At Minnesota Orchestra’s Composer Institute, learning what music schools don’t teach

For the composers chosen to participate, among the nearly 200 who apply each year, the concert was the culmination of an intense multi-day immersion into the artistic life of an orchestra. The post At Minnesota Orchestra’s Composer Institute, learning what music schools don’t teach appeared first on MinnPost.

During a brief pause in a concert by the Minnesota Orchestra at Orchestra Hall last weekend the conductor Thomas Søndergård turned to the audience and said, “So nice to see so many of you here, especially since there’s nothing on the program you’ve ever heard before.”

Indeed, the concert, titled “Future Classics,” featuring the work of four largely unknown young composers, was nearly sold out. When all four of them returned to the stage for a final bow, the audience responded with a standing ovation. This was surely a bold move for a major symphony orchestra, mounting such a program and expecting to attract a paying audience, much less such an enthusiastic one.

But the concert was merely the tip of the iceberg known as the orchestra’s Composer Institute. For the composers chosen to participate, among the nearly 200 who apply each year, the concert was the culmination of an intense multi-day immersion into the artistic life of an orchestra, meeting with the orchestra library staff, honing their skills in public presentation, filming with the orchestra’s digital team, learning about orchestra programming and attending work sessions with Søndergård, now in his second season as music director, and Kevin Puts, the institute’s director. Call it a crash course in composer development – learning things the music schools don’t teach.

“I don’t know of any other major orchestra that does this,” said Puts, whose opera “Silent Night,” premiered by Minnesota Opera, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. “There’s really nothing like hearing an orchestra on this level play your music,” Puts said. “It can be the simplest thing – a series of three notes played by the violas. It just does something to you. It feels greater than the idea you started out with.”

The institute’s roots date back to 2002, with by now nearly 160 composers having participated in the program, including such alumni as Grammy Award nominees Anna Clyne and Missy Mazzoli and Pulitzer Prize nominees Andrew Norman, Ted Hearne and Michael Gilbertson. The composer Aaron Jay Kernis directed the institute during its first decade. Osmo Vänskä, now conductor laureate, came up with the Future Classics idea in 2006 and continued his participation with singular energy and devotion. Puts, a member of the composition faculty at the Peabody Institute currently serving as distinguished visiting composer at the Juilliard School, replaced Kernis in 2014.

This year’s institute was recast to spotlight just four composers rather than the seven or eight in past years, to allow more time and focus in preparing and presenting the music. The Future Classics concert marks the first led by Søndergård.

Speaking in an interview the day before the concert, Søndergård said the Institute “is one of the things I’m so proud of continuing here after Osmo contributed so much. Although we love the classics, it’s just as important to invite today’s artists into our house, to our orchestra, to have our musicians play and investigate what’s in the blood of the new generation, to inspire us and our audiences with what‘s on their minds. We perform the classical repertoire in a different way when we’ve touched base with what’s happening now.”

Under Søndergård’s and Puts’ leadership (with Mele Willis, from the orchestra staff, as a hard-working coordinator), the program will be offered not annually but on a biennial basis in rotation with the orchestra’s new Listening Project, an initiative to program and record the music of historically underrepresented composers.

The hope is to continue the orchestra’s relationship with some of the composers, perhaps commission a new piece from them and have them return. “I know how difficult it is to get an orchestral career going,” said Puts. “The only thing I can do is help the composers whose voices I really believe in. Stylistically, I don’t fit into what’s going on in the composition world – and they don’t either. They aren’t doing things that are difficult or over-complex or hard to read. This is the kind of composer I really want to help, the kind who isn’t getting a lot of attention on awards panels because their music is considered conservative, whereas to me it’s simply effective.”

This year’s Composer Institute program also included a new partnership with Universal Music Publishing Classics & Screen and Ricordi/New York as part of the launch of their RicordiLab US Program, designed to support the careers of young composers. Ricordi, one of the great names in publishing – a name inextricably associated with the works of Verdi and Puccini – will assist with preparing scores and instrumental parts and offer mentoring support to the composers. This is RicordiLab’s first U.S. partnership.

Jude Vaclavik, vice president of US Classical Publishing and Promotion for Universal/Ricordi who holds a doctorate in composition from Juilliard, spoke to the composers last week about the music business and appears to have made a big impression on them.

“I think what inspired them the most was de-mystifying the business behind the music,” Vaclavik said at Orchestra Hall the day of the concert. “It really is a mystery, even to established composers, how this all works, how the sausage is made. So it was a great opportunity to open up that subject and share information, like, how to meet people, what are the things we should be doing to make sure people hear our music, how do we meet conductors, what is music promotion like? Part of being a composer now is, like in so many other lines of work, you have to be a face, you have to be able to speak to audiences and talk to donors. It’s all part of the game now.”

Benjamin Webster, a 28-year-old doctoral candidate at the Yale School of Music, one of the four composers at this year’s institute, described the seminars led by Vaclavik, Puts and Erik Finley, the orchestra’s vice-president of artistic planning, as “frank and honest conversations. They treat us not like we’re babies but that we’re professionals. Their attitude is: you need to know what you’re getting into. That type of conversation doesn’t happen in schools a lot. That’s been incredibly helpful. And just getting to know these people is special, too. It’s been really inspiring.”

Webster’s piece, “Autumn Movement,” was shaped, he said, by his emotional reactions to a season of both personal and socio-political transformation during the summer of 2021. The work was premiered by the Yale Philharmonia in New Haven, Conn., the following year. Trees and their longevity are an important image and are represented by the double bass solo that opens and closes the work, acting as a sort of musical “trunk” out of which the materials of the piece branch off. “Autumn” becomes a metaphor for change.

The music – lush and mysterious – is compelling. It runs just 10 minutes but seems longer because the material keeps evolving, many things happening at one time, taking the listener on a journey, from the ethereal opening to a hazy plateau, then on to combative, jagged textures propelled by soaring horn passages and back to the bass solo and a final soft evocative chord – string harmonics, vibraphone tremolo and flute. But it is more a texture than an actual chord.

Webster found Søndergård to be helpful in the rehearsal of the piece. “Thomas has an amazing ear, and a lot of this piece has these textures that are hard to balance. I mean, I don’t intend that the listener keep track of every instrument that’s playing,” he said. “It’s more about gesture and motion. But Thomas has been really great about identifying the most important thing to be heard at any given moment.”

Elise Arancio from Georgia, at 24, the youngest of this year’s composers, wrote a piece for tape and orchestra, a rarity in a series that has seldom featured electronic music. Titled “Bite Your Tongue,” the music is eerie and thought-provoking. Arancio was 19 when she wrote it.

The piece illustrates an individual being silenced by both internal and external forces. Broken syllables and fragments of the beginnings of words are projected in the tape track which, in rude, brusque fashion, continually interrupts the orchestra’s material, which are thoughts that are trying to break free from this suppression. The word “shudder” forms into “shut her” as the orchestra aligns with the speaker in a final expression of frustration.

“The piece is pessimistic about the possibility of real communication between people,” Arancio said in an interview before the concert. “People today struggle with articulating their thoughts. Rather than talk on the phone, they talk to their computer.”

Arancio will receive a master’s degree from Juilliard later this month. She plans soon to pursue a second master’s degree at Yale University.

For another one of the composers, 30-year-old Soomin Kim, who was born on South Korea, a highlight of the week took place at the Friday morning rehearsal. Søndergård asked each of the composers to stand onstage next to the podium as the orchestra played their piece. “I thought, ‘OK, this is what it feels like to play in an orchestra,”’ she said. “I’ve never been an orchestra musician myself. I was in awe – so many people somehow playing together. It was incredible.”

Kim is a visiting assistant professor of composition at her alma mater, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Her piece, “star/ghost/mouth/sea,” is drawn from “Soft Science,” a book of poetry by Franny Choi that explores the themes of identity, technology, gender and violence. The piece is a set of four miniatures for orchestra that explore the terms of the title as metaphors.

She explained further. “For ‘star,’ for example, I pictured a bright, shining, kind of shooting star sound and tried out various combinations of instruments to create what was to me the sound of a star, a shining sound.”

Kim said this is a good time to be a composer. But even if it isn’t a good time, she would have become a composer anyway. “I didn’t have much choice,” she said. “It’s what I love. Since I was in high school, it was the only thing I saw myself doing for the rest of my life. I was 14 or 15 when I thought, ‘Oh, I want to do this.’ I started writing songs and jazz. Then I picked up classical composition when I was in high school.

“If I think of 50 or 100 years ago, there wasn’t this diverse representation of composers and music that we have now,” she said. “Being an Asian woman, would I have had a chance 50 or 100 years ago?”

Andrew Faulkenberry, 26, began his love affair with music at an even younger age than was the case with Kim. Growing up in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he began playing guitar and writing songs at the age of 8 and later played in high school bands. He received a Bachelor of Music degree in composition from Rutgers University in 2021, graduating summa cum laude, then earned a master’s in composition from Peabody, where he studied with Puts, who recommended that he apply for the institute in Minnesota. He lives now in Baltimore, where he teaches piano and theory. His orchestra and chamber-music pieces are being performed with increasing frequency around the country.

Faulkenberry’s “portrait through a prism,” which served as the concert’s finale, is the work of a skillful and confident composer who is unafraid to write tonal music that is both emotive and even tuneful – Romantic without sounding nostalgic – complicated in its own way and yet direct and appealing, music that, were it played in an academic setting somewhere around 1950 when austerity ruled, would have caused its composer to be run out of town after being tarred and feathered.

The static surrounding the term “Romantic” is not lost on Faulkenberry. “Some people are kind of touchy about this. I try not to be,” he said. “There are certain aspects of Romantic music that I can’t get away from. I just love a sweeping melody. That was one of the things that drew me to writing orchestra music and especially in the Romantic vein – this ability to fill up time. There’s a kind of slow-burning narrative that you can do with this form of music, especially with an orchestra that has always stuck with me.”

As its title suggests, “portrait through a prism” was inspired by the image of light through a prism – how the original image is destroyed but in the process is transfigured into a beautiful kaleidoscope of color. “We are much like that light,” he says in a program note, “impermanent, bound to be destroyed. This fact inspires contradictory emotions in me: powerlessness, fear, awe, reverence, transcendence. This is my meditation on those feelings.”

Puts acted as host at the concert, introducing the composers and having the orchestra play excerpts from each piece. He feels an empathy toward the composers that borders on the parental.

“I do feel a certain nurturing here,” he said. “Composers are such good people. They have humility, and they need that. I mean, to put yourself out there with a group of musicians who are used to playing the best music ever written, and then to hear your own music coming at you and not having it be what you expect and then to get up and do it again, that takes humility. I’ve always liked them, even when they write crazy music.”

And they’re unpredictable, too. Faulkenberry, for instance, is about to make a career detour: He will start law school in the fall. Composers, he said, “are so myopically focused on notes and rhythms and seeing that every 16th-note is perfect that the business end can be a challenge or is simply foreign. I want more exposure to that other side of it because so much goes into making a concert besides actually writing the music that I felt I was at a disadvantage not having a knowledge of that part of the process. I just want to be able to advocate for artists and myself. But the goal is to continue writing music.”