Composition Matters

In a recent review, Bernard Holland of the New York Times wrote, apropos of an American Composers Alliance concert, that “American composers, unlike most of the people who play their music, have no trade union to protect their interests and promote their work.” In his introduction to this virtual panel discussion, Drew McManus asks “Why does the disconnect between orchestra musicians and composers exist? Does it need to be this way?”

I sense a meme emerging. Holland’s version is that composers are disadvantaged compared to orchestra musicians. A suspicious mind might even suspect that he means to imply a linkage between the feather beds that my colleagues and I supposedly recline upon (due to “The Union”) and the briar patches where composers live. Drew’s version, by contrast, is not pejorative, but does imply that the relationship between composers and orchestra musicians has a practical impact on either or both parties.

But does it?

I’ve been in this business for several decades, and have yet to see any concrete evidence that what orchestra musicians think of new music and the people that write it has any systemic effect on that music being programmed or the welfare of its creators. As my colleague Chris Woehr points out , orchestra musicians have, at best, a small role on programming new works. I have yet to notice music directors or artistic administrators giving much thought to what the orchestra will think about the new music that they’ve programmed. On those extremely rare occasions when musicians’ opinions seemed to matter, it’s been because they expressed the view that the music was unplayable – which, translated into conductorese, means that the performance was going to reflect badly upon them.

But that’s not because of any desire on the musicians’ part not to play the piece. I know a lot of orchestra musicians who neither like Bruckner symphonies nor enjoy playing them, but nonetheless do a thorough job of preparation nonetheless. We are, after all, professionals.

I suspect that these meme keeps resurfacing from a desire to find an explanation for the relative paucity of new music on orchestral programs that avoids cutting ourselves with Occam’s Razor. For the simplest explanation of that paucity is that audiences don’t want to hear music that they don’t know – or at least don’t want to hear very much of it.

There is, after all, a lot of great non-new music that doesn’t get programmed. My orchestra has done about 10 performances of the seven Sibelius symphonies in my 18 years here; half of which were of the second symphony and none of which were of the sixth. We’ve done two of the nine Vaughn Williams symphonies, one symphony of Martinu, and have only done the fourth symphony of that most popular of composers, Ludwig van Beethoven, two or three times – once during a Beethoven festival. And new music is even more challenging for most audiences than is unfamiliar non-new music.

I played in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra during the last two years of Dennis Russell Davies’ music directorship. Dennis was renowned for his aggressive programming of new works, which got the orchestra a great deal of attention. But the orchestra spent more money on marketing than it earned in ticket sales. This is not a path to success for orchestras, or at least not as it’s defined in our system of orchestra financing.

I’m looking forward to learning what I can about how orchestra musicians might fit into solutions to getting more new music on programs. But let’s not pretend that the answers lie primarily with us.