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New Music From Small Places Launches N.J.E.'s 12th Season By JOEL SACHS
The New Juilliard Ensemble opens its 12th season of global exploration—and the Juilliard School's 99th concert year—on September 18. The word "new," which is often freely applied to signify anything composed after Brahms, certainly describes the program. Of the five pieces, the oldest was composed in 1991. There will be one world premiere, three U.S. premieres, and one New York premiere. The provenance of the music is certainly non-mainstream: Iceland, Israel, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Ukraine. Apart from Ukraine, the countries are among the world's smallest, but all boast impressive new-music cultures. Perhaps the audience will share my wonder that such small countries can produce so much good music. The most astonishing case is Iceland: With fewer than 300,000 inhabitants, Icelanders include a disproportionately large number of performers and composers. Many of them have told me that their musical riches result from nearly universal musical training for children. Having been deeply impressed by the quality of composers and performers, I find the argument very convincing. Adequate funding for music is, of course, always helpful. Whereas American composers can face tremendous difficulties finding support to attend foreign performances, two composers (Israeli Menachem Zur and Netherlander Robert Nasveld) will be at our rehearsals and concert.
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| Robert Nasveld |
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Three of the composers were unknown to me before my annual explorations started. Remigijus Merkelys, Robert Nasveld, and Haukur Tómasson (Iceland) drew my interest when they or their publishers sent me some striking music. (Artistic modesty is perfectly fine, but without getting their music to performers, even the very best composers may remain tragically obscure. On the other hand, professional aggressiveness does not substitute for talent.) Furthermore, whereas some composers understandably look out only for their own interests, I was very impressed that Lithuanian composer Remigijus Merkelys urged upon me the music of his colleagues, all of whom seem to be utterly unknown in this country. Merkelys' own Compass impressed me by its irrepressible energy and wit, especially at the conclusion, when a solo saxophonist playing an improvised cadenza seems to go berserk.The other two composers had already crossed my path. Menachem Zur—whose son Yonah should be well known to older students and recent alumni—goes back to our days as graduate school colleagues at Columbia in the 1960s. I had been interested in his music for some time, but he had had nothing of an instrumentation suitable for the New Juilliard Ensemble. Only a few months ago, however, he presented me with a score commissioned by an Israeli ensemble that had never played it. It seemed just right for the coming concert, and we would have the honor of a world premiere.
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| Menachem Zur (Photo by Joshua Kamien, courtesy ArtPro-Artists Management) |
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Whereas Menachem and I knew each other as part of the general mass of graduate students at Columbia in the 1960s, my first encounter with Alexander Shchetynsky was a very different affair. In the autumn of 1992, when the Soviet Union had dissolved and Ukraine became an independent country, I was invited to Kharkiv (or Kharkov, in Russian) to conduct a symphonic concert. My host was Valentin Bibik, one of the leading Ukrainian composers and teachers. It was my second visit to Kharkiv; the first time, two years earlier, it was still called by its Russian name and the Soviet Union was terminally ill. Now Ukraine was independent, and frighteningly destitute. (In the December Journal, I shall write about the first visit in the context of the 2005 Focus! Festival, whose theme is "Breaking the Chains: The Soviet Avant-Garde, 1966-1991.") One afternoon, Bibik, wishing to promote the interests of young composers, invited three of his students for tea. It was easy to remember their names: all three were called Sasha (Alexander). Valentin, a very practical man, had trained the three Sashas not to be timid about showing their work to performers, so I came away with a pile of scores. The situation, however, was potentially awkward. One wanted to help the musicians of a country that was on its knees; but being indiscriminately helpful would not help anyone, since composers should be admired, not pitied. And then there was the problem of friendship: I had long since learned that nice people do not always write good music, any more than good music is only written by nice people. The three Sashas, however, were nice guys in their late 20s, who wrote very impressive scores. Happily, I soon had the opportunity to perform one of Sasha Grinberg's pieces in Europe. Sasha Shchetynsky, however, did not give me anything whose instrumentation fit my resources.
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| Alexander Shchetynsky (Photo by Yury Podporenko) |
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Years passed, and in 2001 Shchetynsky unexpectedly resurfaced at a festival in Odessa. Although by then Kharkiv had almost completely collapsed, Shchetynsky still lived there, but was directing a festival in Lviv, at the opposite end of Ukraine, and promptly invited my new-music ensemble Continuum to participate, which we did the following year. I then learned that he had had several pieces with the right instrumentation for the New Juilliard Ensemble back in 1992, but the ensemble was only born a year later. We had lost contact and, not knowing about the N.J.E., he never informed me about those pieces. Upon seeing them, I immediately programmed one.As I complete this article in early August, the coming season has been finalized and I can think about a holiday. It is a pity that my term-time schedule does not afford me the peace of mind to settle down with piles of scores and recordings to plan the season much earlier. Frankly, the experience of working on programming in the summer can be unforgettable. First of all, it focuses the mind by bringing the deadline terrifying close! Programs that feel well shaped finally crystallize just as the Juilliard Communications Office begins to send threatening e-mails. (The expressiveness of electronic media is a phenomenon that never ceases to amaze me.) But the real nightmare begins if one gets too close to the first day of August, when many European publishers begin a month-long siesta, locking away performance materials that will be needed before Labor Day. Fortunately, as of this writing, the materials in greatest danger of summer slumber have arrived. Season 12 can begin!Joel Sachs, director of the New Juilliard Ensemble and the annual Focus! Festival, has been a faculty member since 1970.
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