Players Have Lost The Passion
Group marking 30th year needs a shot of energy
Allan Ulrich, Chronicle Music Critic
Sunday, March 25, 2001
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/03/25/PK162632.DTL
Thirty is a good round number, and as the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players prepare to blow out their 30th anniversary candles tomorrow evening, one can find words to praise the organization for surviving its modest beginnings as the Bring Your Own Pillow Concerts at the Grapestake Gallery. In a profession where institutions shrivel if you look at them askance, survival counts for much.
You have to admire any artistic institution that can keep afloat on a shoestring for three decades by purveying fare that serves only a limited public. Yet, in recent years, SFCMP concerts, with a few exceptions, have sounded both insular and increasingly tangential to the energy and ferment of the new-music scene. More often than not, the musical diet seems comprised of gruel and water. You consume it because you are told it is good for you; that the taste buds remain unstimulated is not supposed to matter.
At this point, the organization's glory days seem behind it, and that is a genuine cause for regret. The problems include a music director post that has remained unfilled since Donald Palma left a year ago, programming that lacks focus and a kind of clubby atmosphere among board members and supporters that has raised permissiveness to an art form. I won't say that this is how the old avant-garde always ends up, but I will say that all this evidence makes the imminent birthday party seem like an empty exercise in self-congratulation.
Mostly what is missing with SFCMP is the kind of outrageously grandiose and even idealistic thinking that puts a new-music organization on the map and keeps it there. Granted, only so much is possible on a $300,000 annual budget. But from 1974 to 1988, when Jean-Louis LeRoux (in collaboration with harpist Marcella DeCray) served as music director, these people were possessed by a vision. It wasn't a job. It was a passion.
Back then, they thought big. LeRoux and DeCray invested their energies in major projects, like the full-length song cycle "Voices" by Hans Werner Henze, an important composer perennially underexposed in the Bay Area; in evening- long tributes to Olivier Messiaen, long before he acquired his latter-day popularity; in homages to that sonic sorcerer Morton Feldman; in programs of Edgard Varese conducted by a great Varese fan named Frank Zappa emceed by a chanteuse named Grace Slick.
"Visionary" for LeRoux and DeCray didn't always mean big; they also concentrated their resources. I remember an entire evening of Pierre Boulez piano music played by one of his important French interpreters, Claude Helffer.
The concert demanded much in the way of concentration and, for some observers,
did not repay all the attention. But you remembered the occasion. The last time SFCMP drew a crowd appreciably larger than its core coterie was in 1992, when the ensemble honored John Cage on his 80th birthday, just months before his death.
The organization can boast what look like impressive statistics. It has commissioned 31 works, although the only one general audiences will probably recall is John Adams' 1993 Chamber Symphony. SFCMP has premiered more than 100 works and has kept up with some trends, like the infusion of Asian modes and sensibilities and Latin American influences into the American music scene. Twenty percent of the fare is devoted to Bay Area composers, notes SFCMP's executive director, Adam Frey.
The move from the acoustically appalling Veterans Building Green Room to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts a few years ago has generated a more gracious concertgoing experience, though, before the Museum of Modern Art relocated to Third Street, the galleries in the Veterans Building were left open for intermission strolling; "Listen to Modern Art" was a nifty and accurate slogan, and there were even tie-ins between concerts and exhibitions - - like those devoted to German Expressionism and Edward Hopper -- that raised provocative questions.
That was in the mid-1980s. Time may have passed SFCMP by. When Charles Boone launched the organization, there was precious little contemporary music to be heard in professional renderings in the Bay Area; the legendary Mills Performing Group, imbued with the spirit of composer-teacher Darius Milhaud, had just closed up shop.
Since then, the San Francisco Symphony has both started and abandoned its "New and Unusual Music" and "Wet Ink" series, though music director Michael Tilson Thomas' occasional "Mavericks" festivals generate incredible publicity. In the past 15 years also, groups devoted to fare of our time -- Earplay, Composers Inc., Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, the Other Minds Festival, the Kronos Quartet, of course, and any number of ensembles coming out of institutions of higher learning -- have established themselves.
SFCMP has been left without a profile or a philosophy. LeRoux's successor, Stephen "Lucky" Mosko, adopted a less international artistic policy and is believed by veterans to have taken the job to advance his conducting career. Considering Mosko's concurrent post at the California Institute for the Arts, programming logically included Southern California composers. Palma, a former guitarist turned double bassist, had roots in jazz, but was inclined to schedule Eastern seaboard establishment figures. Since his premature exit, guests have been responsible for the motley repertoire.
It has been haphazard. A fair retrospective of Jonathan Harvey's music and an all-percussion concert were the better offerings this season, but if SFCMP knew anything about publicity, it might have lured hundreds more people to the percussion concert, which exerted a visceral appeal.
These folks think small and seem to believe there is some virtue in exclusivity. The absence of artistic direction has been damaging, perhaps fatally, for SFCMP. The board of directors, a congeries of old experimentalists, well-wishers and stage mothers, makes decisions that cause one to question its legitimacy. Two years ago, the group commissioned a David Del Tredici song cycle that was introduced by a mezzo-soprano whose vocal prime was a distant memory. It was an excruciating experience. Why did it happen? Because this person paid for the commission. Talk about vanity enterprises.
Frey says that the low salary for a music director has kept the post open longer than he would have liked. If SFCMP were smart, it would restrict its search to a man or woman younger than 35. I lobbed this possibility at an esteemed senior composer in the community recently and he winced at the suggestion.
Yet, there is a younger generation of listeners who approach contemporary music from a different perspective, one in which dissonance and consonance register in a different manner. Thomas has tapped that energy and openness in his "Mavericks" festivals and the mood at those affairs has been exhilarating in a way that SFCMP has not experienced in many years.
Given the mature audiences at the ensemble's concerts, it is a proposal
that will not go down easily. Yet, as SFCMP prepares to enter its fourth
decade, it needs a transfusion more than it needs a piece of birthday cake.
S.F. Contemporary Music Players The ensemble, led by Jean-Louis LeRoux, will present a 30th anniversary concert of music by Steve Mackey, Ellen Harrison, Kui Dong and Pablo Ortiz at 8 p.m. tomorrow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard St.,
San Francisco. Tickets $12-$23. Call (415) 978-2787.
E-mail Alan Ulrich at aulrich@sfchronicle.com.
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle