On The Edge Of The Millennium
There's No Time Like The Present / Those Were The Days. Or Were They?
by Mic Holwin
originally appeared in American Composers Orchestra Quarterly Vol. III No. 1 Fall 1998
There's No Time Like The Present
1972. Elliot Carter is writing his third string quartet, which will win a Pulitzer Prize the next year. Pierre Boulez is causing a ruckus in his new post as music director of the New York Philharmonic. Anthony Kelley, Melinda Wagner and Randall Woolf are doing their math homework, riding bikes, maybe practicing for their piano lessons.
It's hard to earn respect in the difficult field of contemporary classical composing, especially when you're a young composer who would consider even a relatively modern-day work like Philip Glass's Einstein On The Beach a golden oldie. Today's emerging composers have a substantial last few decades--let alone last few centuries--within which to contextualize themselves.
Just the last century alone has had more than its share of upheavals. After all, not only have the rules changed every decade or so--just take for one the rejection of tonality, the acceptance of atonality and the embracing of tonality once again--but the playing field itself has unceasingly metamorphosed with the advent of countless paradigm-shifting inventions. A short list would include the phonograph, television, CDs and personal computers (the last a late 20th-century composer's de rigueur compositional tool used for countless tasks from sound generation to score printing)--enough to render the world incomprehensible to a turn-of-the-century composer, should he teleport into our present.
How has this all affected today's composers and made them unique from previous generations of composers?
"There aren't so many ideologies--'I'm gonna be this kind of composer doing this kind of thing,'" says New York composer Randall Woolf. "The world is so complicated now no one can be an expert in even these little fields. Whatever comes your way, you adapt as quickly as you can."
Anthony Kelley, composer-in-residence for the Richmond Symphony, agrees. "There's less of schools and more of an individual impulse to create something."
"When [composers like Crumb, Diamond and Perle] were coming up through the ranks, it was almost impossible to get an orchestral piece performed," says Philadelphia-born Melinda Wagner. "In the last 20 years, that's really changed.
"Large corporations like Exxon started underwriting conductor residency programs with the major orchestras in the early '80s," Wagner goes on to explain. Meet The Composer also started to place composers-in-residence, who began performing current scores. "I see this as one of the major changes in this century that's going to make the next century possible for us," she says. "Before that, you had to have gotten your Pulitzer Prize to get a major orchestra to play your work."
Woolf, too, feels that more young composers are getting orchestra pieces played now than 25 years ago, citing Tan Dun, Aaron Kernis and Michael Torke as examples. In spite of this, he feels there are troublesome issues involved with writing orchestral music today. For one, he says, "the orchestra itself is very unwilling to change. You're committing yourself to writing for a group that is pre-Stravinsky. If you want to add a few instruments, it means your piece is unlikely to be played."
He wonders if orchestras' resistance to upgrade with the times will hasten their own extinction. "Maybe people don't want to go and see something that's a hundred years without a change. Maybe people don't want to write for something that's a hundred years without a change." Consequently, Woolf is pessimistic about the orchestra's future and his future with orchestra. He questions whether it's a wise choice to pursue symphonic writing as a main focus.
"But, it's very seducing," he concurs, "the sound of the orchestra is just fantastic. There's nothing like it."
Kelley, in contrast, believes in the staying power of orchestral music. "There's always a place for the orchestra," Kelley states, citing film soundtracks, pop records and multimedia events as ever-growing employs for orchestra. "I don't think it's outdated at all. There's nothing that compares to the sound of a live orchestra, or even a recorded orchestra.
"I see the orchestra as limitless in presenting material because you've got such a wide range of instruments. Even if you're just going for conservative orchestration, it's infinite."
Wagner believes there will be a place for orchestral music in the future. "I feel very positive about it. I think audiences have had their appetites whetted a bit [for contemporary classical music]. People ultimately don't want to go on hearing the same old stuff over and over."
"I'm pretty sure that there will be even more eclecticism in the styles," predicts Kelley for the 21st-century American orchestra. "References to world music, which was going on even during Crumb's heyday. But there's going to be even more because the world gets smaller and smaller. And there's going to be more references to the popular styles. Our generation has heard a lot of popular music, and it's really hard to get away from that influence. As John Harbison once said, 'The music you love is the music you grew up on.'"
Speaking of, many if not most young composers today have been raised on pop, rock or jazz, and are using --knowingly or unconsciously--popular idioms in their orchestral works. Kelley sees this hybrid language as a way to draw audiences back in to concert halls. "[Popular influences] gives new audiences something else to grasp on to," he says. "To some degree, a lot of the high European art music references began to lose audiences, in America especially. Where the sounds are always interesting and titillating, the material isn't something that audience members can retain and take out of the hall with them."
Raised on rock and playing in garage bands before ever hearing an orchestra, Woolf (whose new CRI/Emergency Music CD of chamber and solo music is entitled Rock Steady) believes that most composers of his generation are re-discovering their rock or jazz roots, himself included.
"For example, I really like a lot of rap music. The textures that Public Enemy does--very complex things with samples at all different times--I get a lot out of that and put it into my classical pieces. But if you listen to my music, I don't think you would ever say that it sounds like rap."
Though it shares half a title with a Velvet Underground album, Randall Woolf's work for orchestra White Heat doesn't consciously invoke rock sources. (Though Woolf, who's done orchestral arrangements for Velvet guitarist John Cale, can easily translate rock to symphonic.)
White Heat was written during a "fast and intense summer" when Woolf was a student at Tanglewood and studying with David Del Tredici and Oliver Knussen. "I wanted to write a piece that would be a really fast blur," explains Woolf. "Things just whizzing by. This piece has many themes and sections but they all go by so quickly in the end it's just this blur, like white light--composed of all the different colors--is a blur."
Jazz is Kelley's main influence and he utilizes its melodic flow and rhythmic swing in his orchestral writing. In fact, a dream of his is to write a melody that would one day become a jazz standard.
Another dream of Kelley's led to his jazz-inspired piece The Breaks. Kelley dreamed its opening measures. In playing through the next morning what he had scribbled down in the middle of the night, he relates, "when I heard these large smashing chords--BAP!--and everything responding to those chords, I said, 'Man, that just sounds like a bunch of jazz riffs. What am I trying to do? That's not gonna work for orchestra!' Then I said, 'Well, let's see what happens.'"
What happened was a Gershwin-esque symphonic jazz work complete with "breaks," or solos a jazz player takes without accompaniment at the end of a phrase. These breaks, though, are more like "stylistic parenthesis" through which multiple influences-- swing to pop to Latin to Michael Jackson--permeate. Kelley, currently writing a Piano Concerto for the Richmond Symphony, compares it to "a conversation where you're talking about a nice dinner you had the previous night, but you end up talking about the red bow tie the waiter was wearing."
On the other hand, Wagner's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion (commissioned by Paul Lustig Dunkel and the Westchester Philharmonic), uses neither rock or jazz references and is "very narrative and tells a story, although there's no program." Wagner, who studied with George Crumb, cites Crumb as an influence on not just her but on "every American composer in terms of orchestration--he invented so many of the great sounds that we use every day." Her roots grew in 20th-century classical music. "When I was a kid, I loved Aaron Copland, and still do," she says.
Wagner, at work on a piece for the New York New Music Ensemble, pictures herself in the next century. "I had a Chinese student several years ago who told my fortune," she explains. "He said 'When you're in your 60s, you will be very busy.' And I thought, that's great news. Number one, I'm going to be alive, and number two, being busy is great. So my hope is I'll be busy with musical projects. Looking back, I hope that I would feel that I had been an honest person artistically."
Randall Woolf's White Heat receives its New York premiere at ACO's September 27 concert, as does Melinda Wagner's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion, Paul Lustig Dunkel conducting. Anthony Kelley's The Breaks receives its world premiere at ACO's November 1 concert, conducted by Gerard Schwarz.
ACO's emerging composers program is made possible with generous support of the Geraldine C. and Emory M. Ford Foundation.
Those Were The Days. Or Were They?
"Writing seems to be more difficult as you move through the years," says composer George Crumb when asked about how the composition process has changed for him over his 68-year lifetime. "It never gets easier. When I was younger, I used to think 'Oh gee, in 20 years, it will all be so easy.' But it's not that way if you're not willing to repeat yourself."
Not repeating yourself in half a century is a formidable task for anyone, let alone one of 20th-century music's preeminent composers, whose output can be scrutinized by millions of people. Only a handful of composers living today can claim to have grappled with this problem throughout a good part of the past century.
George Crumb and with him David Diamond and George Perle have observed the comings and goings (and returns) of serialism, neo-romanticism, minimalism and structuralism. Poised on the edge of the 21st century, these respected 20th-century composers have been first-hand witnesses to the process of composing, from the writing of a piece to its final performance, over years of history that span from Prohibition to the Gulf War.
83-year-old George Perle, author of the standard work on the music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, Serial Composition and Atonality (now in its sixth edition), was one of the first American composers to be profoundly influenced by Schoenberg's radical new 12-tone technique in the early years of this century. Perle says the act of composing hasn't changed a bit for him since then. It still only involves "a blank sheet of paper and trying to write something you believe in."
"I'm a composer because I'm a composer," he states simply. How a composer goes about writing, he believes, doesn't change because of stylistic fads, receptiveness of audiences, or whether or not commissions are rolling in. "I hear sounds in my head," Perle says; composing is simply the act of corralling those sounds on paper.
This ability to make manifest one's inner muse is what makes the difference between a composer and a great composer, according to David Diamond.
Diamond, a 20th-century classicist known for his finely-crafted symphonic works, is also 83 and was writing his first commission when Franklin D. Roosevelt was re-elected President. He believes the act of composition can only be accomplished once one has had solid theoretical training. Once thusly grounded, says Diamond, "if a composer has imagination, it will be an important piece and he will be an important composer. Without imagination, they will only be notes on paper."
Crumb, who came to the fore in the '60s with darkly evocative timbres and mystical rituals, also emphasizes a composer's responsibility to add only exceptional pieces to music history's long list of works. "It is easy to write unthinking music," he says. "But I don't think it's a good thing to create less than good music in a world that's full of a lot of indifferent music."
Crumb claims he's slowed down in the last few years ("I think maybe it's age," says the composer, who was just in one door from the Bowdoin Festival in Maine and was almost out another door to Boulder, Colorado). "I sometimes wonder, too," he mulls further, "if people don't have kind of a window of time when they do their best work. And anything after that is like a gift."
Compared to their own years as young composers, the three have mixed opinions on whether it's more or less difficult in today's world for an emerging composer to succeed. Perle, for one, believes it's a better world now for young composers.
"It's easier in certain practical ways," he says. "There was nothing like ACO. More of this music is played today. There's a lot more activity. When I was younger, there was no opportunity for a composer to get played by an orchestra. I wrote lots of piano music, lots of string quartets."
But with the listening public slowly tuning out, Crumb doesn't think all is rosy. "I think we're in a very low point of music right now," he says. "It was better 30 years ago. And it's better in Europe now than it is here. This is not a happy time for this kind of music in this country."
In Diamond's view, hard times for contemporary classical music started 50 years ago and are partially the result of composers themselves. "To me, the most glaring difference [between then and now] is that because of the influence from Europe after the second World War, we suddenly were inundated by double the number of composers who did not have traditional theoretical training," he says emphatically. "They simply started pushing the 12 chromatic notes around."
Diamond taught for a quarter century at The Juilliard School, ensuring that every student who had aspirations to be a composer was solidly grounded in traditional training before they were allowed to delve into any abstruse language of their own. "And if they could not explain what the notes were doing, there was no point to it."
He also attributes contemporary classical music's tough times to the dearth of good conductors in post-War America, a problem that he feels is still with us today. "Everything lies in [the younger conductors'] laps," Diamond says. "They are the ones that it all depends on. They don't choose the works to play carefully, as Koussevitzky used to do when I was a young man--they were very careful in how they chose their contemporary music. Where today is sort of helter-skelter.
"It's all a question of having a certain amount of authoritative judgement, which I'm not too sure exists today. Today what has happened is the attitude of Anything Goes."
Crumb cites the ascendancy of rock and pop music as one reason orchestras and contemporary classical music aren't more in demand. "People aren't so much interested [in contemporary classical music] and the big periodicals are reviewing rock as if that is the contemporary music of our time--of course, it is a contemporary music, and it's not that that music can't have its own kind of integrity, but there's something it leaves out if you say that it's the only thing going on.
"I pick up the New York Times or Time and it's talking about the latest rock group, which I'm sure is exciting to some people, but it neglects a huge area of music. [Popular music] doesn't address some issues. It can't, fundamentally. It's more surface, about superficial issues. As interesting as that music can occasionally be, I don't think it really replaces the other."
That said, Crumb does empathize with those composers who are adding rock and pop influences to their orchestral music. "It's a reflex panic," he says. "They're trying like crazy to make themselves a part of that. We all get some things, I'm sure. My younger son is a rock archivist practically; I'm sure things have filtered out of that--it's in the air in this house."
For Perle and Diamond, pop music was (and is) another branch of music entirely that didn't cross-pollinate their own work. "I didn't feel any conflicts," says Perle about writing atonal symphonic music as pop music began its slow seep into classical language. "I had a language and I developed it. Critics have found connections between my music and jazz. I didn't look to put it in. It's just not even an issue for me."
Crumb, who has quoted Bach to 19th-century hymns, says his music relates to popular musics of other times. "Most of my influences are turn-of-the-century," he says. "The LAST turn-of-the-century," he adds laughingly.
Many of Crumb's pieces, such as his Pulitzer Prize-winning Echoes of Time and the River, make reference not just to music of other times, but to time itself. In Echoes, for example, time is evoked by processionals of players on stage. ("I realized even then that it wasn't the most practical orchestra piece," he laughs about his conception of the piece 30 years ago.)
A dark period of time inspired Diamond's Symphony No. 2, first performed by Koussevitzky himself at Symphony Hall in 1944. "I was very emotionally upset by the War and what was going on in Germany," Diamond says of his self-described "war symphony." While the piece starts with a "funereal adagio," it ends with "a very hopeful last movement, that there will be a victory for all the courageous idealists of the world--and that we'll get rid of Hitler."
Comparatively, Perle's Piano Concerto No. 1, written closer to the coming century than to the last, isn't time-specific. Perle doesn't see the millennium mark as a reason to reevaluate music and the methods of its creation and dissemination. Along with the other composers, he firmly believes there will be a place for the orchestra in the 21st century.
"I'm optimistic," says Diamond about music of the future. "I won't be around at that time, but I think the next 25 years are going to put things through sieves." aco
George Crumb's Echoes of Time and the River and the New York premiere of George Perle's Piano Concerto No. 1 will be performed at ACO's September 27 concert, conducted by Paul Lustig Dunkel. David Diamond's Symphony No. 2 will be performed at ACO's November 1 concert, Gerard Schwarz conducting.
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