New Turf for Composer

Can music express political ideas? Can it expound propaganda? Can it inspire people to action?

John Duffy, the veteran American theater/film/television composer now completing his first symphony on a commission from the Utah Chapter of the Sierra Club, acknowledges that “ideas cannot be expressed in music.”

How then, did he approach his assignment, described by the Sierra Club “to create national and international interest in the preservation and protection of the unique lands in the canyon country of Utah, which are currently threatened by competing claims. . . . “?

“With great humility and trepidation,” the 60-year-old music maker answered, in a phone interview from his home in New York City. A protege of both Aaron Copland and Luigi Dallapiccola, Duffy has spent most of his career writing for the theater, usually in long-term residencies such as those he held at the American Shakespeare Festival, the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and Center Stage in Baltimore.

For the composer, Duffy confided, the Sierra Club commission “is not just another piece of music, this is music meant to draw attention to the wilderness. It causes me great concern--and not a little self-doubt.”

After much thought, Duffy said, he decided that “the only thing I can do is try to write music that moves people. To impart feelings, not words or ideas--we all know that ideas are inexpressible in music.

“But music can lift the spirit,” said the composer, who has written chamber music, a lot of choral pieces and several concertos but no large-scale symphonic work. “It can express grief, sorrow, pleasure, even bitterness.”

To prepare for the writing of this symphony, Duffy went to the scenic Glen Canyon area of Utah.

“I listened to the birds, I listened to the wind--there are all kinds of winds and breezes out there, even what I call an audible stillness. I studied the history of the Indians. And I decided that my concern for the land could best be expressed in the urgency and energy of the music I wrote. In trying to speak from one heart to another.”

The new, three-movement, 24-minute work--Duffy said the finale is all that remains to be written--will receive its world premiere in New York, Nov. 29, by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, conducted by Paul Connelly, on a program of first performances; Duffy’s compositional colleagues that evening will be Lukas Foss, Michael Torke, Joan Tower and John Adams.

Funded by grants from both the national Sierra Club and the Utah Chapter of that organization, the work, now called the “Utah” Symphony, will later receive a performance by the Utah Symphony, led by its music director, Joseph Silverstein, Duffy said.