A Meeting of Musical Minds

Huddled in a small music rehearsal room at USC, composer Naomi Sekiya and conductor James Gaffigan are perusing the score of Sekiya’s “Sinfonia delle Ombre” (Symphony of Shadows), which Gaffigan is preparing to conduct.

Popping in to ask questions, offer observations and clarify issues are Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Esa-Pekka Salonen and Miguel Harth-Bedoyah, Philharmonic associate conductor. They’re part of the Philharmonic’s Synergy program, a five-day series of workshops and rehearsals designed to help emerging American composers and conductors work more closely and effectively together and with orchestras. The program culminated in a concert Thursday in the Bing Theater at USC (see review).

The series, the brainchild of Salonen, was co-sponsored by USC and two service organizations, American Symphony Orchestra League and the American Music Center. Sekiya, Gaffigan and the others--eight pairs in all--were culled from a field of 361 applicants (161 composers, 200 conductors) all of whom had some professional experience and recognition.

“What I hope is the composers and conductors learn about the pressure of how to realize an idea,” Salonen said. “I also wanted to incorporate some of the practicality issues--how to maximize your rehearsal time, how to prepare materials. These are things that when they work perfectly, nobody comments about them. When they don’t, it’s a disaster.”

Sekiya, a native of Japan, now a doctoral student at USC, seconds the notion.

“At most rehearsals and performances, we simply don’t have enough time to communicate with musicians and conductors,” she said during a break in the workshops. “Synergy is so unique. I get to look at my music from a conductor’s point of view and also from a musician’s point of view. So I’m learning to study my music from different angles.”

Gaffigan, her conductor, provided a new point of view. The recipient of the first Robert Harth Conducting Award given at the Aspen Music Festival and School, Gaffigan, 23, is in his final year of graduate study at the Sheppard School of Music at Rice University in Houston.

“I have different priorities than Naomi,” Gaffigan said. “She’s worried about sound and balance. I’m worried about keeping it together because there are really difficult parts. It’s a bit frustrating. The piece is also mine, in a way, to work with.”

Sekiya has received several international prizes, including getting a work played at the Ojai Music Festival in 2000, with Simon Rattle leading the Philharmonic. Surprisingly, she began composing only after she came to the United States for undergraduate study in the early 1990s.

“I wanted to do everything,” she said. “You know how a 17- or 18-year-old is: You feel you can do anything if you work hard. You can become president of the United States. I wanted to become an English major or a history major, but I couldn’t speak English. So that was hard.

“That’s when I started writing music. Music doesn’t require English that much.”

She said her three-movement “Sinfonia” was inspired by Dante’s “The Divine Comedy,” although it doesn’t use text or represent scenes from that work. The first movement received its premiere in Warsaw, Poland, in 2001.

She revised the work last summer, adding measures and changing some of the instrumentation. It was the longest and most difficult work presented at Synergy, and because of limited rehearsal time, only the second and third movements were played. But their performance constituted a world premiere.

Sekiya likes to work big from the outset, laying out a full orchestra score of 25 or more parts as she goes. “I want to know which instrument is playing or not playing,” she said. “Some composers write piano scores and at the end orchestrate it.”

Once she’s done, she has to provide the orchestra with at least one copy of a conductor’s score and enough individual scores for the musicians.

Composers who don’t have professional publishers generally use computer programs to generate the scores. Still, it’s not cheap. Sekiya estimated it cost almost $900 to provide the Synergy performance scores. Fortunately, the American Composers Forum footed the bill.

Self-Publishing Problems

At a Tuesday workshop, however, Sekiya discovered that self-publishing has dangers: The computer programs need to be finessed or the scores can be difficult to read, with poor spacing of the bars, awkward page turns and ambiguous markings.

She took the news in stride. “Talking about how to improve my notation was a good thing,” she said. “Last time the L.A. Phil performed my music, I never received that kind of comment, but I kept doing the same things. This time, they mentioned what to do, what not to do. I feel, ‘OK, why didn’t you tell me two years ago?’ ”

Gaffigan, too, had some surprises during the week. For all his preparation, he was dealt a shock with his first downbeat at the Tuesday rehearsal.

“When I first stepped up on the podium, nothing sounded like I expected,” he said. “The piece had never been performed in the U.S. There was no tape of it. You come up with your own sounds mentally, and pretty much you’re in shock at the first rehearsal. The biggest lesson: You shouldn’t overstudy a score or come up with an idea of what it will sound like. You will be shocked.”

As was the case with all the conductors, Gaffigan’s rehearsal with the orchestra--half Philharmonic and half USC musicians--was videotaped, then reviewed by Salonen.

“Basically, Esa-Pekka pointed out what I didn’t have to do to be effective,” Gaffigan said. “Or spending too much time on details. Just get on with the rehearsal.”

Workshops, rehearsals and videotape reviews of the conductors continued up to the Thursday evening concert, which opened with a sense of festival excitement. At the end, all eight pairs of composers and conductors took bows to a standing ovation.

Still, Gaffigan at least felt there was a lot more to learn. “I didn’t think we had the best performance, because I felt there wasn’t enough preparation time,” he said at a reception afterward. “This is such a difficult piece. There’s so much going on in it. There’s no way you can get it perfect unless you have two about-full rehearsals, not half an hour here, an hour here.

“But for the most part, we got the idea of the piece, and I think that’s the most important thing. I was a little too stressed out about details. I think that’s my biggest problem in this atmosphere. I’m used to fixing everything and getting everything I want.”

Sekiya, however, felt “very satisfied with the performance. James did a wonderful, exciting job. And Synergy was wonderful, conductors and composers all together. We all felt like we’re a family who had known each other for a long time. This kind of relationship is very important to me. I feel it will grow and continue for a long time.”