So, Andrew Norman's "Play" might be the best orchestral work that the 21st century has seen thus far
— Will Robin (@seatedovation) December 20, 2014
We have Andrew Norman to thank, and Will Robin, too, for Symphomania, the 24-hour marathon of 21st-century orchestral music that web radio station Q2 Music streamed on March 24 and repeated on the 28th. And, no question about it, mighty thanks and admiration are due.
Norman's part was to compose Play, a 47-minute cycle commissioned by Boston Modern Orchestra Project in 2013. A recording was issued on that ensemble's label, BMOP/sound, late last year.
It's a brilliant piece, a major addition to the repertoire. Hearing it compelled Robin – a diligent scholar, a compelling blogger, a social-media adept, and an invaluable contributor to the Arts & Leisure rotation at The New York Times – to sing the work's praises on Twitter. His endorsement earned a quick outpouring of retweets and favorites, suggesting widespread agreement.
The response caused Robin to muse further.
What are the best large-scale orchestral works of this century? As in, 30+ minutes? (And not opera)
— Will Robin (@seatedovation) December 20, 2014
Twitter promptly responded in great gushes, churning up an invaluable tide of recommendations that Robin summarized with a Storify post, "Towards a 21st century orchestral canon."
In January, I was contacted by Alex Ambrose, intrepid managing producer of Q2, who invited me to participate among a gathering of 21st-century music practitioners and observers in Symphomania, a 24-hour webcast based on Robin's Norman invasion of Twitter and Storify. Ambrose asked if I would speak about 21st century orchestral music in general, and hold up a single piece as exemplary.
Given that I'm a huge Q2 fan, and also eager to keep myself engaged in the Cultural Conversation from my new home base, I immediately assented. But I asked for an important clarification – one having to do with an issue that I'd been mulling for quite some time.
The pieces that came to mind instantly: In Vain, by Georg Friedrich Haas. Cryosphere, by Rand Steiger. Penelope, by Sarah Kirkland Snider. Jagden und formen, by Wolfgang Rihm. Akrostichon-Wortspiel, by Unsuk Chin. Schnee, by Hans Abrahamsen. Hrim, by Anna Thorvaldsdottir. For Lou Harrison, by John Luther Adams. torsion: transparent variation, by Olga Neuwirth. La sette chiese, by Bruno Mantovani.
None of which was composed for "Full Blown Symphony Orchestra," which was what Ambrose had stipulated when I inquired. (It's worth noting that Robin had not made this stipulation.)
In thinking about the new pieces I've heard in this young century that really made an impact on me – that struck me as moving the discourse forward in some fundamental way, that broke new ground, that demonstrated something that we hadn't heard before – none of the music that jostled to the head of my personal queue had been composed for the orchestra, per se.
Which is not to suggest that I hadn't heard any worthy orchestral music in the 21st century – that would be a ridiculous claim. On the Transmigration of Souls by John Adams, for one, still guts me. But I guess that I thought of Adams, perhaps wrongly, as being a composer whose style and substance solidified during the late 20th century, and entered the common discourse at that time.
Likewise, works by some of the composers whose music I love best – Harrison Birtwistle, John Corigliano, Christopher Rouse – didn't cross my mind, for feeling more like an extension of an established career than something of this century. I was less interested in a work's calendar date than in a sense that it was going to some place we hadn't been before. (I recognize that this is a pedantic and perhaps specious argument, since I know that among the pieces I cite as "new" are some that could be deemed nothing of the sort by colleagues and musicians whose views I know and respect.)
In the end, I selected a different piece by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Aeriality, for its keen mix of tradition and innovation, and for the sense of inevitability that I get from all of her strongest pieces. (Become Ocean, the Pulitzer Prize-winning piece by John Luther Adams, was spoken for already; still, my vote would not have varied.)
In my rambling Q2 interview – an edited portion of which is archived here, among the humbling likes of David Robertson, Susanna Mälkki, Gil Rose, Robert Spano, Ludovic Morlot, and Alex Ross – I mentioned that most of the 21st-century non-chamber music I'd pondered did not meet the "Full Blown Symphony Orchestra" criterion.
The pieces I held in highest esteem tended to be championed by groups called Alarm Will Sound, Signal, Contemporaneous, and wild Up, or whose names included terms like "sinfonietta" and "ensemble" and "project" – as in Boston Modern Orchestra Project, responsible for Norman's Play, and, as it happened, a number of other important and worthy pieces that would be included in Symphomania.
Here, courtesy of Schott Music, is the instrumentation for Play:
2(2.pic).2.2.2(2.cbsn)-4.3.2ttbn.1btbn.1-3perc(I. vib, 4bng, 5tempbl, 3splash cym, 5tin cans, kick d, brake d, washboard, slapstick; II. crot, 5log d, 4opera gongs, 4tom-t [sm], kick d, spring coil, tri, guiro, tam-t [lg], slapstick; III. xyl, 4wdbl, 5cow bell, h.h, kick d, ratchet, slapstick, b.d)-pno-str(12.10.8.6.4)
Does an ensemble with a 40-member string section qualify as a "Full Blown Symphony Orchestra," in the modern post-MahlerBerg sense? Actually, it's slightly smaller than the 44 players that Our Friend Wikipedia cites as the standard for the Classical era. Big, blown implements and percussion phalanx aside, Norman's orchestra is closer to Beethoven's than to Mahler's.
I'm splitting hairs about a sensational composition that provided an exciting premise for a wholly remarkable, repeatedly illuminating webcast, and I absolutely do not mean to throw shade on the proceedings.
But what I tried to express in my Q2 interview – and ended up sort of raising by glancing implication in the edit that aired – is my deeply held skepticism about the orchestra being a fundamental aim, a realistic aspiration, or even a desirable goal among many of today's most compelling composers.
How many of your favorite living composers – how many living composers, period – will be invited to write a major orchestral work, let alone one that stands a chance of being widely heard, circulated via recording, and repeated?
Not many. And far fewer in the United States, I'd reckon, than in Europe, where municipal and national funding for the arts has created a more viable playing field than exists here, where most orchestras have neither the money nor the time to invest in music of the present day to any meaningful extent – nor, in some cases at least, an audience amenable to support the effort.
Among the important compositions that Europe produces, too few reach these shores, and those that do, usually years late. Beyond those points are well-documented disparities residing in issues like gender and race, as well as, presumably, a subtle politics of taste among the performing rank and file.
As I said before, chewing tenaciously on this particular sock isn't new for me. Presently residing in a cardboard moving box somewhere is a cassette tape that contains an interview I once conducted with Brad Lubman, a founder of Signal and a noted new-music conductor, whose then-new debut CD as a composer (Insomniac, Tzadik Records, 2005) included no orchestral music.
I forget the actual topic of our discussion now, but in passing, and in light of his new CD, I asked Brad whether the orchestra was still useful or meaningful to the contemporary composer. Alas, his answer ended up on the cutting-room floor. (I really should try to find that tape.)
Very much on my mind at that time was a downsizing of the American Composers Orchestra from "Full Blown Symphony Orchestra" to chamber band, a reduction that now seems permanent. The diminution of this proud and important ensemble infuriated me: a slight to composers past, present, and future, prompted by vulgar economics, or so it appeared. But was it also a sign of the times, a tacit admission that music itself had moved on?
The Symphomania webcast proved resoundingly that excellent pieces are still being written for the orchestra – a claim that remains accurate even if you remove BMOP's contribution entirely. But as much as I enjoyed the hours that I was able to take in, and as much as I regret not being able to hear the whole thing (as if!), I can't say that my view of a significant decline in the orchestra's primacy as a viable vehicle for new music was changed.
You could even argue that BMOP's name cedes the point: a "project" intended to address a dearth of opportunity for the creation of new large-ensemble repertoire, and undertaken as well to document shadowy corners and creches of the existing canon.
Those are noble, necessary goals. But there is something terribly sad about the idea that, for most major American orchestras, certainly, generating new music can seem to be no more than a byproduct, a diversion from cash-beholden business as usual.
A few more observations gleaned from the process of learning about Symphomania, exploring its topical terrain, preparing to talk about it on Q2, and listening to the results:
1. Forget the clickbait lists about which orchestras is the best in the world; it's time we all acknowledge that the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg might well be the most important orchestra in the entire world, both for the overwhelming amount of new music it plays, and also for the diligence, rigor, and excellence with which it handles its job.
2. Jerusalem (after Blake), by the 49-year-old Luxembourg-born Australian composer George Lentz, was the marathon's jaw-dropping discovery; no surprise that it came via the intrepid David Robertson, ever among the top-rank American conductors who doggedly insist on flying a new-music flag. No question that 58 strings meet the "Full Blown Symphony Orchestra" requirement. The back story also proved compelling: Lentz's stirring piece was prompted by a tragic loss of lives.
3. Will Robin did an excellent job of curating 24 hours of contemporary orchestral music, not only covering an admirable span of ages, styles, and personal demographics, but also inventing some fascinating juxtapositions. Take a look at the complete playlist – I know that I was not the only one to note the sequence that meaningfully conjoined Martin Smolka, Nico Muhly, Bernhard Gander, and David Lang.
Finally, here is a short and admittedly personal list of remarkable 21st-century orchestral pieces that I discovered (or rediscovered) as a result of scouring the Web for the sake of Symphomania, or via links posted by friends and colleagues on social media as a result of the #21cOrch hashtag initiative that Q2 coordinated – many of which did not make the final tally, and, sadly, few of which I anticipate having a chance to hear performed live. In that, I would love to be proved wrong.
Peter Ablinger - Drei Minuten für Orchester (from Altar) - SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Sylvain Cambreling (YouTube)
Hans Abrahamsen - Let me tell you - Barbara Hannigan, Berlin Philharmonic/Andris Nelsons (Berliner Philharmoniker Digital Concert Hall < YouTube sample)
Julian Anderson - Eden - City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Martyn Brabbins; Imagin'd Corners - City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Sakari Oramo (NMC)
Mark Andre- ...auf... III - SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Sylvain Cambreling (NEOS Music < YouTube 1, 2)
Georg Friedrich Haas - Limited Approximations - Pi-hsien Chen, Christoph Grund, Florian Hoelscher, Akiko Okabe, Sven Thomas Kiebler, Julia Vogelsänger, SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Sylvain Cambreling (NEOS Music < YouTube)
Georg Friedrich Haas - 7 Klangräume (with Mozart, Requiem) - Genia Kuhmeier, Anton Holzapfel, Salzburger Bachchor, Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg/Ivor Bolton (YouTube)
Anders Hillborg - Clarinet Concerto ("Peacock Tales") - Martin Fröst, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Esa-Pekka Salonen (Bis)
Helmut Lachenmann - Schreiben - London Sinfonietta/Brad Lubman (YouTube)
Bernhard Lang - DW 8 - Dieter Kovacic, Marina Rosenfeld, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Peter Rundel (col legno < YouTube)
Isabel Mundry - Ich und Du - Thomas Larcher, SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Pierre Boulez (NEOS Music < YouTube)
Isabel Mundry - Penelopes Atem - Salome Kammer, Teodoro Anzellotti, SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Sylvain Cambreling (NEOS Music < YouTube)
Tristan Murail - Le Désenchantement du monde - Pierre-Laurent Aimard, New York Philharmonic/David Robertson (New York Philharmonic broadcast)
Tristan Murail - Les sept paroles - Netherlands Radio Orchestra and Chorus/Marin Alsop (YouTube)
Brice Pauset - Symphonie IV "Der Geograph" - Nicolas Hodges, SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Susanna Mälkki (YouTube)
Brice Pauset - Symphonie V "Die Tänzerin" - SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Sylvain Cambreling (NEOS Music < YouTube)
Enno Poppe - Keilschrift - SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Sylvain Cambreling (NEOS Music < YouTube 1, 2)
Rebecca Saunders - Miniata - Teodoro Anzellotti, Nicolas Hodges, SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart, SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Hans Zender (Kairos < YouTube)
Rebecca Saunders - still - Carolin Widmann, BBC Symphony Orchestra/Lionel Bringuier (YouTube)
Michel van der Aa - Violin Concerto - Janine Jansen, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Vladimir Jurowski (YouTube)
Akiko Yamane - Dots Collection No. 6 - New Japan Philharmonic/Kazumasa Watanabe (YouTube)
Thanks so much for this, Steve – for your kind words, but most of all for your active ears, brain, and social media use during the proceedings. I made a short-list of people for Alex Ambrose to reach out to, and you were at the top if it because I knew you would have a lot to say. And thank you for nit-picking; splitting hairs is important. I had honestly expected and hoped for more critical backlash to the music I had chosen, a few Facebook posts of “I can’t believe he didn’t include ___!” I’m proud of what we did on this but it’s not at all comprehensive, and I would love to read a full-blown attack addressing what I missed, or even criticizing the wrongness of the presence – it could open up a very interesting conversation.
I have many thoughts, and some are quite scrambled, but here’s an attempt at a few of them.
My initial Twitter question/Storify didn't make explicit that I was interested in music for full orchestra, but it's what was in mind. Great 21st century works for chamber orchestra, new-music ensemble, and even string orchestra are obvious to me, and I was curious not about what I knew, but what I didn’t. I wouldn’t have guessed that Norman’s Play was so incredible, and I might have overlooked it had a couple friends not strongly urged me to listen. What else might I have missed?
So one of the first decisions I made when figuring out the scope of Symphomania was to limit it to full orchestra. I wasn't quite sure what that would mean, but I kind of figured it out on the process. So when Alex reached out to you requesting full orchestral works, it was following a stipulation that I made, a deliberate constraint on the act of curation.
Why? For starters, I wanted to make this explicitly about the orchestra, that giant conglomeration of musicians with all of its historical, institutional, financial, and artistic baggage. We all know that Klangforum Wien and Alarm Will Sound occupy the center of the new music universe. There is also perhaps a certain amount of flexibility between, say, the Ensemble Modern, Signal, A Far Cry and Contemporaneous. These are large ensembles that are not quite symphony orchestras, with differences of repertory, instrumentation, and how they identify themselves. But the orchestra is inherently something else, defined not just by its size but also by its mission, a centering around the preservation of the past and, if we’re lucky, an occasional foray into the new (of course BMOP here is an obvious exception, so perhaps this wasn’t the most well-thought-out idea). To focus exclusively on the new would mean presenting a mostly invisible side of the orchestra, a contradiction I found intriguing to explore.
And focusing on the orchestra forces an edge of unfamiliarity into the proceedings. You mentioned that great chamber orchestra and new-music ensemble pieces jumped right out at you; pondering music for full orchestra offers an opportunity to sink into a repertoire that's unfamiliar, a chance to dredge up a commission heard once but then forgotten, a recording that was overlooked when it was issued.
And honestly if it means getting Steve Smith to brainstorm—or a bunch of other smart people to brainstorm—then it's probably a good thing. We always have great music on the tips of our tongues to suggest, but we might also all end up suggesting In Vain. In Vain is great; it deserves its spot in an emergent 21st-century canon (canons are dumb, yes). For this marathon, the only clear choice was Become Ocean: it was recent, by a famous composer, and a Pulitzer winner. After that, to a certain extent, the other 23 hours were not at all obvious.
This restriction meant leaving out many works that I love, including Hearne's Law of Mosaics, Snider's Penelope, Andres's Home Stretch, and many others I can't think of right now; but it also meant that I would have to actively seek out pieces I didn't know. I made giant lists of potential composers, looked into who had works I may not have known, scanned the BMOP catalog, poked through Donaueschingen festival box sets (thank you, Naxos Music Library!).
Over the years I have heard and read plenty of statements that the future of contemporary music lies not with the symphony or opera but with the chamber orchestra, new-music ensemble, etc, etc. That’s totally understandable—composers can’t simply wait for a phone call for a commission from an organization that they will probably never hear from in their entire lives—and we can probably trace that rhetoric back to Pierrot Lunaire if not further. Certainly these ensembles, and their artistic and financial dedication to new music, place them at the crux of creating valuable new work. But to put together 24 hours of new music for orchestra—to shout quite loudly that not only do at least 60 pieces of great music for full orchestra exist, but that they are only the tip of the iceberg—is a deliberate attempt to not divest, to not cede the ground exclusively to that smaller ensemble world in the 21st century. It’
As large orchestras, as you mentioned, move towards commissioning for smaller forces (and I think of a project like the Phil’s Biennial or Contact series, which fortunately spreads the love with many commissions but which also means fewer ones for full orchestra), they are joining a trend already in existence, and one I think we should fight. Only the largest orchestras have the money and resources to give a composer a chance to work with Beethoven’s toolbox, and even if the constraints and weaknesses are obvious – the lack of adequate rehearsal time, the mess of bureaucracy, the occasional reluctance of performers – I’m not ready to give up on them. If anything, I’d like to see that trend reversed. I had a conversation a while back on Twitter with Judd Greenstein and some others, as I wondered if it might not be better for the Met to commission several black box works rather than throw all their resources at a single Two Boys. Judd disagreed, and I realized later that I disagreed with myself too; you only get a handful of chances to write a large-scale opera in all its glory, and if the big companies give up on that then there are hardly any opportunities left. And we should also have a conversation about finances: big orchestral and opera commissions can provide a hefty source of income for a composer to do her work.
For my dissertation research, I’ve been reading a lot about Meet the Composer, an organization whose importance in crafting the American repertoire as we know it today can’t be understated. Beginning in 1982, Meet the Composer directed massive amounts of corporate funding towards pair composers with orchestras in residency programs across the country. We have its founder, John Duffy, to thank for sponsoring Adams’s Harmonielehre, Tower’s Silver Ladders, Druckman’s Horizons festival at the Philharmonic that brought the orchestra to the center of the conversation around contemporary music in the U.S.
It seems like we might be harkening back to this era again, as we see New York and Los Angeles continue their residency/adviser programs, with other orchestras like Nashville joining them. (That the composers-in-residence, like Adams and Kernis, are the same ones as thirty years ago is, well, troubling.) Because of a program like this, the orchestra had a central role in the life of American composers. MTC continues today in the form of NewMusicUSA, and fortunately we also have programs like the ACO’s EarShot guiding the orchestra and composers towards each other. All it takes sometimes is a huge amount of money and a huge amount of attention to make something feel authentically part of modern life. So Symphomania might be another very, very small step of advocacy in that direction.
(Steve's readers, please feel free to contact me directly with any questions, suggestions, etc -- email is william l robin @ gmail, and twitter is @seatedovation)
Posted by: Will Robin | March 30, 2015 at 09:24 AM
I hope no one minds me commenting on a post that is a few days old -- it is such a fascinating topic, and one of particular interest to me!
What I found revelatory and unexpectedly heartening, and why I was so enthusiastic about Symphomania, is, indeed, just what Will says, the discovery that “60 pieces of great music for full orchestra [from the 21st century] exist, [and] that they are only the tip of the iceberg.”
The reason I found it so heartening is also some of the stuff already pointed out: new orchestra music is expensive to make happen (compositionally, personnel-wise, printed music-wise, rehearsal-time-wise), sometimes (sadly) performed with inconsistent amounts of preparation and enthusiasm, and often received by audiences skeptically. So, that the genre could survive all of these things working against it and still make some really awesome pieces seems like a triumph to me.
I'm most interested, though, in the nascent possibility that orchestra music may develop a renewed aesthetic function as slowly, creepingly, new music becomes more tolerated/accepted/enjoyed/expected(!!)/listened-to by a concert-going audience. Which is to say, it's easy for us to forget sitting in a 21st century concert hall that, say, Beethoven's orchestral music in its original context had not only a particular set of artistic agendas but also served as a sort of public statement in a way that it seems contemporaneous audiences consumed ravenously. (I always think of how NUTS that 4-hour concert on Dev. 22, 1808 in an unheated Theater an der Wien must have been.) ...that his audiences interpreted it strongly and in multitudinous ways – in terms of politics, philosophy, affect, etc. – and these interpretations were life-influencing, and fundamental to what it meant to be human in 19th century Vienna. That living composers could harness the possibilities of the modern symphony orchestra in ways that are not merely to function as a sort of commodified 8-minute overture before we get to the Tchaik violin concerto, but to restore a truly artistic function, to “mov[e] the discourse forward in some fundamental way, [break] new ground, demonstrate something that we hadn't heard before” as Steve says, is a hopeful sign indeed.
I see in there the possibility that the myriad of stunning new pieces might have a hand in taking the institution of the symphony orchestra in America in newer, cooler directions. The more, better, well-performed, engaging new pieces happen on stages, the more American orchestras can slowly break out of their reified practices and the more they can be interpreters of our culture.
To give an example: when my students in the orchestras of the DePaul University School of Music gave the US premiere of Mathias Spahlinger's “doppelt bejaht [doubly affirmed] – 24 etudes for orchestra without conductor” (so I sat in the audience, lolz) – a set of pieces that are half-structured and half-improvised, with branches between them that are the same – just last month, watching them play I realized that I was seeing something new... an orchestra (not some other kind of musical ensemble) co-composing on stage, making decisions as a political body, and as a result thematizing the society in which we live. Rather than engaging in the “omg is classical music dying or irrelevant” meta-conversation (and having that conversation circumscribe the musical materials), the piece was simply a work of art about our place and time. That this would happen at the same time that something like Symphomania was in the works does not seem coincidental to me.
All of which is simply to say something hopeful: I imagine the the possibility of, not simply an increased financial/institutional/market viability of the symphony orchestra in the future (honestly, I'm not competent to comment on this), but a true artistic renewal of it as a vehicle for interpretation of culture; in short, a possible place of as-yet-unimagined artistic production. Symphomania was a very welcome, eye-opening signpost pointing the way!
Posted by: Michael Lewanski | April 05, 2015 at 12:30 PM