Quote of the day:

If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you.
—Groucho Marx

Back in the 1950s Leonard Bernstein worried that symphony orchestras might become museums, only playing the music of bygone eras, because they were playing very few contemporary pieces, and those that they were playing were not catching on with the concert-going public.

But in those days, most of the composers were only turning out crap. I mean atonal, serial, twelve-tone pieces, that the professors in ivory towers claimed was the only way to compose.

Happily, we’ve gotten past that nonsense and now that composers have returned to a somewhat more accessible idiom, the public has been responding, and there are more and more contemporary pieces finding their way onto concert programs and even finding favor with the public.

Case in point: Jennifer Higdon’s blue cathedral, which has been performed more than a thousand times since its premiere in 2000 and is the most performed contemporary work in the United States.

In 1999 the Curtis Institute of Music here in Philadelphia commissioned Higdon to write a piece to commemorate its 75th anniversary. Her younger brother Andrew had just died of skin cancer, and she wrote in the score:

I began writing this piece at a unique juncture in my life and found myself pondering the question of what makes a life. The recent loss of my younger brother, Andrew Blue, made me reflect on the amazing journeys that we all make in our lives, crossing paths with so many individuals singularly and collectively, learning and growing each step of the way. This piece represents the expression of the individual and the group… our inner travels and the places our souls carry us, the lessons we learn, and the growth we experience. In tribute to my brother, I feature solos for the clarinet (the instrument he played) and the flute (the instrument I play). Because I am the older sibling, it is the flute that appears first in this dialog. At the end of the work, the two instruments continue their dialogue, but it is the flute that drops out and the clarinet that continues on in the upward progressing journey.

 

At a recent BBC Proms concert Alison Balsom and Ryan Bancroft introduced the piece with a personal anecdote followed by Domingo Hindoyan conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

How American is that?