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Oregon Bach Festival: Underinvesting in Oregon’s musical future

By Brett Campbell
July 10, 2013
Featured, Music
Helmuth and Martina Rilling, with Matthew Halls, looking at the score of James MacMillan's "Allelulia" at its July 6 world premiere.

Helmuth and Martina Rilling, with Matthew Halls, looking at the score of James MacMillan’s “Allelulia” at its July 6 world premiere.

By BRETT CAMPBELL

Last Saturday, the Oregon Bach Festival chorus sang a sweet surprise 80th birthday gift for retiring founding music director Helmuth Rilling – an “Alleluia” commissioned from the great contemporary Scots composer James MacMillan, who is working on a big new commission for the 2016 Festival. It’s a treat to see the OBF returning to sparking the creation of new music, as it did for awhile every other year a decade or ago, resulting in major works by Arvo Part, Osvaldo Golijov and other composers. (You can hear some of that music this Saturday night at 8 pm, and on demand for two more weeks, on Robert McBride’s excellent Club Mod radio show on Portland’s KQAC radio.)  It’s a coup made possible by a $25,000 NEA grant and by the festival’s executive director, John Evans, a fellow Brit who goes way back with Jimmy Mac.

Note: This story was originally published as part of a larger News & Notes post, but because of the volume of comments and interest, we’re republishing it and the other components as separate stories. Please continue this fascinating discussion below!

Yet amid all the good news, one question kept troubling me: why do our major Oregon classical music institutions keep sending American taxpayer dollars to non-American composers at the same time they fail to invest in the development of contemporary Oregon music? Of course, no Oregon composer is as famous as the above-listed worthies. But MacMillan didn’t reach the stratospheric compositional heights that qualified his for that august OBF commission by accident, or, as the old Romantic mythology would assume, solely by virtue of innate genius. In large part, MacMillan’s success stems from early and continuing support from his homeland music institutions—the kind of nourishment that backward-gazing organizations like OBF and others have failed to provide Oregonians.

Before he was 30 years old, the promising young Scot received showcases by at least three of Scotland’s major music festivals (in Edinburgh, Orkney, and Glasgow) for  his first major pieces. Those helped put him on the radar so that, in 1990, he was appointed composer in residence by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which supported his composing for years. In fact, SCO gave MacMillan a crucial commission when he was 28, and he soon received other commissions and performances from his homeland’s other major classical institutions, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Which under-30 Oregon composers have received comparable sustained, career-boosting support from the state’s festivals and orchestras?

That crucial early support for his music from his home orchestras helped bring MacMillan another commission by another British music festival, the Proms, for which he composed his breakthrough: the searing “Confessions of Isobel Gowdie.”

In fact, Britain’s music institutions supported MacMillan all the way up the ladder. The BBC Philharmonic made him its composer in residence from 2000 to 2009, and MacMillan also curated London’s Philharmonia Orchestra’s contemporary music series, the kind no Oregon orchestra bothers to sponsor. Few composers are going to invest the massive time and effort that goes into writing a symphonic work without knowing that an orchestra or festival will be willing to perform it, and to provide the support that gives them the time and resources to do so.

ComposerJames MacMillan. Photo: Hans van der Woerd

Composer James MacMillan. Photo: Hans van der Woerd

In other words, thanks in great part to the early support this rising young contemporary composer received from Scottish and British classical music festivals and orchestras, unlike those provided by comparable Oregon institutions, James MacMillan became an international star and helped revitalize the Scots classical music scene that had demonstrated such faith in his early promise.

How often have Oregon music festivals or orchestras done for promising Oregonian composers what Scotland’s classical music institutions did for MacMillan? Had Oregon institutions shown similar faith in our creative artists back in the 1980s and ’90s, maybe that plum OBF/NEA commission could have gone to an Oregonian rather than a Scot. It’s fine to have the OBF commissioning the superstars, but shouldn’t it be devoting at least equal efforts to nurturing new Oregon music?

That difference in political and artistic leadership may explain why Scotland (population 5 million) has succeeded in cultivating its native composers, and Oregon (population 4 million) hasn’t: unlike Scotland’s, shortsighted Oregon political and classical music institutions have failed to invest in our state’s creative artists.

If we want Oregon classical music to flourish, every Oregon classical music institution, especially those that receive any public funding, should be regularly performing, commissioning and otherwise encouraging the works of Oregon composers. Their record to this point has been disgraceful. “The Oregon Symphony hasn’t commissioned a work from an Oregon composer in three [now going on five] years,” Oregonian writer David Stabler noted at a March Music Moderne panel in 2012. “That’s outrageous.”

Granted, for years, the Oregon Bach Festival has sponsored a biennial Composers Symposium devoted to the cultivation of new classical music, but it’s not exclusively for Oregonians and it’s aimed at students. And the OSO and OBF are only the most visible culprits. If our major classical music organizations would only demonstrate visionary leadership and commitment to the creative future of the state they’re supposed to serve, they might find the next James MacMillan right here in Oregon.

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