Taking Note of Composers’ Basic Needs

Living composers need love, too, not to mention networking opportunities and other professional aid. They work in solitude with or without commissions, and they usually have to rely on others to bring their notes to life. They’re generally underappreciated and underpaid in the ranks of the high-culture work force, yet the urge to compose, once embedded, defies all adversity.

What better recipe could there be for the need to organize? Such is the underlying premise of the American Composers Forum, which has just opened a chapter in Los Angeles for the first time in its 27-year history.

The “composer-service organization” got its start in 1973, when composition students Stephen Paulus and Libby Larsen sought to create performance opportunities for fledgling composers, and the Minnesota Composers Forum was born. Today, Paulus and Larsen enjoy well-established careers, and the Composers Forum has a national membership and mission, as well as chapters in such cities as Atlanta, San Francisco, New York and Boston.

On May 15, the L.A. chapter officially, if symbolically, opened its doors--it has yet to set up a physical office. But it does have another crucial ingredient for its launch--a James C. Irvine Foundation three-year $400,000 start-up grant, providing time, as chapter director Heidi Lesemann says, for “the chapter to find its sea legs.” The forum’s mission is to link “communities with composers, encouraging the making, playing and enjoyment of new music.” That means sponsoring composer residencies, putting grant and commission money to work locally to get music created and performed, and educating a potential audience.

As for the particular challenges that face the L.A. chapter--the ones mentioned most are navigating the sprawl and embracing diversity.

“What we’re doing,” Lesemann says, “is to try to break into the consciousness of a very broad community.

“L.A., as we all know, is pretty unique among cities. How on earth do you go about forming an organization to get people together who suffer such long distances? Also, there is the diversity and the fact that there is already a lot going on in a lot of different places.”

On the other hand, Lesemann says, the city is ripe for compositional networking. “Los Angeles is a very flourishing musical community. We have some of the best musicians in the world here, who are the most adventurous, always willing to take a chance on something. They tend to be marvelous readers, beautifully trained, and they’re interested. They want more involvement.”

Lesemann knows what she’s talking about when it comes to linking L.A. to new music. She worked as an administrator with Ojai Music Festival, Monday Evening Concerts and, for 18 years, with the Schoenberg Institute, when it was based at USC.

Her first goal is to fill what she considers to be an information gap. “There’s a lot already [going on] here,” she says, but it’s often hard to locate.

To that end, one of the local chapter’s initial efforts will be to create a Web site, as “a sort of clearinghouse of information, linked to lot of other Web sites.” And the site will be linked to the forum’s mother-ship site (https://www.composersforum.org). Lesemann has also launched a new-music calendar, sent to a growing mailing list, “to provide a place for all new-music events to be listed, because a lot of things fall into the cracks.”

Another pilot project taking shape in the Los Angeles chapter is the “Subito” Grant Program--subito means “suddenly” in Italian, and it’s a directive used on musical scores. The grant program is an emergency fund for composers who have “needs that need to be dealt with right away,” Lesemann says. “They might need help with extra rehearsals for concerts, or they need funds for a mailing, or they need funds for even baby-sitting, so they can attend their rehearsals.”

Among the composers who have joined and helped organize the chapter so far are local figures with various academic and organizational liaisons of their own. William Kraft, now a professor at UC Santa Barbara, has deep roots in Los Angeles, as a percussionist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its first composer in residence, and has put on an annual New Music Festival at UCSB since 1992. From USC’s music department comes Donald Crockett, also involved in contemporary music performances around the area. John Schneider is a composer, radio programmer, guitarist and organizer of the recent Microfest, a festival of microtonal music in venues around L.A. Steven Hoey is based at CalArts, and is the founder of Different Trains, one of the newest new-music organizations on the block.

While many of its members are from classical quarters, Lesemann insists that the forum’s stylistic outlook is “all-inclusive. There isn’t a sense that you only have to write one kind of music to be acceptable.” Among founding members in Los Angeles, she also counts jazz pianist Patrice Rushen, who has long been part of the national organization.

“I would say that the emphasis is on noncommercial music, if we’re going to define it as a particular thing,” Lesemann says. “In commercial music, composers are off in another kind of world. They have their own network, which is great. But for a lot of [other] composers, they need to find out what the opportunities are.

“What I’ve gotten from the composers is a great sense of isolation. One said, ‘Composers are isolated, hungry and exhausted.’ This is what we need to work on.’ ”

Nationally and locally, the forum fuels its operations via grants and membership dues: Composers, performers, ensembles and “friends of new music” pay between $35 and $60 per year to join.

As a national organization, it has a $3.2-million budget, has members in 49 states and 15 countries, and in fiscal 1999 made awards to approximately 400 composers, performers or ensembles.

For their dues, members get access to a host of programs organized nationally, as well as the specific events and programs that local chapters support. For instance, the forum offers low-cost loans to composers to create their own CDs, distributed on its in-house innova label. A millennium project, “Continental Harmony,” is a yearlong effort in which composers are being commissioned to write works geared around a national new-music celebration this summer. (Locally, the American Jazz Philharmonic premiered Thomas Oboe Lee’s Jazz Symphony at the Cerritos Performing Arts Center on June 4.) “Community Engagement” matches composers with organizations that need music, establishing residencies that help the composer and make a distinct local connection with an audience. “Faith Partners” specifically commissions new music for religious denominations.

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What the forum won’t do, Lesemann says, is put on concerts. “Of course, composers need performances,” she says, “[but] it is generally felt by the forum that it’s better to develop audiences, [to improve] the ability of a community to engage in concert series.”

Lesemann hopes to see the L.A. chapter’s Web site up by the end of the summer. The grant program should be available early in 2001. But bringing about the rest of the mission--setting up local education and commissioning or residency programs--is in the future. In the meantime, the organization’s national programs are already available for individuals--the new local simply provides an easier way in.

Lesemann has high hopes for what the forum can mean for L.A., now that it will have an organized physical presence here.

“It’s going to be a wonderful experiment,” Lesemann says. “It’s disturbing the status quo. It’s getting composers organized to talk about things that matter to them, to bring about change.” *

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American Composers Forum, Los Angeles Chapter, P.O. Box 970, Whittier, CA. (562) 463-7949.