.gif)
Each of the past two summers I have been playing the two week new music immersion that is the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. The festival is located in Santa Cruz, California, and it offers a unique musical opportunity to simultaneously expose and be exposed to some of the best new music being written today. Every year the festival brings in the leading composers of our time and they collaborate with music director Marin Alsop and the orchestra to create concerts that focus solely on new music; there is no old musical warhorse being trotted around these grounds. If you want to hear Tchaik 5, or Beethoven 5, or Pictures at an Exhibition, you’ll have to find a different festival.
This year, I am especially excited about the festival because I am performing the U.S. Premier of Desolation Wilderness, a trumpet concerto written by the British composer, Joby Talbot. The concerto was written in 2006 for Alison Balsom and it features driving minimalist-style rhythms, soaring melodic lines, and lightning fast technical passages reminiscent of the great violin concertos; it is a welcome addition to the trumpet repertoire to be sure. If you don’t know Joby’s music, you should definitely check it out. He has done some extraordinary work. You can learn more about him by visiting www.jobytalbot.com.
Joby’s music is a perfect example of new music that bucks the trend of being difficult to listen to and academic. Indeed, my experiences the past couple of summers at the Cabrillo Festival have introduced me to a wide range of composers who write music that is strikingly beautiful and quite easy to listen to, while maintaining important aspects like originality, finely crafted orchestration, and a well organized formal structure. This new direction for modern music is exciting and necessary for the survival of classical music as an art form. Over the last 50-100 years the vast majority of composers have ignored their audiences and written music that most of the population would not choose to listen to. Artistically speaking, I have no problem with that. I truly believe a composer should write the music he/she most believes in, regardless of what people think. The problem comes when we want to be able to make a living writing or performing this type of music. For that, we need to be able to make money, and to make money we need the audience to care about our work; it’s that simple. If classical music is going to continue into the future as a living, thriving art form — and not as just an old museum relic — it will need to have new music that audiences care about, that people are excited to hear. New music is the music of our age; it needs to be the main attraction, and the main attraction has to be good!
For two short weeks in Santa Cruz that is exactly what is on offer, and I am happy to be a part of it. To see what is going on at the festival this year simply visit: www.cabrillomusic.org
{ fin }
