There Are No Nonwestern Influences in Jennifer Higdonã¢â‚¬â„¢s Blue Cathedral

With her hearty laugh, engaging manner, and twangy Tennessee accent, Jennifer Higdon — whose 1999 piano quintet is being performed tonight and Sunday as part of the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival - is hardly your stereotypical classical composer. After all, composers of classical music - if they're not already dead - are supposed to be at least "serious," and, let's face it, of the male gender.
What's more, the upfront, unpretentious Higdon is the first to admit she knew next to nothing about music until, at age 15, she picked up a flute and began teaching herself to play from a standard instruction book. It wasn't until she was a 20-year-old performance major at Ohio's Bowling Green University that, at the suggestion of her perceptive flute teacher, she first tried her hand at composition.
It was just a simple two-minute piece for flute and piano, but the genie was out of the bottle.
In ensuing months, Higdon continued to compose a handful of other short pieces showing such ingenuit flair that, upon graduation, she was immediately accepted as an Artist's Diploma student at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music. (She is now on the faculty there, teaching composition and a popular course on contemporary music.)
In Concert What: Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival's Program 4, featuring Jennifer Higdon's Quintet for Piano and String Quartet, along with works by Bruckner and Bach
Performed by: Pianist Gary Graffman, the Borromeo String Quartet and violist Marcus Thompson
When and where: 8 tonight in the First Congregational Church, Main Street, Wellfleet and 4 p.m. Sunday in Lillie Auditorium, Marine Biological Laboratory, — Water St., Woods Hole. A preview lecture will begin at — p.m.
Tickets: $27, $24 for seniors, $15 for students (with ID) age 18 and under admitted free
Information: 800-818-0608 or 508-945-8060
Today, the 41-year-old Higdon - who earned both her master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Pennsylvania - is riding high as one of the most sought-after and prolific American composers on the classical music scene. In 2003 alone, she has already completed 11 commissions for new works, with several more to go, and is compositionally "booked," so to speak, through 2006. There are approximately 60 to 80 performances of her works annually, some of which she herself conducts.
Last season, her 35-minute "Concerto for Orchestra," originally commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra for its 2000 centennial celebration, was premiered to wildly enthusiastic applause and lavish praise from musicians and critics alike. And in July, performances of the colorful Concerto and the composer's haunting, impressionist-style "blue cathedral" (featured on a recently released Telarc recording by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra) were met with prolonged standing ovations at the prestigious Tanglewood and Vail (Colo.) summer festivals.
The verdict is in: Higdon is a hit.
A tear-inducing work"I absolutely love it," the composer says of her fast-accelerating career. "(Music) is such an amazing art form it has so much communications capability, and people respond to it on such an instinctive level. The concerto makes people really excited, but "blue cathedral" is probably the piece that has triggered the most response. I've had quite a few people come out of concerts who couldn't even speak (because) they were crying. It was really moving to see people touched that way."
The unusual work, which can best be described as an ethereal tone poem, was written as a memorial tribute to her younger brother, Andrew Blue Higdon, who died in 1998 after a prolonged battle with cancer.
"When I wrote it, I was imagining a blue cathedral of glass in the sky," says Higdon.
She is speaking by telephone from her midtown Philadelphia residence, where she not only does most of her composing but, since 1994, when she first started writing symphonic music, has managed to singlehandedly publish her scores, orchestra parts and all. She uses a computer, a sophisticated printer and a binding machine. publishing and distributing her own music, Higdon has become one of those exceedingly rare composers who is able to earn a living from the sale of her work.
But the mushrooming demand for her scores is forcing her to reconsider priorities.
"I'm handling it all alone. It's crazy!," she says. "I don't think it's too healthy in the long run for the composing. You do need some sort of balance, and I've got to go see my films." A peal of hearty laughter follows.
Film fanaticHigdon's scores often convey vivid, emotion-packed images in a kind of journey-like sequence that the composer, who admits to viewing "somewhere between 50 to 60 films a year," says is much like a narrative or documentary film. As a child growing up in Atlanta and later in rural Tennessee, she was frequently taken to contemporary art exhibitions and "a whole bunch of film festivals" by her parents, who were both professionally involved in the visual arts.
"I'm telling a story just like that," she says. "I always say to myself, 'You're taking someone's time. Let's do something exciting - make a picture, make a movie, but with music. ...There's always an image in my head that I'm trying to create a sonic image of. It's very rare that I don't have that. It helps me to compose."
As an example of this process, she cites her quintet for piano left hand and string quartet, the work that will be featured in this weekend's festival concerts. Subtitled "Scenes from a Poet's Dream," the five-part composition is a sequenced series of images drawn mainly from her memories of growing up on her family's 40-acre farm in the picturesque Smoky Mountain region of eastern Tennessee. It will be performed in tonight's and Sunday's program by the Borromeo String Quartet, with the distinguished pianist Gary Graffman, for whom it was commissioned. (Graffman, who is now president/director of Curtis Institute, permanently lost the use of his right hand due to an injury sustained in 1980 at the height of a successful concert career.)
The first movement, titled "Racing Through the Stars," challenges the players at the start, she says, with breathtaking "slow-rising passages" through all 12 major keys. "It's kind of bizarre, but it does give the feeling that you're racing along upwards," she says.
Of the second movement, "Summer Shimmers Across the Glass of Green Pond," Higdon says it evokes fond memories of hours spent fishing in a pond in a field near her home.
The inspiration for the third movement is a bit more arcane. "I Saw the Electric Insects Coming," which she describes as "edg scary," refers to George Crumb's 13-part "Black Angels for Electric String Quartet," which opens with a surreal section called "Night of the Electric Insects."
"I wrote a movement that leads up to the opening of his quartet," she says. "The last measure of my third movement is the first measure of his string quartet." Highly regarded as one of America's most imaginative and resourceful composers, the West Virginia-born Crumb, who teaches composition at the University of Pennsylvania, was the most important influence on Higdon during her graduate studies there.
"George taught me to listen to my inner voices and to the environment - to go back to my roots," she says. "I had almost forgotten about those haunted sounds that come traveling through the air, through the woods, and over the mountains. At night you could hear bobcats, whippoorwills, and sometimes voices that are 10 miles away floating across."
"In the Blue Fields They Sing," the hymnlike 4th movement, is, like "blue cathedral," a tribute to her dead brother. "The two works were premiered within a few months of each other," she says.
Creation theory"I write really instinctively," says Higdon.
"I didn't study a lot of theory - probably the amount any music student does: some harmony, some counterpoint, nothing extraordinary. ...You can teach theory. You can explain how things are put together. But you can't teach intuition. You just have to trust and to kind of let go."
Like the legendary Joan of Arc, Higdon confesses to hearing (musical) voices, and sometimes entire sections of music will appear full-blown in her aural imagination. But it's not simply a matter of dictation, she says emphatically.
"You can't assume, hearing it in your head, that it's going to be perfect. I'm always trying to figure out how to make it better. ... I constantly ask myself : 'Is this the best this line can be?'"
"It takes so long to write just a couple of seconds of music, it's hard to get an idea whether you are hitting the mark or not. That's what's really tricky about this profession. Sometimes it takes months and months to write just 10 minutes of music."
But even with the ever-increasing demands of her professional life, Higdon says she "gets back to writing easily after interruptions - the muse is still there."
Although she was looking forward to being on Cape for this weekend's performances, Higdon - not unforeseeably - has had to change her plans.
"I've been overwhelmed with traveling this summer - seven trips so far, flying and driving," she says, adding that she also needs to stay home a few days to complete a commissioned choral work that is overdue. Then she's off again to the West Coast, returning in time to travel to Atlanta for the early fall recording of her "Concerto for Orchestra" with Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
It was Spano who, as a 24-year-old conducting instructor at Bowling Green University, urged Higdon to apply to Curtis, his alma mater. More recently, he has championed her works by conducting the Curtis Institute Orchestra in the Philadelphia premiere (and later the recording) of her "blue cathedral" and by commissioning a major orchestral piece, "City Scape," which was premiered in Atlanta last November.
This fall, performances of her "Concerto for Orchestra" will open the season for the New York Philharmonic, Rochester Philharmonic and the Dallas Symphony orchestras. Leonard Slatkin will also conduct performances with the National Symphony Orchestra (Washington, D.C.) and London's BBC Orchestra. Higdon's characteristically ingenuous comment: "Pretty amazing, isn't it?"
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Source: https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/2003/08/15/higdon-breaks-mold-for-composers/50953634007/
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