|
By 1974 I had become a professor of composition at State University of New York at Binghamton, president of the American Music Center, and a composer who had found a publisher, Oxford University Press. When the National Endowment for the Arts convened a meeting at the Juilliard School of Music to discuss ways it might help the American composer, I was asked to attend. Walter Anderson, the director of Music at the Endowment, brought together a group of composers and musicians that included Elliott Carter, Gian Carlo Menotti, Peter Mennin, Robert Mann, Arthur Weisberg, and Roger Sessions who memorably said, “Whatever you do, treat the composer with respect.” Subsequently the Composer/Librettists program was created, and I was asked to be its first chairman. This began an extraordinary adventure for me culminating in my appointment in 1979 as head of Music Programs at the NEA. I took an extended leave from my University and moved to quarters in Washington that were in the same building complex as the NEA. I would for the next three years get up very early, compose until ten a.m., go down one bank of elevators, cross the plaza, go up another bank of elevators, be at my desk ready for a day of amazing opportunity. These were 'can do` days at the Endowment. The possibilities were endless, the potential to make a difference, enormous. We were able to create programs that truly addressed the musical needs throughout the country. I found out belatedly that New York City was not the center of the universe. The 'Big Apple` remains formidable and breathtaking, but this new environment taught me that a wonderful level of music making was happening all over the USA…and where it was not, the Endowment was in a position to change the climate.
My Washington years were truly satisfying. Working with Nancy Hanks, Livingston Biddle, Mary Ann Tighe, Billy Taylor, Sidney Yates, the list could go on for a long time, was its own reward. At the same time my life as a composer was compromised. I could not accept or seek a commission or a performance of an existing work from any group or individual who received support from the NEA. A conflict of interest charge would instantly undermine my position. Many a time the potential for such a dilemma existed. I had to walk a very narrow, straight, and forthright path. It was tough, but I had made a choice with my eyes wide open, and I don't regret the decision.
The outlet for my music in these years was for-profit institutions, like CBS TV, and groups outside the USA like the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, or the Coen String Quartet of Rome. My first Violin Concerto featuring Matthew Raimondi, “Meditations on Isaiah” for Solo Cello performed by Timothy Eddy, Partita for Violin with Elmar Oliveira, “Multiple Voices” for solo viola with Toby Appel, were all premiered over CBS TV, as well as the Opera/Oratorio “Galileo” written together with Joe Darion. That premier on CBS TV from Riverside Church had as its intermission feature an impassioned message from the Reverend Sloan Coffin, rector of the church, on his return from Iran where he had tried unsuccessfully to free the hostages held at the American Embassy in Tehran. All this came to an end when Ronald Reagan became President.
Frank Hodsell, the new chairman of the NEA, daily gave us our marching orders, to come up with a plan to cut the budget in half for the next fiscal year…and by half again the following year. This meant that I was to decide which music programs were to be truncated or eliminated. It was a disaster for me, and for the Arts. With my wife's encouragement, and with my children now all out of college, a decision was made. On February first, 1982 I resigned from the NEA, and simultaneously retired from SUNY Binghamton. On the very next day we went to Israel. For the next three months we were, among other things, in residence with the Israel Philharmonic. Coming back early that summer I was once again a mere composer, without a job, but bursting with a desire to move my music in a new direction. Why, how, and in what manner my music went over the next decade will occupy this space in Volume Six.
—Ezra Laderman
For five decades Ezra Laderman has been privileged to be performed by the musicians of Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Symphony has collaborated with him a number of times; in 2003 the orchestra will feature its bass clarinetist, Richard Page, in a new Laderman concerto that it has commissioned. Other of the city' ensembles over the years have been equally staunch supporters of the composer's work. The newest of them, The Pittsburgh Chamber Music Project, commissioned and premiered Laderman's 1997 Sextet for English horn, bass clarinet, and string quartet.
Laderman is an attentive collaborator. He gets to know the musicians as people, and in composing his works often chooses the performers' personalities as a point of departure. Certainly he has done so in a number of his string quartets, a genre for which he is deservedly celebrated.
Perhaps, though, he has never done it more explicitly than in the first movement of the Sextet. There are six themes at work here, each dominated by a different player in the ensemble, each in some way characteristic of that player. First violin, bass clarinet, cello, English horn, second violin, and finally viola take their turn. (Each dominant part is marked in the score with a “Hauptstimme” symbol, first used by Arnold Schoenberg to designate the principal line.) The first violin then breaks in again with its characteristic theme. At this point Laderman pursues a daringly individual strategy, presenting each of his six themes again at the same pitch level or “key”. However, each theme is now truncated, though in a way that preserves the flow among ideas. The process is now repeated, cutting swaths through the musical fabric so that each of the six ideas is now represented by only a note or two. By the fourth pass, only the initial idea of each theme remains. At this rate of change, the gestures combine in a kind of dance, a twittering machine in the manner of Paul Klee. Relief from the incredible foreshortening of materials comes only at the very end of the movement in a brief unison passage, a merging of remnants from the six disparate themes into a new grouping of pitches. Laderman had pursued this kind of formal strategy in the first movements of two previous works, a flute concerto for Jean-Pierre Rampal, and a clarinet concerto for David Shifrin.
In the second movement of the Sextet Laderman abandons his approach of treating the six players as separate but equal. The strings begin to function as a quartet, the two woodwind instruments as twin soloists. Laderman remarked that what lay behind his choice of bass clarinet and English horn was, among other considerations, his desire to exploit the full range of these instruments and not merely the lower, most commonly heard registers. The opening of the second movement captures the poignancy of the upper registers with a slow steady ascent above the quartet of strings, which with their delicate and intricate textures constantly play upon and shift the predominant line. Whispered chords emerge from this climactic climb, and fade unexpectedly. Suddenly, utterly new material, a folk-like melody and accompaniment, appear and carry off the movement to its close. Issues of form, so meticulously plotted in the first movement, give way in the second to an emotional outburst that cannot be explained formally. Perhaps it marks the intrusion of personal grief, of life upon art. In at least two other Laderman scores, strains of notes composed in response to real events spill beautifully and true to life over the organized musical world, disturbing it irreversibly. One is the Seventh String Quartet, arguably the composer's richest and most deeply felt work. The earlier example is an Elegy for solo viola composed in 1973 for Toby Appel, composed soon after the death of Laderman's mother.
This more private music gives way in the third movement to a struggle of sorts, an opposition between winds and strings in a rondo-like format. The composer marks here, over the top of the score, “With great freedom, quasi cadenza”, and the music is characterized by a tremendous feeling of release, perhaps from the weighty and plaintive passages just before. Laderman, a composer of ten string quartets, is in full command of the possibilities inherent in the medium. The movement begins with a wonderful gesture for the four strings, its repeat four bars later featuring a tremolo first violin doubled and highlighted every half beat by the second violin batting the strings with the wood of the bow. With increasing urgency, he deploys this principal gesture and its opposing gesture in the winds more closely together, in ever more truncated fashion. It is a fitting parallel to the procedure of the opening movement. Unlike the first movement though, here Laderman does nothing to dispel the rising tension, and the music reaches a taut, hair-raising close.
The composer's Violin Duets were composed the following year, in 1998. Like the works by Bartok and Berio, Laderman's Violin Duets are miniature meditations, each composed in a single session, a day, a few hours, that performed together accumulate artistic weight through comparison and contrast. Over the last decade Laderman has turned to miniature duets as a means of musical refreshment, writing them in the interstices between blocks of time devoted to large-scale compositions. His first set of duets was written for violin and cello, a medium made popular by Ravel, Kodaly, and Martinu. Then came a set for flute and clarinet, premiered several years ago by Ransom Wilson and David Shifrin at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
In some ways the Violin Duets exhibit the hallmarks of Laderman's style, evidenced by tremendous variety of texture and formal procedure in the set of ten pieces, from jazzy riffs to baroque devidevices like strict canon at the unison (the beginning of the tenth), invertible counterpoint (third), and patterns of ritornello and varying episodes (fourth, fifth, and ninth). Another feature of the style can be heard most clearly in the fifth duet, in which he invests each recurrence of the ritornello with slightly more material, stretching it just a little bit more, reaching just a little bit higher in register. Also in evidence is a germinative gesture, the pitches D-A-F-Ab; its intervals, particularly the falling half-step (A to Ab), determine much of the melodic contour throughout the ten duets. It is unusual for Laderman, though, that he places this gesture far from the beginning of the overall work, inserting it instead at the outset of the fourth duet. Quite often, the very first notes of a Laderman work function as a DNA blueprint for all that will and can follow. Delaying the appearance of this gesture until the middle of the piece adds a layer of uncertainty and even mystery to the work as a whole. It is also unusual for Laderman to prevent such a gesture, once it has been made, from recurring in its entirety for some time. Yet throughout the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth duets, the four note group is as a unit submerged again into the fabric of the music. Rearranged slightly, it surfaces again in the second violin part in the ninth duet, and regroups for a fuller hearing in the canonic statements of the tenth, the longest and most formally involved of the compositions.
Some composers in mid-career abruptly changed aesthetic direction; Elliott Carter and George Rochberg are but two examples of musicians who found their artistic selves after a long search. Others knew the course that they would chart from the very beginning. Ezra Laderman is one of these musicians. There is a remarkable consistency to his aesthetic approach over the years. This very consistency allowed him to reach back over four decades, to re-examine a work he had composed in the early fifties and revitalize it for a premiere in 2001. This is not easy to do. Later in his life Johannes Brahms looked back at his early, remarkable but not fully realized B Major Piano Trio, and refined it into the repertory work as we now hear it.
A year after graduating from Columbia University in 1952, Laderman began work on a Concerto for Bassoon and Strings. He completed the concerto in 1954, and it was given a reading by Bernard Garfield (who, later, for many years, was the principal bassoonist of the Philadelphia Orchestra) and the National Symphony under conductor Leon Barzin. But, aside from a student performance at Juilliard, the work remained on the shelf for more than forty years. Nancy Goeres, principal bassoonist of the Pittsburgh Symphony, revived the composer's interest in his early concerto. When he first revisited the material, Laderman was struck by how much of his mature personality was encapsulated in the music, sensing
that its “rhythmic drive is part of what I am.” He overhauled the work in 2000, providing an entirely new second movement, tightening the structure of the outer movements by giving primacy to the opening gesture, and ensuring that the string textures could be as clearly realized by a chamber group of five strings as by a full orchestral string section. The concerto is likely to find a secure place in the bassoon repertory. Laderman gives the soloist plenty to do, particularly in the dramatic third movement. The music reaches such frenzy there that the soloist virtually boils over with virtuosity and needs a pause. This gives way to a sobering finale, somewhat unusual for a concerto, in which the soloist tries out and rejects various kinds of music proposed by the string instruments, returning ultimately to the original theme.
—Harold Meltzer
Louis Lev (Violin) is currently the Associate Principal Second Violinist of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. He has performed extensively as both soloist and chamber musician in the US, Israel and Europe and served as concertmaster of the Haifa Symphony Orchestra from 1990 to 1992. His teachers include Sidney Harth and Camilla Wicks and he holds degrees from Yale University and the University of Michigan.
Chia-Chi Lin (Violin) has been a member of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra first violin section since 1992. She previously held the Principal Second Violin chair with the Honolulu Symphony and was a member of the Galliard String Quartet. She holds a bachelor's degree and artist's diploma from the Peabody Institute of the John Hopkins University. Her teachers include Berl Senofsky and Edward Shmider.
Sara Brough Blomquist (Violin) joined the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1999. Her undergraduate degree is from the North Carolina School of the Arts and she holds a master's degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied with William Preucil. Ms. Blomquist has performed as soloist with numerous orchestras including the Utah Symphony.
Isaias Zelkowicz (Viola) has held the position of Associate Principal Viola with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra since 1978. He earned both bachelor's and master's degrees from the Juilliard School as a student of Dorothy Delay and pursued further studies with Josef Gingold and William Primrose at the Indiana University at Bloomington. He is currently on the faculty of Carnegie-Mellon University.
Michael Lipman (Cello) joined the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1979 and enjoys a varied career as a recitalist, chamber musician and educator. He was a founding member of the Pittsburgh Chamber Music Project and has toured widely with the Dalihapa Ensemble, which he co-founded in 1995. Michael is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music and studied with Ronald Leonard and Paul Katz. He has served as Principal Cellist of the Aspen Chamber Symphony and is an alumnus of Alexander Schneider's New York String Seminar.
Harold Smoliar (English Horn) is a native of Philadelphia, where he attended the Curtis Institute of Music and earned his bachelor's degree in 1978. He held the position of Principal Oboe with the Symphony Orchestra of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro prior to assuming his current position as English Hornist with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1979. He is co-founder of the Pittsburgh Chamber Music Project and the White tie Group.
Pittsburgh Chamber Music Project
The Pittsburgh Chamber Music Project was founded in 1982 and has since become the city's premiere chamber music ensemble. With musicians drawn from the ranks of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the PCMP has a repertoire that is both broad and deep, with performances ranging from Mozart to Messiaen and beyond. The PCMP's innovative chamber music series at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, now in its fifth season, has presented the Pittsburgh premieres of a number of significant twentieth century compositions. The works on this recording were premiered by the PCMP in New York in March of 2001.
|
