Hallowed Ground
This Halloween weekend may be one of the busiest local composer Michael Alec Rose has ever experienced. The associate professor at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music has not one, but two, important gigs coming up. Friday and Saturday nights, the Nashville Symphony Orchestra will give the premiere of his new work, All Hallows,and Sunday evening, he’ll participate in a Vanderbilt University program remembering the Holocaust.
If the coming concerts represent a career highlight for the composer, they’re certainly not the first. Rose has already experienced substantial success: The Nashville Symphony’s performance of his “Overture of the Open Road” was well-received, as was a performance of his String Quartet No. 4 at the Eastman School of Music. (The Blair String Quartet will include the latter work in its Nov. 14 concert.) For all his achievements, though, Rose admits that he came somewhat late to his profession.
“My father got me this set of Time/Life Great Men of Music for my 17th birthday,” he remarks, bending down to pull out a boxed set of LPs from an office shelf. Cradling it in his arms, he remembers, “The first one that came was Tchaikovsky. Whoever did the marketing on these things was brilliant, because when you put on the First Piano Concerto—that’s it!”
It took a few years before Rose decided he wanted to become a composer. “I had composed a few tunes as a child,” he notes, “but it was really in college that I was encouraged by my professors.” He entered undergraduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in the premed program. “I was going to be a doctor like my father before me and my brother and sister, who are both physicians.” But sometime during Rose’s junior year, the “seduction” of music became so great that he knew he wouldn’t be happy if he pursued a medical career.
“I didn’t yet know whether I had what it took to become a composer,” he says, “because at that time I was still only imitating.” Rose’s talent for imitating, however, helped him in an undergraduate program that valued imitation. Even so, he feels that his studies hindered the development of his creativity. “And I still feel like I’m catching up,” he says somewhat ruefully. “My own voice is still coming into focus.”
Rose’s compositional voice has been shaped by study with such notables of 20th-century American music as Richard Wernick and George Crumb, but he considers George Rochberg his greatest professional mentor. “His whole odyssey is extraordinary and important to me. [He] was one of the great American 12-tone composers...and then [he faced] the crisis of the ’60s [when critical opinion began to turn against serial compositions]. There was the deadpan imitation of older styles with his Concord Quartets, and then his later work, which attempts a synthesis of all that went before. It’s less polemical, much harder to pin down.” Rose still keeps in close touch with the 79-year-old Rochberg and continues to be much in awe of his mind, his dark soul, and his musical heart.
While George Rochberg’s heart fascinates Rose, another mentor, John Harbison, impresses with his command of the musical craft. “He’s the only one who doesn’t feel musically belated to me,” Rose says. “[Harbison] is absolutely of the moment, but ironically for him, that means he is faithful to the past, and his understanding of the past is a feeling for craft. His craft is a discipline of compositional technique...the setting of such classical subjects as Ulysses and The Book of Samuel or use of such forms as the cantata. And the craft is in the service of transcendent spiritual expression. Harbison moves me down to my soul.”
If heart and craft are the abiding gifts bequeathed to Rose by his mentors, Rose’s own heart and craft are at the core of the works that Nashvillians will hear this coming weekend. The first is All Hallows, a piece commissioned by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra that will be featured in the ensemble’s Friday/Saturday concert pair. Inspired by one of Walter de la Mare’s ghost stories, the work is by no means programmatic. In the original story, Rose explains, “a visitor to a remote and ancient church is shown evidence of hideous repairs wrought upon the masonry by invisible and, presumably, demonic hands.”
Formally, the piece focuses on this climactic moment in the story, a confrontation with the presence of evil at work. Rose notes that this confrontation is not only at the heart of this work, but at the heart of the Halloween holiday. “I think that Halloween affords us a strangely cheery way to address the horror of the proximity of evil. We do so with the tradition of trick-or-treating to get the evil out of our system. We confront evil...and then we have to deal with it.”
A different sort understanding of evil is at the heart of Rose’s piece about the Holocaust. “What will happen on Friday and Saturday nights at TPAC is a more subtle and sophisticated version of what will happen Sunday night at Vanderbilt.” Rose has contributed three works to Vanderbilt’s annual Holocaust Lecture Series, and he’ll narrate a musical program as well. One of the pieces on the program is an arrangement of “Ani ma’amin,” or “I believe,” a statement of faith in God and hope for the coming of the Messiah; Holocaust victims sang this song as they were herded into the gas chambers at Auschwitz. “It’s a fact well documented by survivors,” Rose observes.
The link between these two pieces isn’t just a thematic concern with evil; there’s a melodic connection as well: “Ani ma’amin” also serves as the germ—the melodic cell—of All Hallows. Although All Hallows does not function as a set of variations on a musical theme, “Ani ma’amin” was the source of much of the original melodic material. As such, Rose feels that both works are strong statements that use musical form to project a heartfelt message. Rose also considers these two pieces the first time that he has so completely used the craft of music for so particular an ethical purpose.
Rose notes that both upcoming concerts bring his music back to some personal roots. The song basis of the piece for the Holocaust concert reflects Rose’s Jewish heritage, while the NSO concerts are more a reflection of those “Great Men of Music” LPs. Not only is the rest of the symphony program made up of works by Elgar, Mozart, and Dvorák, the program’s soloist will be Isaac Stern, one of Rose’s first musical heroes.
Rose is quick to note his debts to such heroes—especially those composers who first drew him to music. “One of the ways that I attempt to build an alliance against evil in All Hallows is to enlist the help of some past composers.” And which composers might make an appearance? Rose counters that this is one musical trick he won’t explain. Now, that’s crafty.
