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ASPEN — For the world premiere of a new opera at the Aspen Music Festival and School this summer, the creators of “Siddhartha, She” felt like there was no such thing as too much to ask — even for a show that would only run one night.
The opera by composer Christopher Theophanidis and poet-librettist Melissa Studdard reimagines the 1922 Herman Hesse novel about man’s search for enlightenment with a woman in the title role. This version, on Aug. 2, involved not only vocal artists and a full orchestra but also contemporary dancers, video, abstract art installations and a theatrical “soundscape” of natural environments recorded in India and Nepal.
Theophanidis and Studdard wrote “Siddhartha, She” in a way that would work just as well pared down, the way some other venues will choose to present it. But if you can go all-out, with support from festival leaders like Munroe President and CEO Alan Fletcher and vice president for artistic administration Patrick Chamberlain, why wouldn’t you?
“We would ask them for something that we thought they would just laugh at, and they would just pause for a minute and say, ‘Sure, why not?’” Studdard said. After all, they’d joke, “it’s only money,” Theophanidis added.
Fletcher promoted the opera as “possibly the most ambitious performance” in his 20 years at the helm; it was one of the top-billed events in the festival’s packed summer season, which opened July 2 and wraps up Sunday. And it premiered at a time when big investments in new art are under threat.
“It’s almost an act of optimism in the front of things becoming more difficult,” Theophanidis said, as creative institutions grapple with the loss of government grants and uncertainty about the future of organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts.
When hopes for funding from the NEA and other sources didn’t materialize for “Siddhartha, She,” several music-loving philanthropists “immediately stood up and said, ‘I’ll fill this gap,’ ‘I’ll fill that gap,’ and that was an incredible testament to the community,” Theophanidis said.
The piece, co-commissioned by the festival and other musical powerhouses, was a collaboration among Theophanidis and Studdard, soundscape composer Patrick Harlin, director and designer Anne Patterson and the festival’s music director Robert Spano — whose “persuasive personality” and ability to “bring a lot of people along into the excitement that you feel” is rather effective at getting folks on board with contemporary work, Theophanidis said.
The cast and crew of “Siddhartha, She” take a bow after the opera’s world premiere at the Klein Music Tent in Aspen on Aug. 2. The Aspen Music Festival and School co-comissioned the piece, which involved not only opera singers and a full orchestra but also visual art, dance, video and recorded sounds of nature. (Diego Redel, Courtesy of the Aspen Music Festival and School)
For all of its ambitious newness, though, “Siddhartha, She” wasn’t just a lark for the 76-year-old institution that many still associate with performances of Beethoven and Mozart. Throughout its summer season, the Aspen Music Festival and School, or AMFS, has highlighted nine other co-commissions, in which multiple institutions back an artists’ new work. (Carnegie Hall, the Santa Barbara Symphony and the Juilliard School were among the “co-comissioners” for pieces that played in Aspen this year, presenting the work at their own venues, too.)
And while about 80% of the music played by its three big orchestras is traditional classical music, the other 20% is contemporary, according to stats provided by the communications team. Even some of the historic pieces were once considered new: Igor Stravinsky, considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, was the first conductor to present his own work at the festival in 1951.
These days, the organization spends about $40,000 a year to commission new works, and allots another $130,000 to its Susan and Ford Schumann Center for Composition Studies, which offers full fellowships each summer to eight to 10 emerging talents, mostly in their 20s and 30s.
Theophanidis, as composer-in-residence, helps lead the center and is joined by other guests throughout the season; one of the composition fellows will be selected by faculty and administrators to write a commissioned work for the festival next summer. That budget line for the Schumann Center also supports the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. The smaller group performs new pieces by the composition fellows as well as other works by living artists and “20th century classics,” according to the festival’s description of the ensemble.
“Great music of the past remains great, but it doesn’t speak about life right now in the same way as contemporary music does,” Fletcher wrote in an emailed statement. “But, equally, the great music in our tradition can’t speak to us, if we don’t make it live, so we believe we have multiple callings: service to what is already great, and inquiry into what might become great.”
“We need to take risks”
This is an era of contemporary music in which “anything goes,” said composition fellow Celka Ojakangas, who has a doctorate in composition from the University of Southern California and teaches courses at Occidental College and Glendale Community College in Los Angeles. She’s a self-identified “people pleaser” — it’s also the title of a piece she’s been working on this summer, in which a mosquito-sounding violin tries to keep up with the rest of the instruments — but she likes to make audiences think, too.
“I’m trying to write something that just makes people go, ‘Huh,’ when they first hear it,” said Ojakangas, who plays the viola herself. “And then they get used to it, and then they enjoy it.”
Studdard, the poet who wrote the libretto for “Siddhartha, She,” sees that ethos in all kinds of contemporary art.
“Rather than having this really nice bridge that helps you get across from one part of the artwork to another, you’re being tossed like a rope swing and having to jump over yourself,” Studdard said. “And if it’s not an art form that you practice or that you’re super familiar with, it feels like a lot of work sometimes to swing across the river.”
That doesn’t always go over well. Some people “want to go and relax,” Studdard said, when they engage with a work of poetry or music. But there’s merit to the challenge.
“We have a tendency as humans to sometimes assign a higher value to something that we’ve had to work for,” Studdard said. It’s the feeling that “I was able to understand something that I didn’t think I would be able to understand, and that, always to me, feels like a tremendous reward.”
That might be an apt explanation for some of the works on this summer’s lineup, like the 2014 piece “Tumblebird Contrails” by Gabriella Smith that the chamber symphony performed in early August. To an audience member in the right mindset, it might sound like a walk on a moody seashore. It was also, as the program-book essay put it, “almost entirely devoid of melody, pitch, or even a sense of teleological motion. Its 12 minutes are, instead, a mass of shifting textures that pass by, following nature’s unfathomable logic.”
Composer Jasmine Barnes celebrates a performance of her piece “Kinsfolknem” with featured soloists at the Aspen Music Festival and School’s Klein Music Tent on July 11. The piece, inspired by Black family gatherings, highlighted Demarre McGill on flute, Titus Underwood on oboe, Andrew Brady on bassoon and Demarre’s brother Anthony McGill on clarinet (not pictured). (Diego Redel, Courtesy of the Aspen Music Festival and School)
Furthering the field
Other new works are more likely to make the audience dance, or at least bob their heads, as with Jasmine Barnes’ celebration of Black family gatherings titled “Kinsfolknem.” The festival co-commission combined classical with jazz, gospel and other genres for a performance by the chamber symphony and a woodwind quartet in mid-July. As one music critic noted, it seemed to outshine even the infamous “dun-dun-dun-dun”s of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that followed intermission.
“Aspen is a champion of the artists,” Barnes said, listening to what they want to play and create and then supporting it. To her, the festival’s commitment to new works is a way to not only “preserve the field,” but to further it.
“In classical music, there is a hierarchy of what pieces get respect, what composers get respect, what types of music, what styles of music get respect,” Barnes said. “And I like to challenge it, because many of the things that are viewed as commoners’ music (are) what all of us grew up on. … I think the totality of us all can be entered into the space, and I think when I write my music, I think about the totality of me. I think about the totality of my community, my society, our country, the world.”
And besides, the idea of what does (and doesn’t) fit in the classical music canon can change over time, according to Fletcher, who is himself a composer.
“We don’t really know who among us will be judged as a leader by the future (generations), and we need to take risks and be as open as possible,” he said.
Demarre McGill, Titus Underwood, Andrew Brady and Anthony McGill perform “Kinsfolknem” with the Aspen Chamber Symphony at the Klein Music Tent on July 11. The piece composed by Jasmine Barnes was co-commissioned by the Aspen Music Festival and School and performed alongside works by Mozart and Beethoven. (Diego Redel, Courtesy of the Aspen Music Festival and School)
Many of today’s composers and classical music fans still value the works of Brahms and Rachmaninoff and Mahler. But they also see room for more perspectives and styles, and they see the world of new, contemporary music as a way to broaden the understanding of who can create and enjoy the genre.
“I really do think that everybody is ready for that kind of a change,” said Arjan Singh Dogra, one of this summer’s composition fellows who is entering a doctorate program for composition at Columbia University in the fall. “And that doesn’t mean getting rid of the old music, like the Bachs and Beethovens by any means. It just means a more diverse range of programming.”
The bold, ambitious premieres are the ones with the “most excited audience,” he noted. The new, contemporary and experimental work is what draws different people into the room, and the more diverse the group, “the more fruitful culture you end up creating.”
As Barnes put it: “I don’t think anyone is striving to necessarily write like (the composers of the past), in many ways. We study them, of course, but I think modern composers are probably inspiring more sounds than anything.”
And to Barnes, that’s “a really great sign of a healthy field … where people are like, ‘who are your favorite composers?,’ and they list people that are living.”
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