The way he tells it, composer Morris Rosenzweig may have written an uncompromising piece about the spirit of compromise.
The work in question is "Concord," which will be receiving its premiere on next weekend's Utah Symphony concerts. Intended to mark the 200th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the piece was commissioned by the Young Lawyers Section of the Utah State Bar Association and the Utah Council on the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, with funds from the George S. and Dolores Dore Eccles Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union.According to Rosenzweig, the suggestion came from Utah Symphony music director Joseph Silverstein, with whom he had spoken a couple of years ago about the possibility of doing something for the orchestra.
"It was left pretty much up in the air what that something would be," says Rosenzweig, who has taught composition at the University of Utah since 1987, "but two months later I got a phone call from someone representing the Young Lawyers Section of the Utah State Bar."
The result was "Concord," a 20-minute piece whose title, Rosenzweig says, reflects "the way in which the Bill of Rights came into existence, i.e., by accord or by agreement." Along those lines, his notes for the piece allude to "the rancorous positioning and tremendous tension between those parties proposing a strictly federal bias and those insisting on the protection of personal rights" and "how these constitutional addenda were drafted, reformed, reordered and some finally excluded to eventually form the first 10 ammendments to the Constitution."
The 39-year-old composer denies that that process is strictly imitated in his music, or that it is intended to be a programmatic reflection of the Bill of Rights itself. "I mean I don't have gunshots going off with regard to the Second Ammendment or anything like that." But he acknowledges that the seemingly diverse ideas of the Introduction, "generally unsettled," are, in the ensuing nine sections, further contained, reordered and subjected to a "purging what is not needed."
At the same time one gathers that the musical language of the piece is a bit less compromising.
"Is it tonal?" Rosenzweig asks, echoing the implied question. "Yes, in the sense that I mean tonality, which is probably not what most people consider it to be.
"It seems to me that one of the key underlying problems we have in understanding modern music is that we expect music, in order to be coherent, to be based on triads, good old C major and its friends. That simply isn't the case in my music, but that's not to say I've gone out of my way to create any arithmetic formulas. I make music by writing what I hear, and for someone who's spent the amount of time I have teaching music and its history it's inevitable that some kind of musical evolution is going to have taken place."
Rosenzweig's evolution began in the public schools of Louisiana, where he was exposed to as wide a range of music as someone born and raised in New Orleans could expect.
"I became more interested in classical music than any other type I was dealing with," he says, "including band music, rock music, even to a limited extent jazz. It's kind of hard not to be involved in that in some way growing up in that environment."
Somewhere along the way he also became interested in composition. "I started playing French horn around the fifth grade," he recalls, "and when I was about 14 or 15 I decided to write something for myself, and then something for my friends. First came a book of horn etudes, which I have since lost, then a horn quartet and a woodwind octet."
Eventually that led him to the Eastman School of Music, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and New York University, where he was teaching when the opportunity arose to come to Utah. At the same time the "friends" for whom he has produced pieces have come to include, besides the Utah Symphony, the New Orleans Symphony, Speculum Musicae and violist Lawrence Dutton of the Emerson Quartet.
Currently he is at work on a piece for the Leonardo Trio, to be premiered next March in Amsterdam, and recently had his "Dyptich," from 1984, released on the Centaur label along with pieces by his onetime U. of U. colleague David Froom (including the latter's "Down to a Sunless Sea," premiered by the Utah Symphony in 1988). Rosenzweig himself is the conductor on that recording and, since coming here, has also directed the New Music Ensemble at the U.
Utah, he says, appealed to him for a variety of reasons, one of them being the situation he says he was trapped in at NYU, "pretty much teaching the same old introductory courses," another being that he hated New York itself. ("It's a horrible place.") At present, he says, his wife is a second-year law student at the U. and neither he nor his family regret the move.
And the key moment in that personal musical evolution? "I think it was when I was studying with George Rochberg, which was just about the time he started writing what we traditionally call tonal music. I had begun by writing what we call classical music - you know, Mozart etc. - but by my late teens was writing music that sounded pretty much like Frank Martin, Ernest Bloch and Paul Hindemith."
At school that development was compounded by getting to meet Copland, Boulez and George Crumb and coming more under the influence of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. "Then when I listened to what Rochberg was doing, I thought, `Gee, that sounds a little like Mahler or Beethoven and I want to write in my own voice.'
"I suppose it sounds `modern,' " Rosenzweig muses. "I think it sounds like me." If so, what better place than a Bill of Rights piece to excercise freedom of speech?
Also on next weekend's programs, to be presented Friday and Saturday, Dec. 6 and 7, at Symphony Hall, are Copland's "A Lincoln Portrait," with Sen. Orrin Hatch as narrator, Hanson's "Song of Democracy" and Vaughan Williams' "Dona Nobis Pacem," the latter two with the Utah Symphony Chorus. Soloists in the Vaughan Williams will be soprano Marjo Burdette and baritone David Power.
Starting time is 8 p.m., with a complimentary pre-concert lecture each evening at 7:15. Tickets range in price from $10 to $30, with student tickets available for $5.
For information call 533-NOTE.