Finding Their Voice

Baritone Richard Giarusso leans into the opening words of a melody, followed closely by a clarinet and piano, as a cello bows low notes in the background. Over the next four minutes, this quartet plays a gorgeous, if brooding, piece by a Peabody student composer. Given that it’s the Peabody Composition Department’s December 2 student recital at Griswold Hall, that’s expected. But as McGregor Boyle, the chair of Peabody’s Composition Department, remarked during his introduction, this night’s program is a bit unusual.

This evening, at the semester’s close, the audience will hear four pieces that are making their world debuts, works commissioned by Andrew Talle from four graduate student composers—doctoral candidates John Crouch, Elisenda Fábregas, and Ying-Chen Kao, and 2008 master’s graduate David Witmer. Talle, who chairs Peabody’s Musicology Department and teaches at both Peabody and the Hopkins Homewood campus, commissioned the pieces for his undergraduate course focusing on historic premières.

Each composition student was given the same text—a poem titled “Solitary” by Peabody faculty member Hollis Robbins—as inspiration for a musical composition written for an ensemble of baritone, clarinet, piano, and violoncello. “Solitary” is an almost elegiac 14-line reverie from a prisoner, presumably in solitary confinement, recalling somewhat better earlier times of fishing during summer nights. The poem’s subject matter is emotionally heavy and its tone is complex, where a momentary joyous remembrance is offset by recollections of violence, and the four composers must address this complexity in their music.

The same quartet—musicology professor Giarusso (baritone), Talle (cello), and Peabody students Miles Jaques (clarinet) and Tim Hoft (piano)—will play all four pieces. Talle likens his course and tonight’s culminating performance to Iron Chef for composers, where the students take a given set of ingredients and then see what they can create.

Peabody is really all about performance,” says Boyle (MM ’85, DMA ’90) who has led the department for the past eight years. “We tell students, ‘You will hear your music. Whether for large ensemble or small ensemble or solo players, we will do everything we can to make sure that happens. Because that’s how you learn—especially when writing for a large ensemble.’”

Composition at Peabody is an intimate department of five faculty members and a composer-in-residence (currently Christopher Rouse). Boyle and Geoffrey Wright also teach in Peabody’s Computer Music Department, which overlaps slightly with the Composition Department, while Oscar Bettison, Michael Hersch, and Kevin Puts focus on acoustic composition. This academic year, the Composition Department includes 17 undergraduates and 13 graduate students, and half a dozen DMA degree-in-progress students.

Graduates from both Composition and Computer Music have gone on to impressive careers. Richard Dudas (BM ’90) taught at Europe’s pioneering musical science powerhouse Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) and eventually worked with the developers of the computer multimedia software Max/MSP. Alexandra Gardner (MM ’97) has been commissioned by international ensembles, and her compositions have been featured at international festivals. In fact, Mobtown Modern, the Baltimore series focused on contemporary composers, spotlighted Gardner’s works this season.

This tight-knit community encourages student composers to get their works performed. “Everything I’ve written [at Peabody] has been performed,” says John Crouch, one of the student composers participating in Talle’s competition—and the defending champ from 2008. “It might take awhile. I wrote a piece for nine trombones and piano, and that took two years to get performed—because I think there’s only 12 or 13 trombonists at the school, so you have to almost get the whole department to do it.”

Boyle says that Peabody’s emphasis on performing student compositions is very attractive to aspiring composers. “There are two main questions that everybody asks when they apply to Peabody, ‘How hard or easy is it to get my music performed?’

“The impetus to get a piece performed is completely up to the composition student,” notes Boyle. “But we’re lucky here at Peabody because we have a great relationship with the performance faculty. We have a lot of faculty support for the playing of new music, and that means a lot of the students are [supportive], too.

“The other thing students ask is stylistic,” Boyle says. “They want to know if they’re going to be forced to work in a particular style. And the answer is no. We have lots of stylistic diversity here among the students. What we try to do as composition teachers is figure out what the student is trying to do and help them get there. That’s what it’s about.”

That attitude encourages students to find their voice in the department and even expand their own repertoires. “Something I believe very strongly is to trust and rely on one’s roots,” says Elisenda Fábregas, who admits to not being the typical composition graduate student.

Born in Spain and recently a naturalized American citizen, Fábregas has a strong piano performance background—she earned a master’s from Juilliard in 1983—and started composing later in her career. Although she was a published composer before she came to Peabody, she was self-taught and wanted to expand her horizons. She was attracted to Peabody’s broad aesthetic, excellent faculty, and the interaction she saw between performers and composers, both at the faculty and student level.

“As a Catalan, I grew up in an environment where Catalan and Spanish music was all around me, and later unavoidably found its way into my own music,” she says. “Because I was a full-time pianist when I started to compose, it was a natural for me to write music I could perform myself and/or with friends, therefore, I have written substantial works for piano solo, with voice or in chamber music. I have always enjoyed the intimacy of chamber music, but now I am expanding my musical forces and writing two concertos, one for cello and one for flute with set performers and conductor. I always like to know who I am writing music for because it motivates me—there is a huge emotional component in writing music—and I can also take into consideration the performers’ strengths.”

The department works hard to cultivate such creative expansion. It hosts six student recitals per year, two in the fall and four in the spring, and sponsors three in-house competitions: the Prix d’Été, a chamber music ensemble competition that in alternate years includes a technological component; the Macht Orchestral Composition Competition; and the Virginia Carty deLillo Composition Competition, which includes a cash prize and public Peabody performance. Last fall, the Peabody Camerata performed Lonnie Hevia’s Ritual: Sublimation, composed by the 2008 deLillo winner, on the same program with Robert Hall Lewis’ Diptychon and Lukas Foss’ Time Cycle.

As Boyle notes, students within the Composition Department are expected to take primary responsibility for seeing their works performed. The student finds and organizes the performers, coordinates the rehearsal process, and attends a number of rehearsals, guiding performers through the interpretation of the piece.

These pragmatic skills are an important part of the learning process. “It’s definitely a skill, [learning] how to work with performers,” says Ying-Chen Kao. A pianist herself, the Taiwanese Kao came to Peabody to study composition with Christopher Theofanidis. “Being a composer means you have to do several different things,” she explains. “You have to understand instruments and performers, you can’t just write whatever you want—and you have to be a good coach. And you have to go into a rehearsal with performers and be comfortable and know what you’re doing. They’ve been playing their instrument for a while; why would they want to listen to a person who doesn’t play their instrument?”

Kao, who has also studied with Michael Hersch, particularly values Peabody’s orchestral readings, in which student composers get about 45 minutes to work with a student symphony as the players sight-read their orchestral pieces. For Kao, just being able to hear an orchestral work and stand in front of performers to work through it is invaluable. “That’s part of the training—learning how to be a confident composer,” she says. The lessons she’s learned to date? “In an orchestra reading, nobody wants to hear a long explanation of why you want something a certain way. You have a limited amount of time to convey to a large group of performers what you’re trying to do, and they’re looking to see how you organize yourself. You have to stay on schedule. Sometimes you might only have three rehearsals before a performance—how do you use that time efficiently?”

Performance rehearsals are a crucial point of training for student composers. It could be the first time a composer hears his or her piece. Perhaps more importantly, the eventual performance often marks a composition’s debut. Performed at a recital or concert, the work will be recorded and used by the student composer for grant applications, for entering competitions, or just to share with future instrumentalists. Communicating the idea of the piece to the performers is a key aspect of the composer’s job.

“That’s the hard part of contemporary music,” Kao says. “People study Beethoven for a long time. They study how you’re supposed to interpret that language. But there’s nothing to refer to about me. Once you get a performer who has performed five or 10 of your pieces, then they understand what you’re trying to say. Otherwise, players don’t know anything about you.” That learning curve appeared during the first public rehearsals for the December 2 recital/competition, which took place at the Mattin Center on the Homewood campus.

Talle invited his Homewood class of 30 students to attend the rehearsals, to give them a window into the process involved in bringing a new composition to performance.

On this Monday afternoon, Crouch’s work is up first for rehearsal with the assembled ensemble—baritone Giarusso, clarinetist Jaques, pianist Hoft, and Talle on cello.

“First rehearsals are always weird because it sounds terrible,” John Crouch says, laughing. “Instruments don’t always know how they fit in with everything else, so when you get all the parts going there’s sometimes a little confusion. I like to sit back during the first few run-throughs and let them sort of figure it out on their own, and then point things out.”

That’s exactly what he does during this rehearsal, from his seat at the front of the class. His work starts with voice, with the piano, clarinet, and cello coming in a few moments later and following the vocal’s melody. “The clarinet and the cello work really well together,” Crouch later explains, of this ensemble. “They’re all in a similar range. So my piece came out with everything kind of noodling around itself. Those two instruments go around the same melody line that the baritone sings.”

A minute or so into the work, the ensemble stops in its tracks. “Something happened in this bar,” Talle says, pointing to the score. The other performers check their copies, and pencils come out to make notations to themselves before asking Crouch if the tempo sounds right.

“I think the tempo is fine,” he says. “But wait for the piano on the downbeat. You guys are out of sync intentionally.” “There’s sort of a wobbly echo here when you and I play,” Talle says, pointing out something in the score to Jaques. “Let’s start at 9 and proceed, just cello and voice.”

The ensemble does just that until it hits its next rough patch, and the rehearsal continues in this stop-and-start manner for the next half hour. It’s a fascinating process—the “noodling” melody Crouch describes is especially notable when pairs of musicians isolate themselves during this rehearsal and figure out how to play it together. Even in this brief time period, the ensemble’s comfort level has dramatically increased. By the end of the rehearsal, they can play through the entire piece without pausing.

The second half of this class was devoted to Fábregas’ piece, and Kao’s and Witmer’s pieces were rehearsed for the class the following Monday. During these rehearsals, the student composers discover that not every authorial idea can be dictated by the score. “The bowing of a string changes everything,” Kao says. “And that’s the question I asked once: Are you supposed to indicate how to bow a phrase? Some composers say you should give them a little space [to interpret], some people say you should notate exactly what you want. But I think you can find a balance in that. I try to notate exactly what I want, but it’s not always physically doable for every performer.

“So that’s the part you have to evaluate at rehearsals. I, as a composer, really, really care about the big picture of the production, so in general my comments tend to go more toward how the music works together.”

This issue of communication was the focus of a composition seminar held in November, with Peabody Composer-in-Residence Christopher Rouse, one of America’s foremost orchestral composers working today. The performance arts magazine Musical America named Rouse its 2009 Composer of the Year, and his works are memorable for their emotional intensity. For this roughly 90-minute seminar, student composers played a piece for the faculty composer, who then discussed it with the class. Rouse made the most comments about the piece, but he also solicited comments and considerations from the class.

Two students played a recording of their pieces and one performed his on the piano that day. During the discussion, Rouse frequently asked the student about his or her intent during parts of the work: Is the natural or artificial harmonic notated in the score? Rouse also dispensed advice: With odd or complex scores, he pointed out, it’s important to identify not only the type of sound but also how to articulate it. The workshops moved and felt like a visual art critique or writing workshop—an opportunity for an artist to get feedback from peers.

Such seminars allow student composers to refine their approach and find their “voice,” notes David Witmer, who started out as a pianist before moving to composition, a difficult shift for him.

“The first couple of years, I don’t think I really knew what I was doing—who I was, what I was trying to do in my writing. Peabody provided the chance to do that—just by writing, writing, writing, writing, which helped me get to where I was going, and by not putting constraints [on me] or telling me what to do,” says Witmer, who has studied with Michael Hersch.

He continues, “There’s a big psychological aspect of it, as little bits and pieces of yourself start coming through what you’re writing. For me, you really learn about who you are through the music.”

Witmer’s piece in Talle’s competition was one of the more unique of the bunch. Since each of the composers worked from the same text, there were some superficial similarities. Each talked about the poem’s dark tone, for instance, and used a specific line from the poem (“despite the midnight beatings”) to mark a slight crescendo or sharp change in tone. Witmer’s piece, however, started off with voice and soon drifted into the ethereal, as the cello, clarinet, and piano played sparse lines that briefly came together before drifting back into a ghostly mood.

While every piece shared a pensive mood, each composer approached it differently. Kao’s found a somber lyricism in Robbins’ words, with the clarinet playing off the piano in the early lines. Crouch’s piece sounded the most complex, and the threaded together clarinet, cello, and piano melody lines created a dizzying sound. Fábregas was the most instantly accessible, creating an airy melody through which the lissome clarinet line darted around. The class ultimately voted hers the winner.

After a brief intermission, six more student compositions were performed by a variety of ensembles, including an arresting violin and prerecorded electronics piece called Deplorable Nostalgia by Gleb Kanasevich, a fascinatingly dreamy percussive piece for two pianos and two vibraphones titled Blueshift by Jeremiah Ricketson, and a show-stealing solo clarinet piece titled Zanelle by Viet Cuong, which showcased Miles Jaques’ virtuosity.

Throughout the evening, the students were running the show. Some from the Rouse seminar worked the stage change between ensembles. Other students passed out the recital’s programs. And the student composer of one piece showed up as a performer in a later ensemble.

“I looked at a lot of different schools and sometimes composition departments can be kind of unfriendly in a way, because people don’t see each other that often,” Kao says. “The majority of the time you’re working at home and writing your own music, and people don’t really spend a lot of time together.

“But at Peabody, people spend time together and get to know each other and each other’s work. That’s definitely one of the reasons I came here.”