Following the concert, retiring SSO director Michael Jonnes will be honored at an audience reception.
Kevin Rhodes, conductor and music director of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra.
“When I was a little kid, a toddler, we had a piano in the house,” said composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, whose “Rituals” for Five Percussionists and Orchestra will be featured on the next Springfield Symphony Concert, Jan. 12 at 7:30 p.m.
“I crawled up on the bench and found out what happened when you pushed a key,” she continued. “After that I did the normal thing for my generation…took lessons on trumpet, then violin, played in band, you know….”
This perfectly ordinary musical childhood laid the groundwork for the world famous composer Zwilich has become, paving her way to numerous prizes and honors, including the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Symphony No. 1 (she became the first woman ever to receive this coveted award), the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Chamber Music Prize, the Arturo Toscanini Music Critics Award, and many others.
“When I got to high school I wrote things for high school band – I wrote a string quartet early on – I was always involved in jazz, played trumpet in the high school big band,” Zwilich recalled. American composers, she said, have so much material on which to draw – the best of the European tradition, plus countless musics from around the globe, plus their own idioms of blues, jazz, and folk music, and she was fascinated by all of it as she grew and synthesized all these influences into her own distinct musical voice.
“Composition can’t really be taught,” she said. “Hopefully it’s not a thing like teaching someone how to build a certain kind of bookcase. I was always interested in so much, and things finally began to come into focus.”
She earned a Bachelor of Music from Florida State University in 1960 as a violinist, and moved to New York to play in the American Symphony under Leopold Stokowski, continuing in that employment through her doctoral studies at the Juilliard School, where in 1975, she became the first woman to earn the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition, and (in the same year) Pierre Boulez programmed her “Symposium for Orchestra” with the Juilliard Orchestra, bringing her critical attention.
“I had played the violin for many years, never as well as I would have liked, and I decided I would either have to get better or break it over my knee,” she said. “I had also never written a piece where I said ‘I nailed it!’ so I decided to put everything on the line and go for a doctorate in composition at Juilliard. As it turned out, she placed her musical eggs in the right basket.
Since 1975, the prolific Zwilich has contributed to every genre of music except opera.<
“I got a really good offer for an opera once,” she said, “but while I was mulling it over, I went to a performance of my First Symphony.” As she sat listening, she reflected on the profoundly meaningful experience of hearing her instrumental music given birth by fantastic players to an eager, appreciative audience, and decided to turn down the opera offer.
“I’m an instrumental composer – it was my childhood dream, and I’m fascinated by instruments of all kinds,” Zwilich said. She has nurtured a particular interest in percussion as among the oldest human musical instruments. “Rituals,” the piece Maestro Kevin Rhodes and the SSO will play on Saturday, was born of a commission from the Nexus percussion ensemble, based in Toronto, Ontario.
Founded in 1971, the ensemble stands out in the contemporary music scene for what their website describes as “…the innovation and diversity of their programs, their impressive history of collaborations and commissions, their revival of 1920′s novelty ragtime xylophone music, and their influential improvisatory ideas.”
Zwilich visited with the Nexus musicians for a few days. Did she feel like a kid in a toy shop?
“You said it! They invited me to listen to them rehearse and play, and showed me their favorite (percussion) setups – you know, some percussionists like melodic instruments (marimba, xylophone, etc.) and others are pure drummers – there are all these different personalities.”
“It seemed like I was there forever, because I got so involved in learning about all these wonderful instruments and sounds and notations...” (the percussion list for “Rituals” reads like a musical kitchen sink – for example, “Thai Gongs, Chinese Opera Gongs, Melodian, Boobams, Guiro, Woodblocks, Glockenspiel, Bass Drums, Tom Toms, Castanets, Piccolo Snare Drum, Bongos, Crotales, Tubular Bells, Tibetan Cymbals, Balinese Trompon Gongs,” etc. etc.)
Zwilich returned home from her session in Canada, and “thought about it, and thought about it.”
Unabashedly immersed in the western music tradition, Zwilich realized that she would be unwise to attempt to use these instruments with a sense of concrete cultural “authenticity,” so she began to think of them in a more existential way, centering on the concept of percussion use in cultural rituals around the world.
She writes in the program note for the piece, “In recent years, many of us have become more aware of the musical world outside the Western tradition—of musics that follow different procedures and spring from other aesthetics. And contemporary percussionists have opened many of these worlds to us, as they have ventured around the globe, participating in Brazilian Samba schools, studying Gamelan and African drumming with local experts, collecting instruments from Asia and Africa and South America and the South Pacific, widening our horizons in the process. …
After long consideration, I decided that it would not only be impossible, but even undesirable for this Western-tradition-steeped composer to attempt to use [Nexus's exotic array of] instruments in a culturally 'authentic' way. My goal was an existential kind of authenticity: searching instead for universal ideas that would be true to both myself and the performers while acknowledging the traditional uses of the instruments."
‘Rituals’ is in four movements, each issuing from a ritual associated with percussion, but with the orchestral interaction providing an essential element in the musical form. I. Invocation alludes to the traditions of invoking the spirit of the instruments, or the gods, or the ancestors before performing. II. Ambulation moves from a processional through march and dance to fantasy based on all three. III. Remembrances alludes to traditions of memorializing. IV. Contests progresses from friendly competition—games, contests—to a suggestion of a battle of "big band" drummers, to warlike exchanges.”
One of the most performed and widely appreciated composers in America today, Zwilich will enjoy performances of sixteen of her compositions this season alone, and these are the ones she knows about – it often happens that performances come to her attention online, in a brochure, in a review, etc. Asked about her relationship to her audience, Zwilich encapsulated it this way:
“I am my first audience - when I decide that a piece is good enough, I let it out – my pieces are like my children, I let them out into the world when I know they can survive on their own!”
“My second audience is the performers – and I always bring an eraser to rehearsal – I have been fortunate to have superb musicians play my music, and they always make constructive thoughtful suggestions.”
“My third audience is the audience of which I am a part, when I (we) hear the piece performed for the very first time.”
This laudable direct and human approach to the creative process certainly contributes to the broad appeal and success of Zwilich’s music.
Rhodes is very much looking forward to performing “Rituals.”
“I found the wonderful sound world of all of this percussion together so engaging,” he said in a pre-season interview. “In addition, having a percussion concerto for 5 players is really unique, one of the most special concerts we’ve ever done – we’ll have all the players and instruments down at the front of the stage.” Rhodes has chosen Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” suites (a medley of the two existent suites that he will compile for this concert – “In the Hall of the Mountain King” will surely be part of it), and Rimsky-Korsakov’s exotic “Sheherezade” to complement the Zwilich concerto on Saturday’s program.
Tickets from $22-$65 may be purchased through the SSO website, www.springfieldsymphony.org or by calling the box office at (413) 733-2291. Following the concert, retiring SSO director Michael Jonnes will be honored at an audience reception.