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The Value of New American Music
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# : |
17357 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1990 |
2,353 Words |
| Author
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Samuel Lipman
Samuel Lipman is publisher of the New Criterion and author of
the book of essays Arguing for Music/Arguing for Culture. |
The American Composers Orchestra represents a valiant attempt by composers of symphonic music to take the future of their work into their own hands. Founded in 1977, the ACO is made up of excellent free-lance players who reserve time from their busy schedules each year to give a series of concerts in New York's Carnegie Hall devoted to the American compositions of the present - many of them world premieres - and the past.
The main responsibility for choosing the repertory for these concerts is shared by music advisor (and principal conductor) Dennis Russell Davies and composer Francis Thorne, the ACO's president. The resulting programs demonstrate the ACO's self-proclaimed mission of performing the best American orchestra music "of all styles"; this goal of inclusion of a broad range of activity rather than concentration on a particular school or schools of composition makes the orchestra's programs a valuable index to current thought in musical composition.
The very fact of the existence of an institution like the ACO suggests the parlous state of American music today. It is composers who write music, after all, and it is performers, whether as soloists or banded together in great orchestras, who have traditionally prospered by bringing this music to an audience. Often in the past composers themselves - one thinks immediately of such virtuoso pianists as Beethoven, Liszt, and Chopin, and closer to our own time Bartok and Rachimaninov - have made celebrated careers by performing their own music and the music of others. But such success - and with it the entire organization of concert life - relies upon the existence of a large body of music beloved or at the very least desired and appreciated by audiences. Nowadays, this large body
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