A Composer’s Education

One of the themes that quickly emerges, when examining the lives of the world’s greatest artists, is the necessity of a rigorous training period. No matter how talented a given individual might be, he must go through years of demanding technical training in his chosen art before he has the breadth of skill necessary to create something original and beautiful. Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of music composition training. Stravinsky, for instance, studied for several years with Rimsky-Korsakov, then moved to Paris and studied for several more years with Nadia Boulanger. Barber spent nearly five years doing demanding counterpoint exercises under the guidance of his teacher Rosario Scalero. Frank Bridge, Benjamin Britten’s first composition teacher, drilled his pupil in harmony and Palestrinian voice leading on a daily basis. Yet out of this seemingly monotonous education sprang The Rite of Spring, Adagio for Strings, and The War Requiem.

A new album on the Orchid Classics label highlights the brilliance that can come from this kind of education. Midsummer Light, featuring the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Michael Poll, includes Byron Adams’s Midsummer Music, David Conte’s Sinfonietta for Classical Orchestra, and Samuel Barber’s violin concerto (Jack Liebeck, violin soloist). It is a lovely album, well-produced and evenly balanced, yet not so polished as to remove the welcoming sounds of real instruments making real sounds. 

I take no particular issue with the Adams composition, though I found it to be less convincing than the other works on the album. My remarks here will focus on the Conte and Barber compositions.

I’ve written about Conte in these pages before, and I’ve made no secret of my view that he is the preeminent American composer alive today. Like Barber, Conte underwent a rigorous, traditional education in harmony and counterpoint. And despite being nearly a century apart from Barber in age, Conte’s music has some of the same characteristics as Barber’s: unique yet relatable tonal textures, energetic and innovative rhythmic gestures, clear themes with identifiable ideas, and lasting public appeal that ensures its presence the repertory. Both composers eschew the serialist and minimalist fads of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, preferring instead to compose firmly structured works that draw on the rich tonal palettes presented by the modern orchestra. In doing so, they carry on the tradition of the great composers who have come before them.

Perhaps the best evidence in favor of their approach is the simple fact that their works have stayed in the repertoire. Conte has published over 150 works, and both the Adagio for Strings and the violin concerto are now considered standard Barber selections. That the violin concerto has earned a permanent spot in the repertoire is, however, no surprise. It is a masterful work, a polished exhibition of Barber’s immense compositional technique that combines a thoroughly American soundscape with exquisite orchestration and structure. In this recording, Liebeck does an admirable job of highlighting the lyrical nature of the violin line, which seems to draw on the collective melodic genius of the Romantic-era violin concerti in spinning lush, almost painfully beautiful melodies throughout the first and second movements. Maestro Poll and the Royal Philharmonic are equally impressive. There were several points at which I looked up in surprise at an obscure oboe or viola line that, until now, I had not heard highlighted in any other recordings of this concerto. 

One explanation for Barber’s tremendous ability to create lyrical lines is his preoccupation with composing music for the human voice. Despite his tragically early death, Barber managed to compose two full song cycles and two operas. It is therefore interesting, in light of Conte’s established reputation as a composer of vocal music, to note the same lyrical quality in Conte’s music. Indeed, he has said as much in his public comments about the piece: “Long study of the works of composers I most admire has taught me that instrumental music is informed by a vocal impulse; I have therefore striven to imbue my Sinfonietta for Classical Orchestra with dramatic and lyrical melodies.” 

Conte specifies the work for “classical orchestra,” rather than simply “orchestra.” A classical orchestra is smaller than the large modern orchestras we see on today’s concert stages, containing double winds, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings—no brass, auxiliary woodwinds, or percussion (aside from timpani). It is, in fact, the orchestra most of the Beethoven symphonies were composed for (as well as the orchestra Prokofiev wrote his brilliant Classical Symphony for in 1918). 

The first movement abounds in robust, Stravinsky-esque energy. A constant stream of running lines gives the piece a distinctly classical feel. The music then drops into a series of reflective woodwind solos that transition, without pause, into the second movement, which Conte titles Elegy. Conte writes a lot of Elegies; the fourth movement of his second string quartet is an Elegy, and there’s the more recent “Elegy for Violin & Piano.” To be clear, this is not a complaint, merely an observation. I cannot think of another composer that uses the Elegy title and form in the way Conte does. Here, in the Sinfonietta, the Elegy is a spacious, expressive work in which one can hear the influence of Copland (and perhaps even Barber). This is no surprise. After all, Conte lived with Copland for a summer. To surmise that Copland’s distinctive sound-world might have thus trickled down into Conte’s music is not out of the question. Finally there is the Finale, which returns to the jaunty, vivacious energy of the first movement. Always melodic, never stagnant, this movement provides an emphatic and stylish close to the work and the album.

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