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LA Phil Inside - Winter 2008

In This Issue:

SPECIAL REPORT

A Conversation with Composer Steven Stucky

Steven StuckySteven Stucky

Over the course of a 20-year creative association with the LA Phil, Pulitzer prize-winning composer Steven Stucky has completed six commissions for the LA Phil, wrote four other works as gifts, helped to develop new artists and repertoire, and participated in the creation of a robust audience in Los Angeles for the most challenging and ambitious music of our time.

In addition to his roles as the LA Phil’s Consulting Composer for New Music, Stucky teaches music composition at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where he resides.

Recently in town to conduct a Green Umbrella concert celebrating his 20 years with the Philharmonic, Stucky took some time to speak with us about his recent experiences with the orchestra, the challenges and rewards of his dual identity as a teacher and composer, and the past, present and future of new music in L.A.

INSIDE: You’ve been a part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since your appointment as Composer in Residence in 1988. How has the orchestra’s approach to new music evolved over the years?

STUCKY: I think we’ve sort of grown up together. When I came to L.A. in ’88, Ernest Fleischmann had already built a commitment to new music that was pretty impressive and long-standing. It wasn’t like I had to come in and do an emergency rescue. I always felt that I learned as much from Ernest, Esa-Pekka, Deborah Borda and my other colleagues as they’ve learned from me. I think what’s different today is the extent to which the LA Phil has branded itself as a new-music-oriented organization. The idea that new music was something special — something we did in addition to the core mission — doesn’t exist anymore. New music is now assumed to be an important part of our thinking. I think that’s evolved quite a lot.

INSIDE: How do you work with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the artistic planning staff to influence our experience of new music in Los Angeles?

STUCKY: The artistic direction of the orchestra is in Esa-Pekka’s hands, but that doesn’t mean he can make all the decisions every day. We try not to go with anything important that he doesn’t approve of, which is actually different than saying every piece we play and every composer we commission or have a relationship with reflects Esa-Pekka’s personal tastes, or mine, or Chad Smith’s. That would be too narrow, I think. It’s lucky we don’t always agree completely, because that broadens the playing field.

INSIDE: Shortly after the world premiere of your new composition, Radical Light, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in October, you traveled with the orchestra on its European tour. How did it feel to accompany the Philharmonic on a tour premiering your music throughout Europe?

STUCKY: Along with the Second Concerto for Orchestra, Radical Light is probably the piece of mine that’s gotten the warmest reception in L.A., from the orchestra and the public. The chance to travel around Europe with the orchestra and the piece — to “chaperone” it — is actually something quite special that I’ve never done with the LA Phil. As we’re coming to the end of Esa-Pekka’s tenure, and the last European tour that Esa-Pekka will do as music director, it was a personally very important experience for me to be able to go and bond with the orchestra through this piece.

INSIDE: You’ll soon be conducting members of the orchestra yourself. What role does conducting play in your life as a composer?

STUCKY: The reason I conduct at all, in L.A. or anyplace else, is not that I’m such a good conductor — you know, I’m a composer. Some of us get by as conductors [laughs], partly in self-defense. In my case I don’t really need to conduct because I have such great champions, like Esa-Pekka. But conducting keeps me honest, as a working musician. And it’s the only outlet I have as a performer. I think it’s important for a composer to have the feeling of what it’s like to be on the other side — of carrying out these instructions. It’s personally satisfying, and it’s even somehow ethically or morally necessary, I think, to take your own medicine, so to speak.

INSIDE: Is new music doing as well within other arts organizations as it is at the LA Phil?

STUCKY: City of Birmingham in England has a small new music group, as does Chicago, but nobody has the longevity and stability and, frankly, the quality that the LA Phil has had over the last 20 or so years.

INSIDE: To what do you attribute that?

STUCKY: Well, first it was just Ernest’s stubbornness [laughs]. Then Ernest and Esa-Pekka and Deborah were all too stubborn to let the thing die, even when finances were a challenge in the 90s. Having weathered all those storms, here we are in the new hall, and all the excitement that has come with the rise of the orchestra has attached itself to the new music concerts, as well. We often play to 1,500 or more people for Green Umbrella concerts. I tell this to people around the country, and their jaws drop. But, to answer your question, I think it’s a perfect confluence of factors. Esa-Pekka has become a kind of dependable ‘brand’ himself, and his brand is new music. As a composer himself, and a really important one now, he has his own following. We’ve also managed to keep the quality of programming and the playing in our new music concerts just as high as in the standard subscription concerts. They’ve never had the feeling of being ‘experimental’ — you know, experimenting by playing bad music, just to see how it goes. So I think we’ve earned a kind of loyalty among a fairly large audience, who have learned that they can trust us to give it our best.

INSIDE: Late in May, we will have the world premiere of your sixth LA Phil commission — an orchestral arrangement of Stravinsky’s challenging Les Noces. How did this project come about?

STUCKY: This is a project that arose only because Esa-Pekka and I had similar interests, and we decided to try something a little crazy, which was to, in effect, rescue Les Noces from its instrumentation for four pianos, which has not exactly boosted its number of performances. The idea was to see what it would sound like in an orchestral garb something like the other pieces from that era, like Rite of Spring and others. I don’t know if this is going to work or not, but I do know that having spent a lot of time very close to Les Noces, I know that piece in a way I never would have known it before. It’s been a tremendous education for me.

INSIDE: In many of your works, you seem drawn to perceptual experience rather than narrative or emotional idiom. Are these concerns characteristic of the music of our age?

STUCKY: In my own case, I’ve found that starting with metaphors that have to do with light or color, or space even, is somehow inspiring to me. By the time the piece comes into existence, it’s really the notes that matter. The metaphor turns out to have been a kind of excuse or launching pad. What the piece is always about is, in fact, an emotional experience that I don’t always have a good explanation for. I suppose that’s why I write music instead of plays or essays. Radical Light, which began as an exercise in orchestral texture and creating a fluid, one-part, evolving form — inspired frankly by Sibelius’ forms — turned into a very gripping emotional experience for me. I can hardly breathe by the end of that piece. So, it turns out it’s about that: it’s about goose bumps and hardly being able to breathe.

INSIDE: In addition to your creative life and your work at the Philharmonic, you have taught at Cornell since 1980. What does an artist learn from teaching?

STUCKY: Being in academic life for 40-some years has probably made me a particular kind of composer. It’s also made me useful to orchestras like the L.A. Philharmonic, where one of my jobs is to be a kind of quasi-expert about other composers. Over the years, my interest in the theoretical and historical aspects of music has tapered off, and my passion for actually doing it has grown greater. But the balance is still there. Facing students is a great way of concentrating your own mind. What I have to do as a teacher is get my students to think as clearly as possible about what they’re doing. And as it turns out, you can’t get them to do that unless you can get yourself to do it as well. In challenging their assumptions, I end up challenging my own. In asking them hard questions about just what they think they’re doing, I have, in effect, to ask myself the same hard questions. When they come in with different aesthetics, and assumptions, and backgrounds, it keeps me fresh and honest — or at least as honest as I can get!

INSIDE: You’ve recently taken on another project with the Philharmonic — overseeing the LA Phil’s Composer Fellowship Program for high school-age composers. What are your goals in overseeing this fellowship?

STUCKY: Over the last few years in L.A., I have run into some very talented, very interesting young musicians who have wanted to compose or who were composing, but they all existed in isolation. This is a different situation than with my students at Cornell, who at least have a community of like-minded kids. But if you’re a fourteen-year-old composing in L.A., you’re basically alone. Over the years, a lot of these young people and their teachers have appealed to me to do something to help these students, so we’ve started a little community, and the students are just delighted! We just gave them the keys to the greatest musical candy store in the world. They’ve already had readings of string quartet pieces they’ve written, using professional musicians. They’re meeting all sorts of visiting composers, conductors, and soloists. It’s still a small program, but if it’s still going well this time next year, we’ll think of doubling the size. If one or two of these kids go as far as I think they might, and we help them to do that, we will have had a huge effect on the world of music.

Steven Stucky’s orchestration of Stravinsky’s Les Noces will receive its world premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall on May 29.