Byron Adams, Zen Composer : Ignore fashion, says the man whose new ‘Capriccio’ will enliven the Strawberry Creek Festival

Byron Adams says the modern composer is faced with two dilemmas.

First: “How do you create a style that is at once poised, expressive and flexible?”

Second: “How do you build a career?”

Adams deals with the first, he says, by writing music that is “not too complex.”

As for the second, he gets by with a little help from his friends.

“I have been very lucky in that I have built my career on having met, at the right time, performers who were interested in my work,” says the 35-year-old composer, whose “Capriccio” concertante will receive its premiere on Aug. 11 as part of the Strawberry Creek Music Festival, which begins Saturday (see accompanying schedule).

“Many of these people, including (festival director) Yehuda Gilad, have become musical and personal friends of mine, but not in an opportunistic way at all.

“That’s how I have built my career. It’s slower, but ultimately it’s a more solid process as opposed to anything that is based too much on fast, public-relations appeal.”

Born in Atlanta, Adams grew up in Jacksonville, Fla., and studied music at Jacksonville University, USC and Cornell. Among his teachers were Halsey Stevens and Karel Husa.

“Capriccio” is the third piece Adams has written for Gilad, who met while they were both students at USC.

In 1979, he wrote a chamber piece, “Nightingales,” which Gilad has recorded. In 1987, he composed “Intrada and Alleluia” for brass and percussion, which Gilad performed while he was conductor of the Santa Monica Symphony.

Gilad also has invited him to be the first composer-in-residence with his Colonial Symphony, in Madison, N.J., for the 1990-91 season.

For the past three years, Adams has been earning a living teaching choral music at UC Riverside.

“No one ever has actually made his living as a composer,” he says. “Even if you go back to Monteverdi. He made his living as a chorus master.”

But the job has given him the opportunity to grow and develop at his own pace.

“It’s so hard to find one’s own way as a composer,” he says. “It’s sort of a Zen process. You feel as if you’re making an eternal beginning. Each new piece, each blank piece of paper, is a new beginning.

“Only when you look back do you see a certain line to what you’re doing, a certain consistency. I think I am myself at last. I think that’s what every sincere composer is striving for.”

He credits composer William Austin, his doctoral adviser at Cornell, for giving him three bits of “crucial” advice: “He said: ‘First, ignore fashion. Second, ignore fashion. And the third is, ignore fashion.’

“That was the best advice I’d received, outside of a composition lesson, and that’s what I’ve done, I hope,” Adams says. “I feel that I write for a circle of unseen friends, those people who will feel the same way about life and art as I do.”

Adams describes his new 9-minute “Capriccio,” commissioned by the festival, as “a little tip of the hat” to American composer and critic Virgil Thomson.

“I admire him tremendously,” Adams says. “His views on what American music should be are identical to mine. He fought against the German hegemony which has bedeviled American music from the late 19th Century until today, and which I think continues to bedevil American music.”

The piece quotes “Nettleton,” a hymn tune Thomson used in one of his film scores. Otherwise, the piece, Adams says, is “a little problem I gave myself in design.”

“I wanted a certain kind of brilliance, so I decided to omit the low brass instruments and concentrate on the brighter timbres,” he says. “The piece is very soloistic in its writing for the woodwinds. Each woodwind gets a turn in an important solo part.”

While he considers himself lucky to get the premiere of his work at the festival, he recognizes that another danger lies therein for the modern composer.

“There’s always the danger of any composer in America, me or someone in an older generation, of becoming a premiere machine,” he says. “You write this piece, it will be premiered and after the premiere you’ll never have another performance. It’s a disturbing phenomenon.

“Part of it is the expense of producing a large orchestral piece. Also, oftentimes performers, conductors and instrumentalists, just for economic reasons, will go with safer programs. They’ll be excited by doing a piece and do it once and will feel, ‘I’ve done my bit for contemporary music.’

“Sadly, this can be the composer’s fault too, sometimes,” he added. “Either he or she will provide a score that somehow is not practicable. . . . You can write a fiendishly difficult piece and have the piece premiered. But the fiendish difficulty will militate against a second performance.

“Elliott Carter can write a (notoriously difficult) Double Concerto, but if a person my age and at my reputation wrote a work as difficult as that, the chances are the composer will wait a long time before getting a second performance.”

Nonetheless, he believes that quality will prevail, and he advises composers to “write a consistent flow of music.

“That’s not stressed enough. I also wish there were more avenues for second performances. There are so many grants and commissions that deal with the initial performance. I wish there were a grant apparatus that would fund second performances.”

(In fact, there is at least one such fund, the “AT&T; American Encore” program, created in 1985 by the telecommunications giant to provide support for orchestras to revive infrequently performed works of 20th-Century American composers.)

While “Capriccio” is scheduled for only one festival performance, he believes it has a good chance for further performance because of its length and orchestration.

“It’s not easy, but it doesn’t present insurmountable difficulties to an orchestra,” he says.

“It’s going to be an interesting program, quite aside from my piece. The program is my ‘Capricco’ Concertante, then the Immolation from (Wagner’s) ‘Gotterdamerung,’ with Jeannine Altmeyer, and then the Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony.

“I’m rather glad my piece comes first. Who wants to follow the ‘Immolation Scene’? The person who should be nervous is Tchaikovsky.”