Composer Gets 1 Shot to Win Over Listeners

Composer Charles Wuorinen is confident that avant-garde music only needs adequate exposure to win over reluctant listeners.

“The question of acceptance depends on familiarity,” he said. “After all, Bach and Beethoven wrote demanding music, but because it is played by devoted performers and taught in schools that value the music, ultimately, the complex and demanding becomes familiar. Their music is loved, even if it may not be understood.”

Wuorinen has but a single opportunity, however, to make his case to the San Diego Symphony audience Thursday evening at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium. In the inaugural concert of the symphony’s Pulitzer Series, the 51-year-old New York composer will conduct a pair of his recent works as well as two Stravinsky compositions.

At the expense of cultivating an adoring and understanding public, Wuorinen, who is often described as a second-generation 12-tone composer, has made “complex and demanding” his musical credo. Despite a prolific output--about 160 works in almost every musical medium--he has never attracted the attention of such minimalist media darlings as Philip Glass and John Adams.

“Those of us who write real music do not do it for the immediate satisfaction, but in the hope that it will last. That which is wildly popular will not last--the more popular they are, the shorter their works will be around,” Wuorinen said.

Not that he wishes to be known as a minimalist basher.

“Minimalism is not the issue,” he said. “My problem is this: A lot of music that is essentially pop music is now being declared to be serious music and played on programs with Beethoven, Mozart and yours truly. Entertainment is healthy in its place, but I object to confusing it with the higher arts.”

It is possible that Wuorinen’s non-stop flow of awards and prizes, starting at age 16 with the New York Philharmonic Young Composers Award, has forged such unwavering self-confidence. In 1970, while in his early 30s, he was the youngest composer to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize (and the first to receive one for a composition of electronic music), and in 1986 he won a megabuck MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

If Wuorinen has been loathe to cultivate a personal following, he has regularly collaborated with major orchestras to keep his music before the public. Last year, Wuorinen completed a four-year residency with the San Francisco Symphony, where he also served as the orchestra’s new-music adviser. He showered music director Herbert Blomstedt with praise for giving his compositions thorough preparation and first-rate performances.

The orchestra also made a compact disc of Wuorinen’s “The Golden Dance” and Third Piano Concerto, with Garrick Ohlsson as soloist. In January, 1989, the composer’s only opera, “The W. of Babylon,” was given its sole performance in a concert setting by the San Francisco Symphony. Subtitled a “Baroque Burlesque,” the lascivious (according to local music critics) and satirical opera had been sitting on the shelf since its completion in 1975.

“It was a happy relationship. I had a very good time while I was there, and our relationship will continue. I’m putting the final touches on a work for chorus and orchestra that San Francisco will be playing in March.”

In spite of the time spent in San Francisco working with the symphony, the New York native did not discover a distinctly West Coast school of composition.

“There are so many different approaches--the range of compositional style is so great. How would you put, say, Lou Harrison, John Adams and a Roger Reynolds in the same category? The cultural scene is so adrift, you begin to ask, ‘Does anything mean anything?’ ”

When Wuorinen ascends the Mandeville Auditorium podium to conduct “Bamboola Squared” for orchestra and quadraphonic tape, the piece will finally have come home.

“The tape for ‘Bamboola Squared’ was produced and realized at the university’s Center for Music Experiment laboratory. The piece was written for the New York Philharmonic’s 1984 Horizons Festival, which (UCSD professor) Roger Reynolds and I co-produced.” (Reynolds’ music will be featured on the San Diego Symphony’s next Pulitzer Series program on Feb. 15 at UCSD.)

Although Wuorinen asked the center to retool the tape portion of “Bamboola Squared” in the latest electronic technology--magneto-optical hard disc--for this performance with the San Diego Symphony, the center’s wizards could not comply.

“The new technology is not as reliable in performance, say, as a clarinet,” said the centerspokesman, John Lauer. “But we did recompute the file that Wuorinen left when he first made the tape in ’84 and freshened it up a bit.”

On Thursday’s program, Wuorinen will also conduct his 1988 “Machault, mon chou,” one of the works written for the San Francisco Symphony and dedicated to Blomstedt. The Stravinsky pieces will be “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto and “Monumentum pro Gesualdo di Venosa.”