The Year in Music, North America

By Leslie Kandell

Together at Last, Music and . . . Technology
Undisputed: Music helps students pay attention and retain information.

Uncovered: Most basic subjects can be taught through music. (Research shows that music-based lessons=100 percent improvement on fraction tests.)

Unbeatable: University of Pittsburgh music department chair says, “Music is the soundtrack of history.” Last summer, high school teachers from across the country gathered at Pittsburgh (with sponsorship from the National Endowment for the Humanities) to consider today’s musical culture as a base—the base—for teaching other subjects. Neither students nor potential audiences, it was seen, stay glued to an art form presented in a way that is no longer state of the art.

Virtually every orchestra has figured out the value of a Web site, and many have school outreach, but no musical hub has more spokes than the happening San Francisco Symphony. The orchestra’s site for youngsters (www.Sfskids.com) is open to all; for the city’s 91 public grade schools, the online option augments musicians’ regular classroom visits. The kid site’s “Performalator” plays familiar tunes, while “Composerizer” helps make one up. The orchestra also has a Web site (www.Keepingscore.org) for its television series: Michael Tilson Thomas, winner of the “best classical” Grammy for his latest Mahler recording, takes you through masterworks (he calls Tchaikovsky a “sonic cinematographer”), or if you click elsewhere, he conducts orchestral excerpts expressing any emotion selected.

The charismatic Tilson Thomas, celebrating ten years as music director at the San Francisco, also founded the Miamibased New World Symphony back in 1987 for conservatorylevel players. New World, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, now uses ultra-high-speed Internet2 technology to hold online auditions and music lesson videoconferencing. (No jet lag; less expense.)

The Boston Symphony’s interactive “Online Conservatory” at www.bso.org includes Wynton Marsalis’s ambitious oratorio All Rise. Before attending a live rehearsal, 2,000 students from 25 Massachusetts high schools studied it online. Berklee College of Music gives 80 free online lessons—in performance, technology, improvising, teaching, song writing, and business. All this in three formats.

Concert Companion, a handheld device tested in concert halls with several major orchestras, displays commentary about the ongoing performance. Also handheld is a stocking-stuffer piano—49 keys, four octaves, and 100 tones, as well as timbres of organ and trumpet. It takes AA batteries and folds into a tenby-four-inch carrying case. (Amaze your friends.) Then there’s a robot that conducted the Tokyo Symphony in Beethoven’s Fifth. (It took the robot a mere seven tries to get it right.)

www.Violinmasterclass.com has free video clips that teach everything from square one (“Here’s how to hold the bow” and sample practice charts) to lessons with teachers, performances of frequently played pieces and studies, and links to competitions. Choral singers exploring the Web for ensembles, events, and related travel can click around the Vocal Arts Network (www.van.org) while groups as small as the New York Collegium publicize not only their early-music concerts but their bi-weekly recorder-lesson school visits as well.

Technology removes travel boundaries, and learning thrives: The Johann Sebastian Bach Archive in Leipzig will restore and digitize 44 original scores, as well as some of its prestigious holdings, and make them accessible through an online catalogue. The manuscript for Tales of Hoffman, thought destroyed in an 1887 fire at Paris’s Opéra Comique, was discovered on a shelf at the Palais Garnier. It won’t hit the auction block like Maria Callas’s jewelry, but thanks to the Internet, scholars will have online access to it. Music and technology share offline beds too: Tech rehearsals for the Metropolitan Opera’s Magic Flute began before singers arrived—Julie Taymor’s design required even more complex effects than The Lion King.

Music and . . . Health
Music influences not only physiology but also the autonomous nervous system, concluded researchers at the University of Frankfurt. Their results, based on blood tests of amateur choir members before and after singing the Mozart Requiem, also found that the participants’ mood improved during the singing. Collegeage musicians are emotionally healthier than their non-musician counterparts: You can read the results on www.supportmusic.com.

The University of Toronto developed evidence that the study of music promotes intellectual development. For 36 weeks, 144 children were given I.Q. tests before and after a weekly lesson in keyboard, voice, drama—or nothing. Increases in I.Q. from pre-to-post-test were larger in the music groups than in the two others.

Music Is the Soundtrack of History
In the wake of Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, composers are turning for inspiration to contemporary conflicts and headline news—from a hip-hop company’s rapping Moammar Gadhafi to Microsoft: The Opera, with Bill Gates on a journey down the information superhighway. Jerry Springer: The Opera drew howls of laughter in Edinburgh and London, and is now headed for Broadway. After being delayed twice, Charles Wuorinen’s uncompromising Haroun and the Sea of Stories, based on a children’s book about free speech by Salman Rushdie, had its premiere at the New York City Opera—by coincidence just before Election Day. The Albany label has recorded Haroun for its Wuorinen series.

Mel Marvin’s opera Guest from the Future was presented at Bard College’s SummerScape festival. The opera imagines an all-night dialogue in war-scarred Leningrad between the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and the Latvian-born British intellectual Isaiah Berlin; Jonathan Levi of the Nine Circles troupe, which focuses on this period, wrote the libretto. Richard Danielpour’s Margaret Garner (libretto by Toni Morrison) is based on the true story of a slave who killed her baby rather than subject it to slavery. A Michigan Opera Theater premiere is planned, but excerpts were heard during three days of American opera previews at New York’s Symphony Space. This four-company collaborative project called Vox also offered John Eaton’s The Reverend Jim Jones, with a libretto by James Reston, Jr. The Mines of Sulphur, Richard Rodney Bennett’s haunting (and serial) opera resurfaced and people drove to Glimmerglass Opera for this harmonically sensual horror story. Hindemith’s lurid, intentionally embarrassing one-act operas, exhumed by the American Symphony under Leon Botstein, received a spirited revival in concert. Botstein also conducted the U.S. premiere of Bruno Walter’s First Symphony, purportedly not heard in over a century.

Music and . . . Dance
When Isadora Duncan danced to Beethoven it was an outrage. Now, Mark Morris sets a Schumann quintet and it’s a beautiful thing to do. “We’re starting at bar 68,” Morris says in rehearsal, assuming that dancers have the score memorized. His two words to an aspiring dancer? “Study music.”

Morris captured the kinetic joy of Bach in Falling Down Stairs, which sets a cello suite, as did Paul Taylor in Esplanade, which uses a Brandenburg Concerto. Black Grace, a company otherwise devoted to ethnic dances of New Zealand, interpreted the Brandenburg No. 3 in Method.

At Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, the Brussels-based company of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker danced to soprano arias composed for opera revivals or subsequent singers. Dances had the names of arias: Singers and fortepianist (Steven Lubin) were onstage, and program notes discussed the score.

New York City Ballet’s Balanchine centennial was arranged around composers’ nationality: American, European, and Russian. Calcium Night Light treated an Ives song group transcribed for orchestra without voice, and Ivesiana used four small Ives works that benefited from choreography.

Not that every piece of music does. New York City Ballet’s Chichester Psalms and Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s setting of Bach’s Magnificat lacked imagination; dancers trailed the music’s rhythms and mimed the lyrics. Maybe it’s something about choral works—too much going on already. The next Isadora is awaited.

Music and . . . Themed Events
The New Jersey Symphony, under music director-designate Neemi Järvi, began the year with a Dvorák festival marking the centennial of his death with concerts, talks, documentary films, and visits to high schools. (The orchestra’s new collection of Stradivari and Amati stringed instruments is safe with its happy players, though the high-profile Herbert Axelrod, who sold it to them, tried to run from the law and will have another flamboyant chapter for his memoirs.) The Boston Symphony’s Dvorák offering, in addition to some orchestral works, was an eight-week chamber music survey, ending with gorgeous, rare choral pieces.

Juilliard’s Focus! Festival was all about Charles Ives, 50 years after his death. The New York Philharmonic’s “Charles Ives: An American Original in Context,” included a potpourri of music old and new, classical and pop, which fit with whatever inspired Ives—namely, almost everything. Both festivals featured his Fourth Symphony; we’re finally getting a handle on this masterpiece, which until recently was considered chaotic.

Yo-Yo Ma brought his colorfully garbed Silk Road Ensemble—Middle-Eastern and Far-Eastern music performed on ethnic instruments blending with cello—back to its Tanglewood roots and again to Carnegie Hall. Ravinia highlighted its centennial with four all-Rachmaninoff days conducted by Leonard Slatkin, and a Zulu opera, Princess Magogo. Bard College’s twin weekends, using its new Gehry-designed Fisher Center, concentrated on “Shostakovich and his World.” Masters of the downtown—Bang on a Can All-Stars, Terry Riley—moved uptown to Lincoln Center with the London Sinfonietta and the Orkest de Volharding for “Sonic Evolutions,” two concentrated weeks of Louis Andriessen; the two U.S. premieres were the exotic De Materie (Matter) and the oddball film Rosa, a Horse Drama.

The Mostly Mozart Festival was in good form under Louis Langrée, in his second year as music director, who added Jonathan Miller’s punk-dress Così fan tutte and is credited with reminding the festival what it was about. The American Composers Orchestra, led by Anthony Davis and Alvin Singleton, concentrated on improvisation during a week of concerts and discussions of its history, influence, and wellsprings. (Online excerpts can be heard at the American Music Center Web site, NewMusicBox.org.)

Music and . . . Jewish Influences
It has been 350 years since the first boatload of Jews landed in America. Artists reflected Jewish memory and history fused with jazz, Broadway, folkways, klezmer, and neglected works in celebrations taking place at New York’s 92nd St. Y, the Hebrew Theological Seminary, and numerous other venues. James Conlon led three concerts of works by Erwin Schulhoff, a death camp victim whose music mixed classical, jazz, and Dada styles. A radio series hosted by Leonard Nimoy, better known as Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, features the Milken Archives CDs on the Naxos label devoted to aspects of American Jewish music. The mixed-media “Vienna: Jews and the City of Music, 1870-1938” was brought from Vienna to the Yeshiva University Museum. It included a video interview of Felix Galimir by Leonard Bernstein, in which Galimir recalls Jews being savaged in the streets, but “in the conservatory, we were all Jews. (Laughter.)” In cooperation with this exhibit, the Austrian Cultural Forum hosted Constance Hauman’s recital of songs by Second Viennese School composers. The Houston Opera commissioned Salsipuedes from Daniel Catan, a Sephardic Jew living in Mexico. Osvaldo Golijov poignantly blended Ladino and Latino rhythms in Ayre; his unlikely but persuasive muse was Dawn Upshaw. And the film soundtrack from The Pianist is still on Billboard’s classical chart, above Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s Beethoven’s Piano Concertos, if notably below collected slow movements called “The Most Relaxing Classical Album—Ever!”

Music and . . . New Ideas
The large-orchestra standout at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music was Impressions from “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” by Michael Gandolfi. The profoundly named garden, in Scotland, was designed by architect Charles Jencks to display aspects of nature that relate to modern physics. The four conventionally structured movements have innovative color and instrumentation.

Before composing Mallet Concerto, Ned Rorem, whose 80th year is still being celebrated, said, “In growing older I’ve come to feel that percussion is, at best, mere decoration: at worst, immoral, like too many earrings or too many exclamation points!!!” His concerto, introduced by Evelyn Glennie, is scored for soft and glittering percussion. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s new percussion concerto is based on rituals associated with percussion, such as war-like exchanges.

Music and Spaces and . . . Movers and Shakers
Choices for heads of musical state reveal lively minds at work, and smart board votes. Clive Gillinson, managing director of the London Symphony, follows the late Robert Harth as Carnegie Hall’s executive and artistic director. The Pittsburgh Symphony is to be a three-headed orchestra: Andrew Davis, artistic adviser, Yan Pascal Tortelier, principal guest conductor, and Marek Janowski, endowed guest conductor chair. David Robertson succeeds the late Hans Vonk as music director of the Saint Louis Symphony; Neemi Järvi leaves the Detroit Symphony to succeed Zdenek Macal at the New Jersey; Kent Nagano succeeds Charles Dutoit at the Montreal, and will leave the Los Angeles Opera, his successor being James Conlon. David Finckel and Wu Han are to be directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Pierre Boulez will continue as the Chicago Symphony’s guest conductor when Daniel Barenboim relinquishes his title as music director at the end of the 2004-05 season. Joseph Volpe is leaving the Metropolitan Opera in 2006; and though many have called to replace him, none is chosen.

Overture Hall, in Madison, Wisconsin’s new arts center, “lures you in with a sunlit spaciousness,” according to a glowing review. Its $2.9 million German-built pipe organ has curved patterns to convey the impression of sound waves.

Eyes on the Prize
The Pulitzer Prize now includes film and theater scores as well as improvisation; Paul Moravec received it this year for Tempest Fantasy, a set of piano variations. (Last year’s winner, Stephen Hartke, is the recipient of the Ives Living, a three-year composing fellowship.) Unsuk Chin has the Grawemeyer Award for her 2002 Violin Concerto. Joan Sutherland and John Williams were chosen for Kennedy Center honors. Keith Jarrett is the first jazz musician since Miles Davis to win the University of Copenhagen’s Sonning Music prize. The Sibelius Prize—not awarded since Ligeti—went to Magnus Lindberg, whose works were noted at Tanglewood’s contemporary music festival as part of a tribute to Finnish composers. The Emerson String Quartet won the Avery Fisher Prize (and the updated Avery Fisher Career Grant includes a video for winners to use in publicizing their work). The Richard Tucker Award went to bass-baritone John Relyea.

Milestones
Elliott Carter is 95; his Micomicón was the Boston Symphony’s first commission for its new music director, James Levine. The New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, 80, celebrated with children from the National Dance Institute. George Crumb is 75. Bernard Rands, honored at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music, and Marilyn Horne are 70; James Levine, Michael Tilson Thomas, Leonard Slatkin, and Andrew Davis are 60. So is the Atlanta Symphony, which commissioned works by David Del Tredici and Christopher Theophanidis. The Lyric Opera Company of Chicago commissioned William Bolcom’s A Wedding for its 50th anniversary season.

Obituaries
In 2004 and late 2003, the music world recorded the loss of composers Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, David Raksin, M. Searle Wright; conductors Carlos Kleiber, Hans Vonk, Iona Brown, Heinz Wallberg; tenors Franco Corelli, Barry Morell; bass-baritones Nicolai Ghiarov, Hans Hotter, Gerard Souzay; pianist-statesman David Bar-Illan; violinist Erick Friedman; oboist Philip West; musicologist-conductor Denis Stevens; Carnegie Hall Executive and Artistic Director Robert Harth, Classic Arts Showcase founder Lloyd E. Rigler, violin maker and dealer Jacques Français. A new requiem by Luke Mayernik was performed memory of Mister Rogers.

Leslie Kandell contributes to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, American Record Guide, BBC Music Magazine, The Berkshire Eagle, and other newspapers and magazines.