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N.J.E. Season Finale Is Packed With Premieres By JOEL SACHS
The New Juilliard Ensemble concludes its 2003-04 season on April 1 with another premiere-packed program. Therein lie some new chapters in the ongoing saga of finding new music.
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| Among the composers featured in the upcoming N.J.E. concert are composition student Cynthia Wong. (Photo by George Kunze) |
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One story begins in Holland, in December 2002, when I had the pleasure of my third visit as an observer at Dutch Music Days, an annual December festival in Utrecht. A showcase for Dutch music, the concerts include jazz, sometimes film music, and even some rather peculiar corners of Dutch traditional music (such as an ensemble of elderly rural women playing watering cans, teapots, etc. the following year). One of the highlights in 2002 was a new violin concerto by Guus Janssen, a concert composer and superb jazz pianist, whom I had known for some 10 years. Much of the concerto, written for New York's multicultural virtuoso Mark Kaufman, is improvised—most of the solo part, and some of the orchestral accompaniment. No two performances will sound alike.I decided to ask Janssen whether he contemplated making a version for small orchestra. Although he had not, he seemed to like the idea, especially if I meant the New Juilliard Ensemble. I assured him that finding a suitable soloist among the students was no problem, adding that I actually imagined the piece as a clarinet concerto. He said he would give it some thought. After several weeks with no word from him, I assumed he had dismissed the idea. Then he e-mailed that he needed the instrumentation and my thoughts about a soloist. I supplied the names of three students: Hideaki Aomori, a classical clarinetist with an excellent reputation as a jazz player; Erica vonKleist, an alto saxophone player from the jazz program; and Kinan Azmeh, a clarinetist from Syria with great experience in Middle Eastern traditional music. Janssen jumped at the idea of giving his concerto a Middle Eastern embodiment—at least on this occasion. But the drama still had one more episode, for when Kinan graduated in May 2003 he would become ineligible. I think the concerto helped persuade him to stay another year for the Graduate Diploma program. Guus Janssen's Clarinet Concerto was on its way.The second story illustrates how some governments do good deeds by assisting their artists expeditiously. Since conducting Etymology, by the young Swedish composer Henrik Strindberg, during the first New Juilliard Ensemble season (1993-94), I had developed a friendship with him and his family. I therefore felt I could take the risk of proposing something that I do not particularly enjoy suggesting, but which has had some good results: namely, asking if he would like to write a piece for the N.J.E. even though I could not offer him any money. I sometimes do this because many composers have told me they would love to have an opportunity to write for our famously talented students. Furthermore, the N.J.E.'s instrumentation was formulated precisely so that a piece written for it might be played by the European ensembles that are similarly constituted, and so that the N.J.E. could play works written for those ensembles. Strindberg agreed immediately, and eased my guilt by saying that if I wrote a letter officially requesting a piece, he could apply to the Swedish national arts council for funding, converting a friendly invitation into a proper commission. Thus we have a new piece for baritone and chamber orchestra, "I thought someone came …" (texts by Bruno K. Öijer), whose cover says, "commissioned by Rikskonserter for the New Juilliard Ensemble." The soloist will be Ryan McKinny. The score had arrived only the day before this article was written, but at a quick glance, it looks extremely varied and beautiful.
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| Swedish composer Henrik Strindberg |
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The third commission is no less exciting a prospect. Each year Juilliard composition students are invited to submit anonymously any score (preferably with a recording), and I attempt to locate one or more who seem ready to write adventurously for chamber orchestra. One of this season's crop—Dalit Hadass Warshaw's Al Ha-Shminit: Interludes on a Bygone Mode—was played on November 14. The other, Stages by Cynthia Lee Wong, will have its first performance on the April 1 concert. Wong, who expects to receive her bachelor's degree in May, describes it as embodying a process of re-examining her own compositional methodology. "Rather than experiment with the music itself, I decided to experiment with the creative process. What resulted was an immense amount of material—drafts, charts, sketches, etc. and very little music. I realized that despite my increased understanding of the piece, I was not arriving fast enough at its conclusion. I had become too self-conscious and too judgmental." She also found herself having to deal with the balance between her ear and intellect in new ways. "I wanted to create a work that both captures the human spirit and challenges the mind. I thought about the world around me—how full of distractions it seemed, how rushed, how fragmented, yet how alive. What if I were to imagine life through many different perspectives, as though each perspective were only a piece of the puzzle—then try to fit those pieces together? It would seem as though this would lead to a chaotic mess. But isn't this what modern life has become? A series of events that continuously pop up with almost no relation to each other? It is left up to the person to create the associations between seemingly unrelated events—to create meaning and connections."The remainder of the program is dedicated to the American premiere of Appearances (2002) by Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin, another Scandinavian whose music has been heard on earlier Juilliard programs. Oddly enough, Wallin's impulse is somewhat like Wong's. He writes:"This planet has seen many life forms emerge and vanish on its surface. Each of them has had a lifespan, long or short. A species can be marginal or totally dominant, and its extinction can be almost imperceptibly gradual or dramatically abrupt. Similarly, in human history, great and not so great ideas, good and evil, have appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in a bewildering, fascinating stream. One example is the highly refined and seemingly durable thoughts of art and philosophy, currently almost suffocating in the deluge of sewer water from the entertainment industry. The earth is full of these patterns, like a midsummer's sky: the clouds emerge literally from thin air, grow, reshape and vanish, the fate of each of them impossible to predict for the spectator.
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New Juilliard Ensemble
Alice Tully Hall
Thursday, April 1, 8 p.m.
For ticket information, please see
the calendar.
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"This music behaves in very much the same manner. Yes, I say 'it behaves,' because during the composition process, I have let the different musical entities in the piece evolve almost on their own, instead of by a preconceived principle. They also have suggested to me how much and where in the time span of the work they should appear and disappear, and their relationship with the other musical 'inhabitants' of the piece. Some novelists describe how their characters start to live their own life during the writing of a book, and that's exactly how I have felt during the creation of this piece. It has grown in the tension between the many-faceted interaction of the wills and needs of the different musical entities, and my own urge as a composer to read a meaningful pattern in it."Intrigued? Join us for this conclusion to a memorable season at Alice Tully Hall on April 1.Joel Sachs is the director of the New Juilliard Ensemble and the annual Focus! Festival.
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