UCI WORKSHOP : COMPOSER COACHES THE YOUNG

Music can bring people together as no other art can, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Norman Dello Joio.

“You put a band of kids together making harmony and they start relating to each other like they’ve never done before,” Dello Joio, 73, said in a recent interview.

Dello Joio has been coaching more than 70 local high school musicians in his own choral and instrumental works at UC Irvine’s sixth annual Summertime Music Workshop Festival.

His purpose, as Dello Joio tells it, is “to reach out to young people and make them aware that composers are still living.”

The composer’s interest in reaching young people goes back a long way. In 1959, for instance, he devised a project to place young composers in high schools across the nation and thus give them the opportunity to write music for the school ensembles.

Funded by the Ford Foundation, the Contemporary Music Project for Creativity in Music Education, as it was bureaucratically called, lasted 14 years. Dello Joio was chairman of the policy committee.

“We placed 75 composers,” Dello Joio said with obvious pride.

“These included Philip Glass and Salvatore Martirano. They were all very young at the time, and, of course, they went on to other things. But instead of sitting in an attic somewhere writing a symphony that no one was going to play, they had a ready audience, and there was a market for the music. And publishers contacted them.”

Of his work with the UCI students, Dello Joio expressed enthusiasm and optimism:

“The students in the choral workshop were marvelous,” he said. “There was a wonderful tone quality out of those voices, which shows that they were working very hard.

“Naturally, instrumental students have much more difficulty with performance than vocal students. For them to reach an achievement on some level takes a longer time.

“But when dealing with young kids, it’s important that you don’t discourage them or make them feel inadequate.”

In his own varied music career, New York-born Dello Joiobegan musical life as an organist, following in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. He received grants and awards, and there were regular performances of his music almost from the start.

During the Depression, he played in a jazz band to help support himself. Later he taught at Sarah Lawrence College and various other colleges.

He turned to composition only when he felt that he “could play some kind of role.”

Highlights of his compositional career include the scores he provided for dance giants Eugene Loring (“Prairie,” “The Duke of Sacramento”), Martha Graham (“Diversion of Angeles,” “Seraphic Dialogue”) and Jose Limon. In fact, his 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning composition, “Meditations on Ecclesiastes,” for string orchestra, was written for Limon’s 1956 ballet “There Is a Time.”

But in addition to his concert and stage works, he embraced such popular outlets as television, composing the music for the series “Air Power” and winning an Emmy Award in 1965 for the NBC special “Scenes from the Louvre.”

“As a composer, I didn’t change when I started to write TV music,” Dello Joio said. “And I wasn’t asked to tone anything down, either.

“My music was accessible and had an appeal. Of course, some composers said it appealed (only) to the most base instincts. But people said that about Verdi’s ‘La Traviata,’ too.”

As part of his advice to young people, he urges composers not to overlook television and the school system:

“Be a realist and meet the realities that are at your doorstep. Today, there are opportunities in television and in the schools that we didn’t have. And don’t wait for handouts.”

But his main advice is to “be true to yourself.”