guglielmo), a stationary shop owner and part-time secret agent in the service of a foreign government, and his wife Winnie (Katie Baughman). The point of contention is the accidental death of Winnie’s developmentally impaired brother Stevie (presumably in Act II), killed in her husband’s failed mission to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. The urgent, initially neoclassical music underscores both declamatory and lyrical vocal dialogue, and approaching the end, in Winnie’s upstage solo soliloquy about Stevie, swells in emotional passion to conclude the scene with a Tosca-esque stabbing of Adolf—but with scissors.

The Anarchists is to be Bryant’s second full-length opera. His first, Zabette, libretto by Mary R. Bullard, was premiered in April 1999 by the Georgia State University School of Music.