Contemporary Philadelphia composers

Most Philadelphia composers are linked together through their relationships with Penn, Temple, the University of the Arts, and other area schools. Many of them have studied with older Philadelphia composers, such as George Crumb and the late George Rochberg, the composer who initiated the renaissance in American composition in the late ’60s.

In spite of all that interaction, conductor James Freeman received a negative response when he raised the idea of a Philadelphia school during the pre-concert discussion at the Orchestra 2001 event. The three composers he was interviewing all agreed they followed individual paths stylistically and philosophically. Personally, I think they’re overlooking a shared trait that’s more fundamental than style: They all agree that composers should go their own way.

Changing approaches

That may seem like a rather commonplace idea, but it’s a major aspect of the revolution that has revitalized the American new-music scene in the last 30 years. The upsurge in American composing began as a revolt against the idea that composers had to stick to the type of music now generally labeled “academic music.” The academic composers had set the tone for several decades and had essentially decreed that more traditional types of music had become obsolete, and composers could only be up-to-date if they composed in the accepted avant-garde mode. A composer who turned out a string quartet that appealed to people who like Mozart and Beethoven could be marginalized as a prisoner of outdated modes, as Samuel Barber was for much of his career.

In addition to this shift, most contemporary Philadelphia composers share two other attitudes that Rochberg championed. They are willing to create music that expresses their feelings, and they aren’t afraid to create music audiences will find beautiful and compelling.

That doesn’t mean they only create expressive music. At the Orchestra 2001 concert, two of the composers described their pieces in purely musical terms. In his notes for his Piccolo Concertante for String Orchestra, Robert Capanna discussed features like his explorations of the intervals in a certain type of scale. Andrea Clearfield described her Concertino for Marimba and String Orchestra as a “showcase” for the marimba and the soloist she wrote it for, Philadelphia Orchestra percussionist Angela Zator Nelson.

Neither dry nor soulless

In spite of that, the Capanna didn’t feel like a dry exercise, and the Clearfield couldn’t be dismissed as a soulless display of instrumental pyrotechnics. The three movements of Capanna’s Concertante can all be described with emotional words like intense and singing, and the piece had many moments when you could listen to it for the sheer beauty of its sounds. The Clearfield brought the Orchestra 2001 concert to a happy close as the audience responded to the way the composer played with the possibilities of the solo instrument and the soloist met the challenges she had created.

At the Penn concert, the composers generally described their pieces in formal terms. Jeremy Gill’s Whistling in the Dark was a set of variations on a theme — one of the oldest formal schemes in the composer’s playbook. Jay Reise said he wrote his Sonatina for Viola and Piano as part of a series he is creating for “underexploited” instruments. Anna Weesner described her Flexible Parts as a group of short movements constructed from “rather simple, plain, unassuming musical fragments.” Again, you could listen to all three pieces for qualities like drive, drama, and sheer liveliness, in spite of their technical and formal origins.

Extra-musical associations

Two of the pieces at the Orchestra 2001 concert, on the other hand, came with extra-musical associations. Aaron Jay Kernis’s Musica Celestis takes it title from the medieval vision of the angels singing in heaven. Andrew Rudin called his three-movement work September Trilogy because he felt the three movements expressed his feelings about the events of September 11, 2001.

The Kernis evokes all the mystery and intensity of its subject, but it’s also an extremely varied piece, constantly surprising you with the combinations and effects the composer draws from the string orchestra. The opening movement of Rudin’s trilogy would make a powerful sound track for a documentary about 9/11, but the piece actually has a formal origin. Rudin accepted a challenge to create a few bars of music every day for a year, discovered the fragments could be strung together, and eventually used them as the foundation of the first movement. He attached a title to the entire piece after he wrote it, when he realized it expressed his feelings about 9/11.

All these pieces could be enjoyed by anyone who grew up listening to the standard repertoire, but they all explored new possibilities and they were all stamped with the personalities of the composers. Individuality can be a movement, too.