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February 16, 2005
TT: The first time
I went last week to hear the premiere of Morph, a wonderful new piece for string orchestra by Paul Moravec, whose Pulitzer-winning Tempest Fantasy is now out on CD. A couple of days later, Paul sent me this e-mail:A great experience for a composer to invent something--two-dimensional, in black-and-white in the studio, I-think-it's-going-to-work-but-who-knows?--and then suddenly there it is in 3-D, living color, and it works like gangbusters. The piece made me listen as a disinterested audience member to a considerable extent. Of course I know how it goes, but as they were playing I was sitting there thinking, Gee, what happens next?
Boy, do I ever know how that feels. Writing a book is one thing, but holding it in your hand is something else again, though the really big moment comes when you first see the text set up in type. All at once your words have a life of their own--they're not just pixels on a screen--and you can feel them slipping out of your control and into the world, there to make their way among strangers. It's terrifying. It's also thrilling.
All of which reminds me to do something I originally intended to do a couple of weeks ago. I wrote the liner notes for Paul's Tempest Fantasy CD, and it occurs to me that those of you who haven't yet heard any of his music might be interested in reading what I had to say about it. (If you've already bought the CD, pardon my redundancy!)
* * *
Paul Moravec lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, two blocks north of me, and whenever I bump into him on the street, I say, "Is that a Pulitzer laureate I see strolling down the sidewalk?" He always laughs and looks embarrassed--but pleased, too, as well he should. Winning the Pulitzer Prize for music, as Paul did in 2004 for Tempest Fantasy, is no small thing, especially when you've been laboring in relative obscurity for years. To be sure, Paul is well known and respected within the tight little world of American classical composers, but a household name he isn't. Yet not only did winning the Pulitzer get his name into every major newspaper in the United States, it also gave him permanent entrée to a club whose other members include Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Samuel Barber, Gian-Carlo Menotti, Ned Rorem, George Rochberg, and John Corigliano. That's fast company.
I was especially gratified by Paul's Pulitzer because I'd been writing about his music with passionate enthusiasm for a decade, ever since I first heard the elegant, soaringly melodic violin sonata he composed for Maria Bachmann and Jon Klibonoff in 1992. In the lexicon of criticism, the word "great" is the reddest of flags; only time can tell whether a work of art is great, and when you use the word to describe a living composer, or a brand-new piece, you're leading with your chin. Still, there's something about great art that makes itself manifest on the spot, a commingling of immediacy and elusiveness that causes you to want to re-experience it as soon as possible, and that's how I felt when I heard the Violin Sonata. It reminded me of what George Bernard Shaw wrote about hearing Elgar's Enigma Variations for the first time: "For my part, I expected nothing from any English composer...But when I heard the Variations (which had not attracted me to the concert) I sat up and said ‘Whew!' I knew we had got it at last."
Shaw's encounter with the Enigma Variations took place in 1900, at a time when English music had hit a dead end and seemed unlikely ever to be revived. Nine decades later, American music appeared to be in similar shape. The hard-edged, over-complicated works of such dedicated devotees of atonality as Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter had long dominated the new-music scene. To be sure, the stranglehold of the "complexity boys" (as Virgil Thomson called them) had been challenged by such older American tonalists as Ned Rorem, David Diamond, and Leonard Bernstein, then weakened significantly in the Eighties by the fast-rising popularity of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams. But the stuttering chatter of minimalism was too simple-minded to satisfy my longing for intelligible yet challenging new scores, and I feared that the mainstream of classical music might have dried up for good.
That's why the Moravec Violin Sonata hit me so hard. It acknowledged the eternal verity articulated a half-century ago by Paul Hindemith: "Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors, or the architect his three dimensions....In the world of tones, the triad corresponds to the force of gravity. It serves as our constant guiding point, our unit of measure, even in those sections of compositions which avoid it." For Paul, triadically based harmony, the tonal language of all Western music from Bach to rock, was a given--yet he used it with a freshness and individuality that made it sound as current as the morning paper.
I started following his career closely, and soon discovered that he was one of a number of younger American composers (he was born in 1957) who wrote classical music that was at once unmistakably contemporary and firmly rooted in the techniques of the past. I dubbed them "New Tonalists" in an essay I wrote for Commentary in 1997, singling out Paul as a key figure in the movement:
Though their music varies widely in style, all of them speak the language of tonality, and do so without irony or self-consciousness. This is what sets them apart from the postmodern movement: they are neither embarrassed nor paralyzed by tradition....Moravec uses post-Debussyan tonality not to comment on an older style but to make a direct statement of his own.
With each successive premiere, I grew increasingly certain that Paul was the real right thing, a great composer in the great tradition, and I continued to write about him whenever I got the chance, learning in the process that he was also an exceptionally articulate spokesman for his art, one whose comments on music revealed a deeply philosophical turn of mind. "Musically, I say what I mean and mean what I say," he told me when I interviewed him for an essay about the New Tonalism called "Back to the Future" that appeared in Time in 2000. "The irony in my music is not glibly postmodern but, rather, the essence of making audible the human experience of ambiguity." Needless to say, most composers don't talk that way, but Paul does (though he can also be side-splittingly funny).
What he meant by that subtle remark is demonstrated by the music on this album. I'll leave it to him to describe Mood Swings, Scherzo, B.A.S.S. Variations, and Tempest Fantasy in his own words, but I do want to add that despite the considerable, at times formidable complexity of these tough-minded works, which are anything but "easy" in the way they translate experience and emotion into the realm of sound, their complexities are never gratuitous. To put it another way, these powerfully moving pieces make sense. Their harmonies are lucid and logical, their melodies indelibly noble. They are, literally, eloquent, the painstakingly wrought utterances of an artist who believes with all his heart in the possibility of beauty. I know no other music written today that moves me more.
Such music cuts sharply against the grain of trendiness, and for a long time I wondered whether the rest of the world would ever catch up with Paul. But he kept at it, gradually building up a reputation as a composer of warmly expressive, consummately crafted pieces, and while most of the big-city critics continued to overlook his work (Tim Page of the Washington Post is an honorable exception), performers and audiences embraced it with growing enthusiasm. Then came the Pulitzer Prize, and now this album, on which you can hear four of Paul's finest pieces performed by the superlative musicians for whom they were written. As I listened, I thought of something that Ned Rorem, another long-unfashionable composer who has lived to see the restoration of tonality, said when he won his own Pulitzer: "I've never run with the pack, composing according to fashion; I've always been a lone wolf, composing according to need. The Red Queen said you've got to run fast to stay in one place. I stayed in one place. Now it's clear I've run fast." So has Paul Moravec.
An hour or so after the Pulitzers for 2004 were announced, I got an overseas telephone call from Paul, who was vacationing in Sicily. He was clearly thrilled by the news, but reacted with his usual sense of humor.
"Do you realize that I'm going to be in the World Almanac next year?" he asked me.
"And every other year--from now on," I replied.
Posted February 16, 2005 12:01 PM
