New York’s White Light Festival fuses spirit, sound

Jane Moss, vice president for programming at Lincoln Center, appears as worried about what’s going on outside concert halls as within them.

“People are just not running their lives,” Moss says. “They’re overwhelmed yet don’t realize they have the tools to turn it off. And the longer you don’t have that hour on the beach alone pondering the mysteries of the universe, or anything remotely resembling that communion with yourself, the more terrifying it gets.”

Unlike most people, however, Moss thinks she has something that can help. That something is the forthcoming White Light Festival, a new fall event here that Moss has designed to focus “on music’s unique emotional capacity to move us beyond ourselves and illuminate our larger interior universe.”

There’s some Brahms and Beethoven, and such well-known performers as the Westminster Choir, Tallis Scholars and Hilliard Ensemble, but the unusual bill also includes Croatian poetry, Muslim musicians from North India and monks performing modern dance inspired by ancient Chinese martial arts. Writes Moss on the event’s website: “These musical encounters enable us — if only for the course of a performance — to experience a shared emotional connection and wholeness in an increasingly frenetic and fragmented world.”

Moss isn’t the first programmer to notice all this, of course. “Presenters have programmed more and more with an eye and ear toward the spiritual,” observes Kerby Lovallo, Connecticut-based director of New World Classics artist management, whose artists include White Light participants Hilliard Ensemble and the Latvian National Choir. “But this is the first festival I see that has made this connection between spirit and sound as its focus, and it’s touched a chord. As soon as it was announced, there was a buzz on the Internet.”

White Light, which runs from Oct. 28 through Nov. 18, capitalizes on a growing societal worry about what everything from the iPhone to Facebook is doing to our need for quiet time. The Festival’s focus offers a great marketing concept, which Moss acknowledges, but the veteran programmer has the credibility and personal conviction to pull it off. Since she took over Lincoln Center programming in 1992, Moss has successfully been reworking schedules and programming options to keep them not just high-quality but more current and more marketable.

Interviewed in her small, uncluttered office, the soft-spoken, fine-boned redhead exudes calm. She has no cellphone and says she has never sent or received a text message. Her catalyst for White Light “wasn’t a ‘eureka’ moment or personal crisis. The word I would use is ‘evolution.’ Two or three years ago, I got very involved in yoga classes and both the classes and people in them strongly illuminated for me a kind of searching going on.”

The tranquillity she found in yoga seemed in direct contrast to the distracted culture she found outside. “Energy is going outward and not toward being fully present in the moment. Experiencing art, including music, is essentially a contemplative act. You empty yourself out, and you let the art fill you up in some fashion. That requires time and space.

“The prime mover of 99% of my energy is providing experiences at a certain aesthetic and quality level. Now, in addition to that, I’m getting more cause-oriented. How do we give experiences to people that enlarge their lives and their understanding of what it means to be alive?”

Enter the White Light Festival. “It’s about transcendence and how music is the unique vehicle for that,” she summarizes. “The idea is that after a successful concert, life feels bigger and you feel connected. You have been literally transported to a different place. That, to me, is the ideal audience transaction.”

Moss oversees programming for about 300 events at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, including its Great Performers series, and such long-running shorter programs as its Midsummer Night Swing, American Songbook and Mostly Mozart Festival. Indoor events generally take place in Avery Fisher Hall, Alice Tully Hall and other Lincoln Center venues better-known for presenting the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic and other resident groups.

“When Jane first told me about the White Light Festival, I rolled my eyes a couple times,” admits dancer and choreographer Mark Morris, a longtime participant in the Mostly Mozart Festival. “Then I saw the proposed programming. Wow. She seems sort of small and unassuming, but she’s tough and smart and has fabulous, wide-ranging taste. We don’t always agree, but I trust her taste and admire the way she operates. And I love that she’s looking at all these alternatives.”

Born in Lancaster, Pa., Moss received a degree in philosophy from Franklin & Marshall College, where her father taught geology. Both her parents loved music, she says, and recounts Saturday afternoons spent listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. But her initial career was in theater administration and although she was executive director of Meet the Composer in the late ‘80s, she was still associated more with theater than music when she took the Lincoln Center job.

“I was a somewhat nontraditional choice,” she concedes. “Nobody in the music world knew who I was. But not having been immersed in that world, I had an enormous advantage in terms of seeing things differently. I could easily have had a life that didn’t have music at the center of it. But it’s unimaginable to me — music is such a huge part of my heart now.”

When she first arrived at Lincoln Center, she says, programming was in flux. Traditional formulas for classical musical presentation, including an emphasis on celebrity, were already beginning to decline. Moss and company not only brought in new performers but began presenting them in new ways — on Sunday mornings, at late-night concerts with candlelight and wine, and in new music marathons at various venues on and off the Lincoln Center campus.

Consider the changes at Mostly Mozart, the popular summer festival that began in 1966 and is currently underway here through Aug. 21. “It started as a great experiment with relatively inexpensive ticket prices and an informal ambience, like the ‘proms’ in London,” Moss says. “I am astonished at the number of people who tell me that the first concert they ever heard was at Mostly Mozart.”

But audiences were beginning to drift away, she says. “The festival had become formulaic. So I started thinking about how to diversify programming. The development of period instruments offered an obvious new category of programming, and we started bringing in a variety of outside presentations. We also made it multidisciplinary and commissioned new work.

“At the center, absolutely, is the genius of Mozart — he is the star — but the point is to put Mozart in a lively, engaged context. The thing I feel most proud of is that it doesn’t feel like your grandmother’s Mostly Mozart Festival anymore. It doesn’t feel stuck in the past.”

Moss collaborates on Mostly Mozart programming with the Mostly Mozart Orchestra’s music director, Louis Langrée. The conductor calls their goal “mutual inspiration,” pegging Moss’ programming vision as “very Mozartian. He was playing for kings and princes at official events but spent evenings with his friends in cafes. The festival offers a kaleidoscope look at all the different facets of the genius of Mozart.”

With White Light, the kaleidoscope’s focus turns to spirituality. For instance, the Hilliard Ensemble, a British vocal chamber group, will sing with Norwegian saxophone player Jan Garbarek at New York’s Church of St. Ignatius Loyola. “Groups like ours are performing more and more sacred music from different sacred cultures,” says countertenor David James, a Hilliard co-founder. “You get so easily pigeonholed into singing certain types of music. To be able to do this in a mainstream festival and in this church is extremely special.”

Hilliard agent Lovallo concurs. “What Jane does is stretch what has been traditional programming at Lincoln Center to make real connections with contemporary society. With her programming, she’s aiming for the hipster crowd that would show up at contemporary art museums and then trying to bring them into what was a straightforward classical presenting organization. She has made classical performing arts relevant. You know you’re alive in the 21st century at these events.”

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