Future music

We're inordinately proud at the announcement this past Monday of a BMI foundation "Outstanding Musical Citizen Award" that went to our very own Beth Cowart and Aaron Kernis for their work as co-directors of the Minnesota Orchestra Composers Institute.

The Minnesota Orchestra’s Composers Institute is a program unique in the orchestra world; each year 7-9 composers are given the opportunity to have their works performed by the Orchestra in our FutureClassics! Concert following an intense week with the Orchestra, Aaron Kernis (our composer-in-residence) and Osmo. For the 2008 incarnation of the Composers Institute we received over 150 applications, a huge stack of scores by anyone’s standard. Of course winnowing this down to the lucky 8 or so composers is an arduous process, one which required a 12-hour day for the panel of judges which, this year, included me.

Conductors tend to have an abundance of new scores pass their desks; often composers send their music unsolicited in an effort to get their works out and seen. In addition, my position at the Curtis Institute requires me to work on a consistent basis with young composers (students and graduates) from Curtis as well as the University of Pennsylvania. And a few weeks back, during an epic day at the American Music Center in New York, I perused over 70 scores of composers ranging in age from 18 to 55.

Apart from the excitement of deciding on those winning scores, the experience was fascinating in that I was able to pore over new scores with some esteemed colleagues and discuss what we saw. All of the panelists remarked on a trend; pieces that relied on skilled and colorful orchestration that sometimes revealed a paucity of actual musical ideas. Writing a symphonic score requires expertise in two distinct areas; compositional skill (the ability to put together nuanced musical ideas within a coherent structure) and mastery of instrumentation (a facility in distributing the aforementioned musical material amongst the different instruments of the orchestra). Ideally, both skills are interconnected and equal, but if this group of composers is any indication, the current tendency is to highlight well-developed orchestration skills over complex musical content.

I’m not sure to what we can attribute this trend, although I have my theory about the influence of culture and technology.

First, the technology. Most composers eventually input their music for engraving via programs like Finale or Sibelius. These programs provide instant playback of an input score, allowing the composer to hear a reasonable representation of what they have written. While this is a fantastic tool, I have observed some composers writing directly via these programs, ie, doing without initial thematic/harmonic sketches or even overarching structural ideas. Because these programs are so convenient to use, perhaps there is the temptation to do without the significant step of working and reworking thematic ideas in the mind's ear and via written sketch, which I've always found to help truly internalize something that you're working on. It's easy enough to move around a slew of notes on a computer screen, push playback and see if it sounds pretty; I've done it myself. But does this ease of execution perhaps allow us a little intellectual laziness?

The cultural impact I've observed is the tremendous influence of film music (which many of my composer friends are keenly interested in, as it can be quite lucrative!). The best symphonic film music naturally uses orchestral colors to full advantage, and this has certainly worked its way into our collective consciousness. And it's gotten to the point where we can point at a young composer's score and say, "Hey, look, a Williams moment", where a sweep of harp and percussion, decorative high woodwind figures and a brass chord voicing are an unmistakable (and perhaps not entirely conscious) mimicking of the great film composer John Williams (whose music, incidentally, I've loved since I first heard his score to "Star Wars" as a kid.)

Or perhaps it just happened to be this batch of scores I saw. But while I certainly don't want to make sweeping generalizations, it seems to me that while in the past one would have to develop substantial compositional chops before attempting a large scale orchestra piece, it has, via technology and the ready availability of recorded music, become plausible for composers to take a shot at such a piece much earlier in their development.

I pondered composition at one point - I did my BA in composition at Harvard - but I found it wasn't for me. I felt uneasy creating something and then giving it away to a performer to bring to life, even if, ironically, I was the performer, conducting my own work. For me it created too much of a disconnect; and, besides, I always liked it much better the way it sounded in my mind's ear (does that make sense to anyone but me?). And I found composition to be such difficult work; it's too easy to become self-consciously avant garde, or to rely on a saccharine tonality, or to flounder around with minimalist techniques. It takes far more to actually find your own unique voice.

I'm happy to report that there were indeed some very unique and personal voices in that pile of scores, and I look forward to hearing them brought to life by the Minnesota Orchestra next fall!