Classical music is an odd beast in today’s world. Some important people think it’s very important. Chambers of commerce, for instance, see it as an essential recruiting tool: Many high-level professionals don’t want to bring up their children in a city without a good symphony and a good opera company and a good ballet. So lots of cities are trying to build arts organizations. There are literally dozens of orchestras at work around the country, with annual operating budgets ranging from more than $9.5 million to less than a couple hundred thousand.
But for all their supposed importance, orchestras are not profit-making organizations. Quite the opposite, in fact. Many foreign ensembles depend on government subsidies; orchestras in this country depend on individual sponsors, corporations and charitable foundations for their funding. This is necessary, it seems, because some people who support classical music—who insist that it is so crucial to our cultural well-being—don’t even listen to it.
That’s because classical music is more like religion than rock ’n’ roll; it may entertain, but it is not merely entertainment. Classical music connects us with the traditions we grow out of, so that we understand who we are. It may define and validate our identities as human beings—and our contributions to it may be tax-deductible. Even so, churches and concert venues both need to fill seats to justify tithes and offerings. And classical music organizations all over the world are playing to lots of empty seats. This is certainly true in Music City. Our own predominant classical ensemble, the Nashville Symphony, managed to get 1,000 Tennesseans to travel to New York City to see the ensemble perform in a highly publicized engagement at Carnegie Hall—but it routinely has trouble filling seats at TPAC.
In the midst of all this, the smaller and less well-known Nashville Chamber Orchestra (NCO) has for more than a decade been quietly and patiently developing its own kind of classical musical programming. And in the last couple years, NCO has shown a dramatic growth spurt. In 1998, its budget was less than $300,000; this year, its budget is three-quarters of a million. Meanwhile, its board of trustees has grown from 10 members to 21, some of them high-level executives on Music Row, and NCO is launching its own record label and its own music publishing house. Paul Gambill, NCO’s founder/director, says the organization is “turning a corner. There is something going on here that the world needs to hear about, and will be hearing about, before too long.”
It’s easy, of course, to talk the talk. And often the talk is self-serving hype. NCO certainly isn’t an artistic powerhouse. Even a $750,000 annual budget is fairly modest, considering that some classical organizations are working with millions of dollars. And though NCO has recorded several CDs, none so far has made much of an impression on classical record buyers. Nevertheless, what has happened to the organization recently shows exciting promise, both for NCO and maybe—just maybe—for our city as well.
There are signs that NCO is doing what poet/academic August Mason used to call “putting a new edge on the leaf.” Mason 40 years ago was talking about literature, and how it changes over time. For him, “revolutions” in taste were mostly exaggerated. Seen in proper perspective, spectacular or dramatic shifts were more apparent than real, more “epic” to contemporaries than after. Authentic change was almost always a subtle mutation, brought about through natural process.
History, for the most part, supports this view. But meteors have hit Earth from time to time. Some critics and historians say that one struck classical music between the last century’s two world wars, and the victim has not yet recovered. In the aftermath of World War I, reality became a nightmare that various forms of modern art tried to awaken people from. All the arts were affected—painting, sculpture, cinema, theater, dance and writing, as well as music.
The other arts recovered pretty quickly, and healthy intercourse between “high” and “low” forms begat some strapping young artists on both sides of the tracks. But in music the low forms trumped the highs. The public followed Elvis toward The Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, leaving such composers as Schoenberg and Webern and Stravinsky the hostages of university graduate schools. If classical music compositions weren’t amorphous and didn’t screech, they were considered effete, or lowbrow, or both. This nonsense made even lovers of the music cover their ears and run.
But the truth is that most “serious” 20th century musical compositions have more in common with Brahms than one would think. Most composers ingested and metabolized atonality and dissonance into a new edge on a new leaf on a very old tree. They did not, by any means, uproot the tree. This may explain why, even in the 21st century, not much “new” classical music has a chance to be heard—it is still hugely overshadowed by pop music.
NCO may have found a way to start changing that. Current board president Bill Peerman and vice president Don Cook learned at a recent Philadelphia meeting of the American Symphony Orchestra League that NCO is commissioning more new music than any other orchestra except the Cleveland Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. Cook says that NCO is the only chamber orchestra regularly performing new music. When he mentioned NCO’s programming in the meeting, the attendees were incredulous.
New classical music is rarely heard, and then only by specialized audiences. But NCO is identified by the new music it has commissioned, and local audiences, at least, are hearing it. What’s more, the commissions themselves are special: Characteristically, they incorporate the music Nashville is internationally known for, and do so in ways that respect the integrity of these Music City materials—even as they marry those materials to the special procedures of the classical tradition. Even more audaciously, NCO makes the new commissions the axis of its programming. “We program backwards from the way most orchestras do,” Gambill says. “We program the new music first and then the traditional music around it, finding works that will complement one another.”
NCO’s music may be noteworthy because it’s fresh, but it’s even more exceptional because people are actually listening. Benjamin Roe, a senior producer at National Public Radio, says, “The Nashville Chamber Orchestra is truly what’s new in classical music—both in Nashville and in America.” And James Undercoffler, president of the Eastman School of Music, may have identified the root of the matter: “They choose their repertoire and their commissions in a kind of educational partnership with their community. All this adds up to a new and vital model for American orchestras.”
This model has been more than a decade in the making, though it is not the result of long-range planning. Indeed, it seems to be a special kind of mutation triggered by a chance concatenation of special circumstances. The NCO’s upcoming season provides a good example of how Gambill’s serendipitous approach has developed into an inventive, well-wrought concept.
The season’s core is three concerts called the “Adventure Series,” to be delivered in Blair School of Music’s superb new Ingram Hall (and at The Factory at Franklin as well). The series opens Oct. 18 and 19 with a program called “Fiddlers Three,” designed, Gambill says, “to explore the different ways the violin has been used.” It will feature three violinists—Stuart Duncan, a bluegrass master; Crystal Plohman, a Celtic virtuoso; and Carolyn Huebl, who recently joined the violin faculty at Blair. The evening’s axis is a new commission: Atlanta-based composer Nickitas Demos will deliver a kind of double concerto entitled “Long Journey Home” that counterpoints the playing of Duncan and Plohman. The evening opens with each soloist presenting a three-minute selection, unaccompanied, in her/his special style. Then Huebl, with the orchestra, performs Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5. The evening concludes with Igor Stravinsky’s Concerto in D, a brief and brilliant orchestral tour de force.
The program functions as an ideogram whose components illuminate and identify one another. “I absolutely guarantee you,” Gambill says, “that hearing the Mozart violin concerto, and then a new piece featuring the two fiddlers, and then the Stravinsky—those two outer pieces will not be heard the same way because that middle piece is in there. And the middle piece will be different because it is heard in between them.”
This is not an instance of revolutionary daring; it is a subtle alteration of standard practice. Every well-designed program tries to become a whole greater than the sum of its parts. But almost no program sets a new commission as the axis everything else revolves around. The choice is audacious—even arrogant. And it might well have been doomed anywhere but in Nashville.
In a 1998 essay in Symphony, the magazine of the American Symphony Orchestra League, critic (and former Scene contributor) Larry Adams noted one essential of NCO’s emergence: It happened in a city with a “rich vein of professional musicians who earn their living primarily in free-lance session work.” These are not neophytes just out of music school. These are journeyman pros who can and do play in a wide range of styles.
Equally essential, if not more so, was NCO’s decision to program newly commissioned works by Conni Ellisor, an archetypal Nashville music professional, who became the ensemble’s first composer in residence. Ellisor’s first NCO commission, “Conversations in Silence,” was performed in 1996. Adams writes that it was “a tonal essay, steeped in the classical tradition, yet distinctly 'Nashville’ in its rhythms and bluesy in its harmonies. Its popular and critical success whetted the audience’s appetite for more of the same.”
But NCO did not spring full blown, like Athena, from its father’s head. Even in 1998, two years after Ellisor’s success, its commissions did not always succeed. But then, such bumpy progress is characteristic of the ensemble’s development from day one.
When the NCO began in 1990, it was not an orchestra at all. Gambill, out of Indiana University, had come to play French horn with the Nashville Symphony. But he wanted to conduct, and though he is utterly passionate about classical music, he is also a tenacious and canny pragmatist. At the outset, that meant being particularly astute about how to introduce an upstart organization in a town whose very modest classical music community was already dominated by a well-established ensemble.
Gambill realized early on that he needed a special way to attract listeners—particularly in a city where music to most ears does not mean Monteverdi and Palestrina. He did not want to compete, or even appear to compete, with the symphony. He began very modestly indeed—with a woodwind quintet doing a Peter and the Wolf program in the public schools. Audiences as well as other musicians paid attention. After a couple years, Gambill got a chance to do two chamber orchestra performances, and the group’s reputation began to grow.
But it grew slowly. Just finding places to rehearse and perform was not easy. Area churches were hospitable, but by no means ideal. And cost, of course, was always a cardinal concern. Right up through last season, the orchestra has played in a variety of venues, often on an ad hoc basis. And though its music is essentially acoustic, the musicians have often been obliged to plug into amplifiers to be heard. Always on the move from one venue to the next, the players have had to fight hard for consistency of sound.
The orchestra has come a long way in a dozen years. For most of that time, it has been making itself up as it went along. But whether through foresight or instinct, Gambill has made a lot of great choices. One was his choice of basic ensemble—some two dozen string players comprising a chamber orchestra.
“Chamber music” is meant to be performed in a salon or a church instead of a grand hall. The performance can be by a soloist, as in Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites, but more often it’s by a small group. For some ears, the quintessential chamber group is the classical string quartet (two violins, a viola and a cello). If you add a contrabass to that foursome, and multiply by five, you get the germinal chamber orchestra. This ensemble has a remarkable correspondence with the human voice singing in mixed choirs, so that it wonderfully accompanies singers, whether solo or choral. Moreover, it is almost infinitely versatile. A conductor may add one or more brasses, or winds or percussion players, as the music demands. If enough of these are added, the basic chamber orchestra grows into a symphony fit for Wagner or Mahler.
It can also do the works of Beth Neilsen Chapman, Gretchen Peters, Matraca Berg and their Music Row peers—which is precisely what Gambill decided NCO should do. His choice turned out to be a winning lottery ticket. He wanted to perform classical music, and he wanted to perform it for an actively engaged audience. And he had a hunch that performing it with established Nashville singer/songwriter/artists might allow him to do that. For their own reasons, these musicians agreed to give it a go.
From the very beginning, Gambill’s gambit has been attacked by snipers. Even now, at a gathering where classical music enters the conversation and NCO is mentioned, somebody will sniff and say that Gambill is just using non-classical musicians as bait to get people into the hall.
At first the sniping had a basis. NCO worked with its guests the way other orchestras do in “pops” concerts: That is, the orchestra acts like a huge guitar or mandolin, essentially playing chords behind the singer’s melody. Such playing is easy, and it can be very effective. It’s what happens when the Boston Symphony backs Mel Tormé or the Nashville Symphony sets up behind Barry Manilow. But the fact remains that people who come out to hear the orchestra as backup band for a pop star don’t come back until the next pop star appears on the bill. And if NCO had simply kept on emulating other orchestras in this way, it might have kept going around in circles, as other orchestras continue to do.
But NCO’s success lay in another emulation of the way larger orchestras work: the commissioning of new works by living composers. In this case, though, it drew on the city’s resources—and in the process began a new kind of programming, very likely unique in the world.
In this too, Gambill proceeded through trial and error. Early results were mixed, at best. The first NCO concert I heard was in 1998, two years after Ellisor’s triumphant debut with “Conversations.” The venue was Blair’s Turner Hall, an excellent place for such a program. The featured commission was a song-cycle composed by half a dozen writers including Beth Neilsen Chapman and Gretchen Peters, each scored for solo voice and strings by Conni Ellisor, Don Hart or John Mock. All the songs were performed by versatile bluegrass/country singer Kathy Chiavola.
It was not at all what I was used to from a “chamber orchestra.” And as a whole, this experiment did not succeed: The songs and the orchestration styles were too diverse. The theme intended to unify the diversity—songs about emotional relationships involving family—was too gossamer a net to hold such variegated birds. Even so, much of the music was compelling and deeply moving, all the performances were solidly professional, and for me a world of new possibilities had been opened.
The composer who has most compellingly defined that world is Ellisor, surely the mother of the orchestra’s transformation from maverick gypsy band into masterful ensemble. Her versatility is stunning. Classically trained at Juilliard, she is a violinist with more than 15 years of experience as a composer/arranger. She has done work for Amy Grant, John Berry and Emmylou Harris, and for ensembles ranging from small chamber groups to full orchestras, including the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the London Symphony and the Nashville Symphony. She has ears, chops and imagination. She can take materials out of diverse non-classical traditions and marry them with classical ideas and methods so that each tradition retains its distinctiveness within a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
In the same year as “Conversations in Silence,” she produced another authentic masterpiece—“Blackberry Winter,” a concerto in three movements for string orchestra, mountain dulcimer and the dulcimer variant known as a Tennessee music box. First performed in Blair’s Turner Hall in 1996, this music is “classic” in the fullest sense—in its use of classical strings along with melodies, rhythms and sonorities belonging to two instruments that an Appalachian mountain man might make with his own hands. In this music, the past does not vanish; rather, it is incorporated into a new configuration so that the old and the new reciprocally identify each other.
Two years later, Ellisor executed another kind of masterpiece when she collaborated with fiddler Jay Ungar and his wife, guitarist Molly Mason, to produce “Harvest Home Suite,” whose germinal tunes belong to the folk tradition. Ellisor has executed several other commissions as well—including a stunning collaboration with the internationally renowned percussion ensemble NEXUS. The excellence, consistency and variety of her work put her in a class by herself.
But other composers have delivered outstanding commissions as well, including Atlanta’s Nickitas Demos, whose new commission will lead off the upcoming season, and Mark Scearce, who this season succeeds Ellisor as NCO’s composer in residence. Scearce is executing a commission that will be the hub of next season’s finale.
Last season may well have been a watershed year for NCO, when a decade of trial and error coalesced into a uniquely effective kind of programming. In fact, the season ended with an event that may serve as a prototype for programs to come. To close out last season, NCO hosted the first Nashville Guitar Festival (sponsored in part by the Gibson Guitar Company). The two-week festival’s main events were three showcases, plus a season finale concert, all designed to feature some of our city’s guitar virtuosos in a wide spectrum of styles, from bluegrass to jazz to classical. In each performance, three guitarists (among them such well-respected Music City pickers as Phil Keaggy, John Jorgenson and John Johns) joined the NCO string quintet, each player exhibiting his own specialty. The final concert featured the full Nashville Chamber Orchestra performing 20th century Spanish maestro Joaquín Rodrigo’s celebrated “Fantasia for a Gentleman” for orchestra and solo guitar, with Ernesto Bitetti as soloist. The entire festival combined cogency, variety, maturity and an exhilarating level of performance by soloists and orchestra.
So successful was the festival that Gambill would like to make it a regular event and is planning toward that end. The next guitar festival is projected for 2004. In the meantime, the 2002-03 season will finish with an American Song Festival following a similar format. Again, the concept is one perfectly suited to Nashville: A series of showcases will feature a dozen top songwriters, including Kathy Chiavola, Steve Earle, Marcus Hummon and Janice Ian, working with the NCO string quintet. The choice of collaborators is shrewd: Hummon, who has found phenomenal success as a songwriter for the Dixie Chicks, is himself a thoughtful, adventurous artist, having recently written and staged an original musical, Francis of Guernica. As with Steve Earle, his presence in the festival lends both popular and critical credibility to the whole affair.
The American Song Festival finale, which takes place Apr. 26 and 27, will close out the orchestra’s 2002-03 season. Its axis is to be a new Mark Scearce commission for mezzo-soprano and orchestra. The sung text, written by African American Pulitzer laureate Toni Morrison, commemorates the events of Sept. 11, 2002. Again emulating the guitar festival, the prologue to the finale will be a special series of concerts called “Acoustic Cafe” showcasing some stunning acoustic instrumentalists (Phil Keaggy, Darol Anger and Mike Marshall, and John Jorgenson) and the songwriters noted above.
For Gambill and NCO right now, life is good. Funding is solid, the board shares their enthusiasm, and for the next season anyway they have found an ideal venue in Nashville: Blair’s excellent new Ingram Hall. Accommodating some 600 listeners, and with no bad seats, it seems custom-designed for this ensemble.
What’s more, the orchestra’s staff has just moved into new digs at Blair Boulevard and 21st Avenue South. To Gambill’s great delight, NCO hired Connie Linsler some six months ago to be executive director, so that Gambill, who has been stretched between truly demanding creative and administrative duties, can now concentrate on being the artistic director. Linsler began as a clarinetist, but early on recognized a greater talent for administration. She holds a degree in business with a minor in music from SUNY, and was a part of the American Symphony Orchestra’s management fellowship program. She was at age 23 managing the Odessa Symphony Chorale in Texas and has spent the last 15 years doing exactly the kind of work she’ll be doing for the NCO.
Signs are, she and Gambill will both be busy. Besides designing and delivering its regular programming, NCO is starting its own record label and its own music publishing venture. “This is really the future for us, I think,” Gambill says. “We will own our recordings, and we can license them to different markets around the world. Certainly, what we’re doing will be very attractive to a [foreign] record label. We know the level of artistry is there. Our goal is, in the next three years, to be recording internationally.”
There is no doubt that NCO in concert is making a special kind of very high-quality music. There is no doubt it can deliver that music in state-of-the-art recordings. What is not yet known is whether people will buy those recordings. But optimism is not groundless. For Ree Guyer Buchanan, Wrensong Publishing’s president and an NCO board member, publishing scores is also a good idea. “Lots of other orchestras are calling us now and asking to perform our music,” she says.
No new venture is a sure thing, of course. But NCO may well be poised to put a new edge on both classical music and what the world knows as “the Nashville sound.”
