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New York
"I'm concerned about the future of orchestras and new composition," Aaron Jay
Kernis told me, looking wary, and at the same time eager. He's the 1999 Pulitzer
prizewinner in music, and along with Michael Torke was one of two youngish but established
composers who got commissions from Disney -- yes, the Disney that gave us Donald Duck and
"The Little Mermaid" -- to greet the millennium with huge choral symphonies.
This commission, Mr. Kernis said, might address his concerns about the future, since, with
Disney's visibility, it might draw attention not just to himself, but to all new classical
music.
His words seem poignant now,
because the New York Philharmonic has presented premieres of both Disney works, and in
response, some prominent critics -- not loving what they heard -- thought that Disney
might have bought the two composers' souls. Which is bitterly ironic. I had long
conversations, on and off the record, with many people involved in the premieres -- the
composers, their publishers, a publicist for one of them, and people at the Philharmonic
-- and not once did anybody even hint that Disney had control. Instead, the doubts went
the other way. Why wasn't Disney doing more? Why, with Disney's clout and Disney's money,
wouldn't the symphonies be televised? Why didn't Disney host a grand reception after the
premiere?
The answers, I suspect, are not too complicated. It's well known that
Michael Eisner, Disney's CEO, heard Mahler's Eighth Symphony, a gigantic work for
orchestra and singers, and was so inspired that he wanted to commission a modern
equivalent. He delegated the project to Jean-Luc Choplin, a delightful Gallic type who
counts Robert Wilson and the late John Cage among his friends, once ran dance productions
at the Paris Opera, and now works for Disney, planning special arts events. Mr. Choplin
picked Mr. Kernis and Mr. Torke, wishing, as he told me, "to give a chance to younger
composers who are using tonality."
Of course Mr. Eisner
wouldn't want a dark, atonal piece, but then the return to tonal harmony isn't exactly a
Disney plot. A new generation of composers has been writing tonal music for quite a while,
and Mr. Kernis and Mr. Torke are its leaders; they get commissions everywhere. To start
the project going, Mr. Eisner wrote a "treatment," as he might for a proposed
new movie; if the composers had followed it, they would have written folksy oratorios,
tracing the life of an American family from the dawn of the atomic age to the millennium.
But Mr. Kernis didn't care for that, so (with no complaint from Disney) he evolved his own
scenario, a search for hope and light amid the horrors of our century. Mr. Torke,
cheerful, wry, and worldly, adopted Mr. Eisner's plan, but "pared it down," he
says, "to haiku, then pared it down still more," reducing it to abstract scenes
from post-World War II America, scenes of everything from civil rights to baseball and
rock 'n' roll.
Disney paid for two advance
readings of these works, one of which expensively involved the full Philharmonic.
"This was the biggest luxury that Disney provided," says Welz Kauffman, the
orchestra's thoughtful artistic administrator. He'd be thrilled if all commissions could
be tried out this way, not for the commissioner to ask for changes, but so the composers,
conferring with conductors, could make fixes on their own. Certainly the readings made the
composers feel that they had Disney's support, since, as Mr. Torke says, when Disney
people heard the music, they only told him, "We love what you're doing. Keep on doing
it." When Kurt Masur, the music director of the Philharmonic, had anything to say,
Mr. Torke adds, the Disney people listened with a respect bordering on fear. Apart from
Mr. Choplin, they didn't know classical music; they weren't on familiar territory.
And that, I think, explains the lack of vast publicity. There was talk,
early on, of television, and of performances at Disney's world-wide theme parks; that was
very likely Hollywood speaking, and people on the classical music side might have taken it
too seriously. (Mr. Kauffman, who has Hollywood experience, says he functioned as "a
currency adapter," explaining Disney to the Philharmonic, and the Philharmonic to
Disney.) Mr. Torke told me he's arranging the last part of his piece for a parade at
Disneyland; Mr. Choplin, who's producing the spectacle, said he'd asked for this from Mr.
Torke, but that he wouldn't use the arrangement until he knows for sure it's suitable.
Which -- coldly summarizing -- might be Disney's take on the complete symphonies: We can
fund them at the Philharmonic, but before we roll them out in something we produce
ourselves, we'll have to know they work for us.
So it's with sadness --
especially since the composers have been attacked -- that I have to say the symphonies
don't work for me. The music doesn't have a trace of Disney sellout. As Mr. Kauffman
rightly said to me, other recent works by Mr. Kernis ("Simple Songs," for
instance, which had its premiere in 1995) have the same eager sunlit harmony that's in his
Disney piece, "Garden of Light." Mr. Torke's "Book of Proverbs," just
released on a Decca CD, has the same slyly pointed, bouncy tonal verve that's in
"Four Seasons," his Disney composition.
But Mr. Kernis chose his
librettists (Menna Elfin, later replaced by David Simpatico) badly. Some of their text is
doggerel: "For our children we'll find a way/To give them hope for a better
day." The rest pounds and bangs, insisting on the obvious until Mr. Kernis had almost
no choice but to write obvious music. And he did: If I page through the score, I'm
dismayed by how frequent the climaxes, even small ones, are. It hardly matters that the
piece is full of compositional niceties; the very strength of Mr. Kernis's workmanship
throws the overall naiveté of the work into even stronger relief.
Mr. Torke's text (by Philip
Littell) is better, but contradicts the folksiness it seems to look for. In a rural
vignette, a farm woman sings about her children: "Too soon they will be growing up/We
got cows and corn, but they're the crop." The effect is unsettling; no farmer, I
think, would devalue what she grows in quite that way (and since she'd want her crops to
grow, the comparison of crops to children she wants to keep around forever seems
uncomfortably forced).
Faced with these unworkable
conceits, Mr. Torke wrote too-clever music, built from lively fragments and wonderfully
wrought, but, at least to my ear, not quite there emotionally. His American touches,
especially, don't seem to work. An artificial taste of blues, in a section about a black
girl frightened as she goes to integrate a Southern high school, seems both a blatant and
unintentionally patronizing way to remind us of her race.
So I'll end with yet another
irony. If Disney misled the two composers, it wasn't by corrupting them, but by proposing
an artistic standard that they couldn't meet. Asked to write huge, optimistic scores, they
both responded honestly, but Mr. Kernis got bombastic, and Mr. Torke hid behind his
cleverness; they couldn't make their music as large as their conception. It's hard to
blame them, because classical composers, lacking a wide audience, aren't used to making
big, plain and highly public statements. Some people even think they shouldn't, which
might account for the critics' anger. But I disagree: I think classical music needs to
widen its appeal. So I hope that Disney gives us more commissions -- to encourage
composers to expand their reach.
Wall Street Journal, November 2, 1999
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