2014 Program Notes, Book 10 47
Friday, August 15 and Saturday, August 16, 2014
“Our conference happened in the year of millennial change. We look at these dates
as landmarks because humans have always marked time, and during the Cambridge
conference it became clear to many of us how arbitrary these landmarks of time are.
“Century changes usually elicit much press on how they’ll affect us; the beginning
of the 20th century was full of positive utopian predictions, and in contrast our 21st
century seems to cast an overall darker shadow so far. But the millennium change
this time somehow had a different feel; it seemed to inspire questions more than
predictions. For example, might the new millennium denote the beginning of a whole
brave new culture, divorced from the past? So many of the institutions of the previous
millennium are currently under heavy review — they are costly, for one thing — and in
music one of them may be the orchestra itself. Many of us have feared the funneling
of the opera house, the concert hall, the symphony into one big enclave of the rich
musical past. Though there is still a passionate audience, and schools of music and
conservatories are turning out very talented artists performing this music, many, many
people in our society do not relate to this culture at all. It is clearly up to us in music to
invite these people into our enclave and to the many beauties waiting for them.
“But it also up to us to recognize that new, vital, energetic forms of art are
aborning all around us that do not directly grow from the previous art we know.
These forms will give birth to new institutions, as they have already in the recent
past (for example, nothing like the exponential growth of popular music in the last
century ever occurred before, dwarfing the classical world and inventing its own
history). Each new technology unleashes a new possible artistic medium. How will
the orchestra face this brave new musical world?
“Thus
Millennium
. When Grant Park commissioned me for a work, I drew on my
thoughts about time from fourteen years ago and began to think of the orchestra’s
history of the last four centuries. The piece is a concerto for orchestra with a
progressive musical form — unlike a symphony which is often circular in shape and
returning on itself. The origins of the orchestra are hinted at the piece’s beginning,
but it is mainly the interplay of solo instruments and instrumental choirs in dialogue
that advances the piece as in a play or novel. There are several passing sections
like chapters in this one-movement piece, played without pause:
Introitus
,
Rockets
,
Dreamscape:
,
The Love-Dream
,
Rude Awakenings
,
A Conclusion, for Now
.
“
Introitus
harks back to the beginnings of human noise, where
Rockets
recalls
the rocket-like upward string scales of the Mannheim School, the first modern
massed orchestra sound. The modern orchestra took its basic form at the end of the
18th century, expanding in the 19th-century Romantic era
(Dreamscape: The Love-
Dream)
to the form it has taken since the First World War — where it remained for
the last hundred years virtually intact, as a living historical monument. The remaining
Rude Awakenings
are what we all are experiencing, and
A Conclusion, for Now
won’t
provide the comforting closure of many large orchestral pieces. But
Millennium
has
the positive charge of being premiered in a millennial park in a vibrant, evolving city.
And here we all are together in this park, hearing a new piece.”
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