Alexis Terrell
July 25, 2007

Just before his 5th birthday, Michael Torke’s parents bought an upright piano, and he started taking piano lessons. Unlike many kids, he enjoyed it and started changing the music from what was written on the page. To spur this creativity, his teacher wrote one bar of music, left the second bar blank, wrote the third bar, left the fourth blank and so on.

Torke didn’t realize he was composing. He was just doing what came
naturally.

It’s a parent’s worst nightmare. You want your son to take piano lessons, but 15 years later, you don’t want him to tell you he’s going to try to make a living from it. The odds of success are slim. It’s like trying to win the lottery, but you have to work a lot harder before you go broke.

Torke, 46, was lucky enough that people liked his upbeat, positive, almost caffeinated classical music. But what chance do most modern composers have?

“It’s really hard to make it in the arts,” Torke said. “It requires some passion, some skill and a lot of luck.”

Contemporary composers only have several hundred years of familiar names to compete with — does Bach, Beethoven or Mozart ring a bell? These guys have stood the test of time and are keeping orchestras busy. It leads some to argue that the classical music genre doesn’t have room for more.

Audiences will criticize what they don’t understand, said Lynne Mazza, the associate artistic director for the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival.

“When you don’t know something, you’re afraid of it,” she said. “Like going on a roller coaster — the unknown is scary. It’s the same with music.”

More people will come to hear what they know than what they don’t, she said. Simply put: The classics sell.

Bravo’s 2007 composer-in-residence Kevin Puts, 35, starting composing at age 11. Some people are meant to interpret and others are meant to create, he said.

Now, 24 years later, he’s still creating, getting inside the process of crafting a melody and finding the right medium for each performer. When he began studying composition at the Eastman School of Music in New York, he was told that it’s hard to get commissions and that you can never predict which of your works will be played the most — if at all.

“It’s a scary lifestyle to live,” Puts said. “It’s like a blank page. In 20 years, I don’t know what kind of music I’ll be writing.”

Economies of scale
Instead of fast-forwarding 20 years, maybe we should rewind first.
If you go back three or four decades, if you wrote 12-tone music — giving equal importance to all 12 notes of the chromatic scale — other composers would think you were crazy, Puts said.

“I think composers like me were in a predicament,” Puts said. “You can hear the guilt in the music.”

These days, composers are allowed to write anything they want, he said. It’s not out of necessity. They’re liberated. The minimalists of the ’60s, like Steve Reich and John Adams, wrote mathematically processed pieces, Puts said. As their style developed in the ’70s and ’80s, it became more romantic.

“I’m sure some people look down on me and think my music is so cheesy artistically,” Puts said of his orchestral style, which tends to be emotional and narrative with rich orchestration and free-flowing melodies that build to a climax. “But it’s a small price to pay to hear the music I want played.”

Hearing his music played means he had to learn how to write for an orchestra without much practice time. It’s hard to get 200 people together just to let Puts tweak a piece until it sounds brilliant.

“Orchestras are very busy,” Puts said. “It’s all business. And music isn’t going to sound as good if it’s too hard to put together fast.”

Once a piece is commissioned, it may get two rehearsals at the most and one is usually on the day of the performance.

“Either you can fight it and be angry or make it work,” Puts said. “Most of the audience is not there to hear new music.”

The Mozart effect
Torke finds classical composers are reversing roles with modern pop and rock artists. “Thirty years ago, if you wanted to be a classical musician, you had to be prepared for tons of setbacks,” he said. “Now, I’ve found that the rockers are having a harder time.”

While a pop artist may have a No. 1 hit on the charts for a dozen weeks in a row, it still doesn’t have the staying power of classical music, Torke said.

People may still play their Buddy Holly records, but Holly always will be associated with the 1950s. Classical music is timeless, Torke said. Classical music will last a lot longer than the flames did when Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire.

A piece of Torke’s called “Javelin,” was commissioned for the Atlanta Olympics and has been recorded by the Boston Pops conducted by John Williams and the Atlanta Symphony. An unknown number of symphonies are always in the lineup for performing popular pieces, and for Torke, royalties seem to increase little by little each year.

“Classical music is a thriving niche market that will always have people performing it for very little money,” Torke said.

Artists need to be realistic when it comes to introducing new music, Mazza said, but Bravo! is very conscious of bringing new sounds to its audience. That’s why it commissions a work every year from a contemporary American composer. The New York Philharmonic performed composer-in-residence Puts’ “Two Mountain Scenes” in Vail on July 25.

Programs like the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival are great for keeping the arts alive in the valley, but the fate of classical music depends largely on the schools, Mazza said.

“When schools start cutting art programs, by the time kids are 18 they’ve closed their minds to it,” she said. “They think of a bunch of dead guys with crazy hair as a figment of a past century that’s not accessible. It’s just not true.”

With contemporary composers, kids can come to a concert and see them living and breathing.

“They see this is a real person; he’s young, wears jeans and eats hamburgers,” Mazza said.

Eventually, in music as in all the arts, the good stuff survives. Classical music is said to be the foundation for all forms of music. For some, it’s the richest and deepest form of music there is. But it’s hard enough to find classical music getting fair play on radio or in music stores.

“A lot of times, human beings want to know the rulebook,” Torke said. “My theory is there are no rules because the world is always changing. Music is such an innate part of our culture — there will always be work in music. You just have to be prepared to change with it.”

Torke thinks the future is rosy. Even if classical music remains the choice of people older than 50, the baby boomers are a strong and growing segment of society, he said.

“When you put together music that moves the ear and speaks to the heart, people will demand it,” he said.

Maybe that’s why people are still demanding the classics.

“Most classics have withstood the test of time and deserve to be played,” Puts said. “It’s great music, and it took a genius to write it. It’s not that I think I deserve to be played in place of Mozart. I feel fortunate to be played at all.”