Knowing the Scores : The Tone Differs for Community Group’s Leader

Not everyone can conduct in Munich, Vienna and London. Someone has to lead the bands in Bakersfield, Waterloo and St. Paul. So, while Yoav Talmi makes the headlines in the big leagues, Thomas Nee makes his own path on a different circuit, with different thoughts and ideas. This is a look at two men doing the same thing, but differently.

Conductor Thomas Nee, had planned an exceptional concert for last weekend. But the fates conspired against the music director of the La Jolla Civic University Orchestra & Chorus.

So the concert proved to be only a superior choice of musical pieces.

“I was going to do Penderecki’s ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’ and Mozart’s ‘Requiem Mass,’ ” Nee said last week. “Two views of death. That would have been good.”

But the orchestra did not play the demanding “Threnody” by Polish avant-gardist Krzysztof Penderecki. Written in 1962, the atmospheric lament is scored for 52 solo string players.

Obtaining the right players and enough rehearsal time for his amateur orchestra of 90 members was only part of the problem. The rented scores arrived late, Nee said, and then “the damned things” proved unreadable.

Instead of Penderecki, the final program at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium included the originally scheduled “Requiem,” with chorus, and Stravinsky’s landmark “Symphony in Three Movements.” Nee added Mozart’s “Overture to Titus” as a concert opener.

For Nee, a compact man with a quiet sense of humor who helped found UCSD’s music department, programming for an amateur orchestra is always fraught with challenges.

“You have to ask how many hours do you have to rehearse,” Nee said. “Who can play, and who’s going to listen to it?

“When I first came here, I often chose music that was too hard for what we could play. I was

thinking what a university orchestra ought to do, rather than what it could do.”

Nee, 69, has spent almost 40 years conducting, mainly on the B Orchestra Circuit. No London Symphony Orchestra. No Berlin Philharmonic. But plenty of good music making, just the same.

“It’s the difference between being pro and semi-pro, like baseball,” Nee said. “The differences are a quickness of learning. The San Diego Symphony, for instance, is a very adroit orchestra. They’re completely full-time musicians. Whereas in other regional orchestras you find a small group full time and others who are part time players and aren’t quite as quick.”

The benefit of working with a community symphony, such as the La Jolla Civic University Orchestra, is a high level of enthusiasm from musicians who are devoted to the music, along with a lack of jaundice “as can happen with a strictly professional orchestra,” Nee said. The down side, though, is the constant requirement in rehearsals to do more “specific teaching than with a professional orchestra.”

“If you play something like Mozart that has a pretty definite style of playing, it’s very likely that a lot of people in groups like ours have not been taught that,” Nee said. “You can’t take anything for granted.

“Perhaps you don’t do such a good job teaching, or have too many pieces on a program and not enough time, (then) you’re likely not to have enough time to conquer it. That’s a real risk.”

Nee prefers conducting professional orchestras like the New Hampshire Music Festival orchestra he has directed for six weeks each summer for the past 29 years.

“I enjoy New Hampshire and giving several programs a week,” he said. “New Hampshire is quite intense for six weeks.”

After Nee earned his master’s degree in music, rather than retain a manager to promote his conducting career, he took a teaching job.

“In the early ‘50s there weren’t that many orchestras,” Nee said. “It was basically just the big cities. It’s different now, with the amazing number of orchestras about the country.

“I probably thought I didn’t have the background. I always thought of myself in teaching, and typed myself.”

Even so, Nee feels he has been fortunate.

In the absence of a manager, he has taken “almost anything” in conducting jobs, ranging from the Shreveport Symphony in Louisiana and the American Composers Orchestra in New York to conducting in Bakersfield and Waterloo, Iowa.

Though not an A Circuit conductor, Nee has played an important role in introducing San Diego to new music since 1967, when he came to UCSD and was handed the artistic reins of this town-and-gown orchestra. Many community orchestras play only musical staples from the 18th and 19th centuries. Not the La Jolla Civic University Orchestra & Chorus.

Under Nee and chorus director David Chase, the group has a distinct propensity for 20th-Century composers. Concert-goers are as likely to hear Alban Berg and Henry Brandt as Beethoven and Brahms.

But who, exactly, is this soft-spoken advocate of the kind of modern music, which reminds some people of the sound of fingernails scratching across a blackboard?

Musical colleagues repeatedly use the words “good organizer,” “taciturn” and “easy to get along with” when describing Nee.

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Roger Reynolds is a close friend of Nee’s. Besides Nee’s skill at “causing people to work well together in all kinds of situations,” Reynolds says Nee has “an unusually acute sense of tempos.

“It’s a question of having a very fine sense that allows each (piece of) music speak most effectively,” Reynolds said. “I’ve often been struck by that, more often in theater music. And he hasn’t had much of an opportunity here for that.”

“Competence and courage come to mind,” said Cecil Lytle, a pianist and provost of UCSD’s Third College. “He has courage. He will tackle anything from the most standard repertory to the most outrageous of the avant garde. He has an infectious sense of music and a joy in music that bring out the best in everyone. Whether it’s the piano soloist or the last seat in the second violins, everyone wants to make music with him.”

Nee uses his unassuming manner to let musicians know when they are out of line. Lytle related an incident during an orchestra rehearsal for the summertime New Hampshire Music Festival.

Nee was rehearsing a concerto. Some wind section member came in late and was making a fuss, a noisy nuisance of himself. Just as the person sat down, Nee said, in a voice just loud enough for the latecomer to hear, “You wouldn’t do that if Tom Nee was alive.”

“It showed great humor,” Lytle said. “He has a special way of chastising and coaxing the best out of people. No one was ever late again.”

Nee faces mandatory retirement in two years from UCSD, where, as professor of music, he teaches courses ranging from new music performance to aesthetics in music to conducting and music theory.

Besides the La Jolla Civic University Orchestra, he often directs UCSD’s new music ensemble, SONOR. He led SONOR through a series of concerts at the prestigious Darmstadt Festival in Germany last year.

Nee’s affinity for conducting goes back to the days when he played in his high school band.

“I always had another idea about how the music could go rather than how it was being done,” Nee recalled. “I do remember listening at rehearsals and thinking why I didn’t play longer or shorter; why don’t we, or I and my associates play it another way? I would get this didactic point of view: How can I fix it?”

Nee grew up in a relatively conservative Midwestern family in Iowa and Minnesota, but his parents encouraged his musical interests.

He taught band for several years in small towns like Osage and Lake Mills, Iowa, but resigned after hearing a Minnesota Symphony concert.

“I had always been interested in new music like Schonberg,” Nee said. “I quit teaching and went to the Twin Cities and got a job at Hamline University (in St. Paul),” where the composer Ernst Krenek was in residence.

Nee received a Fulbright scholarship for two years of study in Vienna after earning his master’s degree at Hamline. Vienna was a powerful experience to the young conductor, being the home not only of Schubert, Mozart and Mahler, but of the new music apostles such as Schonberg, Berg and Webern.

Nee’s career has continually intersected with major figures in the U.S. avant garde. Returning from Vienna, he spent a year at Black Mountain College in North Carolina with the likes of choreographer Merce Cunningham and composers Stefan Wolpe and John Cage.

Situated outside Asheville, N.C., Black Mountain was, in the 1940s and ‘50s, a center for experimentation in the arts.

Nee worked a stint as assistant conductor under Antal Dorati with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. Then in the early 1960s he and composer Dominick Argento co-founded the Minnesota Opera Company under the wing of the Walker Art Center.

In those years the operas were performed on the Guthrie Theatre’s long stage that thrust far out into the audience. There was no place for an orchestra, so Nee conducted the musicians on stage behind the performers. The singers watched him on strategically placed television monitors.

Nee was attracted by UCSD’s focus on new music and came here with his wife, Mary, a theater director and designer.

“We’ve got a very good faculty here,” Nee said. “You learn from each other. We’re all interested in new music and performance and putting it on and in keeping at it, in having failures and successes.”

Nee would like to do more theater music, that is, contemporary operas. About 10 years ago, he and his wife, Mary, who designs and stages for the theater, collaborated on a production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” at UCSD.

There are many good 20th-Century operas that are never done, Nee says. “I’d like to do ‘The Mother of Us All.’ It’s by Virgil Thompson, about Susan B. Anthony, with a text by Gertrude Stein. I’ve done it before. I think it would go over well.”

Nee enjoys performing any good music, but new music is his favorite. He talked about the significance of the Stravinsky piece on this weekend’s program.

“I think it’s a landmark 20th-Century piece,” he said. “It’s so clear and hard-edged a piece. It’s brilliant, metallic almost, in some ways. It seems like the essence of a certain kind of 20th-Century thought.”

And that is at the heart of Nee’s attraction to the kind of new music that others find absolutely no affinity for:

“It seems to me such a natural thing that I don’t even think about it,” Nee said. “New music, even when you don’t like it, seems to speak in such contemporary terms. I think a composer would say that’s the music of our time.”