A visit to New Orleans

Last weekend (that's October 27th and 28th), the Lousiana Philharmonic did a notable weekend of new music. I was part of it, as one of the judges of a composers' competition. But lying behind everything they did -- and making it even more important -- is (of course) the situation in New Orleans, which is really sobering to see. More on that later, though it might be the most important part of this post.

But the orchestra! They called their weekend "Festival of Living Composers," which (speaking affectionately, as a friend) I might say is just a little ghoulish. I mean, if this was a festival of living composers, what would we call all their other concerts? Though, to be fair, they're doing new music on other programs, including (in May) what I think is an inspired pairing of David Del Tredici and Carmina Burana.

The festival of living composers had two parts. First, a concert featuring three finalists in the composers' competition, conducted by the orchestra's former music director, Klauspeter Seibel. And then a concert featuring John Corigliano's Clarinet Concerto, with Stanley Drucker, principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic (for whom the work was written) as the drop-dead amazing soloist, and the orchestra's new music director, Carlos Miguel Pinero, conducting.

John was there, which made the concert especially friendly. He introduced the piece in a way that made everybody want to love it. The backstory is irresistible -- John's father was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, so John has known Drucker all his life (and even took a few clarinet lessons from him); this was the first piece the Philharmonic ever commissioned from John; his father had just died; he found a way to get every Philharmonic musician into the performance. How can anyone resist that? And then Drucker comes out, and from the very first almost whispered, rushing phrase, plays the thing with knife-edge virtuosity. The audience was on its feet at the end, just about screaming. There was no barrier here between new music and the standard repertory (the concert continued with Pictures at an Exhibition), and no barrier between new music and the audience. The people at the concert just seemed to love hearing this piece.

On to the composers' competition, which the Louisiana Philharmonic arranged wonderfully. Long before Katrina, they'd made their plans, and solicited scores worldwide. From 50-odd submissions from 12 countries, musicians from the orchestra picked 10 semifinalists. These semifinalists were then ranked by three judges, two conductors and myself; we had scores and recordings to work with, all anonymous. I'm told we all picked the same three entries, whose composers then became the finalists in the competition.

And here comes the good part. The Louisiana Philharmonic commissioned all three finalist composers to write a 10-minute piece, paying them quite good money, which I must say isn't all that common. So by the time the three pieces were unveiled at the October 28 concert, all three composers -- Frank Proto, David Remelis, and Allan Zavod -- were already winners. How often does that happen (or anything approaching it) at a composers' competition? The generosity and care for the composers was really notable. All three were present; all three had been at rehearsals. The orchestra played all three pieces, and then two decisions got made. I and the two conductors that weekend, Klauspeter and Carlos, huddled to pick a winner, who'd get another commission from the orchestra. Meanwhile the audience voted, and their pick -- David Remelis -- got a special audience prize. We picked Frank Proto.

Needless to say, the audience loved this, and got avidly involved in the voting (just as the audience did in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago, when they were asked to pick which of three new works they liked best). One important point, here -- one point of the competition was that all works had to have some relationship to jazz, which for New Orleans makes perfect sense. It also gives the music written for the competition a special spark -- there were improvised solos, for instance (especially for trumpet), which really made the audience sit up and pay eager attention. We shouldn't forget, either, that music is a central part of New Orleans's spirit, and that the orchestra -- as it recovers from the shock of Katrina, and, not least, the dispersal of its staff and musicians, and the loss of many instruments -- is welcomed in the city as yet another sign of renewal. All the more reason why the music it commissions should have some relationship to other music in the city. And in no way were the pieces weakened by the jazz requirement. They stand up to anything I'd usually hear in the normal run of new music performances, and maybe even had an extra edge, because their jazz involvement made them especially engaging.

Besides, look at what we got at a party after the competition night. A Cajun band played, and at one point two of the composers sat in, David Remelis on fiddle, and Allan Zavod playing the piano as if he was possessed by Jerry Lee Lewis. When they really got going, two percussionists from the orchestra joined it. This was hot! When else have we seen composers playing like this after a concert?

One last point about the program. The three competition works were bracketed by American classics -- Gershwin's Cuban Overture, and Leonard Bernstein's dance episodes from On the Town. This was brilliant programming. Both these pieces demonstrate that mixing jazz and classical music is nothing new. The blend has a tradition of its own, with its own classics. Gershwin and Bernstein, if you like, legitimized the competition pieces (for anyone who might have thought they needed legitimizing). They also set a standard, as if to say, "This will show how sweet the classical/jazz blend can be."

There's one other reason the weekend was special. The Lousiana Philharmonic, as I've said, was dispersed by the hurricane and its aftermath. Among the many individuals and organizations that helped the orchestra recover were the Nashville Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, both of which gave concerts with the New Orleans musicians in their own halls. So now, for this festival of living composers, players from Nashville and the New York Philharmonic joined the Louisiana Philharmonic on its own stage (well, a temporary stage -- they play in various locations, for these events a convention center, while their concert hall remains unusable).

I should also say that the orchestra and conductors did really well. It's no easy job to put together four tricky new pieces (and the Clarinet Concerto is very, very tricky) in a single week, and everyone involved deserves a lot of credit, both for their hard work and for the high quality of the result.

And now about New Orleans. When my plane approached the New Orleans airport, I looked out the window, and saw a residential neighborhood, full of subdivisions with single-family houses. The houses, as far as I could tell from up above, looked intact. So there wasn't any problem there, I thought -- until I started noticing the trailers in many of the lots. That's where most of the families were living, and not in their homes. So the houses, most of them, were very likely uninhabitable.

I found the same thing elsewhere in the city, when I saw it from the ground. The famous Ninth Ward -- the poor, largely African-American neighborhood -- that was especially hard hit, is a ghost town, stretching on for miles. It's extraordinary to see. House after house sitting abandoned, grass and weeds overgrown in the front yards, markings on the outside walls painted by the National Guard, to show what was found at the point (how many bodies, for instance). Sometimes the houses look intact, sometimes they're in ruins. Abandoned cars are everywhere. Once in a great while you see a pristine home, newly painted, with people living in it. And then of course you wonder (especially if you've talked to people in New Orleans who themselves are facing choices like this) -- what kind of brave people want to live, maybe with young children, in the middle of a ghost town, with no neighbors, and lots of rats? Understand that I'm not criticizing anybody doing this. But many people in New Orleans -- in middle-class neighborhoods as well -- hesitate to make this choice.

The city's big downtown hospital is closed. Maybe it'll never reopen; there's an intense debate about that. Stores and restaurants curtail their hours, and city services are spotty, all because so many people left the city. People just aren't available to fill all the jobs. Many businesses are closed; you see that as you drive around. New Orleans has trolley lines on some of its streets, and one of them, on a wide, important street, isn't running. The tracks are rusty. Eventually, I guess, it'll be restored, but for the moment this stands as a reminder that things are hardly back to normal. Not that anybody in New Orleans needs that reminder, but somehow, for this outsider, the rusty trolley tracks were eloquent. As were the water stains high up on many walls, and the casual remark someone made to me, as we drove through what looked like a normal residential street: "During the flood, the water here was up to the rooftops." And then of course there are the stories everybody tells, about their own dislocation, their own losses, and/or those of friends and family. It's sobering to see and hear all this. We mustn't forget about it.