MUSIC : Stucky Strikes Chord for a ‘Common Language’

Although he has taught music at Cornell University since 1980, Steven Stucky is no ivory-tower composer. Even if he wanted to be--which he doesn’t--the Los Angeles Philharmonic, for which he is composer-in-residence, wouldn’t let him.

“One of my roles with the Los Angeles Philharmonic is to be seen a lot,” Stucky said in a recent phone interview from his home near Cornell in Ithaca, N.Y. “Not in a frivolous PR way, but because to the extent there’s a sort of gap or reservoir of mistrust between the consumers of modern music and the producers of modern music, one of the ways to get over that is through ordinary human contact.”

Stucky will make that human contact in a talk about his music tonight at 7:30 at the Laguna Art Museum.

“Simply having the chance to meet the artist and talk in easy, layman’s terms about what he’s trying to do goes a long way to creating a common language to approach the music. . . . I’ve seen it happen over and over again,” said the 40-year-old composer, who has received commissions from orchestras in Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis and, of course, Los Angeles. His Concerto for Orchestra was a finalist for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize in composition.

“It helps for me as a listener, too. I often find it easier to warm up to a piece by someone I know than to a piece in which I have no human entry, only the notes. Connecting the piece with the personality of the composer, knowing something about him as a human being, gives you a natural way in.”

But don’t expect Stucky to talk too much about his private life (“My life is boring,” he said) or to talk in lofty technical and theoretical terms.

“I don’t think about (music) that way,” he said. “I tend to talk about what makes my pulse race, my hair stand up, what gives me visceral reactions. When I’m composing, I suppose what I’m trying to do is raise those reactions in myself in the hope that I will make them in other people.”

Composing, however, is a “slow, painstaking, note-by-note” process, Stucky said.

“I’m constantly revising, tinkering when I’m writing,” he said. “It’s not fast. It can be weeks or months; months usually. But it usually produces in the end what I want without having to go back and try again.

“There comes a moment after a few months, when the piece exists even though it’s not finished. It takes on a personality and becomes easy to write. It has momentum, a history of its own.”

Astonishingly, he orchestrates his work as he writes, bar by bar, sometimes filling up to 34 staves.

“Ideas are always related to their instrumentation right away,” he explained. “There is no reason to wait to work an idea out until later. The relationship of the idea and its orchestra coloring is very close, and that’s part of what I have to get down right away.

“The momentum from bar to bar is an illusion which arises later,” he added. “It doesn’t exist in the moment of composing, normally.”

How does inspiration fit into the picture?

“I think of inspiration as something that comes of long, hard work,” he said. “You create the conditions in which an idea can be born by working hard with your imagination. At a certain moment, an idea exists which didn’t exist before, but it comes from preparing the ground for it.”

Critics have tended to describe Stucky’s music in terms of color, and he is happy with that approach.

“Color--which is a sloppy metaphor, we don’t have a good language for these things--color is important to me,” he said. “I’m trying to use elements of music other than traditional ones for carrying the main emotional freight or dramatic import: Things more important (to me) than traditional elements like melody and harmony are other aspects, like loud and soft, high and low, light and dark, which you could call coloristic aspects.

“It’s possible to take that argument too far. I’m not sure how much the traditional categories can be replaced. But I’m interested in redressing the balance away from the hard-core 19th-Century Germanic ideas of what the elements of music are: melody, harmony, counterpoint. Other aspects have been neglected.”

Most of Stucky’s recent music has been written for orchestra. “I think that’s where I’m most at home,” he said. “My way of expressing myself depends on a fairly large range of color, and the orchestra is the place to get it.”

Consequently, he is happy that perennial predictions for the demise of that institution still haven’t come true. “It’s not dead for me or for some other composers,” he said. “That situation is less true today than it was 10 to 20 years ago. There are combinations of factors for that. One is the new system of placing composers in residence with orchestras, which created a mechanism so that audiences could get the hang of the music. It also ensured that other composers have an advocate within the ensemble.

“So the number of new pieces programmed is higher than it used to be. Some composers see a purpose in writing orchestral music. They have hope of seeing it played.

“But it is an anachronism. Technologically, the orchestra is a 19th-Century instrument. Most of the instruments have not changed much in at least 100 years, and sometimes longer than that. It’s a machine built to play 19th-Century music, but some of us, I hope we’re not being too retrogressive, seem to have things to say that can be said by that same instrument. I hope it hangs around a little bit longer.”

Steven Stucky, composer-in-residence for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, will talk about his music at 7:30 p.m. today at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, in Laguna Beach. Tickets: $6 general admission; $4 students, seniors and museum members. Seating is limited; call for availability. Information: (714) 494-8971.

BAROQUE FESTIVAL LINEUP: Programming has been announced for the 10th annual Corona del Mar Baroque Music Festival, June 3 through 10. The four 8 p.m. concerts will be split between St. Michael and All Angels Church, 3233 Pacific View Drive; and Sherman Library and Gardens, 2647 E. Coast Highway.

Dates and programs:

-- June 3, St. Michael’s: Concertos for organ and orchestra by Edwards, Handel and Respighi. -- June 6, Sherman Library: Works for chamber ensemble by Corelli, Leclair, Christoph Graupner, Kolbel and Handel. -- June 8, Sherman Library: Handel’s “Acis and Galatea”.

-- June 10, St. Michael’s: Bach’s Easter Oratorio; Cantata No. 172 (“Ershallet, ihr Lieder”); other works.

Subscriptions to all four events: $50. Individual tickets, available for June 3 and 10 concerts only: $15 each.

Information: (714) 549-7175.