Meet the Composer Funds Distributed

Awarded this week, grants totaling almost $430,000 will fund commissions to 32 composers under the Meet the Composer/Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program. Now in its second season, the program will soon have distributed close to $1 million to North American composers.

In 1989-90, the composers receive the monies for these grants through 19 consortiums comprised of 52 symphonic and chamber orchestras, opera and theater companies, choruses, soloists, public radio stations, jazz and chamber ensembles and presentors. The individual grants range from $10,000 to $80,000.

Applicants to the commissioning program--usually the composers themselves--are required to form consortiums with arts organizations from different parts of the country. And, in many cases, consortiums have made applications to fund several composers. The consortiums must perform the commissioned works at least six times within three years of receiving the award.

Among the composers and commissioning consortiums:

Joan La Barbara and the Center for Contemporary Arts (N.M.), Gregg Smith Singers (N.Y.) and I Cantori (Los Angeles): $20,000 for a vocal work to be called “to hear the wind roar,” and to be created in three separate versions.

From her home in New Mexico, composer La Barbara described the three incarnations of her as-yet unwritten piece, saying the “first version will be for solo voice with a multitrack accompaniment, some of it percussion instruments. The second will be a rescoring for I Cantori--a group with a maximum of eight singers at any one time--the solo lines redistributed, possibly with the singers playing hand-held percussion. The full-chorus version will incorporate all the materials in the first two versions.”

The text for the new work comes “From Thoreau, I think, through John Cage’s songbook. I was inspired to write this piece when I went skiing, at 12,000 feet, and encountered the incredible silence, and the rich variety of single sounds, at that altitude.”

(Veteran conductor Gregg Smith, reached by phone in upstate New York, had nothing to add to La Barbara’s description. “Actually, I know nothing about it (the new work), except that Joan asked me if I would perform it, and I said yes,” Smith reported, from the headquarters of his Festival for American Music in Saranac Lake. “I’m not worried,” he concluded, “I believe in Joan, and am glad she asked us.”)

Steve Reich and the Institute of Contemporary Art (Mass.) and the Brooklyn Academy of Music: $80,000 toward costs of his music-video-documentary-theater work, “The Cave” (see Calendar, July 9).

La Monte Young and the Kronos Quartet (Calif.), Hancher Auditorium (Iowa) and the New World Symphony (Florida): $15,000 for a 60-minute work for string quartet and synthesizer.

Tod Machover and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Richmond Symphony/Sinfonia (Va.) and the New Mexico Symphony: $17,000 for a work for violin and chamber orchestra.

Machover’s work, as described by Brent Assink, manager of the Saint Paul ensemble, utilizes an acoustic violin “integrated into a computer system, which not only enhances the sound of the violin, but also has other expressive possibilities. The composer calls it a ‘hyperinstrument’ because it can produce so much more than the acoustic violin.”

Charles Wuorinen and the San Francisco and Honolulu Symphonies and Minnesota Orchestra received $30,000 for a work for chorus and orchestra to be called “Genesis.”

Meanwhile, the National Endowment for the Arts has announced 39 fresh grants under its New American Works program for fiscal 1989. This program supports the creation of new operas and musical theater works.

Among the companies and composers receiving grants (ranging from $5,000 to $65,000) are:

The American Music Theater Festival (Lalo Schifrin), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (two commissions: Scott Johnson and Elliot Goldenthal), Los Angeles Music Center Opera (Thea Musgrave), Lyric Opera of Chicago (William Bolcom), Metropolitan Opera (Philip Glass), Minnesota Opera (two: Meredith Monk and Libby Larsen), Opera Guild of Greater Miami (Carlisle Floyd) and Walker Art Center (Paul Dresher).

CONDUCTOR-WATCH: Gisele Ben-Dor has been appointed resident conductor of the Houston Symphony by music director Christoph Eschenbach. Ben-Dor has previously held assistant conducting positions in Houston and Louisville. . . . James Conlon has been appointed general music director of the City of Cologne (West Germany) for a five-year period beginning with the 1991-92 season; Conlon was previously named chief conductor of Cologne Opera, a position he assumes in September. . . . John Larry Granger, founder and music director of the South Coast Symphony, will add to his schedule the duties of music director/conductor of the Pomona College Orchestra this fall.

BRIEFLY: Slask, the national folk ballet of Poland, will make 28 stops on its United States tour beginning Sept. 19 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In Southern California, the 100-member troupe will perform at the Wiltern Theatre Oct. 27-28. . . . A new home for the Dallas Symphony, the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, will be inaugurated with two weeks of orchestral concerts, most of them conducted by the orchestra’s music director, Eduardo Mata, Sept. 8-17. . . . Following the withdrawal of editors Irene and Sherwin Sloan for personal reasons, the Opera Quarterly, under its new editor-in-chief, Bruce Burroughs, moves from the University of North Carolina Press to Duke University Press beginning with the next issue. That issue is due out in January, after a hiatus to “facilitate the transition,” according to Burroughs.