By JAMES M. KELLER

When the first Focus! festival took place 21 years ago, The Juilliard School was entering a period of transition so far as its relationship to contemporary music was concerned. Joel Sachs had been teaching part-time at Juilliard since 1970, giving music-history lectures (his Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia had been about Mozart's pupil Johann Nepomuk Hummel), and he was chomping at the bit to help the School become more vitally involved in the music of our own time. He would end up doing precisely that, and in the years separating then and now, his stewardship of the Focus! festival and the New Juilliard Ensemble would do much to realign Juilliard's involvement in the contemporary-music scene.

Luciano Berio (center) with Cathy Berberian after a performance of Berio's Folk Songs in May 1968 with the Juilliard Ensemble, precursor to the New Juilliard Ensemble. (Photo by Oleaga)

New music was not entirely absent from Juilliard in the preceding years. Two of the School's distinguished presidents of recent memory—William Schuman and Peter Mennin—were active composers, a profession that is at heart intertwined with new sounds. But those sounds were rarely heard outside the composition department. In 1967 no less a personage than Luciano Berio founded the Juilliard Ensemble, but even that made less impression on the School itself than on the external music community. "Juilliard had such a reputation for conservatism back then," Sachs recalls. "Even that first Juilliard Ensemble [precursor to the current New Juilliard Ensemble] was an unofficial group. I'm told that Peter Mennin tolerated it but not much more. There had been a contemporary-music festival every January, but there were many problems with it." It was overdue for something to be done.

Mennin died in 1983 and Gideon Waldrop assumed an interim presidency, one that allowed Sachs to expand the curriculum with a workshop on 20th-century performance problems. Joseph W. Polisi assumed the presidency with the 1984-85 academic year, and that lay the groundwork for a sea-change in how contemporary music would be viewed within the institution. Sachs remembers thrashing through new-music concerns with the new president. "He recognized the problem," says Sachs. "We both agreed that we didn't want to ghettoize new music. We came up with the idea of revising the festival, such as it stood at that time, to make it thematically organized in some way. We could present really new music or 20th-century classics, or whatever we wanted so long as it held together with a coherent theme. At the beginning, he essentially said, 'Figure out what needs to be done and we'll draw up a contract, because you should be here full-time.' Our agreement was that I could program anything I wanted as long as he could hate anything he wanted."

Joel Sachs, here at the piano, is the director of the New Juilliard Ensemble and the annual Focus! festival. (Photo by Nan Melville)

Thus was born the Focus! festival, with Sachs at its helm, an annual exercise in modernity that since 1983 has immersed listeners in musical stimulation they would be unlikely to encounter otherwise. The topics have been extremely varied—sometimes focusing on a geographical area, sometimes on a time period, sometimes on a single important composer—and each festival typically involves a mix of chamber and orchestral offerings. Two years ago the festival was given over to Ives, in honor of the 50th anniversary of his death, and in 1995 Focus! was devoted to Webern for the 50th anniversary of his death. Ives? Webern? You might imagine that such figures would qualify as relatively mainstream by now, reasonably well represented without the boosterism of the Focus! festival. And yet, Focus! invariably manages to shed unaccustomed light on its subjects. The Webern festival, for example, put forth "virtually the entire canon of this Viennese master" (as the cover of the program proclaimed), and among Webern works both famous and obscure were sprinkled carefully selected pieces by later composers who were particularly susceptible to his influence—Stockhausen, Babbitt, Westergaard, Dallapiccola, Feldman, Kurtág, Boulez, Gubaidulina—demonstrating how Webern was continuing to resound among composers practically up to the time of the concerts themselves. For this year's festival (see article below) the repertoire simply could not be more up to date: it consists of music completed in 2005.

To this day President Polisi keeps a watchful eye trained on the festival, and like music-lovers in the city beyond, he finds himself preferring some offerings more than others. "During one of our early years we devoted Focus! to young European composers," Sachs recalls. "It seemed like a good topic just then because Western Europe was on the verge of integrating and people were very interested in issues of European unity and diversity. Afterwards, Joseph Polisi told me he'd been at four of the concerts but that he thought that only about half of what he heard was actually terrific." Sachs doubts that the critique was meant as a compliment, but he took it as one, and responded, "It's amazing that you would hear such a quantity of new works and find that half of them were actually impressive!"

Joel Sachs's search for new music has led him down many less-traveled paths. Here he is in June 2005 in the South Gobi Desert of southeastern Mongolia. (Photo by Rose Kovacs)

After Focus! had been going for a decade, Sachs undertook a second incentive that has proved crucial to the status of contemporary music at the School: the re-establishment of the Juilliard Ensemble (now called the New Juilliard Ensemble), which had tapered off into nothingness after the Berio years. As with Focus!, this endeavor has grown over the course of a dozen years to become an essential part of the School's fabric. The personnel of the New Juilliard Ensemble is in almost constant flux—a given for any student group—and one of Sachs's first tasks every fall semester is to carry out auditions to fill chairs that have become open from the preceding year. Participation is completely voluntary—nobody is ever "drafted" into the New Juilliard Ensemble—and that means that everybody who participates is seriously interested in the experience of performing new music. "We can pretty much accommodate those who want to play," says Sachs, and in general the demands on the participants are not so great that they prove onerous in relation to other obligations. He continues, "So many students want to take part, and the programs are very diverse, so not every member has to learn every piece on a program. Often a player may be involved in only one piece in a concert, but they're getting important experience from even that one piece. The participants in the New Juilliard Ensemble represent a fraction of the students, but a large fraction. In the course of a year about 110 students typically take part in the New Juilliard Ensemble, and that represents about a fifth of the instrumental majors in the student body. And besides them a lot of students tell me they wish they could participate but that they don't have time in a given semester—often for perfectly understandable reasons—though they are looking forward to coming back the next year."

The group's popularity continues to grow, and Sachs is particularly gratified that some members are even able to play internationally and occasionally derive some income from their work. Sub-ensembles from New Juilliard Ensemble have now appeared six times in foreign venues—France, Russia, Poland, Germany, Israel, and the U.K.—and a number of participants have received paychecks when they are tapped to perform for the Lincoln Center Festival (which has drawn on the New Juilliard Ensemble four times so far) and the Summergarden series at the Museum of Modern Art (which Sachs has curated for more than a decade, and which is now back on track after having been put on ice during the museum's recent reconstruction).

Read an article about this year's Focus! Festival.

Like Focus! events, New Juilliard Ensemble concerts can range widely through a variety of styles. Sachs explains, "I have always operated on the theory that stylistic variety is a good thing in programming, so everyone comes away having liked at least one thing. The hard part is that I myself have to absolutely believe in all the pieces I program." That does not seem to be much of a problem; to Sachs, discovering new repertoire seems as natural as breathing. He is constantly confronted with intriguing new pieces, thanks in large part to the fact that he so often finds himself among musicians in far-flung places. For some 30 years he has toured widely as co-director of the contemporary-music ensemble Continuum—not just to the usual musical capitals, but also to Armenia, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia (four times to Mongolia, in fact). "Before I got involved with the New Juilliard Ensemble, we were championing the Soviet avant-garde with Continuum," he explains. "Then we got to know the Eastern republics that evolved out of the Soviet Union, and all the time we're making friends in these distant musical communities and asking questions about what's happening in new music wherever we find ourselves." These peregrinations are a boon for the New Juilliard Ensemble and for Focus!, neither of which would have evolved as they have without the breadth of their director's exposure and curiosity.

Seen through the prism of new music, the Juilliard of today scarcely resembles the Juilliard Sachs began teaching at 35 years ago. "The administration has really pushed for a lot more up-to-date repertoire," he is happy to report. "The School encourages teachers to teach modern repertoire and it encourages conductors to program recent works in general orchestral concerts. Of course, this is a conservatory of music, so we're always faced with the same question: is it more valuable for a student to get as much experience as possible with traditional repertoire to prepare for auditions and an eventual career, or is it better to give them rich opportunities to play new music, which they are not likely to get once they join an orchestra and therefore will cherish as a lifelong experience? It's hard to know the answer." Fortunately, it's not an either/or proposition, at least not at Juilliard.

James M. Keller is program annotator of the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. This past fall his article "George Crumb: An Appreciation" was published as the lead essay in the book George Crumb and the Alchemy of Sound (Colorado College Music Press, 2005).