By Richard Dyer
The Boston Globe original link

Tanglewood fest focused on pleasure, not principle
Works of all styles aimed to stir listeners' imaginations

LENOX -- Composer John Harbison curated an unusually undoctrinaire Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood last week.

The concerts were not about making points but about providing pleasure and sustenance, about awakening the listener's imagination. The pieces were varied in ambition, style, technique, size of performing forces, and length. The composers ranged in age from David M. Gordon, born in 1976, to Elliott Carter, born in 1908. Four women were among them, which would have seemed more remarkable a few years go; it just seems normal now.

The works represented everything on the stylistic spectrum, from the traditional disciplines of strict counterpoint to the rigors of 20th-century serialism to concert music influenced by rock and rap.
Consequently, the festival provided another demonstration that style or technique provides a method of describing music, but not of evaluating it. Quality is not determined by style.

Harbison's criterion for quality, for choosing composers and works, was emotional impact. In his overview in the program book, he wrote, ''I hope every listener is haunted, afterwards, by at least one piece on every concert."

Good composers, even young ones who used to follow party lines, are still doing what the best composers have always done, which is to write the music they have always wanted to hear but never been able to find. They want to reach an audience, whether small or large, and they seem to be succeeding. This was the best-attended festival in many years.
Of course, new music almost always has roots. The conscious or unconscious display of influences has been a characteristic of composers ever since they have found access to music from times and places other than the ones they live in. They often want to re-create in their own voices the qualities of the music of the past that means most to them.

That past can be recent or not -- works by Margaret Brouwer and Shulamit Ran on the vocal program, for example, included a harpsichord in the instrumental ensemble. Brouwer's ''Light" quoted music by the 15th-century composer Johannes Ockeghem and responded to the ecstasies of the medieval abbess Hildegard of Bingen with whirring modernist minimalist rapture. Ran's ''Amichai Songs" drew both on traditional Middle Eastern sounds and gambits and the techniques and styles that evolved in early 20th-century Vienna.

The festival was fortunate in its old masters -- Boulez, Carter, Dallapiccola, Harrison Birtwistle, all in characteristically challenging and rewarding form, and in its world premieres, of which the most remarkable was the Grand Concerto for Percussion and Keyboards by that grand master Gunther Schuller, still going strong at 80. Scored for 11 musicians playing more than 150 instruments, Schuller's three-movement work was entirely serious and thoughtful. He completely passed over the opportunity for novelty or for sheer volume in favor of composing almost meditative music for these extraordinary forces.
The piece was heard in the invigorating context of two other pieces commissioned by Boston Symphony Orchestra percussionist Frank Epstein and New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble, the glistening, gamelan-like ''Acid Rain" by the late Edward Cohen of MIT, and Joan Tower's invigorating ''DNA."

Among the other surprises were some elegantly dodgy and transparent songs on texts by contemporary poets by Milton Babbitt, in a more relaxed mood than usual. The prominent conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski turns out to be a composer of quality with an individual, melancholic voice. Augusta Read Thomas has deployed a formidable modernist technique from the beginning of her career; now she has learned to use it to convey urgent messages, as in the song cycle ''In My Sky at Twilight."

It was not a surprise to feel that George Perle's ''Critical Moments 2" was another of his masterpieces -- a garland of very short pieces that are in no sense fragmentary, but fully realized, sharp in outline, but elusive. The ailing composer received one of the great ovations of the festival.
Steven Mackey's ''Gathering" is one of his best pieces, a gorgeous setting of the word ''alleluia" scored for two sopranos, trombones, marimba, and harp. His ''Indigenous Instruments" is unusual and more characteristic -- an ingenious attempt to imagine ''a vernacular music from a culture that doesn't actually exist."

There were some astonishing performances by the Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, Tanglewood faculty, the New Fromm Players, and guests. Faculty baritone William Sharp was eloquent in composer Nicholas Maw's setting of Robert Browning's poem about the death of love (''Two in the Campagna"); Maw's music captures the aching modernity and the timelessness of the situation. Violists Mark Berger and Nadia Sirota made George Benjamin's ''Viola, Viola" sound like an entire string orchestra, giving voice to a wide-ranging soul.
It is preposterous to speak of the ''potential" of youngsters like percussionist William James, clarinetist Erin Svoboda (who mopped up in Yehudi Wyner's engaging ''Commedia"), sopranos Meng-Chun Lin and Susan Ruggiero-Mezzandri, and the vivid mezzo Abigail Fischer; they are already artists.

The two conducting fellows also shone, Steven Jarvi in Thomas's song cycle, and Julian Kuerti in Perle's magical pieces.

The guest ensemble was the increasingly famous eighth blackbird, six young knockout players who perform most of their repertoire from memory, dressed as if they were headed out for a night of clubbing. The pieces were varied and fun. Derek Bermel's ''Tied Shifts" is a brilliant adaptation of some of the most advanced rhythmic techniques of Bulgarian folk music. Gordon Fitzell's ''violence" paradoxically depicts its disturbing subject in the most restrained timbres and techniques of French Impressionism. Frederic Rzewski's ''Les Moutons de Panurge" is a game piece -- players invariably lose their way in the labyrinth of high-speed counting, and getting lost becomes part of the music. Gordon's ''Friction Systems" uses microtones not to sound weird but add an additional resonance and element of instability.

The chops and theatricality of eighth blackbird roused the audience to great enthusiasm, while sending a danger signal -- the members must be careful not to go the Kronos Quartet route of finding a popular groove and seldom venturing out of it, when venturing out of the groove was the original point.

The final orchestral concert offered one kind of climax -- a worthy world premiere (Lee Hyla's ''The Triadic Coast"), a rewarding American premiere (Julian Philips's exuberant and ultimately desolating ''Out of Light"), and the luscious, impressively big bow-wow of Stephen Stucky's Pulitzer Prize-winning Second Concerto for Orchestra, handsomely played by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra conducted with insight and conviction by Stefan Asbury.

In a note, Stucky remarked that his ''usual procedures find their fullest and I hope, their best expression here, in the kind of summing up that I imagine might precede striking off in a new direction for less familiar territory."

That's another aspect of contemporary music the festival illuminated: composers experiment, composers sum up, composers light out for new territory, and the cycle continues throughout the lives of the most adventurous -- Schuller, for example, was in completely new territory, not only for him, but for anyone.

One of the most haunting pieces, in Harbison's expression, came early in the festival, his own Fourth String Quartet (2001), especially the close of the slow movement. Quieter things can linger too, and sometimes longer.

Copyright © 2005 Globe Newspaper Company