The Philharmonic’s New Man for New Music

There is a fork in the road up to Yaddo, the renowned artists’ retreat in a lush, extensive estate near the Saratoga Race Course. In one direction, a sign invites visitors to the estate’s gorgeous public rose gardens. However, another sign--”Private Properties/Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted”--warns tourists from taking the other path.

“Go for prosecution,” Steven Stucky, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s newly appointed composer-in-residence, said over the phone when giving directions. But prosecution seems no threat at all as one wends up a rustic hill. Even arriving at the imposing 19th-Century stone mansion that could serve as an almost perfect haunted house--full of Poe fantasies--one finds only a pleasant 38-year-old composer, who seems a little lost among the grandiose Victorian furnishings.

Stucky is no prosecutor, let alone a Roderick Usher, and his new job is to be neither prosecutorial nor scary, but just the opposite.

The composer-in-residence program under which Stucky comes to the Philharmonic is a project of the national Meet the Composer organization, and an important part of principal’s duties is to be a friendly public defender and advocate of new music.

“I think that a person in my position,” he says, “can help by speaking to groups of various kinds and by making down-to-earth suggestions about how this repertory can be approached, for demystifying, descarifying the whole subject for them, and being seen as an ordinary listener like them. We all need strategies for facing unknown repertory.”

Stucky may appear, however, to be an unlikely choice to follow in the footsteps of the loquacious William Kraft or John Harbison, the Philharmonic’s previous composers-in-residence. Unlike Kraft, who was long associated with the Philharmonic and the local new music community, Stucky is a stranger to Southern California.

And while Harbison set the Philharmonic precedent for appointing a Northeasterner, Stucky, who is 10 years Harbison’s junior, does not yet have the national reputation of his predecessor. But that is rapidly changing.

Most of Stucky’s life since 1971 has revolved around Cornell University, which he attended as a student and where he is now an associate professor of composition. And most of his compositions have, until recently, had their creation in university settings. Indeed, when the supposedly inclusive New Grove Dictionary of American Music was published a couple of years ago, Stucky was not yet deemed prominent enough to have been included, a surprising omission given that Stucky also had written one of the best books in English on Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski.

But a breakthrough came two years ago when he wrote “Dreamwaltzes,” a 15-minute fantasy on 19th-Century Viennese waltzes that had been commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra for its Summerfest, the orchestra’s summer festival which is under the direction of Leonard Slatkin.

“Dreamwaltzes” is an outgoing work. With its bits of Brahms and “Rosenkavalier” floating about, it makes its points cheerfully, and it has proven a popular success. Slatkin plans to tour it next season with his regular orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony.

Next season will also see two more new orchestral works by Stucky, a Concerto for Orchestra for the Philadelphia Orchestra, and a smaller piece for the Baltimore Symphony. For the following season, Stucky has another commission from Slatkin, this time for St. Louis. After that--in the 1990-91 season--there will be a big, symphony-sized piece for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“Dreamwaltzes” is also the score which introduced Stucky to Andre Previn, who conducted it with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in November. It was then that Stucky first met Previn, and that experience clearly was important in the orchestra’s extending the appointment to Stucky. Yet for all its success, “Dreamwaltzes” is not exactly representative of Stucky’s music.

“It was my solution to an external problem,” Stucky says of writing a piece for a festival with a Viennese theme. “And, no, it hasn’t led me to other pieces of that kind, although I do like that one piece, having gotten used to the idea of doing something like that.”

But then Stucky says that it often takes him a while to get used to what he writes, for often the music represents a process of coming to terms with the stylistic diversity of our times. “I don’t have a program for myself,” he says.

“To some extent I’m mildly surprised by every new piece, by the precise path that my interest takes. The general direction seems to be becoming fairly clear to me, but every new piece is a small adventure.”

The adventure that is on his mind for the month at the Yaddo retreat is the project for the Baltimore Symphony, which Stucky says is, “as usual, a slight departure for me. It sounds exactly like my music, but it’s becoming a kind of response to Minimalism.

“I’ve never had any relations to Minimalism, and I’m not a whole-hearted fan of that kind of music. I have a kind of love-hate response to it. I find the energy of it, the vitality of the rhythmic energy, irresistible, and the harmonic language off-putting. And apparently I’m working through this conflict in the Baltimore Symphony piece.”

One element that does remain constant in Stucky’s music, though, is his love for instrumental color, which generally causes his music to have attractive, luminescent surfaces, whatever the underlying formal complexities may be. Some of that virtuosity comes from Stucky’s own intimate knowledge of the orchestra. Growing up in Hutchinson, Kan., he began his music studies as a violist, and he spent a considerable amount of time playing in orchestras. In fact, Stucky confesses to never having been much of a pianist; his composing, which he began doing as a kid even before he could properly read music, is not piano-based but conceived directly in orchestral terms.

Writing “Lutoslawski and His Music,” an analytical study of one of the greatest manipulators of the orchestra in our age, also had an influence, although Stucky now considers the time spent on the book, which was published in 1981 and won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor prize, a mixed blessing.

“Spending so much time with someone else’s music slowed my development as a composer at a fairly crucial, tender age,” he says.

“But ultimately I think it was probably good because I learned from the scores of this composer, who I think is one of the great masters of the century, an enormous amount of technical craftsmanship and a kind of respect for the orchestra, which has begun to serve me well. So now that I’ve come through that, and as a composer of my own music worked through the sort of slavish imitation that a student would do, I think I’ve been strengthened by it.”

Stucky’s drive to confront many different styles, however difficult, that make up the process of composition--”I’m the sort of person who really does one thing at a time well”--also happens to be a useful trait for a composer-in-residence, since it will be his job to present and promote new music of all types, not just his own work.

“Of course I have my own tastes,” Stucky says. “I don’t like everything. But I think it’s quite important in this position to be as catholic as possible. After you pass a certain threshold of professional excellence, then my favorite styles shouldn’t enter into the decision making.”

As for his plans for Los Angeles, Stucky says it’s premature to say more than that he has made it his priority to learn as much about music in Southern California as quickly as he can, and to meet as many people in the new music community as he is able. And he is counting on advice from the Philharmonic’s young composer-fellow, Rand Steiger. But Stucky does have a list of priorities.

“My first duty is to push California music and my second is to push American music, but I would like to be sure that we’re getting young European composers heard in a fairly timely way too.”

It will be a matter for Los Angeles to meet the composer, as well. Thus far, besides “Dreamwaltzes,” only one other piece by Stucky, “Boston Fantasies,” a work for chamber ensemble, has had a Southern California performance.

Stucky and Previn are currently fiddling with next season’s schedule to include the new Concerto for Orchestra, a big 28-minute work that Stucky says has some daring formal experiments in it; he is eagerly awaiting the Philadelphia Orchestra premiere in the fall, under Riccardo Muti. He says he intends to conduct one New Music Group concert in 1988-89, and more the following year.

How much time will Stucky give to Los Angeles? He says a great deal. This first season, he will commute from Cornell--though on one of those trips, remaining here for two months. In his second season with the Philharmonic (1989-90), he plans to take a sabbatical from Cornell and live in Los Angeles--in order to be on hand with the orchestra as much as possible.

Teaching, Stucky claims, is, for him, more than just a way for a composer to earn a living.

“It’s very rewarding; you develop quite intimate relations with students and watch them grow in ways that they never imagined possible and you never imagined possible. I would be loath to give it up forever. It’s a very tiring, demanding profession--but I miss the students almost as soon as I’m away from them.”

Given the interest that American orchestras are taking in Stucky’s music, he may end up missing those students a lot.