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Delta David Gier . . . decided to perform a piece by a living Pulitzer Prize-winning composer on each of the classical programs—an unprecedented programming innovation. ”   —Terry Teachout , The Wall Street Journal 

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May 26, 2022 

The New Yorker Magazine 

How the South Dakota Symphony Became One of America’s Boldest Orchestras


The ensemble premières a craggy new work by John Luther Adams, in Sioux Falls.

By Alex Ross​​

The South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, the musical pride of Sioux Falls, has an annual budget of $2.3 million, which is microscopic by the standards of America’s leading orchestras. The Chicago Symphony spends more than that each year on Riccardo Muti’s salary. Nevertheless, the South Dakota Symphony is bolder and savvier in its programming than all but a handful of American ensembles. Delta David Gier, the S.D.S.O.’s music director, recently won the Ditson Conductor’s Award, which Columbia University gives to notable advocates for American composers. The citation called Gier “the model of an engaged conductor.” His group is the model of an engaged orchestra. The S.D.S.O. celebrated its centennial this season, in ambitious style. The roster of composers included not only Beethoven, Grieg, and Tchaikovsky but also Stephen Yarbrough, David M. Gordon, Jessie Montgomery, Anna Clyne, George Walker, Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, and Malek Jandali. One concert was given over to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion; another featured works by student composers from Lakota and Dakota tribes. (The orchestra has a series called the Lakota Music Project.) The season ended with a program that consisted of Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra”; “The Great Gate of Kiev,” from Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”; and “An Atlas of Deep Time,” a sprawling new score by John Luther Adams. I flew in for the occasion, having long admired the group from afar. The program would have tested any top-rank orchestra. The S.D.S.O., which deploys nine full-time musicians and a large array of freelancers, struggled in spots. Yet the performances were never less than creditable, and the focussed energy of the playing overrode any worries about precision. Furthermore, I’ve experienced very few concerts at which a classical-music organization seemed so integral to its community. During some announcements from the stage, Jennifer Teisinger, the orchestra’s executive director, asked former members of the ensemble to stand up. In a crowd of more than a thousand people, dozens rose to their feet. Nothing of the sort could have happened in New York, Los Angeles, London, or Berlin. The founder of the S.D.S.O. was the conductor, violinist, and composer Marie Toohey, who launched it when she was still in her twenties, after a period of study in Germany. One of very few female conductors who have ever played such a role, Toohey died tragically young, at the age of thirty-two. At first, the orchestra was made up of students from Augustana University, in Sioux Falls; later, it was known as the Augustana Town & Gown Symphony and then as the Sioux Falls Symphony, before settling on its current name in 1977. In 1999, it took up residence at the Washington Pavilion, an arts venue and science center downtown. Gier, who is sixty-two, arrived in 2004. He had attracted early attention at the New York Philharmonic, serving as an assistant conductor and leading Young People’s Concerts. When he was trying out for the S.D.S.O. job, he gave an interview to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader in which he expressed enthusiasm for living composers. The headline was “orchestras need contemporary music, conductor says.” Gier thought that he had doomed his chances, but he was hired nonetheless. During his first season, each concert featured an American composer who had won the Pulitzer Prize. As Gier told me, he reasoned that skeptical listeners might feel assured by the Pulitzer imprimatur. “The idea was ‘You don’t have to take myword for it,’ ” Gier said. There was resistance all the same. When John Corigliano’s uncontroversial Second Symphony appeared on one program, a donor threatened to pull his money. Gier, uncertain how to proceed, called Chad Smith, who was then the artistic administrator at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and is now that orchestra’s chief executive. The L.A. Phil had faced similar pushback during its decades-long drive to renovate its repertory, especially in the early years of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s tenure. Smith told Gier that he shouldn’t retreat from his convictions; rather, he should make sure that the staff and the orchestra were speaking the same persuasive language. Gier told me, “You have to know how to answer complaints. Because people are going to complain. They’re going to complain about your Berlioz!” It’s a philosophy of ingratiating stubbornness, and, over time, it tends to disarm opposition. In Sioux Falls, audiences began falling in love with some of the novelties and learned to tolerate the rest. Adams first visited Sioux Falls in 2016, when the orchestra offered his symphonic work “Become Ocean,” which had won the Pulitzer two years earlier. Although Adams is now based in New Mexico, he lived for decades in Alaska and played percussion in the Fairbanks Symphony. In a public conversation with Gier, Adams said that the spirit of the S.D.S.O. had won him over and had also reminded him of his own past: “I’m used to audacious orchestras outside the cultural capitals who don’t know what they’re not supposed to be able to do.” “An Atlas of Deep Time” is the latest in a series of large-scale pieces in which Adams evokes elemental landscapes; in addition to “Become Ocean,” these include “In the White Silence,” “Become Desert,” and “Ten Thousand Birds.” The new work conjures the vastness of geological time—“deep time,” as John McPhee dubbed it in his book “Basin and Range,” which grew out of articles that appeared in this magazine in 1980. “Atlas” lasts around forty-five minutes; if the score were mapped against the life span of Earth, each minute would be equivalent to a hundred million years. The formal structure is modelled on the basin-and-range topography of western North America, with its relentless alternation of mountain uplift and desert flats. Five orchestral aggregations unfold in sequence, gathering force and then subsiding. The ensemble is divided into six spatially distinct choirs. At the Washington Pavilion, strings and percussion were placed together onstage; four groups of brass and winds occupied balconies to the right and to the left; trumpets and trombones thundered from the rear. An ever-changing scheme of superimposed tempos conveys the complexity of geological layering. The harmony, likewise, is governed by mutating stacks of intervals. At the midpoint of each “range” section, the chords assume a snow-capped tonal grandeur. The “basins” are interludes of tremulous repose, with bursts of drumming breaking through shimmery string textures. Many of these elements are familiar from “Become Ocean,” which has hypnotized audiences around the world. “Atlas” is a craggier, denser, more unsettling score, too charged with seismic tension to send listeners into a trancelike state. It may take time to figure out how best to present it. At the dress rehearsal, I sat in the orchestra; at the performance, I was in the mezzanine. Neither perspective was ideal. Down below, the choirs in the balconies seemed a bit distant. Up above, the sound was more immersive, although a phalanx of eight French horns kept blotting out everything else. Both times, murk prevailed at the climaxes. A recording was made in the hall the following day; this will undoubtedly provide clarity. Still, the première had the air of a major occasion. As often with Adams, I had the sense of entering a physically palpable space, one in which the mind can go roaming. Gier pictured the rugged expanse of the Black Hills, in western South Dakota. My thoughts went to Willa Cather, who grew up in Nebraska, about two hundred and fifty miles to the southwest. In a famous passage in “My Antonía,” Cather contemplated the unending vistas of the plains and wrote of the joy of being “dissolved into something complete and great.” The sounding immensity of “An Atlas of Deep Time” afforded the same uncanny pleasure. ♦ Published in the print edition of the May 23, 2022, issue, with the headline “Basin and Range.”

December 14, 2022 
The New Yorker Magazine

Notable Performances
and Recordings of 2022

 

The daring South Dakota Symphony, Germany’s excellent small opera houses, Davóne Tines’s soaring performance in “X,” and other highlights of the year in music.

 

By Alex Ross

Ignore sloppy talk of a Big Five or Big Ten: dozens of orchestras are delivering first-rate performances across the country. For years, I’d been reading about the exploits of the South Dakota Symphony, which defies stereotypes of provincial conservatism by playing contemporary music on a routine basis. In the spring, I finally made it to Sioux Falls, where I heard a huge, new John Luther Adams piece, “An Atlas of Deep Time,” and saw a community in love with its orchestra.

November 22, 2023

diacriticical  Arts Journal Blog

American Orchestras Could Learn Something from South Dakota

By Douglas McClennan

Infinite choice of music in a few clicks sounds like a dream. In reality it can dull your desire and lead to what the social psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the “paradox of choice,” a kind of paralysis in decision-making that causes many of us to disengage altogether. Culture is like relationships; you get more out of them when you’re asked to invest something. So I can’t discount the context in which I attended a performance by the South Dakota Symphony in Sioux Falls a couple of weeks ago. My friend and colleague Joe Horowitz has for several years been touting the orchestra and its music director Delta David Geier as an example of what American orchestras should aspire to be. And last year, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross made the trek to Sioux Falls to attend a concert and came away proclaiming it one of his top ten musical experiences of 2022. Then there was the physical context. I decided to drive from my home in Seattle to Sioux Falls, about 1,500 miles away. I love road trips, and the drive though Eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana and South Dakota is beautiful. A few days before I was to leave in late October, the temperature in Sioux Falls was 75 degrees; alas, the day I started out, the first major winter storm of the season rolled in across the Northwest, and a snowstorm outside Bozeman, MT produced whiteout conditions on Interstate 90, slowing travel to a crawl on a road built for 80+mph. By the time I arrived in Sioux Falls, the temperature was in the teens. So maybe the analog opposite of a click away, and with it, some investment in expectations. The other reason for my interest in this particular concert was a rare performance of the Lou Harrison Piano Concerto. I first heard it as a student in New York in the 1980s in a performance by Marin Alsop’s Concordia orchestra with Ursula Oppens as soloist. It was written in 1983 for Keith Jarrett and revised in 1985, and I’ve only ever heard it performed live twice. Only a couple of recordings have ever been produced, including one with Jarrett and a Japanese orchestra, that oddly, doesn’t really capture the elastic qualities of the music. That the piece hasn’t found a wider following is a shame. Horowitz considers it the best American piano concerto, and I might agree. From its grand bombastic opening and angular melodies, reflective pools and undulating rhythms, it is both original and evocatively American. While performances of Harrison’s music on the West Coast are demi-semi-common – he was born in Portland Oregon and spent most of his career working on the West Coast – in the rest of the country he is less well known. That may be in part because he didn’t work in the mainstream of 20th Century music, with its emphasis on breaking down and reassembling the elements of music. He was deeply influenced by Indonesian gamelan, medieval, and Renaissance music, his musical language often built on Javanese scales, modal melodies, and intricate rhythms. He was a pioneer in alternate tunings and microtones and created a distinctive, culturally hybrid musical language that nonetheless is heavily American-inflected. To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The South Dakota Symphony has a budget of just over $2.3 million, teeny tiny for an orchestra that must put dozens of musicians onstage. It performs only about a dozen programs a year, and its musicians, outside a core group of eight principals, are pickup contract players. In an art form where ensemble familiarity and enduring teamwork are often good predictors of performance, the lack of week-in/week-out experience is usually telling. On the other hand, orchestras made up of musicians that have to extend themselves in the absence of routine can be thrilling. The South Dakota players are good musicians, but what is extraordinary about them is the way they listen to one another, build on one another’s phrases and the willingness of Gier to give them room to do it. Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli was the soloist, a specialist in American music. He tore into the propulsive second movement, using percussion as counterpoint he could play with like a cat with a toy. The longer, angular open-toned melodies he gave room to breathe – they evoke for me the great Western expanses and mountains – and made the gamelan-inflected oscillations of the score supple rather than strict. In every way, this was an idiomatic performance that let it find its own language. The program opened with Princess of the Pagodas from Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, and after the concerto, in the second half, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. And here it is important to return to my opening point about context. Ravel and Rimsky, in both these pieces, were inspired by Eastern music, which sounded exotic to them. Both pieces are audience favorites for their evocative and colorful melodies and washes of orchestral color. They served as bookends to Harrison’s fusion of Eastern and Western in the concerto, synthesized and realized in an entirely different way. Where the Impressionistic Ravel and Rimsky scores are touristic visitors to foreign shores, Harrison melds East and West into a language that seems neither native to both, but not foreign either. To make the connections and context clear, the program began with a stage conversation between Gier and Horowitz and a short video introducing Harrison. And it wasn’t just informational – context isn’t just about more information, it’s about finding ways to locate what you’re hearing in a set of experiences that help give them meaning. So an introduction to gamelan and how it can sound and is traditionally used. As in the Harrison, the performance of Scheherazade was filled with air. Where many conductors like to dance across the sparkle and smash, Gier took his time, let players find their own voices and waited until one long fully-spun climax at the very end. This orchestra doesn’t sound like others. Players come from around the Midwest, as far away as Minneapolis and Chicago, and Gier says they keep returning because they like the camaraderie and the freedom they have there. That players seem to listen differently he attributes in part to their work with musicians from the Lakota Indian nation in the western part of the state. The Lakota Music Project was started in 2005, and features collaborations between South Dakota Symphony musicians and Lakota musicians, “each performing music of their heritages as well as unique repertoire commissioned for the musicians to play together.” The encounters have taught Symphony musicians to listen to one another differently, and this has been infused into the larger group. As for the orchestra’s artistic identity – American music is at its center, and that’s by design. The audience gets a lot of it, including significant commissions by composers such as John Luther Adams. The Harrison on this concert was greeted with a standing ovation, whereupon Arciuli and the orchestra reprised the second movement to further cheers. Context is everything.

October 27, 2023 
The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Performing-Arts Groups Work to Attract Big Donors After the Pandemic Downturn

 

The daring South Dakota Symphony, Germany’s excellent small opera houses, Davóne Tines’s soaring performance in “X,” and other highlights of the year in music.

 

By Maria Di Mento

It’s not often that a performing-arts organization lands a major gift without first courting the wealthy donor, but that’s what happened to the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra. Last year, retired Waste Management founder Dean Buntrock and his wife, Rosemarie, pledged $2 million, after just a few months of discussions. It’s the symphony’s largest gift to date. Buntrock was born in Columbia, S.D., but has lived in the Chicago area for decades and was not aware that South Dakota had a professional symphony orchestra. That changed when he read a New Yorker article about the Sioux Falls group’s wide-ranging music programming last year. Impressed by how much the orchestra was accomplishing both inside and outside the concert hall on a $2.3 million budget — tiny compared to most top orchestras — Buntrock decided he wanted to learn more. He called a well-connected relative in Sioux Falls, former U.S. Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, who currently serves as president of Augustana University. “He calls Stephanie and he goes, ‘What’s up with the South Dakota Symphony? They do all this on a $2.3 million budget? What would they do if they had $4 million?’ So Stephanie calls me and tells me this, and I’m thinking, man, that guy’s singing my song,” recounts conductor David Delta Gier, the orchestra’s music director. Herseth Sandlin introduced Buntrock to Gier and other orchestra officials that August, and in January the organization announced the Buntrocks’ pledge. Buntrock issued a statement that made clear why he was so impressed after learning more about the orchestra. “The South Dakota Symphony Orchestra is a tremendous asset for the state of South Dakota and has been doing great work with a small budget,” Buntrock said in the announcement. “It is my hope that the initiatives funded by this donation will advance the work of this wonderful orchestra and its adventurous programming, making it available to many more people in the state.” Many performing-arts organizations are struggling to recover from significant financial shocks brought on by the pandemic and audiences’ slow return. Against that backdrop, the Buntrock gift illustrates how thoughtful community outreach programs, along with traditional artistic offerings and creative forward-looking new ones can attract wider attention and support from wealthy donors. Performing-arts fundraisers and leaders are spotlighting their onstage and offstage offerings to attract big donors and remind them why the performing arts matter. At the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, those outreach programs include the Lakota Music Project. The program aims to address South Dakota’s history of racial tension by building connections and cultural understanding between the state’s white and Indigenous populations through music collaborations between the symphony’s musicians and musicians from the Oglala Sioux and Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribes. The orchestra’s musicians also hold music-composition seminars for grade-school students on reservations and collaborate with the students to create chamber-music pieces that the orchestra’s musicians then perform. Gier also has partnerships with musicians at South Dakota State University and the University of South Dakota and has used choral groups from both universities in some of the orchestra’s larger concerts. Some of the orchestra’s musicians have formed a string quartet and a wind quintet and regularly play smaller concerts at local hospitals, schools, and behavioral health centers. Big-Gift Fundraising Tips From the Arts That Any Cause Can Put to Use Many performing-arts groups were hit hard by the pandemic and audiences’ slow return. To make up lost ground, fundraisers at those organizations are working hard to win big gifts. What they’ve learned has the potential to help major-gift officers at all types of nonprofits. Get back to basics. Each wealthy donor is different, says Sharon Duncan, director of individual giving at Dance Theatre of Harlem. She says it’s important that fundraisers really get to know who each donor is beyond what your prospect researchers learn about them. Find out how often they want to hear from you and in what ways, and then make sure that you’re checking in with them accordingly. If they’re open to it, create special ways to stay in touch with them, whether with written updates, phone calls, or site visits, if appropriate. “So often we go in with that whole spiel, and we never even take time to listen to what they might be interested in,” Duncan says. She recommends giving potential donors enough information to understand the overall mission and then tailoring communications to their specific interests. “It’s those touch points that are going to be meaningful to them, and that comes out of conversations you have with them. “ Fundraising for major gifts right now is about getting back to the basics, says Elizabeth Rouse, CEO of ArtsMemphis. She says fundraisers need to spend more time with big donors face-to-face, if they are open to it, and have more frequent and in-depth communications with them. “In a way, that is now easier because we all faced such challenging times that you had to have some of these crisis conversations in the beginning of the pandemic,” Rouse says. “That really built more awareness and opened the door to more intentional conversation with donors.” Be gracious. When you talk to donors, be transparent and keep them informed, even if you have bad news to share, Duncan says. If a donor decides to stop supporting your organization, be kind and understanding, she says. Tell them you’re sorry to hear it and ask them if you can still send them information about what’s happening at the organization from time to time. If it seems appropriate, Duncan advises that fundraisers ask donors if you can share information in the future about planned giving. “You still stay a friend at Dance Theatre — and, in some instances, a friend of mine — and that’s really critical,” Duncan says. “If something changes in their lives, we have to understand that. There’s no guarantee we’re going to get the gift every year.” Think big. When it comes time to ask for a substantial gift, be bold and honest, says Gregory Robertson, chief philanthropy officer at Houston Grand Opera. Don’t just ask for what you think a wealthy donor might be willing to give, he says. Instead communicate what your organization really needs and lay out the specifics of what it could do with a big gift. “We tend to be more reticent and think that the smaller we ask, the more likely we are to be able to get the gift, but people can’t read our minds,” Robertson says. “People don’t know what we know about our hopes and dreams and what we want to build for our organizations and the difference we can make in our community.” Big donors are often surprised to hear about all of the work the orchestra does outside the concert hall, says Jennifer Teisinger, the orchestra’s executive director “When you think of a symphony orchestra, you think about them playing Beethoven or world premieres of living composers,” Teisinger says. The South Dakota Symphony does that and does that well, she says, but for some donors, it’s hearing about the string quartet performing for foster kids or the wind quintet performing for adults with special needs that really moves them. “That’s the impact that donors are surprised to hear about it. It doesn’t make the news, and it doesn’t sell tickets so it doesn’t get talked about much by the organization. But it’s those things that are an impact and resonate with donors.” While community programs can attract major gifts over time, Gier stresses that performing-arts groups must develop them carefully, for the right reasons, and with the right input. “It’s about actually being relevant,” he says. “When people see that, they respond well. They can tell where the heart of the organization is.” Embattled Sioux Falls banker Denny Sanford pledged $2 million in September to support the orchestra’s educational programs for children, another big donor attracted by the orchestra’s community programs. His gift will be paid over five years. The Buntrock donation will be paid out over the next four years; it is being used to increase the group’s fundraising and marketing efforts, pay for additional concerts by the Lakota Music Project throughout the state, and support a revival of Giants in the Earth, a 1951 Pulitzer Prizewinning opera based on a novel about Norwegian immigration to South Dakota. With the Buntrocks’ blessings, the orchestra will use about $50,000 of the gift to match donations from other donors to its annual fund. The organization received the first installment of the Buntrock money in January. Part of it went toward hiring the organization’s first-ever development director, who started in August, and will work with Teisinger to broaden the organization’s donor base. While Teisinger’s team is in the early stages of mapping out extensive fundraising and marketing plans, it has hired outside marketing help to get it started on some of the basics. Before the gift, the orchestra couldn’t afford to mail marketing materials to households beyond its Sioux Falls ticketing base. The newly hired marketing firm is helping to identify new potential patrons and donors, and to expand the orchestra’s direct and digital mail campaign to households within a much wider radius beyond Sioux Falls. So far, the orchestra has seen a 7.6 percent increase in season subscriptions and a more than 8 percent increase in revenue from last season, says Brandy Hartman, the orchestra’s marketing manager

March 22, 2023 
Slippedisc

America's Most Innovative Symphony Orchestra is . . . South Dakota.

 

By Norman Lebrecht

That’s the word from Joseph Horowitz, Toscanini author and experienced orchestra manager:

A Museum Culture of Symphony Orchestras? 

By Delta David Gier

Having worked with Joe Horowitz and having read his books I agree in principal with his assessment of the “classical” music industry, its history and present situation. Copland’s quote from 1941 stands as well today as it did 76 years ago. My copy of Joe’s “Classical Music in America” is dog-eared, with quotes from people during the late 19th-century underlined which could have come from my subscribers today. We have indeed created a museum culture out of this art form, one which is perceived as irrelevant for many reasons, an unnecessary result of a focus on the “masterpieces” we all know and love at the expense of the creation of our own voice. The issue of a cultural shift in America (some would say decline) and the diminishing of the importance of education in music and the arts specifically, in the humanities more generally, is in my mind at least as important a factor. The inundation of our lives with popular culture and multiple distractions, and the lack of distinction of fine art from more popular forms confuses the issue further as people view everything through the same lens. (This is most prominent in American culture; in much of Europe and even Mexico, Central and South America this is not so much the case.) Our industry muddies the waters still more by marketing what we play in the same manner as more popular musical forms. I personally think of this as false advertising; we do not need to apologize for what we play – art and entertainment serve different functions in society. As Joe has often suggested, we need to reframe our institutions as cultural resources; I would say for the understanding of our own society and its place within history. I have always believed that our art form is living and breathing, and have devoted myself, as well as substantial time and resources of the SDSO, to supporting living American composers. That is not to say that I am a lover of contemporary music, rather that I am a believer. I believe in the power of art to influence, even restore, society and I idealistically hope for a cultural renaissance in which art can serve in this way. (I often say: if you want to be a game-changer you have to stay in the game; you can’t simply sit on the sidelines and complain.) Particularly at this time in our nation (and in the “western” world) the role of the arts is very important, and could/should/would be more relevant than at any period in recent memory. There is not much music I don’t love, particularly once I’m involved in the making of it, so carrying the banner of new music, helping in whatever way I can to engender our American school of composition (even at this late stage) is no burden. I began at the SDSO with a series based on the Pulitzer Prize, using it as a recognizable imprimatur to validate a new music director’s programming choices; it worked as a way to introduce new music to an audience which had heard very little of it.

Arts Journal 
Unanswered Question

May 22, 2024

 “Ripeness Is All” — Is the South Dakota Symphony’s Mahler Really Better than Klaus Makela and the Oslo Phil?

By Joe Horowitz

Many readers have responded to a series of recent blogs in which I’ve pondered the bewildering appointment of Klaus Makela, age 28, to become music director of the Chicago Symphony beginning in 2027. Some have expressed incredulity that I prefer Delta David Gier’s South Dakota Symphony reading of Mahler’s Third to Makela’s with his superb Oslo Philharmonic.

March 21, 2023

Re-Thinking the Concert Experience in South Dakota and Minnesota 

By Joe Horowitz

There was a time – the 1990s, when I was running the Brooklyn Philharmonic at BAM – when the practice of speaking from the stage at symphonic concerts was controversial, both among audiences and orchestra leaders. And people debated whether or not thematic programing was a good thing.

October 30, 2023

Curating American Repertoire in South Dakota 

By Joe Horowitz

The South Dakota Symphony concert I last wrote about in this space has now come and gone. In every way, it fortified my impression that this is an orchestra that deserves to be a national model.

January 16, 2018

America’s Most Exceptional Orchestra 

By Joe Horowitz

Setting aside PostClassical Ensemble, the guerilla DC chamber orchestra I co-founded fourteen years ago, the most exceptional American orchestra I know is the South Dakota Symphony.

March 9, 2016

Dvorak on the Reservation 

By Joe Horowitz

Sisseton, in the northeastern corner of South Dakota, sits within a Dakota Indian reservation called Sisseton Wahpeton. The population – 2,500 – is half Native American, half non-Native.

Spring 2018 

Humanities
The Magazine for the National Endowment for the Arts

 

Can Orchestras Be Reinvented as Humanities Institutions?

 

South Dakota | The temperature reads minus 7 on a weekday morning in January. Snowflakes whip along the ground without sticking and spin upward into little funnels before scattering. The sky appears beautiful and iconic through the car window, but once you step outside the weather is literally in your face. As you dash across the parking lot, the cold finds your pores and a shrill wind blows straight into your bones.

 

By David Skinner

Inside a handsome former library at the state university in Brookings, people gather in a lecture room to hear from a visiting trio of speakers. About half the audience consists of faculty or town residents. A music teacher talks quietly to his class about where to meet the next afternoon for the bus ride to Sioux Falls. He reminds the students to dress appropriately for the concert. Standing in front, Delta David Gier, the conductor and musical director of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, begins the discussion. Dressed in black and gray, he is tall and Nordic-looking with a longish forehead framed by the suggestion of a center part and a blondish hairline of graying curls. He starts by asking everyone to reimagine an orchestra as a humanities institution—one that brings together symphonic music and the immersive intellectual context you get from a museum. That, he says, is what is going on here, in this room, and tomorrow on stage in the program called “Music Unwound: Aaron Copland and Mexico.” It’s a cross-breeding of classical music and humanistic inquiry. The next person to speak is Lorenzo Candelaria, who goes by Frank. He personifies the institutional ties that, under the right circumstances, might develop between a university and an orchestra. An associate provost at the University of Texas at El Paso, he is a scholar of the Catholic music cultures of Spain and Mexico, a trained violinist, and a board member of the El Paso Symphony Orchestra. Over the next 40 minutes he delivers a brief history of Mexico. Candelaria, who is Mexican American and a seasoned instructor, knows how to keep the material moving. His goal is not to dwell on the Aztec language Nahuatl or the Aztec use of music in rituals involving human sacrifice, both of which he mentions. Instead, he wants to highlight a moment in the twentieth century when many Mexican artists were searching their country’s past for ideas on where Mexican art should go. “How many people here have ever heard of Silvestre Revueltas?” A couple hands stir, but none are raised with any confidence. Candelaria, in a jacket, tie, and an artful rooster’s peak of black hair, demonstrates how to pronounce the composer’s name, one syllable at a time—SIL-vest-ray Re-VWELL-tas—which the room dutifully repeats in a Midwestern accent. Revueltas is the Mexico in “Copland and Mexico.” His propulsive, hard-to-categorize music should be better known than it is, say his enthusiastic fans. The music critic Alex Ross has called him “a giant talent” with “a wildly inventive and laceratingly sharp musical mind.” Candelaria talks about postrevolutionary Mexico in the 1930s, when Diego Rivera was at the height of his fame and Mexican artists were looking to folk culture and an Aztec past for a richer sense of historical identity. Slides flash on the video screen at the front of the room, showing paintings by Rufino Tamayo and the muralist José Clemente Orozco. Candelaria reads the poem by Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén that inspired Revueltas’s composition, Sensemayá, once again putting the audience to work. In unison, they repeat a sacrificial chant at the beginning of the poem, which is about killing a snake. The snake is particularly significant, says Candelaria, as it harkens back to pre-Columbian culture and connects forward to the image at the center of the present-day Mexican flag—something for the crowd to consider as the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra performs Sensemayá this weekend. This lecture is not just an appetizer for the concert, it is part of the entrée. These lessons in the Mexican Revolution, the introduction to a symphonic composer whose gritty material comes from his own life and times, and the reflections on the search for a usable past, all of this material is intended to engage the audience in a certain way: to make them think about the music. It is also an invitation to these students and this college, not simply to attend a concert but to build a larger relationship with an orchestra, to be a partner in its programming. The last speaker is the Music Unwound project director Joseph Horowitz, the oldest of the three men. He wears glasses and his face is fringed with a fluffy gray beard that gives him a professorial air. He is an accomplished music writer and historian, the author of Classical Music in America, Understanding Toscanini, and several other well-regarded books. For several years in the 1990s, he was the executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, then in residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where he first experimented with humanities-infused music concerts. Horowitz brings a very different energy, hangdog, brainy, and a little hard to predict. He decides, seemingly on the spot, not to talk about Revueltas, Aaron Copland, and this weekend’s program, but about Music Unwound’s plans for next year. Sitting down at a piano, he plays a bit of music from memory and asks the audience to identify the composer. It sounds American. George Gershwin, says one person. A good guess but incorrect, says Horowitz. Then he plays another tune, this one older-sounding and jumpier, like a piece by Scott Joplin, whose name someone calls out. Another good guess, says Horowitz, but also wrong. “Dvořák?” asks an older woman in the back. Horowitz is visibly pleased, and quick to congratulate the guesser. He begins talking about “American Roots,” the theme for next year’s Music Unwound program, touching on a body of music he has explored on stage and in writing: African-American spirituals. “I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called the Negro melodies,” Horowitz says, quoting Dvořák. During a long stay in the United States in the 1890s, Antonín Dvořák looked to plantation songs for the beginnings of an American musical idiom, just as he had looked to Bohemian folk music for the compositions that had made him famous throughout Europe. At the National Conservatory of Music near New York’s Union Square, where Dvořák was hired as director, he made the young African-American singer Harry Burleigh his assistant. What Dvořák then developed in the New World Symphony and other music included quotations and variations and riffs of an American style that, Horowitz says, sounded like Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess before the fact. Dvořák, Revueltas, and Gershwin are all good guys in Horowitz’s book (or, rather, books, I should say, because he has written many) for the reason that each sought an authentic source for the music they created. Though composing music in a European genre, Revueltas and Gershwin looked to their native cultures for raw materials. Revueltas listened carefully to the mariachi bands that played in the park and thought deeply about the sounds of everyday life in Mexico. He fulminated against the European masters and claimed to be cleaning out “the old Conservatory that was crumbling down with tradition, moths, and glorious sadness.” Gershwin visited black churches, learned about Gullah culture, and soaked up jazz and ragtime. Their work was less polished and seemingly less finished than some others’, says Horowitz, but the music itself, borne aloft by the historical power behind it, was more genuine. And so what if Gershwin and Revueltas seem less finished? Horowitz asks. The “unfinished” composers, he says, “are going to end up on top.” Gershwin over Copland. Revueltas over his contemporary Carlos Chávez. And Charles Ives, the neglected American composer, too, Horowitz thinks will come out a winner. “Being unfinished is a classic American artistic trope,” he says. “America itself is unfinished. We’ll never escape the legacy of slavery.” This is what it’s like to hang out with Horowitz, by the way. One moment you’re wondering who Charles Ives is, and the next moment he’s talking about the central moral dilemma of American history. ”You can’t talk about music in America without talking about race,” he says. According to Horowitz’s larger argument, a great wrong turn for classical music in America came when it abandoned the musical tradition found among African-American slaves and their descendants. “Classical music,” he says, “remained white,” and thus lost its connection to a musical idiom that could have fueled something different, something distinctly American, and truly exceptional. Horowitz explores this idea at length in a book he is writing called Using the Past—A Meditation on Race and Culture, Reminiscence and Denial. He asks the reader to consider, for instance, what the black vernacular did for jazz. And to consider what it did for the American novel, beginning with Huckleberry Finn. (One can, of course, add what it did for pop music.) Horowitz cites the authority of W.E.B. du Bois, who wrote in 1903 that “the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas.” His argument, however, puts Horowitz at odds with white admirers of classical music who like it the way it is and today’s critics of cultural appropriation as well. But, he says, “appropriating is what composers do.” Take Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess: Some critics fault it for racial stereotypes; Horowitz calls it the “supreme creative achievement” of classical music in America. Not that there hasn’t been other music in the United States besides African-American music. Horowitz is himself an admirer of many American composers from Charles Ives to Steve Reich today. And he is especially interested in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when you could still find conductors who were taste leaders working on behalf of living, breathing composers, and when orchestras were prized by their communities: the golden age before World War I, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra was more popular than the Red Sox. Today, however, the vital signs of classical music all tend in the wrong direction, says Horowitz. The conductors fly in and leave. The musicianship is superior but dull. The composer is long dead, and, on stage and off, people know little about him anyway. The shrinking audience only wants to hear the most pedigreed and canonical of music. The orchestra is not a tastemaker; it’s a follower. Marketing and fund-raising efforts predominate. The financials drive everything, and everything is expensive: the musicians, the guest soloists, the fly-by conductors, the tickets. Horowitz complains a lot, and one of his bigger, more enveloping criticisms is what brings him to the humanities. “Orchestras are not interested in their own history,” he says. “They are not curators of the past.” This is the moment when Horowitz is most likely to smile his brokenhearted, I-can’t-help-it, I-have-to-tell-the-truth smile. As smiles go, it is remarkably sad. Theater companies, he points out, have dramaturges. Museums are staffed by scholars. But orchestras, despite their reverence for great music of the past, don’t even care about their own backstories, says Horowitz. “They’re happy to do coffee table books because they can sell them in their gift shops. . . . But will they underwrite a serious institutional history? No.” A month earlier, I had asked Horowitz on the phone if there was somewhere less cold than South Dakota in January that I might be able to see his program, Music Unwound, which has been performed with a dozen different orchestras across the country. Yes, he said, there was, but I should come to South Dakota anyway because the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra is “in some ways the most innovative orchestra in the United States.” It is, he said, “transformed.” My next question was, Transformed into what? In 2003, the orchestra hired a new conductor and music director. In the right hands, its board believed, SDSO could prove that it was more than just a solid regional orchestra. Delta David Gier, then assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, took the job and moved to Sioux Falls, joining the community he intended to serve. Gier came with an agenda, primarily musical. He initiated a project to perform compositions by Pulitzer Prize winners, forging a link with living composers that Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal hailed as “an unprecedented programming innovation.” A great lover of Gustav Mahler, Gier also decided that SDSO would perform the full cycle of Mahler’s symphonies as a bar-raising exercise to improve the level of performance. Although an advocate of new music, Gier is also a great believer in the standard ideal for an orchestra: performing, as well as humanly possible, a finite set of classic works hailing from a two- to three-hundred-year period of European history. But it is not the only ideal to which he subscribes. Gier also thinks orchestras should look to broaden their audiences beyond the usual crowd of subscription holders and wealthy board members. He believes an orchestra should belong to the whole community. At a cocktail party during his first year in Sioux Falls he approached a woman he knew to be managing the city’s programming for Martin Luther King Day. He wanted to talk about partnering and outreach to African Americans in Sioux Falls and was surprised by her response. Polite but discouraging, she told him that the community that really needed reaching out to wasn’t the black community. It was Native Americans. So began the Lakota Music Project. The way Gier tells it, the orchestra hosted a lunch for Native American leaders from the Sioux Falls area, and the reaction to his pitch was distrustful and even dismissive. Gier said outreach, and his guests heard exploitation. They wondered openly who was going to pay for his little program and, moreover, who was going to make money off it. But Gier made one friend that day, a tribal affairs consultant named Barry LeBeau, who thought, “This guy is nuts, but this is going to be a lot of fun.” In the next four years, Gier accompanied LeBeau to meetings across the state. He learned all kinds of things, for example, that “you don’t get people together on the rez without food.” And it should be their food, not yours: “A nice stew and some fried bread,” is what LeBeau said they needed. Gier also learned not to go around telling Native Americans what he wanted to do for them. Instead, he needed to ask what they should do together. “That’s when I realized this whole engagement thing was about listening,” says Gier, “not building programs that I thought would be helpful.” Finally, in May of 2009, the hard work paid off. The South Dakota Symphony Orchestra performed with Native-American musicians on three reservations and in two other South Dakota communities. The collaborative program included original compositions by Native and non-Native composers, presented in a historically informed context, and has now been performed more than 30 times. It also helped SDSO win the coveted Bush Prize for Community Innovation. Anyone familiar with orchestras is likely to ask, What did the musicians think of all this? Did they balk at sharing a stage with nonclassical music? Did they complain about the hours spent on buses, touring the state? Not that I heard. In fact, the handful I spoke to were all quick to raise the subject and were enthusiastic, echoing what the SDSO violinist Magdalena Modzelewska told a reporter in 2009, “You feel the greatness of the moment, its importance. And it’s wonderful, it really is wonderful.” In 2016, the Lakota Music Project worked with Horowitz’s Music Unwound program. Ronnie Theisz, professor emeritus of English and Indian Studies at Black Hills State University, participated, discussing on stage the rhythm structure and vocal techniques of Native-American music and reviewing how Native Americans had been understood as “noble savages” in the nineteenth century and their culture later reconceived as Indianist kitsch. Chris Eagle Hawk of the Oglala Lakota Tribe contributed remarks on the role of music in Lakota culture and the sacredness of the Black Hills. Music Unwound, being a multimedia program, also used imagery to draw out, for example, the connections between Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” and Dvořák’s Largo from the New World Symphony. New and old music together, all of it set in a rich historical context, and staged for a specific but heterogeneous audience of young and old, Indian and non-Indian: This is what Horowitz meant by “transformed.” On Saturday night, I get to see “Copland and Mexico,” which has been performed before in El Paso, Texas, through the leadership of Frank Candelaria and a collaboration involving the University of Texas at El Paso and the El Paso Orchestra. It has also been performed in Las Vegas with the Las Vegas Philharmonic Orchestra. The program is a loose script of musical pieces and spoken material, some of it expositional and some of it dramatic. Letters, poetry, and even Copland’s 1953 testimony before Congress are all built into the presentation. Again, outreach is a major part of the proceedings. South Dakota Symphony Orchestra recently hired a full-time engagement coordinator named Kristy Kayser to perform the day-to-day house calls and handshakes that keep South Dakotans at the center of the orchestra’s plans. Working with local schools, community centers, business groups, and churches, she has cast a wide net to invite the Latino community of Sioux Falls to the 1,900-seat Washington Pavilion. Students from two local middle schools have produced infographics about Mexico: its population, economy, crime (a surprising number of students looked into this one), history, and culture. These are on display in lobbies around the pavilion. Maestro Gier interviews two of the students on stage before the performance. In all, the orchestra gave away enough vouchers to draw 374 people in addition to the evening’s paying customers for an almost full house. All this community development may sound incompatible with an intellectually adventurous, idea-driven evening of musical discovery, but, apparently, it is not. The performance of Copland is confident, shimmering, and upbeat. The slacker parts of El Salón México recall Gier’s instructions during rehearsal that these should sound a little bit light-headed, inebriated even, but pleasantly so. Primed for yet another evening of classical music, the audience is being lulled into a false sense of security. “Copland deserves to be more controversial than he is,” Horowitz had told me. Gier and Candelaria also take a dim view of Copland. “Perpetually confused,” Gier called him. “El Salón México,” says Candelaria, “sounds like what a tourist thinks Mexican music sounds like.” Horowitz views Copland as a “synthetic populist,” someone who, “as a modernist, wasn’t really comfortable with the vernacular.” The beef against Copland was so strong that I was almost relieved when, over drinks, SDSO’s assistant conductor spoke up for Appalachian Spring, calling it a masterpiece. Copland’s flirtation with the Communists has not hurt his standing as the quintessential American composer, perhaps because no one thinks it was a true affair of the heart and because it took place in the desperate 1930s when communism appeared to many people, along with fascism and Nazism, as just another flavor on the menu of post-democratic scenarios. Also, Copland was a confirmed poet of the American story, as in the ballet Rodeo, complete with cowboys and a hoedown, selections of which open the Music Unwound program. But if the historical record shows something less than a serious political conversion, it left behind one rather damning piece of evidence, which “Copland and Mexico” highlights. In 1934, New Masses, a magazine of the Communist party, sponsored a contest for music to accompany a poem called “Into the Streets May First.” Copland wrote a piece of music, entered it, and won the contest. New Masses praised his song for its style and vitality, commenting that “some of the intervals may be somewhat difficult upon a first hearing or singing, but we believe the ear will readily accustom itself to their sound.” On stage, as Gier and Candelaria discuss the place of Mexico in the life and music of Copland, they are interrupted by a trio of sign-carrying protestors who burst on stage, singing Copland’s prizewinning Communist anthem. The orchestra helps fill out the vocals because plans to work with an actual choir had fallen through. An actor playing Copland then takes a spotlight at center stage and delivers his 1953 testimony from a hearing with Senator McCarthy and attorney Roy Cohn, both played by offstage voices. The composer denies any association with the Communist party, sounding rather weaselly as he says, “Not that I can recall,” “Not to my knowledge,” and so on. Copland disavowed the music for “Into the Streets May First,” calling it the “silliest thing I ever did.” And Joseph McCarthy, of course, soon had his comeuppance at the famous Army hearings. The second half of the program—and, musically, the night—belongs to Revueltas. “You have to choose,” says Horowitz, even if the program itself is proof that you don’t. It is, though, the unstated goal of Horowitz and company to make the case for Revueltas as a great composer. In a kind of mirroring of the Copland first act, Revueltas’s politics are on display. After Sensemayá, introduced by a superbly disruptive, almost noirish, piece of symphonic rebellion, the orchestra plays the composer’s tribute to Federico García Lorca that by itself makes a very convincing case for Revueltas’s depth of sensibility. Next up is a performance of Revueltas’s score for the 1936 film Redes, a gorgeous black-and-white morality tale about fishermen and political corruption shot by the cinematographer Paul Strand, which is screened as the orchestra plays. The music is not one of those mincing little scores one hears whispered in the background of some Hollywood films, but a bold work of art in its own right. Revueltas was not shy about his contribution, believing the film (which, like Revueltas himself, was never quite finished) should be cut to fit the music and not the other way around. Lacking a time-coded copy of the film, Gier has had to memorize each scene to make sure the orchestra is keeping pace. Over Christmas, his relatives were raising their eyebrows as he watched and rewatched this obscure old foreign-language film about fishermen, everyone thinking the same thought: Isn’t there an easier way to do this? The hard work pays off as the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra follows the fishing boats over each swell of ocean wave and annotates the film’s pivotal funeral scene. A child has died because of the cruelty of a system that benefits the rich and fails to protect the innocent, and the simple ritual of a burial in a small Mexican community achieves a massive pathos thanks to Strand’s cinematography and Revueltas’s sonic framing. Live-scoring is a weird kind of race between musicians and movie screen. Whenever the orchestra hits its marks, the effect is riveting. The knowledge that this live experience can’t be had at home on the couch helps ramp up the drama. Having listened to the orchestra practice some of this score, I realize how difficult it’s going to be for them to finish on time, and am taken aback when they find a way to synchronize the very last notes almost perfectly with the close of the film’s final scene. Afterward, when I see Gier, he is smiling but spent. After so many hours on the go this week, talking to students, doing radio interviews, running rehearsals, standing on the podium before one and all as the musician in charge, he is tired, and practically hiding in a seat next to his wife in the back of a restaurant across the street from the Washington Pavilion. And yet he has a matinee to conduct tomorrow. Candelaria, whose reading of the Sensemayá poem and other Revueltas-related text was especially fine, seems totally at ease. Horowitz is jubilant and even more talkative than usual. We talk about spirituality. Horowitz is a secular Jew. Music, he tells me, filled the space that others reserve for religion. Like many believers, Horowitz is conflicted in his faith. There is something paradoxical, he says, about being an American in the Eurocentric world of classical music. There is also something paradoxical about being Joseph Horowitz: In a cultural scene where the jury’s already in, he is reexamining the evidence. He is reopening the case, asking a lot of old questions like, Why isn’t there an American Mozart? And, When did all this become so settled and institutionalized and expensive? In a milieu full of listeners, he is a born arguer. Not that he doesn’t listen. In fact, he is a very sensitive listener as shown by countless examples in his vast output of writing, but I have come to think that Horowitz should make a one-man show of his thoughts on classical music and life. He’s an inspired monologist—or, as he puts it, “I have a big mouth”—and it would be very interesting and not a little bit shocking to have him airing his many opinions in a stand-up format. A brilliant historian, a freethinker, a music programmer, he is really one of a kind.

October 25,  2010 

Voice of America
 

Lakota Get Classical in Unique Musical Mash-Up

 

Native American drum group combines its sound with a classical symphony orchestra

 

By Jim Kent

It's not unusual to find musicians from different genres - or from different cultures - collaborating. Opera star Luciano Pavarotti belted out the blues with Eric Clapton and South Africa's Ladysmith Black Mambazo recorded an album with folk legend Paul Simon. Another more recent musical mash-up has a traditional Native American drum group performing with a classical symphony orchestra. Musical mash-up The Porcupine Singers, a traditional Lakota drum group, performs throughout South Dakota. So does the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra. But they never performed together - until last year. "Any conductor coming into a new music directorship with an orchestra is gonna spend time taking stock of the community and how the orchestra serves the community," says Delta David Gier, who took the helm of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra in 2004. His goal was to bring classical music to what he saw as traditionally underserved areas of the state. His immediate thought was the African-American community. "I met this woman who was in charge of the Martin Luther King Day celebrations in Sioux Falls and we struck up a conversation. I said, 'You know, a lot of orchestras are involved with Martin Luther King Day. They have concerts and invite African-American choirs and artists and so on.' She listened and when I finished talking she said, 'That's really nice if you want to pursue that. But I've got to tell you, I'm a black woman and I don't have a problem in South Dakota. If you want to talk about racial prejudice here, you've got to talk about Native Americans.'" Reaching out Gier followed her advice and set up a meeting with some of the state's Native American leaders, including Barry Lebeau, a Lakota who works with Native American artists across the state. Lebeau told him that ensembles from the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra had visited various reservations over the years for educational purposes. "But he wanted to do something more that involved the greater symphony and American Indian music," says Lebeau. "I was intrigued." LeBeau put Gier in touch with Ronnie Theisz, professor emeritus of American Indian Studies at Black Hills State University. Although he's not a Native American, Theisz has sung with the Porcupine Singers since 1972. He's now their oldest and most experienced member. Playing with tradition The group is known across the country for keeping the traditional songs of the Lakota alive. They've sung at the Kennedy Center and in the film "Dances With Wolves". But collaborating with the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra raised a concern "For traditional singers, the compelling value is always to preserve the tradition, not to experiment too much, not to change things to make it like Anglo music," Theisz says. But since the Lakota Music Project, as it was called, would combine aspects of classical and traditional Lakota music, Theisz and the Porcupine Singers felt it could work. And - from its first performance in May, 2009, it did. The first part of a Lakota Music Project concert offers individual selections by both groups, musically reflecting the human conditions of love, war, death and joy. During the second half of the program, the groups combine their sounds in a composition written especially for the project. Unique collaboration Both Native and non-Native musicians enjoyed the collaboration. Violinist Magdalena Modzelewska, who grew up in Poland, has played with the orchestra since 1998. She sees this project as an incredible musical and cultural journey. "You feel the, the greatness of the moment, the importance of it," she says. "And it's wonderful, It really is wonderful." Porcupine Singer Emanuel Black Bear agrees. "We sing a lot of old songs, and so does the orchestra. A lot of thought's gone into these songs and what we're doing and it's for our music. You know, no matter what race you are, it's the music." And the music will continue. Another piece has been commissioned for future performances so the Lakota Music Project can continue to share and expand its unique sound.

January 12,  2006 

New Music USA
 

Lakota Get Classical in Unique Musical Mash-Up

 

Native American drum group combines its sound with a classical symphony orchestra

 

By Delta David Gier

As music director of a regional American orchestra, assistant conductor for a major symphony orchestra, and as a guest conductor across this continent and in Europe, I have persistently pondered the role of contemporary music in orchestral programming. Theoretically, I have always believed that new music should have a more prominent place in the concert hall, but how to implement this idea has been a perennial question. Facing the real fears of audience reaction and taking some real steps toward innovation with a solid philosophy to back up programming choices has yielded fruit beyond expectation. What I have found is that audiences are much more open-minded than we believe. They are willing to give a piece of music a fair listening if they understand why it is being programmed. Communication of the purpose for our programming is key. Most orchestras and other “classical” ensembles and artists are putting a lot of effort into finding new ways to educate listeners and to reach out to people who are unfamiliar with the music we perform. What should be obvious is that contemporary music must be considered a vital part of our connection with both existing and potential audiences. That potential audience of the future is one whose listening tastes are very diverse—the iPod generation, or call it what you will—they have access to a range of music not even dreamt of by most of us presently engaged in “classical” music-making. And they listen to all of it. What this gives us, in my view, is a colossal opportunity to connect with them on many levels. We may be much more successful in reaching younger audiences through newer sounds than by trying to get them to “appreciate” the standard repertoire first. They will learn to love Mendelssohn and Berlioz when they are hooked on the experience of the live performance of art music. What occurs to me now, with one foot in both worlds, is that rethinking the programming philosophy of a symphony orchestra might actually be easier to do in a regional setting than in larger metropolitan orchestras. Any community that is home to a professional orchestra will usually have a subscriber base that is quite sophisticated. And most of these communities are home to a college or a university, full of intellectually curious listeners who are eager for new experiences, intrigued by what is on the cutting edge, and who tend to pride themselves on being in the know. When an orchestra is the only act in town, possibly in the entire region, that ensemble is responsible for presenting the entire spectrum of repertoire. There might not be many opportunities to see or hear something new, so innovation may be expected, or at least more easily accepted, by its patrons. By contrast, large metropolitan orchestras could be seen by some as guardians of the standard repertoire simply because there are other outlets for new repertoire. If a listener in a large metropolitan area wants to hear new music, there are new music ensembles and touring groups to hear, so the pressure may be off of the larger symphony orchestras to fulfill that role. Underlying the programming of contemporary music in many orchestras today is a philosophy that relegates it to the realm of obligation. The players in the ensemble sense this, and, ultimately, the audience receives the same message. The point should not be simply to play a contemporary piece in order to get to the standard rep on the program. The real sense of duty should be to present the best of what we have discovered, passionately and with excellence, the same way we approach Beethoven, Debussy, or Mahler. But this requires a shift in the programming paradigm for most of us. A few more questions may be helpful in arriving at that juncture: Do we really believe that our Western musical culture peaked in the 18th and 19th centuries? What could happen if we made a real commitment to exploring the music of our time? A revolt? Is that what we are afraid of, and if so, how could we program in order to make sure that doesn’t happen? Or…might we experience a musical renaissance? Is that only a dream? Do we have the courage to take steps in order to make it a possibility? And lastly, if we want to build audiences, broadening our reach to include a younger and more diverse demographic, and if we intend to reach children in order to ensure audiences for the future, where does contemporary music fit in? Are these future audiences just for the 150 years of standard repertoire which is the bulk of what is now played? The music director of a symphony orchestra has a responsibility to adapt to the environment in which music is being made and to be sensitive to the community the ensemble serves. Programming requires a creative approach that is to some extent demographically based. What works in one location may or may not transfer to another. I serve as the music director of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra. We recently performed a rather extensive production of Peer Gynt, including the complete incidental music of Grieg and a substantial portion of Ibsen’s text, with actors, dancers, singers, chorus, etc. In the area we serve, a substantial percentage of the population is of Norwegian heritage. This year also happens to be the 100th anniversary of Norwegian independence, so this project made sense in this place at this time. There are not many other areas of this country where the kind of effort that went into mounting such a production would be warranted. When it comes to contemporary music one’s ear must be even more closely connected to the ground. This process is aided by actively researching the region and its demographics. One of the principal projects on the table for our orchestra presently is how to make music with and for the American Indian population. There are nine reservations in South Dakota. The state has even officially renamed Columbus Day “Native American Day.” Insight comes just as frequently (and often more importantly) in serendipitous encounters with people who share your vision. Last Spring I had a very interesting series of conversations with a remarkable woman of diverse interests with a passion for all things South Dakotan. She is particularly interested in what the symphony can do to build cultural bridges in the state. We spoke at length about all kinds of possibilities: making music on the reservations, Native American Day concerts, commissioning new works based on Native music and instruments, creating public forums for cultural connection, playing music together and for each other, talking about the music, whether sacred, secular, dance, on and on. We spoke of the recent concerts we had performed with music of contemporary jazz composers, one of whom (Jeff Raheb) had actually already written a piece with a Lakota Indian connection. (We subsequently performed that piece, on a reservation, and on the same program featured a Lakota Indian flutist playing the Lakota flute tune on which Raheb’s music was based.) We explored my idea of putting together concerts of music by composers with significant rock influence, whether Chris Rouse, Steve Mackey, Derek Bermel, or the more obvious Zappa and Elvis Costello, always with a view towards connecting with new audiences. This South Dakotan woman even asked about country music which, I confessed, I had not even begun to explore—or so I thought. What had occurred to me was the feasibility of incorporating American “roots” music into symphonic pieces. At one point during all of this brainstorming I thought to myself, “We’re right back to Dvorak!” There are different planes of programming for a symphony orchestra. Artistically, we think carefully about what the orchestra needs to play for its own growth, taking into consideration what repertoire has been programmed in its history, where the strengths and weaknesses lay, and from there how to play to the strengths and shore up the weaknesses. What the audience needs to hear is of utmost importance, again looking at a long stretch of programming to find holes in the repertoire in order to provide a balanced offering. We do well by the standard repertoire in this respect, but what is missing is an active exploration of the “best” of contemporary music. By no means do I intend to belittle the performance of local composers—I have already stated the importance of connecting to the local community—but typically, when a symphony orchestra programs contemporary music they will rarely do more than an occasional piece by a locally-based composer. In so doing, they neglect the most internationally-known and respected composers of today. If this is the only pattern of programming, it is not a fair representation of contemporary music. An audience whose only impression of contemporary music is the work of local composers has an incomplete picture. The orchestra itself is not fully engaged in the contemporary music-making process either and does not have the opportunity of making contact with the great composers of our time. A comprehensive and progressive programming philosophy should incorporate a serious exploration of the music of our own time. I acknowledge that the foundation of our programming is, and must remain, the standard literature that we all acknowledge and revere. But the responsible extension of this idea is an active, systematic presentation of leading contemporary composers. Part of our concert offerings should a laboratory, an experiment in the establishment of composers for the future. It is exciting to be a part of this process and our audiences, if given that perspective, can be quite interested in it as well. Indeed, they can and do take a certain pride in their participation. We now have a canon of composers whose works are considered standard repertoire from the first half of the 20th century (Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Bartok, etc.). That is not to say others will not be recognized and added to that canon, but we at least have come to appreciate several monumental contributions to the repertoire from that time period. For the second half of the 20th century however, at least in most people’s minds and ears, the jury is still out. There are surely major contenders (Messiaen, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, along with many Americans), but most audiences are not familiar with these names, let alone their work. How do we go about establishing these composers? Do we leave it to the major ensembles and artists alone, or is there a part for all of us to play?

May 9, 2005

New Music USA

 

Building an Audience in South Dakota . . . with Pulitzer Winners

Native American drum group combines its sound with a classical symphony orchestra

 

By Delta David Gier

In November 2003, I conducted the South Dakota Symphony as a candidate for the position of music director. After almost twenty years in New York, ten spent as an assistant conductor at the New York Philharmonic, making music on the prairie was a surprisingly refreshing experience. During the course of the week-long rehearsal/interview process, I had a rather lengthy meeting with the Argus Leader, the main paper in Sioux Falls. The arts writer and I talked about many things during our two hours together, but one thing apparently stuck with her. The headline of the article later that week read, “Conductor Says Contemporary Music Is Very Important.” To be honest, I thought, “I’m dead. They’ll never hire me.” But when they called to offer me the position, I had another dilemma on my hands: How do I make good on my commitment to contemporary music and still have a job at the end of my first season? As I was getting ready to jump on the plane and go sign my contract in South Dakota, I ran into my neighbor in Montclair, New Jersey, Steve Culbertson, publisher at Subito Music. He told me that one of his composers, Paul Moravec, had just won the Pulitzer Prize for music. I congratulated him and continued on to the airport. Then, while on the plane, an idea struck me: an entire season of Pulitzer prize-winning composers, one on each concert. It seemed to me an interesting way to present prominent American composers in a unified way. Those attending all of our concerts could come out of the season with a fairly well-rounded familiarity with what is being produced musically in our country, and perhaps find a new way to connect with music. While the immediate concern was how to incorporate contemporary music into the present season in an enticing fashion, the long-term goal has been to lay the groundwork for building an ever more serious engagement with the music being created in our own time. It is my strongly held belief that we need to be actively participating in the process of establishing composers in the concert hall. In our day, this includes the performance of living composers as well as an ongoing exploration of music written in the second half of the 20th century. On a philosophical level, most would agree that this is a worthy pursuit. Practically, working toward that goal is a matter of building trust. Enter this Pulitzer concept—a sort of “Good Housekeeping” seal of approval that lets people know that there is some consensus about the work of a particular composer and a reason for performing these works that lies beyond the tastes of the person doing the programming. Our season is basically 13 weeks, plus a few auxiliary concerts. We have six “classical,” three chamber orchestra, and four “pops” weeks. For this first season, we used only the six classical weeks for the Pulitzer pieces, mostly because of the costs involved in performing contemporary works. All of our chamber orchestra concerts are performed four times, once in Sioux Falls and then in three other locations around the state, and the repeat performance rentals make programming contemporary music cost-prohibitive. The orchestra has a core of nine full-time players, principals in the orchestra that also make up the Dakota String Quartet and the Dakota Wind Quintet. As these entities they perform all season, touring throughout the region with a concert series of their own, along with many types of educational and outreach services. The rest of the orchestra comes from around the region: freelance musicians from as far away as Minneapolis/St. Paul, teachers at colleges and various primary and secondary schools, and musicians who have picked up other careers but who still play quite well. The audience in Sioux Falls is drawn from a community of approximately 125,000 people, of which our orchestra has 2,400 subscribers—a substantial percentage. This shows that we have huge support for our symphony orchestra in our region, where we are treasured as a cultural gem. As with most American orchestras, however, the SDSO new music offerings have been sporadic and relatively sparse up to this point in time. The sophistication and open-mindedness of our audience definitely gives me freedom to explore repertoire with them, but I find that cluing them in on the reasoning behind the programming is extremely helpful. It’s a question of syntax, really. Lack of familiarity with the multiplicity of compositional languages can make individual encounters with new music seem over-(or under-)whelming. Put in context and given a reason for serious consideration, these works have a greater possibility for connecting with their hearers. Of the six Pulitzer composers that we have presented this season, five fall into a sort of “usual suspect” category, and the sixth was Moravec, the most recent winner: John Corigliano: Gazebo Dances Joseph Schwantner: Distant Runes and Incantations Paul Moravec: Monserrat (Concerto for Cello and Orchestra) Christopher Rouse: Kuku-Ilimoku and Rapture Aaron Jay Kernis: Musica Celestis John Adams: Short Ride in a Fast Machine and Tromba Lontana The idea was to present a substantive representation of each composer in order that our audience could come away from the encounter with a real sense of who they are. To be sure, none of these pieces is particularly challenging to the ear, especially for those of us for whom contemporary music is a staple in our musical diet. Again, building trust is key, preparing the way for engagement with all types of concert music. To that end, I have taken great care to present these pieces in the most engaging way possible, in order to give our audience a good perspective. The balance of the program of every concert had to be such that each contemporary piece fit well with more standard repertoire. We have played symphonies of Dvorak, Beethoven, and Sibelius, concertos of Schumann, Grieg, and Prokofiev, but the thread tying the season together has been contemporary. One of the most interesting programs featured the Mozart “Prague” Symphony to start, the C.P.E. Bach Cello Concerto with Hai-ye Ni (Associate Principal Cello, New York Philharmonic), intermission, the Moravec (before which he spoke briefly), ending with Kodaly’s Galanta Dances. Having Paul there participating in the rehearsal process, speaking to the orchestra and the audience, was a real highlight of the season for all of us. I make it a habit to speak to and with our audience about the music we perform whenever appropriate, which is especially important when it comes to new music. The days when orchestras could simply program any music, perform it without explanation, and expect audiences to swallow it whole are gone, if those days ever actually existed in the first place. Part of the problem with programming new music in our present day comes from the legacy of decades of concerts of music that audiences found difficult to understand, played without any attempt at communicating why this music was important for them to hear. Again, syntax, unfamiliarity with a language most audiences don’t speak. Audiences don’t generally come prepared to participate in a concert so actively, where they need to engage in understanding what is being performed. I am trying to take our audience beyond the level of entertainment to which they are accustomed, to the place where they can see themselves as participants in the perpetuation of art music, as this is what they are in actuality. Our audience seems to appreciate that perspective and have responded beautifully; sometimes gratefully, other times indignantly, but always real-ly. At the end of our season, those who have attended all six of these programs seem to be taking pride in their new knowledge of who is composing what and how they fit into the bigger picture. I should step aside briefly and say that there is, probably quite obviously, a good deal of verbal communication going on here. Most audiences appreciate the connection beyond the proscenium, an opportunity to engage more personally with the performers and to “catch the fire” of our enthusiasm for the music. There is always the question of “How much is too much?” and we have to keep from falling into the trap of spoon-feeding, but a tastefully brief introduction or enticement to an unfamiliar piece simply helps a lot. This is not something that comes easily for everyone, but with some creativity the right person or people can be found to provide the appropriate entrée in each situation. Clear but passionate communication about the music has been a very important element in the success of our presentation of these works. It is very satisfying to converse with our audience about these newer pieces. After each concert, I try to spend a significant amount of time in the foyer of the hall talking with people about the performance. The conversations are far and away mostly about the “new piece.” I also have a symphony e-mail address which is provided in every program. Whenever and however I receive it, the feedback is always very thoughtful, but also visceral. Not everyone loves every piece, of course, but everyone that I have spoken with about this (literally hundreds by this point) has said they were glad we are doing this. For me, the most satisfying aspect comes from the fact that I see that people are starting to listen in a different way. They are truly engaging more and more, with all of the music we are playing, but the contemporary music is the impetus for this deepening of their (our) experience. Antal Dorati once said that a good audience listens very, very hard. That’s what I’m after. And the orchestra, not least in this equation, has not only risen to this challenge but has vigorously embraced the concept. A steady diet of fresh repertoire certainly has had an invigorating effect, even if some of the programs feel a little hectic in their preparation. The players, gauging reactions in the community, tell me that they find some people more willing to consider the symphony because of this series. As I often remind our listeners, there are people in the hall, perhaps sitting right next to them, for whom contemporary music is the most interesting music we play. It would seem that this is a very effective way to reach new audiences, those who would not otherwise be interested in most of what we play, but who are artistically and intellectually curious. We can definitely work with that. It does take a whole lot more effort to put together a season in which contemporary music is fully integrated. Passionate communication is a primary factor in presenting art music of any era. It has worked wonderfully for us this season, and we are continuing into next season as well. The next step for us? Steven Stucky with the South Dakota Symphony for a lecture/demonstration followed by a complete performance of his 2005 Pulitzer prize-winning Second Concerto for Orchestra. Because of the groundwork we have laid, I am confident that we will have a wonderful musical experience, and a major success.

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