[From the Ithaca Times, Oct. 31, 2007] If area residents are familiar with the work of local composer Steven Stucky, their acquaintance may well derive from fact that Stucky won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2005. And though the award was indeed a richly deserved honor and a thrilling acknowledgement of his artistic achievement (given for his “Second Concerto for Orchestra,” composed in 2003), the fact remains that no single award, even of the Pulitzer’s stature, could adequately convey the importance of Stucky’s place in the world of classical music today. Simply put, Steven Stucky ranks among America’s greatest living composers, the proof of which is to be found almost everywhere one looks in the classical field. His accomplishments and depth of expertise range across so many domains and institutions, in fact, that it would be impossible to account for them in one article alone.
This Sunday evening, in a concert at Barnes Auditorium, local audiences will have the opportunity to witness for themselves Stucky’s sage vision when he leads Ensemble X in performance. Also on Thursday of this week, Stucky’s friend of 30 years, noted Polish avant-garde pianist and composer Zygmunt Krauze, will give a piano recital of pieces by Stockhausen, Messiaen, Cowell, Webern, Harrison, Lutoslawski, Ligeti, and Krauze himself — an exciting program by anyone’s reckoning.
Perhaps more enthralling still, the live recording of Stucky’s latest composition, Radical Light, which received its world premiere with the Los Angeles Philharmonic last week, is slated for release through i-Tunes next month, which will offer music lovers the world over the chance to hear a recording of this stunning work’s debut performance.
Last week’s world premiere of Radical Light was only the latest in a number of pieces that Stucky has written for the Los Angeles Philharmonic over the past 20 years. In fact, Stucky’s relationship with that venerable orchestra is the longest running between any composer and orchestra in the country. The connection between Stucky and Esa-Pekka Salonen, the LA Philharmonic’s conductor (and a gifted composer himself), is a special one. About it Stucky says, “When I write a new piece for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and for Esa-Pekka there is almost complete transparency in the process. There is no translation required when I hand him the score, or when he goes through the score with the orchestra. We really are on the same page.”
Stucky is also well known for a scholarly erudition that moves effortlessly across the vast landscape of classical composition technique and music history. In 1981, he published a major work on Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski, a study so successful that some mistakenly began to view Stucky as a musicologist who just happened to write classical music. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, as the intervening 25 years of commissions and award-winning compositions have demonstrated in abundance.
Radical Light was commissioned by the LA Philharmonic to be performed in a series of concerts devoted to the legacy of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. Stucky responded to the challenge with enthusiasm, since it offered him a chance to write a piece he’s had in mind for some time. “In general, these days a sort of holy grail for modern composers is to write pieces which are not in movements but continuous, which are not merely a bunch of different ideas stitched together but that make one big motion. Now of course, when you want to make one big motion, what you do is stitch a bunch of different ideas together (laughs), because no one can really make one big 20-minute motion. Encouraged by examples of pieces like Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony and many recent, very impressive pieces by contemporary composers, I decided that it was time to face up to this challenge, which I’ve been putting off for a while. If you want to talk about recent pieces, some of the really big pieces of John Adams, for example, even if they are multi-movement pieces, they might have a 15 or 20-minute movement which really does develop in a very, very long way, and takes a very long journey — though a journey without any hairpin turns or passport controls, so to speak, just a passing from one idea to another. That’s the inspiration for a piece like this.” Stucky is also quick to point out that the concert hall itself, Disney Hall, where the L.A. Philharmonic performs, also played a role in the inspiration for the sonic character of the work. He adds, “It is very much a sound piece, a piece in which the ideas are more about texture and acoustics than they are about melody and harmony.”
Later, when talking about compositional materials, Stucky briefly lifted the veil on the materials that he used in writing the piece: “I still do use 12-tone techniques. Radical Light is influenced by them, and by minimalism, and by all sorts of other things. This is partly due to the fact we have a bigger toolbox than we did before, and I use these tools as I can — though I prefer that we not pin labels on which tool is making which effect at which moment. I prefer instead that listeners think about the expression of the piece as a whole, independently of language or academic tools.”
Stucky’s obsession with classical music began in earliest childhood. Already by the age of four or five he was listening compulsively to classical records. “My mother had a record collection consisting of two records. A classical record in those days was an album containing several LPs. The records that she owned were Dvořák’s New World Symphony and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. And so this was my universe when I was a boy, these two pieces over and over and over again,” Stucky fondly recalls. In fact, Stucky had already decided as a young boy that he wanted to be a composer. “The rest was just a matter of hard work,” he says.
After moving to Texas when he was barely 10-years-old, Stucky began viola studies in the public school system and also began ransacking local libraries for music: “I was probably 10 or 11 when I would go to the public library in Abilene, Texas. I ate my way through their entire collection. Which may not have taken that long, I’m not sure,” he laughs. Stucky heaps praise on his teachers in the Texas public school system who labored tirelessly to pass on the love and knowledge of music to their students.
With one exception, Stucky’s family was not particularly musical: “I did not come from a musical family at all, except in one case. My maternal grandfather played violin professionally for many years. This was in Topeka and Kansas City and Lawrence, Kansas, and I have a wonderful picture of him in tails with his violin in 1915. It was taken, I think — though I don’t remember the name of it — at a theater in Kansas City where they had a live orchestra instead of a soundtrack, as one did in those days. It is a very inspiring photograph. I’m sure that it rubbed off on me, especially the idea of taking the subject of music that seriously.”
Stucky’s activities these days are not limited to Los Angeles and Ithaca, far from it: he will be present when Radical Light is performed in London, Paris, Barcelona, and Lisbon next month, and he also regularly participates in the New York Philharmonic’s series of events called Hear and Now, in which he leads discussions with performers and audience both before and during concerts. Stucky describes the series in the following way: “This is a program in New York which is mostly organized around world premieres, so that the audience does not get a straight concert only, but also a context. There is a pre-concert event with chamber music or other examples of this composer’s music, and during the concert with the NY Philharmonic, and with me, there is a chance to explore the piece from the inside out and to put it in context. It’s a kind of live CD-ROM where all of the sidebars come to life.”
One of the more tantalizing events in the series will occur on Feb. 2, when Stucky will be in attendance to help celebrate the anniversary of recently deceased composer Luciano Berio’s work, Sinfonia. “In this case, because it’s not a world premiere but a recollection of the Berio Sinfonia on its 40th anniversary, we are calling it the ‘Day of Berio,’ with performances to be given of the complete cycle of the Sequenzas and with a fair amount of talk about Berio by some of his closest associates, including his wife, who is coming from Italy to be with us.”
As for the upcoming Ensemble X performance at Cornell, Stucky is looking forward to it. “Ensemble X ran officially for nine years, and when we stopped existing it was because so many of the core members had become so busy with concerts and traveling that it was difficult to give our sustained attention to the group. On the other hand, as soon as we ceased our official existence, we noticed that we kept wanting to play together, and that opportunities like this Italian concert on Sunday kept coming up. So, it’s a bit like some aging rock band who keep having reunion concerts, we can’t quite give it up,” Stucky laughs. “And I am very happy about that, because we love to play together and we’re really looking forward to Sunday’s performance.”
Sunday’s performance will feature an all-Italian program, including two works by young Italian composers who are still in their thirties and who are also mutual friends (Antignani and Antonioni). “In one short concert, we will cover a lot of ground… and I hope that we can introduce a few surprises to our audiences here in Ithaca. Especially with these two young Italian composers, whom they certainly won’t know yet.”
For young composition students, the support of a composer of Stucky’s stature is an invaluable and much appreciated boon, and one that is felt by everyone in the music department. Kevin Ernste, for one, who is the youngest member of Cornell’s composition faculty, speaks in glowing terms of Stucky’s commitment to young composers.
Composition graduate student Spencer Topel says, “Dr. Stucky is one of those rare blends of a great composer and a great academic. In addition to his personal accomplishments, he makes his students a major part of his life, seeing to it that they possess both his eye for excellence in the writing of music but also the humility it takes to keep going.” Current Cornell composition graduate student Norbert Palej, furthermore, offers this description: “Professor Stucky is a mentor in the fullest sense of the word: not only a master in his field, but also a dedicated teacher who cares about his students and who guides them on many, many levels. The awe and respect felt by the composition students who surround him here at Cornell are to my knowledge unparalleled in other departments.”
Awe and respect are indeed easy to understand: to hear Stucky speak about his craft is dazzling. On the topics of serialism and minimalism, for example, two well-known compositional approaches that emerged in the 20th century, Stucky has this to say: “In both cases one could make a general statement that movements or moments in the history of twentieth century music, which were once taken as political positions, or aesthetic positions, or polemical positions to be defended, no longer look so unfriendly. We live now, as listeners and composers, at at a time when all of these developments — let’s say 12-tone music and serialism, minimalism, chance procedures, so-called sonorism and the Polish school and Xenakis and so forth, and more recently the influence of world music and all sorts of other influences — are available to the listener and to the composer without having to sign up for one party or the other, so to speak. It makes for a very, very — the richest possible — language, technically and aesthetically, which we now have at our disposal. We are very lucky.”
Steven Stucky may feel lucky, but we, the audience do, too - in this case, that an artist, mind, and human being of Stucky’s caliber are among us.