New Music Arizona

By Kenneth LaFave

Think "new music" and 9 out of 10 people will think "just-released songs on the radio." I guess I'd have to include myself, at least occasionally, since one of my proudest moments as a dad was telling my then 13-year-old son I'd just heard the first local airing of the newest song by Bad Religion. He was envious. Among the various genres of popular music, the new is desirable, preferred, awaited. Unfortunately, that is not true in the world I usually occupy, that of new concert music, or "contemporary classical" music. There, the new is merely endured, when it's not overtly suppressed.

On Oct. 8, at Phoenix Art Museum's Whiteman Hall, adjacent to the Museum's permanent contemporary exhibit, nearly 200 people heard five recent works by living Arizona composers. To judge from their response, these concertgoers more than merely endured what they heard; they found in it some unique take on existence, some new way of feeling the world, an experience to carry with them into their daily lives. If so, then the thousands of hours that went into the composing, preparation, rehearsal and performance of 90 minutes of new music that afternoon achieved exactly what was intended.

(To contrast the facts of our little concert to some similar report in popular music would be to court ridicule. Two hundred people? How would that look at the Celebrity Theater? Yet, given the audience base for classical music, and the still smaller base for new classical works, that was an excellent turnout. While some pieces of mine have enjoyed audiences in the high hundreds or even low thousands when performed by major groups, such as the Phoenix Symphony or Arizona State University, the numbers for presentations of smaller-scaled new scores can be much tinier. I've had scores "premiered" for a dozen people.)

Called "New Music Arizona," the event was the brainchild of Howard Hendler, whose passion for all things new helped fuel – and fund – the building of the Museum's new contemporary wing. "You can have Whiteman Hall the afternoon of Sunday, Oct. 8, for music by any Arizona composers you want to present," Howard told me one afternoon. Talk about good news/bad news. A free space in a major venue, one with a built-in potential audience, and one that had yet to hear the strains of music composed by living locals. Hooray! All I had to do was spend several weeks of work assembling the composers, the performers and, joy of joys, the funding.

It wasn't difficult finding the composers; the challenge lay in choosing a handful for this outing. Arizona is blessed with many composers of infinite variety and high quality. In an ideal world, I'd have presented seven of them, even eight or nine, but practicalities dictated otherwise. I picked five: James DeMars, Judith Lang Zaimont, Henry Flurry, Alycia de Mesa, and myself. (If you thought I'd pass up the opportunity to perform my music for a new audience, you don't understand the composer mentality. We live for that.) The five represent a pretty decent geographical profile of Arizona, with DeMars a Tempean (he's on faculty at Arizona State University's School of Music), de Mesa and myself Phoenicians, Flurry a Prescottian, and Zaimont, late of Minnesota, a resident of the town of Maricopa in Pinal County. Missing was my own hometown of Tucson. Among many other Phoenix-area composers, I had hoped also to include Warren Cohen and Christopher Scinto. Perhaps, if this concert blossoms into a series at Whiteman, Museum audiences will next time greet music by Cohen, Scinto, a Tucson composer or two and another composer from ASU's illustrious faculty.

Each composer for the Oct. 8 concert was responsible for hiring and paying performers. This is the great wall that divides composers from other creative artists. When a painter is finished, the art is finished. When a novelist completes a book, it remains only for a publisher to print, bind and sell it. But for composers, as for playwrights, being finished means you've just begun. Put the last slur on the final phrase of your new sonata and then you need to find performers, a venue for the performance, and a way to pay the performers. Even when you've been commissioned to compose a piece, and the headaches of performer/venue/pay are lifted, completing a piece means turning it over to a conductor or a pianist or a singer and saying, "It's yours now." As with all human relationships of trust, this can lead to bliss, rage, humiliation, or a combination of all three.

One of our composers transcended this problem by being her own performer. De Mesa, a harpist, belongs to the dwindling category (in classical music, at least) of composer-performer. In my case, the talented, Prescott-based percussionist Maria Flurry had commissioned a percussion concerto from me, so my star performer was built-in. The also talented and similarly Prescott-based Henry Flurry (husband to the latter Flurry) had also received a commission, this time for the unlikely union of marimba and tuba, while Zaimont's piece turned out to be a saxophone quartet already championed by the Tucson group called Presidio Quartet, and DeMars chose his ASU colleague Katherine McLin to play his Tapestry IX, an unaccompanied violin sonata.

All five scores had something in common: none of them featured piano, to his was fortunate, as Whiteman Hall does not posses a piano. There's a fine grand at the Museum café, rarely played, but Whiteman is without one. Go figure. In the case of the Flurry concerto, dubbed Canto de Alba, keyboard was one of the accompanying instruments, so we used an electronic instrument in place of the acoustic real thing. My own piece would not have happened without the passion, the creativity, and the out-and-out insistence of its solo performer and commissioner. Maria Flurry found funding among her personal patrons to commission the piece, and then, when it appeared the accompaniment to her concerto would have to be performed as a MIDI file, proceeded to knock on doors until she found funding (from the Musicians' Union) for a small chamber ensemble.

Human experience is infinite in its potential, and music reflects experience. When "new music" is limited only to certain genres, the experience reflected is necessarily limited as well. Open up new music to every conceivable individual vision, and you can get the sort of varied program presented that day. We need more new music in every context, especially the so-called "classical." Classical music groups that shun living composers do classical music no good. A tradition uncontinued will quickly become an artifact.

Outside Whiteman Hall is the Phoenix Art Museum's magnificent display of contemporary visual art. On Oct. 8, thanks to the Museum, there was also a display of contemporary sonic art inside Whiteman. We can only hope it wasn't a onetime thing.