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Through Music Alive, orchestras large and small are tailoring composer residencies to their individual needs.

by Chester LaneCreatorsin Our Midst

Last winter, as part of a five-week residency with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, composer Charles Coleman submitted a theme to musicians from the CSO’s youth orchestra and invited them to craft their own variations on it. “The point was to show them what it’s like to be a composer—the benefits, the

struggles,” he says. “One budding student, the timpanist, actually did a full-out variation with orchestration.” What the musicians came up with collectively was

shaped into a performable piece by their conductor, Eric Dudley (also assistant conductor of the CSO), and during the March-April segment of his residency Coleman observed a run-through of the variations as they would be performed by the CSYO at their final concert of the season in May.

“It was just wonderful,” says Coleman. “As I said in the press interviews when I was there, I felt like a famous dead guy.”

Boston Modern Orchestra Project Composer in Residence Lisa Bielawa makes it her business to follow all rehearsals closely with her head in the score, and she’s a collegial presence at an orchestra that devotes itself exclusively to contemporary music. Bielawa is pictured above at a post-concert reception last May with Artistic Director Gil Rose (left); composers Steven Mackey and Anthony De Ritis (center and far right); and Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky, the soloist in De Ritis’s Devolution: A Concerto for DJ and Orchestra.

Charles Coleman’s Music Alive residency with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra last season included this visit with fourth graders at Ruth Moyer Elementary School in Ft. Thomas, Kentucky.

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Alive and allowed orchestras that have already presented one or more residencies to “start from where they are and take it deeper. My own sense is that the program has been tremendously successful.”

More than ComposingOrchestras and composers, says Hitchens, “come as a team” to Music Alive and “apply based on their needs. It’s not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ proposition.” That Music Alive embraces a broad swath of the or-chestra field is evident from the list of

participating orchestras: large budget and small, symphonic and chamber-sized, traditional and contemporary in overall artistic mission, and with musicians ranging from full-time professional players to high school students. What all of these residencies have in common is a pre-existing synergy between the orchestra’s leader—artistic or administrative—and its chosen composer(s).

At the Boston Modern Orchestra Pro-ject, that synergy began not with a com-poser’s score, but as a collaboration between conductor and performer. Gil Rose, BMOP’s artistic director and found-ing conductor, met singer-composer Lisa Bielawa in 2001, when Rose was guest

Since 2000, the old joke about com-posers having to be dead—or more specifically, dead, white, and male—to be appreciated has been turned on its head by Music Alive, a joint project of the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet The Composer, made possible with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The Aaron Copland Fund for Music. In communities throughout the U.S., orchestras selected for a Music Alive residency have devised creative ways to surround the performance

of a new work with related activities, bringing composers into classrooms and faculty meetings, alternative performance venues, rehearsals and reading sessions, pre-concert discussions, and donor recep-tions to build awareness of orchestral music as a living, evolving art form.

The very alive and lively Charles Cole-man was one of seven composers to under take short-term residencies through the project last season; a half dozen of his colleagues spent two to five weeks with the Atlanta, Delaware, Kalamazoo, Milwaukee Youth, Puerto Rico, and Stock ton sym phony orches tras. And dur-ing that same time period, another six composers completed or began one- to three-year extended residencies at the Amer ican Composers Orchestra, the Bos-ton Modern Orchestra Project, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Vermont, Green

Bay, and Westfield symphony orchestras. Two of those orchestras—Green Bay and Saint Paul—have opted to work with multiple composers over the residency period, bring ing to ten the total number of extended residencies in the latest round of Music Alive. An eighth round of short-term residencies will take place in the 2007-08 season (see “Music Alive: Round Eight”).

League Executive Vice President and Managing Director Jesse Rosen says that Music Alive arose out of a need for “more effective methods to connect

orchestras with composers. The U.S. is a large country with an abundance of talent, but access to information and resources is often a barrier. One of Music Alive’s goals is to increase the frequency of partnership between composers and orchestras by providing financial resources and guidance in residency activity. We partnered with Meet The Composer to design and execute the program because of that organization’s decades of experience in composer resi dencies. Our long-term goals are that aud iences will

increase their appetite for new music, and that orchestras will increase their capacity for sustained activity in this area.” Composers themselves, says Rosen, are “often the most effective advocates for expanding the musical tastes of both audiences and orchestras. Through Music Alive, they learn to sharpen those skills.” Forty-eight orchestras and 62 com posers have participated in Music Alive residencies since the program was launched in the 2000-01 season. (A complete list of participants can be found at www.symphony.org/artistic.)

Heather Hitchens, who served as pres-ident of Meet The Composer from 1999 until this summer, when she took up duties as executive director of the New York State Council on the Arts, says the availability of both short- and long-term residencies has built flexibility into Music

■ Brooklyn Philharmonic: John Corigliano (two weeks)

■ Colonial Symphony (New Jersey): Harold Meltzer (four weeks)

■ Denver Young Artists Orchestra: Belinda Reynolds (two weeks)

■ Patel Conservatory Youth Orchestra (Tampa, Fla.): Augusta Read Thomas (two weeks)

■ The Philadelphia Orchestra: Jennifer Higdon (two weeks)

■ The Phoenix Symphony: Mark Grey (four weeks)

■ Seattle Symphony: Aaron Jay Kernis (two weeks)

■ SONYC (String Orchestra of New York City): Randall Woolf (four weeks)

8This fall marks the eighth season of Music Alive, a project of the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet The Composer made possible with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The Aaron Copland Fund for Music. Eight composers and orchestras have been selected for short-term residencies during the 2007-08 season. As in past years, the groups selected vary widely in budget, geography, and overall artistic mission. Here’s the list:

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BMOP Composer in Residence Lisa Bielawa teaching a math class how to graph the rhythmic changes in Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, and coaching Boston Arts Academy composition student Kwaumane Brown.

Chester Lane

Last spring the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra premiered Deep Woods by Composer in Residence Charles Coleman, who took inspiration from a painting by his friend Charles Yoder. Coleman (left) is seen here with CSO Music Director Paavo Järvi and a reproduction of the painting.

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Music Alive residencies

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conducting the American Composers Orchestra and Bielawa was a featured soloist in a work by Randall Woolf called Hee-Haw. “It had two chick singers, and I was one of them,” says Bielawa. “Gil was conducting, but it wasn’t his orchestra. I was singing, but it wasn’t my music. But we hit it off right away.” Before long Bielawa’s own music was on Rose’s radar, and when the opportunity arose for BMOP to apply for a Music Alive residency, her name topped the list.

Since its inception in 1996 BMOP has devoted itself exclusively to contemporary music, and Executive Director Catherine Stephan notes that “the composer is almost always here for our concerts, even

when the work is not a premiere.” But a long-term composer residency, she notes, was an opportunity to “do something that was part of our mission and bring it to a higher level.”

Music Alive awarded BMOP a residency for three years beginning in the fall of 2006, which included funds for a full-orchestra work by Bielawa to be premiered and recorded in the spring of 2009. After the residency was announced, says Stephan, the orchestra started “brainstorming about other ways of making Lisa an ambassador for new music, and an advocate for young composers.” The thirtysomething Bielawa was ideally suited to this role, being not only gregarious and well connected to her own generation of creative colleagues, but

richly experienced in mentoring teenaged composers through the New York Youth Symphony’s Making Score program.

BMOP had done workshops at the Boston Arts Academy—a public high school with an ample complement of musical talent, but no composition department—and a resident composer at the orchestra could help expand that relationship. Greg Holt, a music teacher at the school, “was the person Catherine and I met at the very beginning,” says Bielawa. “I said ‘Hi, I’m a composer in residence, and I’m available to you.’ Greg brought me into some classes in the fall, and he put out some antennae to see which students might be interested in after-school activities, such as private meetings with a composition coach.”

Bielawa discovered “three or four kids who were actually writing music,” and one of them—a piano and composition major named Kwaumane Brown—was still act-ively composing as the spring semester wound to a close. Among the multifarious activities packed into the final week of Bielawa’s first season in residence was a coaching session with Brown on his new piece for cello and clarinet, with Bielawa studying the score and suggesting ways for him to reshape some of the harmonies for dramatic effect. “I’ll be working with him again in the fall, probably more regularly,” she says.

But the Boston Arts Academy com-ponent of Bielawa’s residency has not been limited to coaching composition. “I learned pretty quickly that it would be necessary for me to integrate myself into their own curricular needs if I was going to be relevant to them,” she says. At the school’s annual staff and faculty retreat last winter Bielawa gave a two-hour presentation about interdisciplinary arts, and the most “proactive” response, she says, came from a math teacher, who invited her to demonstrate principles of rhythm and analytic listening to his students using both recordings and visual representations of the music. Bielawa presented Steve Reich’s Clapping Music to the students as a literally “hands-on” exercise, and they were also challenged to graph the rhythmic changes in the piece,

with Bielawa at the blackboard. Other works, ranging from Beethoven’s Opus 135 String Quartet to a piano etude by György Ligeti, were graphed for such parameters as tempo, volume, harmony, register, and instrumentation.

In years two and three of her BMOP residency Bielawa hopes to work with other departments at the Boston Arts Academy. Though she confesses to “huge gaps” in her knowledge of music history—the daughter of a composer, she grew up with the idea that creating music, without regard to received conventions, was as natural as breathing, and discovered the Classical-Romantic musical canon only as an adult—Bielawa says she’s “happy to talk about music in relation to really any other discipline.”

Two of Bielawa’s existing compositions—Roam and unfinish’d, sent—were performed on the opening concert of the 2006-07 season, not only introducing her music to BMOP’s audience but advertising her arrival as composer in residence. In that role she’s been enormously beneficial to an orchestra that regularly brings in living composers, providing a collegial ear and an insider’s knowledge that make her an ideal host for the pre-concert Talk Back events. Another way that BMOP has been able to “super-size” the residency, says Stephan, is to establish a commissioning club modeled on the Sound Investment programs at the New Jersey Symphony and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. A project of BMOP’s Board of Overseers, the venture seeks to broaden the base for funding new works by reaching beyond the orchestra’s inner circle of donors. The club’s first commission went to Bielawa for a double violin concerto, which BMOP will premiere next March with soloists Colin Jacobsen and Carla Kihlstedt.

Raising AwarenessUnlike BMOP and several of the large-budget U.S. orchestras, the Cincinnati Symphony has not had a regular commis-sioning program, according to Director of Artistic Planning Julie Eugenio. “We do it project by project. But it’s important to maintain that commitment, and this was a very helpful step,” she says,

Engagement with youth was one benefit of the Cincinnati residency. For

Jeffrey Mumford at the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra, it was the whole show.

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One of the nation’s largest youth-orchestra programs, the MYSO has more than 800 students in its regular ensembles. (“There are ten or twelve of those, depending on how you define an ensemble,” says Richman.) Among the newer ones is Progressions, a diversity initiative that provides third- and fourth-graders—primarily from the inner city, and many of them, like Mumford, African American—with semi-private weekly lessons, coaching, and supervised practice time, with the goal of preparing them for the MYSO’s String Orchestra. Mumford wrote a one-minute piece for this ensemble, providing them with what Richman calls “exposure to music that was dissonant. They got used to it,” she says. “Our staff people were more intimidated than the kids.”

The MYSO also sponsors fellowships for student composers, nine of whom had short works premiered by the organ-ization last season. “I met with a number of them,” says Mumford, “and it was

terrific. These are high-school students! I have to say, the future of music is in very good hands.” Mumford’s own Music Alive commission, underwritten by three MYSO board mem bers, was an eight-minute work called verdant and shimmering air: four views of a

reflected forest, which the MYSO’s Senior Orchestra premiered in May under the direction of its longtime conductor, Marg ery Deutsch. Preceding the concert was a Q&A with the composer, hosted by a musician from the orchestra.

Each of the four sections of verdant and shimmering air, says Mumford, “focuses on a certain group of instruments in the orchestra, so everybody got a chance to shine. My music is very influenced by light and cloud imagery and time of day. I wanted this piece to be very evocative—and also short, so they could prepare it more easily. I don’t know if any members of the orchestra had played this kind of music before. But I have to tell you, their performance was better than some professional orchestras I’ve worked with.”

Deepening ConnectionsProjects like the short-term Cincinnati and Milwaukee residencies have allowed orchestras participating in Music Alive to build a variety of awareness-raising activities around a world premiere during a handful of well-planned weeks. A long-term residency like the one now underway at BMOP is an opportunity to build connections over time with both orchestra and community, ramping upward toward a culminating world premiere.

“One of the first things I did as com-poser in residence,” says Bielawa, “was to start a blog. We’ve had thousands of hits. There are people all over the world who are following my activities as com-poser in residence. Composers are no longer a bust on the piano, and the best way I can think of to be an advocate for the field as a composer in residence is to be as transparent as possible, so people feel close to me. Composers in residence do all kinds of stuff—public relations, advocacy, welcoming the other composers, educating people on the street. A lot of talking, out reach, energy generating.

“But something that composers in residence often don’t do much of while in residence is composing, because all these other activities are kind of anathema to time alone, where you kind of have to

referring to Charles Coleman’s short-term residency last season. By Coleman’s account, the roots of that residency lay in his relationship with conductor Kristjan Järvi, the younger brother of CSO Music Director Paavo Järvi.

“We were both students at Manhattan School of Music,” says Coleman. “After Kristjan formed his Absolute Ensemble, he asked me and a few other composers to get on board and write original pieces or arrangements.” Coleman wrote mostly for the younger brother during the 1990s, but Paavo Järvi took an interest in what he was doing. “Then Paavo got this gig as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony, and asked me to write a piece for his opening concert.” Entitled Streetscape, it was what Coleman describes as “a general, abstract depiction of the area of New York City that I grew up in.”

Eugenio calls the 38-year-old Coleman “an emerging voice,” noting that he’s “one of a small handful of composers Paavo has chosen to champion.” An orchestra residency, says Eugenio, “makes a huge difference in a young composer’s life.” Coleman uses the collegial “we” when referring to his own contribution as com-poser-in-residence. “We knew we were going to work together again,” he says—the CSO had already commissioned a work from him called Deep Woods, inspired by a painting of that name by his friend Charles Yoder—“but we wanted to do more than just write for the orchestra—to get some awareness of living composers.”

To help raise that awareness among the CSO board and top donors, the orchestra asked Coleman to do a presentation for them on John Adams’s Shaker Loops, which included a live performance of the work, in its original chamber version, by seven string players from the CSO. Coleman regards Adams as “the biggest inspiration for me—not just for his music, but for his general concept of what music is supposed to do. I liked that interview where he said, ‘This is a communicative activity, and one certainly wants a response. Otherwise what’s the point of doing art?’ ”

Aside from his Theme and Variations project with the youth orchestra and his Deep Woods commission (the CSO prem-

iered that on May 3), Coleman offered The Lime Factory—an earlier piece of his, also inspired by a work of visual art—to Eric Dudley for both a CSO Young People’s Concert and for a reading session by the youth orchestra. “I also did things with fourth graders in various schools—played a few pieces, showed them my music and the PBS video of Streetscape. And I got a lot of funny questions: ‘Are you famous?’ ‘Do you ever get chased by the paparazzi?’ ”

Engagement with youth—the living, breathing presence of a classical composer in their midst—was one of many benefits

of the Cincinnati residency. For composer Jeffrey Mumford at the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra, it was the whole show. Mumford first became aware of that orchestra through Wendy Richman, the daughter of MYSO Executive Director Frances Richman and at that time a student at Oberlin College, where Mumford was on the faculty. “She’s a wonderful violist,” he says, “and when I heard her we decided to work together. I’ve now written three pieces for Wendy, and from that I got to know her family, and Fran got to know some of my music.”

During the February portion of his two-week residency—he returned for a week in May—Mumford visited with MYSO board members and with many area students, including third- and fourth-graders at the Golda Meir School, a magnet program where virtually all of the kids play a musical instrument. “I don’t think a lot of them had heard the kind of music I write, so it was a quite a revelation,” Mumford says with a laugh, “and they came with good questions. They were very receptive, very well prepared. I played an orchestral piece, one for solo violin, a couple of chamber pieces, and I demonstrated some stuff on the keyboard. We had a nice interchange. Then I met with various ensembles within the Milwaukee Youth Symphony.”

Besides composing a work for the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra’s senior ensemble to perform last spring, Jeffrey Mumford (far right) wrote a one-minute piece for the MYSO’s entry-level group Progressions, two of whose members are pictured here.

“Composers are no longer a bust on the piano,” says

Bielawa, “and the best way I can

think of to be an advocate for the field is to be as transparent as

possible.”

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Bielawa reviews the sketch of her “synopsis” for solo violin with BMOP Concertmaster Charles Dimmick; an hour later he was onstage leading the orchestra in its final concert of the season.

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go under a rock. I thought, wouldn’t it be fun if I found some way to compose in residence—to actually compose while I’m here?”

Bielawa is referring to her “synopses,” the short solos she has been writing for individual members of BMOP. She’s com pleted seven so far, each of them

written during one of her residency weeks. Toward the end of her final week in Boston last season she made time to go over the sketch of her latest synopsis, a violin solo, with Concertmaster Charles Dimmick. (Amazingly, this meeting took place an hour and a half before Dimmick was to go onstage for BMOP’s season

fin ale, a Bank of America Celebrity Series concert at Sanders Theatre.) “This is going to be rocking,” he said as the synopsis work session came to a close. “When can I have it?” Bielawa said she’d be finishing the piece on her laptop during the train ride back to New York, and would email it to him.

In the fashion of Hemingway’s shortest of all “short stories”—its entire text was For sale: baby shoes, never worn—Bielawa is giving each of her synopses a six-word title. (Many of her compositions have literary sources; Roam and unfinish’d, sent are inspired by, respectively, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Shakespeare’s Richard III.) Last May, musicians from BMOP performed the string bass synopsis, I’m Not That Kind of Lawyer, and the one for solo cello, Why Did You Lie to Me?, in the intimate setting of Boston’s Club Café, as part of a series that Bielawa is curating in connection with her residency. She expects to write at least 20 synopses during her three years at BMOP, and has “every expectation” that the full-orchestra Music Alive commission “will end up incor-porating, benefiting from, these pieces. It’s because of the synopses that Gil and I are calling that work a concerto for orchestra. Sometimes I call it a symphony, sometimes a concerto for orchestra—whichever is less intimidating to me at the moment. It’s going to have a title, but who knows what that will be.”

Even Bielawa does not know what shape the final commission will take, or how it will incorporate material from the synopses. But, she says, “It makes me feel good knowing that by the time I really let that piece take over—which will be after the double violin concerto is written, and a whole other chamber piece, and a choral piece—I will have such a rich relationship with the orchestra. How can [the synopses] possibly not show up in the piece? I like to think I’m deepening my intimacy with the orchestra, so that by the time I actually write this piece I’ll discover that I’ve actually been writing it all along.” T

Chester Lane is senior editor of SYMPHONY.

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