You don’t have to be a rock star to compose music for the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. But then again, if you aspire to write symphonic music for an ensemble that’s recorded 27 Grammy-nominated albums with 14 wins, you do have to be a serious, accomplished composer. And if you also happen to be a rock icon, well, so much the better.
Charles Frederick “Kip” Winger is one of those rare artists who’s both a famed rock musician and a noted classical composer. As lead singer and bass player for his eponymous rock band, Winger cranked out a couple of hard-charging, platinum-selling rock albums in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Fast-forward 20 years, and Winger seemingly emerged out of nowhere to be recognized as an important composer of symphonic music, earning a Grammy nomination for his ballet score Conversations With Nijinsky.
Winger’s classical success didn’t go unnoticed in Nashville, where he’s lived for the past few decades. The Nashville Symphony and music director Giancarlo Guerrero performed Conversations With Nijinsky at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in 2017, and the piece more than held its own on a program that also included music by Debussy and Stravinsky. The ovation at the end of the performance whetted Guerrero’s appetite for more.
“Kip isn’t someone you normally associate with classical music, but it was clear after our performance that he’s an amazing classical composer,” Guerreo tells the Scene. “So I met him over lunch and told him, ‘Look, if you write something else for us, we’ll definitely play it.’ ”
The fruit of that conversation with Guerrero is Winger’s Symphony No. 1, which gets its world premiere performance at the Schermerhorn March 17 through 19 courtesy of Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony. The NSO will record Winger’s First Symphony in concert for future release on the Naxos label.
For classical composers, writing a traditional symphony is as ambitious as it gets. These works typically consist of multiple movements that share rhythmic, melodic and harmonic ideas. It’s the musical equivalent of a novel, with recognizable melodic and rhythmic patterns serving as protagonists on a heroic quest. Johannes Brahms was so intimidated at the prospect of writing his first symphony that it took him 14 years to complete it. Winger gets that.
“When Giancarlo mentioned the possibility of my writing something for the orchestra, he suggested I try writing my first symphony,” Winger recalls. “My first thought was like, ‘Well, that’s going to take me 10 years.’ But Giancarlo said the orchestra would record it, so I decided to try and come up with something.”
Winger eventually came up with a concept worthy of an M. Night Shyamalan film. Why not write a symphony about a person who receives SOS messages from their own lost soul? Over the course of a two-year period starting in 2018, Winger’s idea of a spiritual Morse code morphed into a four-movement classical symphony subtitled “Atonement.”
Winger scored his symphony for a large complement of winds, brass, strings and percussion. The biggest surprise in the orchestration is a prominent part in the first movement for a MIDI keyboard, which opens the work with the familiar electronic beeping sound of an SOS message in Morse code.
“I could have just used an oboe to play the SOS Morse code, but I wanted to have a very specific electronic sound in the beginning,” Winger says. “I didn’t want the whole symphony to be about that sound, though, so I explore lots of other possibilities and sounds in different movements.”
Each of Winger’s subsequent movements builds on the SOS message of the first movement, with its meaning reflected in a one-word title. The second movement is “Eleos,” or “mercy,” the third is “Metamorphosis” and the finale is “Metanoia,” or “change of heart,” usually in the sense of a spiritual reckoning. The Morse code spellings for each of these words become rhythmic motifs that are taken up and developed by the entire orchestra.
As the symphony’s sonic lost soul searches for its salvation, it occasionally encounters a formidable obstacle, which Winger calls the “brick-wall chord.” This dissonant five-note tone cluster appears throughout the symphony’s first three movements in different inversions and orchestrations, preventing harmonic resolution and, by inference, spiritual salvation. This barrier is finally shattered at the climax of the third movement. Atonement is then expressed as a kind of reverie in the finale.
“The feeling at the end is like floating out to sea,” says Winger.
Winger is certainly not the first rock star to write classical music. But unlike Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello and other rockers who’ve tried their hand at writing in the classical style, Winger is no dilettante. He’s devoted several decades to mastering composition, counterpoint and orchestration.
Admittedly, he got off to a late start. Born in Denver in 1961, Winger grew up in a musical family. His parents were jazz musicians, and from a young age he studied bass and played in rock bands. He wasn’t exposed to classical music until age 16, when he attended a ballet class with his then-girlfriend. As the sounds of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Debussy washed over him, he soon became hooked.
Still, his resolve to become a rock star never waned. He moved to New York City and, by the mid-1980s, attracted the attention of Alice Cooper. He went on tour with the shock rocker and played on a couple of his albums. But while riding the crest of this wave, Winger surprised everyone when he left Alice Cooper to form his own eponymous glam-metal band along with guitarist Reb Beach. Winger’s new group enjoyed early success. Their self-titled debut album and second release In the Heart of the Young both went platinum. But the group’s fortunes faded in the early 1990s as heavy metal and progressive rock began losing out to grunge.
With his rock career temporarily sidelined, Winger made the unorthodox choice to focus on his passion for classical music. He plowed through the orchestration textbooks of Walter Piston and Samuel Adler and sought out instruction in composing.
A major turning point came in the early 2000s, shortly after he moved to Nashville. Winger began studying with a Vanderbilt University composer named Michael Kurek, an artist whose neo-Romantic style appealed immensely to the rocker’s lyrical bent. Under Kurek’s guidance, Winger produced his breakthrough classical work, a multi-movement ballet titled Ghosts. Noted British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon later staged both Ghosts and Conversations With Nijinsky with San Francisco Ballet.
Winger completed his most recent classical score in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. It will finally receive its delayed world premiere on March 17, the Nashville Symphony’s first classical series concert since the pandemic that will not include a mask mandate. The importance of that milestone is not lost on Guerrero.
“It’s going to show Nashville that we’re back doing what we do best, playing new American music,” Guerrero says.
