Outside Philadelphia, Jennifer Higdon is one of the lesser-known names
that pops up in anthologies of works by women composers and lists of award and
grant recipients. But inside Philadelphia, Higdon is a source of musical relief.
In a city where modernists such as Richard Wernick, Ralph Shapey and George
Crumb lived, composed and left the city's conservative audiences less than
charmed, Higdon has consistently written music that's likeable without being
vapid and tonal without sounding second-hand. She pushes boundaries,
particularly in the use of unconventional techniques on conventional
instruments, but never to be avant-garde for its own sake: there's always a
purposeful expressive intent.
It's a winning musical profile — and, in the wake of the premiere of her Concerto for Orchestra the week of 12 June 2002, a profile that's likely to become prominent well beyond Pennsylvania. The 30-minute, five-movement Concerto was one of nine works commissioned to celebrate the Philadelphia Orchestra's centennial in 2001. Higdon's work was the last to be performed and the most warmly received — by audiences and musicians alike. In fact, the Philadelphia players nicknamed the Concerto "Ein Higdonleben" after seeing how it eclipsed the other work on the program, Richard Strauss' Ein Heldenleben, in terms of audience response. Among those listeners, fortuitously enough, were classical music managers from all over the United States: the American Symphony Orchestra League's annual convention was in town at the time.
Higdon came to composing fairly late, while an undergraduate at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Born in 1962, she grew up in rural Tennessee — teaching herself flute, playing in marching bands and hearing late-1960s rock music from her counterculture parents. That upbringing encouraged artistic expression, but it also made her skeptical of experimentation for its own sake. She recalls attending independent film festivals in Atlanta as a pre-teen and recognizing the avant-garde work as unnecessarily obscure. Also, her father's mantra, "Always question authority," gave her the enterprising spirit to publish her own work via Lawdon Press, her own publishing company. (The name is an conflation of Higdon's with that of her high school sweetheart and longtime companion, Cheryl Lawson.) In addition to allowing a more generous royalty schedule than a traditional publisher would, the arrangement is more efficient: when the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra wanted to perform and record her orchestral work blue cathedral for Telarc in early 2002, there was no waiting for the parts to arrive — she just printed them from her computer and mailed them. So when requests start coming in for her Concerto for Orchestra, she'll be ready.
andante contributor David Patrick Stearns, music critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, talked with Higdon at her home the morning after the Concerto's premiere.
David Patrick Stearns: It's hard to write a Concerto for Orchestra without it being in the shadow of Bela Bartók's piece of the same title. And yours has a similar five-movement structure.
Jennifer Higdon: I had originally planned four movements — I tried not to think about the Bartók. I worried that I'd end up rewriting it. Once I got the commission, I thought, "Oh, I can't listen to Bartók anymore! I have to clear my head."
DPS: You wrote a lot of it on the road, since your partner, Cheryl, is in the business of organizing conventions. Once you and I conducted a telephone interview while you were at a urology conference. How might different settings influence your composition?
JH: The second movement was written around lots of bodies of water. First I was in Pensacola, Florida, at a music festival, then in Los Angeles where Cheryl had a convention and then in Chicago, where I kept looking out the window at Lake Michigan. I think it did influence the music, which reminds me of wind blowing on water. And I can still see those hotel rooms very vividly in my mind.
DPS: Writing in hotels can be good. There's none of your stuff around; the décor is boring. You can't escape from yourself.
JH: I understand that Toni Morrison does her writing in hotel rooms. She checks into hotels to write.
DPS: Many of the orchestra members are people you've known for years. In fact, some were your contemporaries when you came to Philadelphia to study at the Curtis Institute and the University of Pennsylvania. How did that influence the composition?
JH: It helped with the sincerity of the piece. I could see their faces when I was writing; I knew who'd be playing what part. I've worked with a lot of them and know the kind of music they pick for their recitals.
DPS: You made a point of giving solos to the second-desk players.
JH: Why not? They're phenomenal players and don't get the opportunity.
DPS: Your composing process seems so intuitive as to be somewhat oblivious to
outside influences. You talk about composing as though there's some kind of
cosmic radio in your head. And that radio doesn't have much use for sonata form,
fugues or other formal structures.
JH: I just let the music unfold. That causes funny responses. At universities, people will ask about the form of one of my pieces, and I say it's through-composed. And they always look at me very puzzled.
DPS: I wonder if you're influenced by some of the improvisational freedom of pop music.
JH: That has to be the case. How can I go through 18 years of pop music at the front end of my life and not have it be an influence? I think it's also found in my sense of timing. My ideas turn over faster.
DPS: [Composer] Libby Larsen once told me that she went through The Magic Flute with a stopwatch and discovered that Mozart wrote in three-minute song modules.
JH: Mine are more like 10 or 15 seconds. And I don't know how I came across that formula — it's not a formula because I'm doing it instinctively; it seems to be the pattern of the music.
DPS: The fourth movement of your Concerto is carried by the percussion section. At first I thought of Nielsen's Symphony No. 6.
JH: Actually, I was thinking about marching band — those long drum cadences.
DPS: Many people feel you had a stylistic turning point with your orchestral work blue cathedral, which the Curtis Symphony Orchestra premiered in 2000. [click here to listen to blue cathedral in streaming audio]
JH: It feels different, like a breakthough, but it's hard to say why. Maybe it reached a new level of expression, a certain kind of rawness.
DPS: For many artists, the big challenge is getting what's in your head onto the page.
JH: That was a huge struggle for years. Sometimes I still feel like I'm chasing a shadow in my head.
DPS: What do you think of the pieces you wrote prior to blue cathedral? Do you ever want to withdraw them?
JH: Sometimes. But performers and audiences are sometimes a better judge than the person who did the composing. I was having doubts about Zones for Percussion and Tape, but when we did it a couple weeks ago [with the Philadelphia Orchestra Chamber Players] the percussionists were saying it was great. I was surprised at the audience reception — the piece is obnoxious! And the volume! I was afraid I'd cause heart failure or something. It's startling even for me, and I'm looking at the score. But people really liked it. I'm still getting e-mails on that performance.
DPS: I know that sometimes you've been asked to write choral works on militant feminist texts. But in abstract music — yours and others — is there such a thing as a gay/lesbian sensibility?
JH: I've never put something on the CD player and thought, "Let's check out the sexual orientation of the composer." I just think of people as people first. There have been one or two instances when I was talking to somebody and then was told afterwards that she was a lesbian. And I wonder, "How did I miss that?"
DPS: You had a problem with that Lesbian American Composers disc
you're on, the one that shows two women on the cover cuddling.
JH: The cover doesn't look like it's related to anything you're hearing on the disc. It looks like it's going to be relaxing and the music is anything but. The cover bothered all of us [composers] — we all registered strong objections. But we didn't have the final say.
DPS: Sometimes I think that Gustav Mahler, who was heterosexual, is the ultimate gay composer. He's got that Judy Garland confessional quality.
JH: You're right!
DPS: One unmistakably strong current in your music is mysticism. One of the performance markings in your Concerto for Orchestra is "mystical."
JH: I'm a spiritual person. But not with any particular religion. I read all kinds of books.
DPS: It's pretty hard not to believe in powers greater than yourself when what comes out of your pen is sometimes as much a surprise to you as it is to everybody else. You've said that blue cathedral was like that. What aspects of the Concerto for Orchestra were unexpected?
JH: The color — I didn't know how amazing the color was. That
caught me off guard. I worried about the oboe solo accompanied by three
trombones, so at the first rehearsal, I tried having those trombones muted. But
it wasn't a lush sound. So we removed the mutes and I said, "That's it, right
there!"
