I sure remembered this one, though. The Samuel Jones Tuba Concerto may not be the most groundbreaking new work of the last fifteen years but it has some actual tunes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hq9Qc7FF3k
It's also one of the only world premieres given by a symphony where I actually remembered it several days later and enjoyed it enough I was willing to go hear it in concert a second time. His Trombone Concerto wasn't nearly as satisfying for my personal tastes but Jones' Tuba Concerto has stuck with me and I really enjoyed it. But the thign is I was able to remember themes days later. That is, I'm afraid, not so common an experience in a lot of contemporary classical music. Kyle Gann once blogged about how a lot of newer compositions, particularly from students, go for dramatic range-spanning gestures of virtuosic difficulty and that someone he was speaking with said the likely influence for such music was Hollywood.
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2015/12/what-weve-come-to.html
My hunch is that the Hollywood in question is more likely the modern Hollywood in which composers all seem to rely on the same fill-in models and paradigms which leads to most soundtracks sounding more or less similar. What is probably not the Hollywood of choice would be the one Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco worked in. Yes, I'd say Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote music that sounds very Hollywood, but in the best most tuneful sort of way. If you influenced John Williams , Jerry Goldsmith and Henry Mancini you safely get to be considered classic Hollywood. If newer works were being written in that style of Hollywood it might not seem so insulting to compare student works to someone like Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who wrote some excellent music for classical guitar which, obviously, I must add!
And pertinent to Gann's comments about an anti-ism mentality in contemporary American music, I can appreciate a concern that a lack of concern for an ism or an ist school of thought can speak to a lack of musical personality or conviction. Movements tend to be things people do, whether at a social or, ahem, a more prosaic physiological level. I guess if I'd have to describe an "ism" I am committed to I've settled on calling it "fusionism", the idea being that I think composers should do work to shrink the barrier that has come to exist between popular/vernacular music and what has often been known as classical music, the proverbial low and high of music. So my heroes are composers who in some way and at some level, as I hear their work, actually did that. So my big heroes include Haydn, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Shostakovich, Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder, Scott Joplin, Joseph Lamb, Janacek, Messiaen, Stravinsky, some Ravel, and more contemporary guitarists like Nikita Koshkin, Atanas Ourkouzounov, Dusan Bogdanovic ... and I also revere the guitar music of Toru Takemitsu. I should throw in Thelonious Monk and George Russell while I'm at it but I hope you can get the basic idea.
I actually kinda hate jazz fusion but I was into prog rock for a while and I think one of the reasons prog rock is so reviled by fans of rock and pop and also by more traditionalist advocates of what's called classical music is that it is an attempt at fusion that in many respects failed. So I would say that when I think of my goals as fusionist I'm specifically thinking of anchoring the gestural and harmonic vocabularies of American vernacular styles to emphatically 18th century syntactic scripts and norms of gestural development. So an example of what I aspire to do is to compose a fugue based on a melody from a ragtime strain. I love ragtime! Or I would want to find a way to have a second theme recapitulate in a sonata form and become a bravura set of variations on a shape note hymn played in the slide guitar style of, say, Blind Willie Johnson. That's what I mean by saying my aspirations are to what I call fusionism.
In hindsight I realize that I wrote a kind of fusionist manifesto as a guest piece for Internet Monk a few years back where I just frontloaded the manifesto with Galatians 3:28
https://internetmonk.com/archive/guest-post-wth-on-there-is-neither-art-nor-pop-neither-indie-or-mainstream
Galatians 3:28
There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free man, neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus
There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free man, neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus
Colossians 1:19-20
For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His Cross; through Him, I say, whether things on heaven or things on earth.
For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His Cross; through Him, I say, whether things on heaven or things on earth.
If it's something you consider to be true about flesh and blood people then how much more should it be true for the music those people make? That's what I mean when I think of myself as a fusionist.
If through Christ the Father saw to reconciling all things to Himself, and if in Christ all who are in Christ are one then, well, that's what I mean by fusionism. If people from every station, race, ethnicity and tribe are being reconciled in and through Christ and to Christ an implication of this should be reconciliation to each other. So there's neither high nor low, indie or mainstream, classical or pop. But, yes, this manifesto is formulated on explicitly religious and particularly Christian grounds. My dad was Native American and my mom's white but a common thread is some form of Christian belief.
But I'm not interested in formulating a fusionist paradigm that would require other people to have that belief. But I say all this as a way of saying that I think I get what Kyle Gann has been complaining about and I think I might even take a step further and point out that some of the most significant figures of the musical avant garde in the last century had what would today be considered explicitly traditionalist or even reactionary religious beliefs. Messiaen wrote some far out music but was as traditionalist a Catholic as they come, from what I've managed to read about him. Arvo Part is Orthodox. Frank Martin was not quite so far out but he was Swiss Reformed and wrote what could be thought of as the first "modernist" work for classical guitar.
... but I digress ...
And if I'm going to cheat a bit and just invoke a phrase from Ben Johnston's writing, I want to reach that kind of fusion of American vernacular musical gesture and 18th century chamber music developmental processes with "maximum clarity". I have too many friends who are construction workers and electricians and stay at home moms and accountants and what might broadly be thought of as middle class and working class to feel like I have any business or interest in composing music that people need a master's degree to even begin to understand. So in that sense what I like about the Samuel Jones Tuba Concerto is that it may seem a bit Hollywood but I think of it as a throwback to when Hollywood composers still wrote tunes instead of agitated ostinati.
So I wouldn't say the Samuel Jones Tuba Concerto is as charming as a Tedesco work but it's one of the more memorable big sound premieres I've heard in the last twenty years. Usually I'm more tuned into to chamber music for classical guitar and solo guitar music, so perhaps that's endorsement enough, in a way.
And on that note I figure I can close up a night of blogging about tuba music by writing a post about music for tuba and guitar.
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