SPECULUM THRIVES ON NEW MUSIC

Though many listeners find contemporary classical music too difficult and complex to fathom, the new-music chamber group Speculum Musicae thrives on it.

“There’s something wonderful about the complexity, which is challenging to work out,” violist John Graham said in a recent phone interview from New York. “In that complexity, there are wonderful sonorities, wonderful juxtapositions of timbres and instruments and a very compelling world.”

The group was formed in New York in 1971 precisely to specialize in this repertory, Graham said. Its name, which means “Mirror of Music,” was chosen to reflect the musicians’ intention to reproduce the composer’s wishes faithfully.

Since then, the ensemble has commissioned more than 45 compositions and given frequent, critically well-received performances of music by Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Donald Martino, Charles Wuorinen, as well as by Berg, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Stockhausen.

Tonight at 8 at Chapman College in Orange, the ensemble will play Babbitt’s “Hopkins Songs,” John Cage’s “Six Melodies,” William Kraft’s “Gallery 45,” Schoenberg’s “Ode to Napoleon” and Mario Davidovsky’s String Trio. Jan Opalach will be the baritone soloist.

The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. on Saturday at the Japan American Theatre in Los Angeles, as part of the ongoing L.A. New Music Festival. The group also will perform new works by members of the Orange County Composers Circle at 1 p.m. Friday at Chapman College.

Speculum Musicae is a cooperative, with programming choices arrived at through consensus, according to Graham.

“That consensus tends to be more focused on things that stimulate and challenge us as instrumentalists, rather than on categorically saying we play this style or that style,” Graham said.

Rehearsals of up to 40 hours for a single work have been reported, but Graham dismissed that number as nothing unusual.

“All serious musicians spend as much time as they need to to learn any piece from the standard repertory, which still demands a lot of time,” he said.

“Ask any string quartet how much time they spend initially learning any one of Beethoven’s late quartets--then relearning and relearning it. It would be an incredible number of hours.”

As to why composers want to write compositions that are difficult to listen to, Graham called that “a complex issue” but noted that audiences for the literary and the visual arts seem to have “much more leeway” for complexity.

“In those two other forms, you have the object there that you can keep going over and over until you find what it has to offer you.

“With music, though, the (experience) starts, goes through and stops, and you often don’t know what’s gone by or happened to you. You can’t hold on to the experience.”

Only through re-hearing can a person absorb what the work has to offer.

But the same is true with music such as the Beethoven Ninth, Graham argued.

“If you’ve never heard any Beethoven, walked in and heard the Ninth, you might--but I don’t think you would--have a transcendental experience. In our country, in our culture, there are people who would do anything rather than hear Beethoven. We sort of forget that. It’s not transcendental to them.”

Playing in Speculum Musicae is not a full-time job for any of the members. They also play in other New York new music groups, orchestras, chamber groups or early music ensembles.

Members earn only an average of “maybe $3,000” yearly for their work in Speculum.

“That raises the whole issue, then, of why, if you can’t make more money at it, do you do it?” Graham said. “Because we really do enjoy it. It’s something we believe in.”