CREATIVE PROCESS
SF Community Orchestra will test drive new work by Frederick Frahm
WWhether composing to the mechanical feedback of a computer or simply imagining the instrumentation in your mind, it’s tough to tell exactly how a new piece of music for orchestra will sound until actual musicians perform it with the full emotion and nuance of which they are capable.
Or until they demonstrate the limitations of a human in coaxing a particular series of notes from an instrument. After all, it’s only so fast and so far those fingers can fly.
That’s why the Santa Fe Community Orchestra’s ongoing series of “readings” of new music has been welcomed with open arms by New Mexico composers.
“It’s a really great thing to have a live orchestra read a piece,” said Albuquerque composer Frederick Frahm, who has published some 100 compositions. “The music comes alive. A computer can’t help you understand the subtleties of a score ... . The readings are just a huge service.”
One of Frahm’s latest works, “Shadows in a Frame” for string orchestra, will be “read” by the orchestra in an open rehearsal format at 6 p.m. today in the St. Francis Auditorium, 107 W. Palace Ave. Like all SFCO events, this is free and open to the public.
The event will mark a lot of firsts: the first time the orchestra has seen and played the score, the first time the composer has heard the piece performed by a live orchestra and, obviously, the first time an audience has a chance to hear the work.
Expect a stop-and-go experience, though. SFCO music director Oliver Prezant explained that the orchestra will stop often as those involved discuss tempo and other fine points of the piece, with the composer potentially making on-the-spot adjustments in the score.
“It’s not a polished performance,” he said. “But it’s an opportunity for the public to watch new compositions come to life.”
Dozen years of readings
The orchestra has been offering the new music readings for about a dozen years, thanks to generous funding from The Mill Foundation, according to Prezant.
“It’s fairly unusual for an orchestra to offer this kind of program,” he said, yet the SFCO has three sessions scheduled this season, with the final one set for May 6.
It helps that the orchestra is made up of volunteers — retired professional musicians, music teachers, students and more make up the 55-60 members, he said. Gerald Fried, who spent a lifetime composing film and television scores, including for “Roots” and “Star Trek,” is one of the members, Prezant added.
“We’ve had musicians come from Albuquerque to play with us,” he added. “Choristers have come from as far as Las Vegas (N.M.) and Taos.”
Yes, the orchestra includes choral works in its repertoire, which most often features established works in its concerts.
But it also offers premieres of new works, such as Frahm’s “Symphony No. 1” that was performed in December, sharing the bill with a work as well-known as Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite.”
After years of doing the readings, Prezant said, the orchestra has found some works it enjoyed enough to want to rehearse and present as a full performance.
The Mill Foundation support also enables the SFCO to conduct a composition competition, with an independent jury choosing two finalists whose works will be performed at a date yet to be set and who will receive $1,000 each. The orchestra members then will vote by ballot for its favorite, whose composer will receive an additional $3,000 prize.
Over the years, Prezant said, “we’ve had submissions from Las Cruces, Grants, Portales, Las Vegas, Los Alamos, Albuquerque and, of course, Santa Fe — from high school students, college students and faculty, retired professional and amateur composers.”
Inspired by Odilon Redon
Frahm said his piece that will be read tonight was inspired by an art book he stumbled across in Collected Works Bookstore with works by the French artist Odilon Redon (1840-1916). A symbolist whose works can be “dark and brooding,” Frahm said they “created a sense of a musical universe I thought would be interesting to explore.” After all, there is great cross-pollination in the arts, with poems inspired by music and music inspired by written or visual arts.
Frahm’s composition is in three parts, inspired by three of the works: “Fallen Angel,” “Melancholy” and “Strange Flower” (in the English translation of the titles). He said he developed the parts from some previous musical sketches he had put aside, adapting them to suit the spirit of the images.
Prezant described the piece as lyrical with hints of romanticism, while “minimalist from a stylistic point of view.” He called Frahm “a very accomplished composer,” noting that Frahm also is principal organist and music director at St. Luke Lutheran Church in Albuquerque. Frahm said he composes much of the work performed in that church, but also has had pieces performed across the U.S. and in Europe.
Of this latest effort, he said, “It’s of a minimum character, with slow phrases — the harmony is not really static, but it moves slowly. My First Symphony performed in December is of a very different style.”
Looking forward to tonight’s reading, he added, “I’m curious to see if it sounds like I think it does.”