Earlier this month a fascinating article appeared in the New York Times entitled “How Do You Teach People to Love Difficult Music”. Making an example of one of my favourite composers, György Ligeti, it outlines a problem familiar to many musicians: how do we share our love of something that is really complicated, but also fascinating, thrilling and beautiful. So often audiences hear only the complicated, developing an aversion to anything written after 1900.
The author, Ryan Ebright, argues that we tend to make the mistake of trying to describe how the music works technically instead of focusing on what inspired it. For example, Ligeti’s music may be extraordinarily dense and sticky, but it’s frequently inspired by familiar, relatable things:
“We hear his childhood amid the printing presses, typewriters and industrial machinery of Transylvania which resurfaced in the mechanical, clocklike layering of various pulses and tempos in the opening movement of his 1988 Piano Concerto and in the chaotic, ticking energy of his Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes. For the dense textural music of Atmosphères and Lux Aeterna, which Stanley Kubrick incorporated into 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ligeti drew on a terrifying childhood dream of being trapped in an immense web with buzzing insects.”
All of a sudden we have a key to unlock the music, and it is context.
With that in mind I’m looking forward tremendously to our EarShot concert on April 20. Last year the American Composers’ Institute in New York asked us to be one of three orchestras participating in their scheme for young composers. Each year the Institute invites composers to submit new works and picks four compositions to be “workshopped” and performed by an orchestra. We will welcome the four composers for a week during which they will hear the Jacksonville Symphony rehearse their music. They will also have time to talk to me the musicians about what works well in their music, or how they might try to write for the instruments in a more idiomatic way. The Institute has invited a panel of distinguished composers to mentor the four. There will be symposia about career development, self-promotion, and all the other aspects of being a successful composer today. Courtney Bryan, our new composer in residence will help guide the participants, and we’ll also be performing one of her pieces, White Gleam of Our Bright Star.
What excites me about this program is that our audience gets to meet the composers and find out about what motivates and inspires them. When we don’t understand something in Mozart or Wagner, we can’t ask what they meant. But with today’s composers we have the opportunity to delve inside their creative minds, finding out how their music reflects the world we live in. That’s why contemporary music is so important: it expresses who we are now. Mozart’s music is universal, but we tend to forget that its classical proportion and sense of order is the result of the society in which Mozart lived. The seeming chaos and dissonance of much of today’s music is often a reflection of the alienation and frustration many of us feel as we look at the world around us. That expression isn’t something to be feared, but to be embraced and enjoyed, because it tells us about ourselves.
The concert on April 20 will be the first opportunity to hear orchestral music by Courtney Bryan in Jacksonville. Her work from 2016, White Gleam of Our Bright Star, takes its title from James Weldon Johnson’s song Lift Every Voice and Sing. It’s a meditation on both the beauty of America and the enormous challenge we face today to allow everyone in our society equal access to that beauty. In the score’s preface Bryan quotes a line by James Baldwin that comes into my own mind on an almost daily basis: “I love American more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for that reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” In a week in which yet another unarmed, innocent African American was inexcusably shot by police, this meditation isn’t even appropriate, it’s essential.
Reprinted with permission of The Florida Times-Union.