Monday Musicale with the Maestro – October 12, 2020 – NC Composers, Part 1: Steven Bryant

NC Composers, Part 1: Steven Bryant

In looking back over my half century as a conductor, I realize how lucky I have been. I’ve had the opportunity to conduct many great orchestras in some of the great concert halls of the world, including Carnegie Hall. And I’ve conducted numerous famed soloists such as violinist Itzhak Perlman and pianist Yuja Wang. Above all, however, I’ve enjoyed working with those who compose. As a composer myself, I have a special appreciation for the challenges they face. And I can tell you that in music there is nothing more difficult than creating a sonic world that hitherto did not exist. It is one thing to compose, but then one must ask, Is my composition worthy of being heard by someone other than my mom and my closest friends? And at the professional level—well, of course “it’s a jungle out there.” One imagines the choices music directors must make: Hmm. . . .Let’s see. Shall we put on this program a work by Curry—or MOZART? It’s survival of the fittest. As Mahler said, “If you are not at least trying to write a masterpiece, you shouldn’t bother.” You have to be crazily confident to put yourself forward as a composer when so many giants have preceded you.

However, it’s comforting to know that the Masters themselves weren’t as self-assured as we assume they were. Brahms was so inhibited by the Beethoven symphonies that it was only at the age of 40, after 20 years of preparation, that he finally wrote his own. Tchaikovsky thought the greatest ballet was Leo Delibes’ Sylvia and believed that, in comparison, his Swan Lake was an artistic failure. Just last night I read that Richard Strauss said of himself, “I may not be a great composer, but I AM a first-rate composer of second-rate music!”

So what drives one to such an art in the first place? Speaking for myself, I would assert that composing is the ultimate in musical self-expression. Nothing in my musical life has been so personal, exhilarating…and scary. And though it may take me 49 drafts to write a good piece, I keep in mind what Thomas Edison said: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

As a conductor, I’ve had the privilege to champion the music of brave souls who create new worlds. And it has been a special pleasure as Music Director of the Durham Symphony Orchestra to conduct the works of over a dozen North Carolina-based composers. Today we are beginning a series devoted to some of these world-class talents, starting with Steven Bryant.

The musical interests of Steven Bryant span a variety of styles, and his catalogue includes numerous pieces for wind ensemble, orchestra, electronic, and electro-acoustic creations, chamber music, and music for the Web. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1972, he studied composition at the Juilliard School with Pulitzer winner John Corigliano (best known for his opera The Ghosts of Versailles), with Cindy McTee at the University of North Texas, and with Francis McBeth at Ouachita University.

Our first DSO audio selection today features Bryant’s brilliant Ecstatic Fanfare, which was commissioned and premiered by the Durham Symphony in 2014. In the notes for that concert Mr. Bryant explains:

Ecstatic Fanfare is, as the name suggests, a euphoric fanfare. The music is drawn from a much larger work, Ecstatic Waters, which I wrote for band+electronics in 2008 and then adapted for the Minnesota Orchestra in 2015. The first movement of that larger work contains the core fanfare material that I had always felt would work well as a stand-alone piece of music, without electronic elements. This version was commissioned by the Durham Symphony Orchestra under the leadership of Maestro William Henry Curry and premiered on April 6th, 2014, in my adopted home of Durham, NC.

Our second Bryant selection, Loose Id, was performed by the DSO on March 2, 2014. As Bryant points out, Freudian theory describes the Id as “the source of instinctual energy”—the part of the mind which “works on the pleasure principle.” Loose Id, Bryant writes, is

an abstract realization in sound of the energy of the Id. Unleashed, without the counterbalance of Ego or Superego, the Id generates unbridled instinctual energy, resulting in an orgiastic frenzy. Distinct from a state of dementia, this piece represents a thoroughly lucid and intentional rampage of self-indulgence.

My take-away? Freud thought the mind could be divided into three parts:

• The Id wants pleasure and instant gratification.
• The Superego acts as a necessary brake on the Id.
• The Ego mediates between the two.

So without the last two—look out! Mr. Bryant’s piece truly is an exuberant, hell-raising musical evocation of an Id that’s “on the loose” and poised (like Walt Whitman in Song of Myself) to “sound [its] barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”

I am very fond of this piece. It calls for a large orchestra with a percussion section including such non-traditional instruments as a police whistle, a lion’s roar ( an instrument with a drum head and a cord going through it that one pulls to make the “roar”), and a Flexatone ( a small flexible metal sheet that is suspended on a wire frame, often used for “sliding effects” in cartoon music.) I’m sure you are now asking yourself, “But where is the kitchen sink?!” And yet the piece is not a free-for all! The writing is sophisticated, requiring great precision, and is technically rather difficult to play. I’m happy to say that the orchestra rose to the occasion, dealing with the technical challenges, braving its assault on their nervous systems—and having some fun in the bargain. We hope you will also.

The response of the audience at the concert to this piece was rapturous! Rarely have I conducted a piece so “out there” where the response was almost universally positive. I did receive one irate “fan letter” noting the listener’s extreme discomfort at such sounds and disgust at my programming such a work. Concert-goers are more likely to write if they are upset than if they are pleased. This was in 2014, and I can’t remember whether I responded to the letter. When Leonard Bernstein was the Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, he received his fair share of these missives. Here is his response to a ticket buyer who had a negative response to Bernstein’s performance of the Symphony by Anton von Webern.

January 18, 1966
It is the duty of any Symphony Orchestra to keep its audiences abreast of main currents in the development of 20th century music.The truth is the New York Philharmonic does not go far enough in this obligation. If the Webern symphony, already forty years old, already a classic, and a mere eight minutes in length, cannot be comfortably absorbed in a season of more conventional music, then I am at a loss for an answer.

Sincerely,
Leonard Bernstein

Throughout musical history new sounds and new musical grammar have always produced some adverse reactions. Frequently, negative reactions stem from new music that is simply not that good. But sometimes the objective and patient listener just needs an additional hearing or two for the piece to make sense. This is as true for professional musicians as it is for the average listener. I certainly did not “get” Berg’s opera Lulu and Mahler’s 10th Symphony (20th-century masterpieces) the first time I heard them. Mahler himself accurately predicted that his music would not be appreciated until 50 years after his death. During his life, many critics thought he was a musical madman, and his first symphony was especially vilified by the music critics.

A caricature of Mahler conducting the first performance of his Symphony No. 1 in Vienna.

Some works we today place firmly in the mainstream elicited nothing but bewilderment at their premieres. Many know the story of the “shocking” Rite of Spring premiere in Paris (1913). An actual riot broke out as the audience’s cat-calls and boos drowned out the 120-piece orchestra. But only 20 years later, the piece was in the repertoire of every major orchestra.

With this in mind, I would like to recommend to you a marvelous book by Nicholas Slonimsky titled The Lexicon of Musical Invective. Mr. Slonimsky (1894-1995) was not only a composer, but a conductor who specialized in directing the contemporary works (by composers such as Charles Ives and Edgard Varèse) which were at the time extremely controversial. His Lexicon is actually a collection of newspaper articles from the 18th century to the mid-20th-century reviewing the more controversial premieres of the time. It is striking to read these comments, which seem now to bear no relation to the works they describe! Eduard Hanslick’s famous review of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (December 1881) is especially startling to read:

The finale transfers us to a brutal and wretched jollity of a Russian holiday. We see plainly the savage vulgar faces, we hear curses, we smell vodka. Friedrich Vischer once observed, speaking of obscene pictures, that they stink in the eye. Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear.

And this about one of the most melodic and viscerally thrilling works in the entire concerto repertoire! YOU be the judge, though. Here is a performance of that movement by Itzhak Perlman, whom I conducted in 2012 when he played the concerto with the North Carolina Symphony.

When Tchaikovsky read Hanslick’s scathing review of his violin concerto, he was deeply wounded. But his reaction to this, the other nay-sayers, and his own self doubts was to keep on composing. When Leonard Bernstein was conducting the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s, he had to face the harsh invective of the Friday morning reviews by Harold Schonberg of the New York Times. And it hurt him—and yes, I know what that’s like. However, I like to keep in mind the great British actor John Gielgud’s advice: “A bad review may be allowed to spoil one’s breakfast, but it should never be allowed to spoil one’s lunch.” Keep on keepin’ on. We owe much to the boldness and persistence of composers and their champions everywhere!

William Henry Curry
Music Director
Durham Symphony Orchestra

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