O.C. MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : ‘Healing’ Memorial to Vietnam

The Pacific Symphony has commissioned a large-scale symphonic-choral work designed “to musically memorialize the human suffering of the Vietnam War” and which will receive its premiere in 1995.

“This is the kind of project that could wind up offending everyone,” Pacific Symphony executive director Louis G. Spisto said.

“It’s very risky. However, we believe that the perspective it’s being written from is one of healing, not tearing people apart but bringing people together,” Spisto said.

“We’re doing this because it will give the orchestra the chance to explore this subject in a large-scale musical effort. But more important, because this is a community that includes the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam itself.”

To underscore the outreach aspects of the commission, the orchestra made the formal announcement of the commission Tuesday in a press conference at the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Assn., in Westminster’s Little Saigon.

The hourlong piece, the most substantial music commission from an Orange County organization, will be written by New York-based composer Elliot Goldenthal, 39. It will receive its premiere performances by the orchestra on April 26 and 27, 1995 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

The dates fall only a few days short of the 20-year anniversary of South Vietnam’s surrender to North Vietnam on April 30, 1975, thus ending the war.

Other Orange County commissions include a work by Pacific Symphony composer-in-residence Frank Ticheli, to be premiered by the orchestra in February. The Pacific plans to premiere another Ticheli work during the 1994-95 season, Spisto said. Both pieces last no more than 30 minutes.

The Orange County Philharmonic Society has commissioned several short works, and the Performing Arts Center commissioned a brief fanfare by William Kraft for its opening in 1986.

The Pacific will have exclusive performance rights to the Goldenthal work for one year and exclusive recording rights for five years, according to Spisto.

The cost of producing the pair of concerts will exceed by “a minimum of $50,000, possibly as high as $100,000” the orchestra’s typical concert expenses of about $150,000, Spisto said. And that includes a composer’s fee that is considerably less than what Goldenthal normally receives, but which he agreed to accept because of how strongly he feels about the project.

“We believe this is an ideal project to tour and record,” Spisto said. “But we will not tour and record if we don’t receive the necessary additional funds.” He said the orchestra would need “a minimum of $500,000” to do both.

Asked if the piece would be performed in Vietnam, Spisto expressed support for the idea and said it had been discussed “generally” but said that money was an obstacle.

“If anyone has an idea for funding, please see me,” he joked.

Pacific Symphony music director Carl St.Clair said in an earlier interview that he had the idea of such a piece for “a long time” but that reading an interview with humor columnist Art Buchwald “gave me the courage to move forward with the feelings I had.

“Buchwald was asked what was the one thing he felt visitors to Washington should see, and he said the Vietnam Veterans Memorial . . . ‘It’s just waiting for music.’

“Then, it was just a question of what kind of piece, what would be the scope of the piece, and who would write it.”

Goldenthal said his first reaction to the commission was, “My God, how can I ever write anything like that?”

“The biggest challenge when you have something that is this encompassing and which can be almost universally irritating is to find the ennobling, the simple, the voices of dignity, the voices that are so direct, that in their directness they become poetry.”

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He will assemble the text himself, taking “at least six months, meeting people, going to the original sources, going to Vietnam, meeting the vets, daughters and sisters and wives, before one could even approach what the final thing could be.”

Selecting the text is a critical step because it means “finding the clear dramatic key that will unlock the music.”

Goldenthal was recommended to the orchestra by his former mentor, composer John Corigliano, with whom he studied at the Manhattan School of Music in New York. Goldenthal has written the film scores for “Pet Sematary,” “Drugstore Cowboy” and “Alien III,” as well as several concert works.

At this point, he said, the piece is only in the planning stages, but it will incorporate the Pacific Chorale and soloists and children from the Vietnamese community.

“It will be a multi-movement work, with one unifying concept, which I haven’t discovered yet,” he said. One possibility is that “the whole work will start on the final day (of the war) and incorporate people’s most vivid last reflections as a unifying thing.”

Tuesday’s press conference was attended by members of the symphony’s recently established Vietnamese Advisory Committee. Khoa Le, a television producer and photographer, said he sees the commission as the first step the county’s mainstream arts community has taken toward including the large Vietnamese community here.

Le said he hopes the commission will lead to a “long-lasting” relationship with the orchestra. He added that he hopes the orchestra will someday perform works, both traditional and contemporary, by Vietnamese composers.

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Goldenthal did not serve in the Vietnam War and has never been in the military.

“In the final moments of the war, my number was put in the lottery and that was that,” he said. But he lost “many, many friends” in Vietnam, and also has memories of his father, a disabled World War II vet, being poorly treated at a veterans hospital.

“I saw firsthand how he was treated and other vets were treated,” he said. “I was alarmed and dismayed and shocked. Veterans were left in corridors, waiting for rooms, and coming back day after day, asking for help.”

Even raising the question of whether he served in the military drew a reaction from him about putting “salt on wounds.”

“To look back and talk about those years is a trap, in terms of this work,” he said. “This work is not looking back in anger, not looking back in shame, not looking back in resentment, not looking back with anything but the hope that it will be one of many, many musical works that will be that of feeling and rejoicing that there is yet another culture within our culture that we should be examining.”

Goldenthal sees the role of the artist as the cultural “vehicle of reflection.”

“When I was a kid,” he said, “we used to play Civil War games. Then, when I was around 14, I saw (Civil War) photographs taken by Matthew Brady for the first time. Northism, Southism, all that sort of melted away.”

Free-lance writer Rick VanderKnyff contributed to this story.