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The Value of New American Music
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17357 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1990 |
2,354 Words |
| Author
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Samuel Lipman
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The American Composers Orchestra represents a valiant attempt by composers of symphonic music to take the future of their work into their own hands. Founded in 1977, the ACO is made up of excellent free-lance players who reserve time from their busy schedules each year to give a series of concerts in New York's Carnegie Hall devoted to the American compositions of the present - many of them world premieres - and the past.
The main responsibility for choosing the repertory for these concerts is shared by music advisor (and principal conductor) Dennis Russell Davies and composer Francis Thorne, the ACO's president. The resulting programs demonstrate the ACO's self-proclaimed mission of performing the best American orchestra music "of all styles"; this goal of inclusion of a broad range of activity rather than concentration on a particular school or schools of composition makes the orchestra's programs a valuable index to current thought in musical composition.
The very fact of the existence of an institution like the ACO suggests the parlous state of American music today. It is composers who write music, after all, and it is performers, whether as soloists or banded together in great orchestras, who have traditionally prospered by bringing this music to an audience. Often in the past composers themselves - one thinks immediately of such virtuoso pianists as Beethoven, Liszt, and Chopin, and closer to our own time Bartok and Rachimaninov - have made celebrated careers by performing their own music and the music of others. But such success - and with it the entire organization of concert life - relies upon the existence of a large body of music beloved or at the very least desired and appreciated by audiences. Nowadays, this large body of successful music is entirely confined to works written a half-century and more ago; the music written more recently not only fails to attract audiences, but often actually drives them away.
Performers, and those responsible for presenting them, have been quick to notice that only old music sells. As concert programs increasingly concentrate on the masterpieces of the past, new works have trouble finding first performances, and they especially have trouble finding the repeated performances necessary to familiarize audiences with music that is often different, complex, and demanding. What is true for new music, whatever its national origin, is particularly true for American music, written as it is out of the uneasy confrontation between the brashness of the New World and the refinement of the Old.
It has been this difficult relationship of composers, performers, and audiences that has given birth to the ACO and keeps it alive year after year. It would be unreasonable to expect a series of four concerts each year to turn around cultural and historical phenomena that have been many years in the making. Whatever the immediate prospects of such success are, the composers' choice of America's musical capital, and of America's best-sounding and most famous concert hall, as the venue for the ACO's productions makes plain their intent: to show by public example the worth of American music new and old, but especially new.
The ACO's opening concert of its 1989-90 season took place on Sunday afternoon, October 22. A satisfyingly large audience turned out in Carnegie hall to hear a program consisting of four compositions, two of them new, and two old. The concert opened with the two world
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