Sunday, December 19, 2010

NPR: 'Teaching The Symphony To Swing' by Lara Pellegrinelli; Orchestra Workshop With Tania León

[Tania León]

[Audio for this story from Weekend Edition Sunday will be available at approx. 12:00 p.m. ET]
December 19, 2010
“When it comes to creating new pieces for orchestra, opportunities for composers today are few and far between for anyone, let alone composers who work primarily in jazz. So Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies and American Composers Orchestra devised a workshop to give jazz composers the tools they need to conjure new sounds from the imposing symphony orchestra.

Worlds Apart
"'You become identified as jazz, and even if you're a composer, you don't really interact with those people down the hall that are studying classical composition,' says American Composers Orchestra Executive Director Michael Geller. He says that classical composers still have advantages. 'They're introduced to techniques and composers and music,' Geller says. 'If you want to study jazz composition, you might be limited to some classes in big-band arranging or something like that.' Geller was among those who wanted to level the playing field. So he helped enlist a group of distinguished composers to lead seminars on contemporary orchestration, orchestral techniques and notation.

“These composers, including Cuban-born composer and pianist Tania Leon, also happen to be well-versed in jazz and other traditions. 'This is how I grew up, when I was at the conservatory training to be a concert pianist,' Leon says.” “In the first half of the 20th century, the works of composers such as Igor Stravinsky and George Gershwin drew overtly on jazz. Across the color line, jazz composers like Duke Ellington ventured into the elite terrain of classical music — but not without obstacles. It wasn't until 1931 that William Grant Still became the first African-American to receive a premiere by a major orchestra.

“Still wrote about the viability of having a 'Negro orchestra,' and he didn't mean a segregated orchestra of black musicians. That already existed, says George Lewis, the MacArthur Fellowship-winning composer who directs Columbia's Center for Jazz Studies. 'Negro was a metaphor for people who were code switchers,' Lewis says. That's a term he uses for people fluent in multiple musical traditions. 'You had to play classical music. You had to play popular music. You had to be a conductor. You had to be a pianist. You had to be an oboist. And then you had to learn to improvise, because that's what it is in the vernacular music world — it's all about improvisation.'

“Lewis says that Still 'figured a symphony orchestra of people like this, the so-called 'negro orchestra,' would be able to play the written page and to do improvisation. He talked about doing improvisations with the orchestra, and this was 1930.' Jazz is all about improvisation, but the orchestra hasn't evolved much in that direction. Composer Derek Bermel is also on the institute's faculty, and he says that improvising isn't the only thing that separates jazz musicians from classical players. 'They probably can't swing in the way that a jazz musician can swing,' Bermel says.

“That was the point of the Institute: to help jazz composers figure out what you do with all of those non-improvising, un-swinging orchestral musicians. The answers have the potential to shift the course of concert music. 'With jazz composers writing concert music, anything can happen, because there's that freedom,' Bermel says, 'that freedom of improvisation, of being in the moment that's such a part of jazz. That could really combine beautifully with that sense of tradition and exactitude that's in the classical world.'” “You'll have to wait until June to hear the results from the Institute's participants. Eight of them will be selected for an American Composers Orchestra reading of their works.” [Duke Ellington (1899-1974), Tania León (b. 1943) and William Grant Still (1895-1978) are featured at]

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