Join Q2 Music on Sunday, April 24 (with an encore presentation Tuesday, April 26) for our second annual Symphomania, a 24-hour marathon stream of music that offers a vision of orchestral repertoire composed in or after the year 2000. Hosted by musicologist and critic William Robin, Symphomania features an array of articles from conductors, composers, and critics examining the issues surrounding 21st-century orchestral music.
Aaron Copland knew. “At some point, the new music must invade our normal concert life,” he wrote in a 1970 essay. “Any other solution is unacceptable.”
The composer was fighting a two-pronged battle. In the previous decade, he had witnessed a generation of composers, spearheaded by Milton Babbitt, retreat from the concert hall and symphony orchestra into the university and electronic music studio. And he had observed, simultaneously, the decline in attention from American orchestras towards younger composers — an attention that had catapulted him to national renown in the 1920s and ‘30s. “I’m naturally anxious that we have some progeny in the orchestral field, and not only for the sake of the composers but for the artistic health of our symphonic organizations as well,” the dean of American composers wrote.
Copland’s anxiety is just as warranted today as it was in 1970. Orchestras have canonized a repertoire of deceased white men. As statistics compiled by the Baltimore Symphony from the 2015–16 season of 89 American orchestras revealed, the average date of composition was 1883; only 12 percent of the orchestral repertoire was by living composers; and a meager 1.7 percent of the music was written by women. Overlooked by institutions, composers have instead created their own ensembles and turned to their laptops for the expansive canvasses that the symphony once offered.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Just because only 12 percent of the repertoire is alive doesn’t mean that there isn’t a significant swath of incredible music written for the orchestra in our century. As this year’s Symphomania will show, dozens of composers still turn to large-scale symphonic forces to make bold statements, in a dizzying array of musical idioms. Last year, Q2 Music broadcast works by 61 different composers written since the year 2000; this year, we're committed to programming an all-new 24 hour survey of the 21st-century orchestra.
The decline over which Copland once worried has been occasionally mitigated. This year’s broadcast is dedicated to three recently deceased figures that helped revitalize the relationship between new music and the orchestra. As a composer and conductor, Pierre Boulez kept contemporary music at the center of orchestral life. With his decades-long relationship to the Los Angeles Philharmonic — not to mention his deep understanding of orchestral writing — Steven Stucky helped secure a place for new music in the American symphonic ecosystem. Perhaps most important — and most undersung — was John Duffy, founder of Meet the Composer. In the 1980s, Meet the Composer established unprecedented partnerships between orchestras and composers: in 1990, 32 orchestras in the United States had maintained composer-in-residence programs, and the organization had funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to new music. The resurgence that we have seen in the past decade — with composer-in-residence programs at the New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic, and programs like Green Umbrella and Contact! — is one deeply indebted to Duffy’s legacy.
In hearing 24 hours of new orchestral music, I hope that listeners consider not only the astonishing palette of sounds available from the symphony today, but also the mechanisms through which this music can invade our normal concert life. Commissions are only the first step towards changing the institutional culture of classical music. As Andrew Norman — whose Play spurred the first Symphomania last year — told me of a typical commission, “There’s three years of lead time, and then I work on it for six months or a year, and then they look at their parts individually for three weeks, and then we play it two days before the premiere — for the first time! — and then we premiere it. And then they forget about it.” We need commissions, but we also need recordings and repeat performances by multiple orchestras. We need to canonize new music just as much as the stuff by the dead white guys. We need to build a diverse and lasting repertory for the 21st-century orchestra.
*Symphomania includes a yet-to-be released recording of Mason Bates's 'Anthology of Fantastic Zoology' care of Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The album will be available for purchase beginning June 10, 2016 on the symphony's CSO Resound label.