Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup metatuning Meet the composer

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themusicoflove0221feb21,0,5932977.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire

Meet the composer _ and commission your own music

By VERENA DOBNIK

Associated Press Writer

February 21, 2004, 10:20 AM EST

NEW YORK -- A dentist in Iowa, the widow of a Massachusetts computer

expert, a Third-World missionary from Illinois. They all have something

in common: a love for music and the means to help create new sounds.

The three are featured in a booklet that shows individuals how to

custom-order compositions through Meet The Composer, a New York-based,

nonprofit group.

In a bygone era, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven worked at the whim of

nobility who served as arts patrons.

Today, most new music is funded by philanthropic institutions or public

grants, with many composers barely scraping by. But individuals who

commission music are riding a small, but growing wave of custom-ordered

works being performed around the country.

The inspiration takes many forms.

William Rubright, a professor of dentistry at the University of Iowa,

is enamored of the cosmos. He helped fund "Sun Rings," a work for

strings with visual special effects by the California-based composer

Terry Riley, who emulated humming and whispering outer-space sounds

recorded by an astrophysicist at Rubright's school.

The dentist's $10,000 contribution, administered through the

university's arts center, covered some of Riley's five-figure fee, with

funding from NASA and other institutions completing the commission.

The San Francisco-based, cutting-edge Kronos Quartet premiered the

evening-long piece in Iowa.

From California, Kathryn Gould is commissioning nine composers through

Meet The Composer. At her own expense, she's showcasing their work in a

series called Magnum Opus being heard for the first time this year and

in two future seasons.

Gould is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, but says she funds the

music for love, not for money.

"I don't dictate to the composers _ they do whatever they decide to do.

But I live for this music," said Gould, who plays the violin.

At his Brooklyn home recently, composer Kenji Bunch was putting

finishing touches on a symphonic work Gould sponsored. It'll first be

played in April by the Santa Rosa Symphony in California.

Called "The Lichtenstein Triptych," the piece by the 30-year-old

Juilliard-trained musician is based on three paintings by the late Roy

Lichtenstein. One, from 1964, shows a couple kissing, in Lichtenstein's

typical cartoonish style.

"I wanted to write music that's desperately passionate, like this

couple, as if it's their only chance to be together," said Bunch, to

whom Gould gave carte blanche _ and $15,000.

Anyone can commission music, including groups of friends or relatives

who share the cost. That could be, for instance, $700 for a short flute

or violin or voice solo, or hundreds of thousands of dollars for music

as theater _ depending on length, a composer's prominence, and the

stature of the performers.

Usually the works are publicly performed, but some are premiered at

home, for family and friends.

The legal rights to any work remain with the composer.

Maurice Barbash used some of the money he made as a Long Island real

estate developer so he and his wife Lillian could bankroll a piano

concerto by Christopher Rouse for Emanuel Ax and the New York

Philharmonic.

"Commissioning is a way for people who can't play an instrument to make

music," said Maurice Barbash. "That's got to be some kind of an ego

trip!"

From its offices in Manhattan's West Village, Meet The Composer has

made introductions resulting in musical styles ranging from classical

and jazz to folk and ethnic.

"In a democratic society, we're trying to give individuals the chance

to create the music of our time, with new sounds, new inspirations

coming from living composers," said Heather Hitchens, the

organization's president. "At the same time, a person can feel, 'Wow, I

could give music for this special occasion, for a loved one."'

Meet The Composer has helped commission works by more than 700

composers since its founding in 1974 _ mostly through large

philanthropies and grants. With a $2 million annual budget from sources

like the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the

organization is run by a board that includes Grammy-winning composers

John Corigliano and Steve Reich.

After the Ohio-born Hitchens took the helm five years ago, she decided

to offer composers' services to individuals as well.

Last year, Meet The Composer published a free booklet titled "An

Individual's Guide to Commissioning Music," with eight individuals and

families as models for how to go about creating new works.

Richard Gieser, a Chicago eye surgeon who appears in the booklet, found

his way to composers through a college friend, conductor John Nelson.

Gieser looks to music that expresses his love of God _ also reflected

in his travels as a medical missionary to Third-World areas from India

and China to Africa.

He, his wife and their son have commissioned sacred pieces for chorus

and orchestra, including one by the esteemed Polish-born composer

Henryk Gorecki and another narrated by an African-American preacher.

They call the series Soli Deo Gloria. In Latin, said the missionary

doctor, "those are the words Bach put at the end of every composition:

Glory to God alone."

The Meet The Composer booklet also features a couple who commissioned

music before the organization started its program for individuals. They

were lucky: The famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma was their friend.

Robert Goldberg and his wife, Judy, of Newton, Mass., were seeking new

music for their 25th anniversary. At their wedding, a pianist had

performed Bach's Goldberg Variations.

Ma helped them choose six composers _ including Corigliano and Peter

Schickele of "P.D.Q. Bach" fame _ who each wrote a section of the New

Goldberg Variations for cello and piano.

By the time the works were finished, Robert Goldberg had died of cancer.

Ma instead premiered what Judy Goldberg calls "a gift of love" at

Boston's Jordan Hall in 1997. The cellist performed it more recently at

Carnegie Hall, and the work also was recorded.

"The motivation for our commission was to celebrate our very happy life

together," said Judy Goldberg, a music educator. "And then the music

became a memorial celebrating that wonderful life. Unlike people _ all

of us will disappear _ this music is here forever. Robert and I planted

it in the world for people to keep discovering it."

____P>

On the Net:

Meet The Composer: http://www.meetthecomposer.org

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Hanuman Zhang, musical mad scientist: "Na, I don't wanna take over the world,
just the sound spectrum."

Ars sine scientia nihil est. Ars imitatur Naturam in sua operatione.

"The most exciting phrase in science...is not 'Eureka!' - I found it! - but
'That's funny...'" - Isaac Asimov

German: _Geräusch_ "noise" ... _rauschen_ "the sound of the wind" ...
_Rausch_ "ecstasy, intoxication"... Japanese Romaji: _uchu_ "universe"...
_uchoten_ "ecstasy," "rapture"..._uchujin_ [space] alien!

"... simple, chaotic, anarchic & menacing.... This is what people of today
have lost & need most - the ability to experience permanent bodily & mental
ecstasy, to be a receiving station for messages howling by on the ether from other
worlds & nonhuman entities, those peculiar short-wave messages which come in
static-free in the secret pleasure center in the brain." - Slava Ranko (Donald
L. Philippi)

"When you're trying to do something you should feel absolutely alone, like a
spark in the blackness of the universe."-Xenakis

"The sky and its stars make music in you." - Dendera, Egypt wall
inscription

"What strange risk of hearing can bring sound to music - a hearing whose
obligation awakens a sensibility so new that it is forever a unique, new-born,
anti-death surprise, created now & now & now. .. a hearing whose moment in
time is always daybreak." - Lucia Dlugoszewski

"For 25 centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It
has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for
the hearing. It is not legible, but audible. ... Music is a herald, for change
is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society. ... Listening to
music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation & control is a
reflection of power, that is essentially political." - Jacques Attali, _Noise:
The Political Economy of Music_

"...Then out to the flaming stars...
From then, eventually unshackle time,
& traverse galaxies..." - Lou Harrison

Meet the composer _ and commission your own music

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🔗Joseph Pehrson <jpehrson@...>