by Emma Lou Diemer
as published in the ILWC Journal, October 1993, pp. 11-13.
Just returned from musicALASKAwomen, I am inspired as always by hearing new music, seeing old friends, and making new ones among the members and supporters of ILWC. A conference of this kind gives one an overview of the kind of music composers of all ages are writing and have written-all over the United States and in some foreign lands as well. Thanks to Jeannie Pool, Suzanne Summerville, Sally Reid, Judith Shatin, and other conference leaders, we have an opportunity to experience a concentration of women composers and mostly women performers, just as the past has enjoyed a concentration of men composers and performers.
I was interested in the importance of folk music and the return of tonality in many of the works, corroborating a belief I have long had: that music related to the people rather than to a theory or a formula speaks most clearly and most effectively. That is not to say that the simplest music is the best: sometimes in listening to some of the music I wished for more information, more complexity, more counterpoint in some form, just as in listening to dense atonal constructions I wished for melody or a bit of rhythm.
I have been an active composer since my early teens (though I wrote music at five), with no other career purpose in mind except to be a writer of music, creating new sounds first for myself and later for others. A child picking out little pieces on the piano. A teenager writing piano concertos. A music school student challenged by each new assignment. A professional composer fulfilling commissions both large and small. A composer who has lived twice as long as Schubert!, as long as Bach!, eventually-if all goes as planned-an active octogenarian-composer à la Verdi.
All those ghosts of the past: Prokofiev, Ravel, Gershwin, Schoenberg, Clara Schumann; then Bacewicz, Tailleferre, Tower, Thome-so much music we have heard and will hear in our lifetimes. What of our own music? Will it last beyond us? Beyond the 21st century?
I write music that I intend to endure. I have gone back and forth between the neoclassic ideal, believing it is the most durable, and the romantic ideal, believing it is the most personal, all my composing life. In my latest works the two have merged even more strongly than before: the String Quartet, the Variations for Piano, the Marimba Concerto. In these works, intuition (the romantic ideal) and analysis (the neoclassic ideal) are balanced.
A composer needs to be challenged to write all kinds of music for all kinds and levels of performers. I admire most the composers who can write good music for beginners and also good music for the Vienna Philharmonic. Limiting oneself (myself) to either one of these outlets shows little imagination. I admire least the ivory tower composer who actually expects her(his) music to have some value in the grand scheme of things merely because it is unfathomable. Grants are won that way, not grateful listeners.
I was greatly influenced at Yale by two ideas espoused by Hindemith: writing for non-professionals and writing for as many mediums as possible. The first was the hardest to adopt. It was only after Yale that I wrote some "easy pieces" for some piano students I had in a few of those post-school, pre-first-job months. Prior to that, I did not think about writing easy music. (As you well know, easy music is hard to write).
And at Eastman, the benign, generous persona of Howard Hanson awakened many of us to the fact that we must take an interest in and encourage others who are writing music. And surrounded by orchestras and orchestra music at that marvelous school, one could not help but develop a technique to a high degree in that medium. This was also true of the two summers studying composition at Tanglewood and hearing the Boston Symphony in rehearsal day after day.
At the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I taught from 1971 to 1991, we on the composition faculty nurtured and boosted the talents of many a promising undergraduate and graduate student. It was gratifying to see several of these former students at the Alaska conference and hear their impressive music and thoughts.
Even now, after "numerous commissions, awards, and publications" (as we say in our résumés), I occasionally must tell myself it is worthwhile, what I write. I don't believe that is unusual. The most boring people are those who have no doubts, no uncertainties. But what I write must be important to more than myself. Although I do not write for the masses, many of whom have no knowledge or interest outside the realm of popular music (the beat)-and no knowledge of history per se-at least I must write for a discerning body of music lovers. I write for those who treasure the past as well as enjoy new musical ideas and experiences. I like to bridge the past and the present in music.
The composer should be a practicing musician. Though not talented as a conductor (my conducting being confined to many a solitary afternoon as a teenager "conducting" recordings of the Shostakovich Fifth, Finlandia, and other favorites), I have always played any keyboard available, and do most of my composing at one of them. My Fulbright Scholarship in Brussels was in composition and piano. And I play the organ at church on Sundays and whenever time allows. Aside from multi-track recording with synthesizers, the organ is the widest-ranged and most color-varied instrument available. I give recitals of my own music (it not requiring as much practice) whenever suggested.
My greatest composing experiences to date have been (1) the composer-in-residence stint under the auspices of the Ford Foundation long ago in the Arlington, VA, schools where I wrote music for all levels and mediums; (2) the present position as composer-in-residence for the Santa Barbara Symphony with the performances of my Marimba Concerto, written for Deborah Schwartz, and the Piano Concerto, written for the orchestra and my colleague at the university, pianist Betty Oberacker.
The composer must try to make her music available in some form if she thinks it has something to offer. My many choral works continue unabated (I was early labeled as a "choral composer," I think, because of the Three Madrigals, which have been in the repertoire since 1962, as well as other works); the choral medium has the most followers and is the easiest for a composer to break into, depending on her music.
A love of poetry creates song composers out of many of us. I have written and published nine song cycles and a number of single songs, using texts from the Bible, poets of the past including Alice Meynell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale, Thomas Wolfe, Ogden Nash, many of the Renaissance poets, as well as my poet sister and other contemporaries, Chinese and Hindu texts, etc. It is strange that vocal music is one of the most difficult mediums in regard to publication and performance. Vocal teachers must look harder and encourage more new material than they do.
I write a great deal of organ music, being an organist, and have added sixteen collections and several concert pieces to the published repertoire since 1957. So I am perhaps known as an organ composer. Here, too, I have tried to create a variety of difficulty levels: I recently completed a collection of hymn settings for the "parish organist" for a publisher, as well as a difficult concert work premiered at the American Guild of Organists regional convention here in the Santa Barbara area.
Piano music presents a challenge, although it was my first love and first medium. I am perhaps breaking through a bit with several individual works and collections on all levels of difficulty from easy pieces to the concerto. Maybe I'll be known as a piano composer?
For me the hardest medium in which to develop a reputation is chamber music, although 23 works of mine are published. I find chamber groups are almost as negligent in searching out new and different music as are symphony orchestra conductors.
In the field of orchestral music I have written and published ten works in varying degrees of difficulty, from the Youth Overture written for the junior high school orchestras of Arlington County to the Suite of Homages for the Women's Philharmonic. There are several alternatives for a composer of big orchestral works, and I am not an expert in any of them. One must become acquainted with as many conductors as possible including conductors of school and community orchestras. One must have a performance or rehearsal tape of one's own, following that one-sometimes more than one!-performance. One may need to desk-publish and promote the work oneself, or find a publisher who will promote the work (especially if the NY Philharmonic has played it?-congratulations to those who have that experience). One might place it in a publisher's rental library, though it may gather dust there if not promoted by someone.
There are a number of concertos (harpsichord, flute, organ, piano, etc.) of mine that should be performed. The concerto has fascinated me since the age of thirteen and the then-constant listening to the piano concertos of Tschaikovsky, Grieg, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Gershwin, and-above all-Prokofiev. My Concerto in One Movement for Piano was an expression, in modern dress, of my love of the 19th-century piano concerto. This all-out romanticism was somewhat rewarded when it reached the finals of the Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards last September for a performance by the National Symphony and Betty Oberacker. My goal was to write a work a wide audience (and I) might respond to in relation to melody, rhythm, color, and repetition, albeit within a structured 25 minutes of motivic development. Academia was left far behind during those thirteen days spent writing the concerto.
There are two published band works, one out of print from the 1960s and the other languishing in a rental library. This area has almost defeated me because of the difficulty of breaking into that "stable of band composers" syndrome and lack of imagination on the part of publishers. So far I have not had the time to write more school band pieces, the area that offers the greatest opportunity.
Don't limit yourself to writing the most difficult instrumental or choral music you can imagine. I am delighted to have hymns in several of the well-used church song books. (Religion isn't going to die out, you know.)
As early as 1970 I was interested in electronic music and what it would do for my own style in the areas of timbre and flexibility. Although my electronic works for tape alone, for tape and piano, tape and organ, tape and chorus, have structural elements that are neoclassic in concept, the medium's influence on some of my coloristic music written later (the Toccata for Piano, Summer of 82 for cello and piano, for example) is evident. And now technology allows me, as so many of us, to notate on the computer with the use of the synthesizer, and print out the music in publisher-ready form. And at church, I have over 300 sounds from a multi-timbral module interfaced to the 68-rank pipe organ for the amazement and sometimes consternation of the gathered few or many.
The greatest recording successes today, aside from commercial pop music, are in the field of ethnic/folk/New Age/minimalist music, none of which I write in their pure form, though their elements are incorporated in all my music. Are you one of those composers who believes she has many works that would appeal to many people if given a better chance? Welcome to the club!
Finally, do you ever thumb through reference books in the library to see if your name is there? I spent some time a few years ago jotting down all the addresses of music dictionary publishers who did not include me in their publications (narcissism at its height). I wrote to each of them, included a résumé, and encouraged them to add me to their next edition. Some of them did. This is a time-consuming activity, but someday I will do it again. I am sure a number of composers and their agents do this on a yearly basis.
But whether one's name is to be found in Grove's or not, composing is a life, a gift, a joy, always to be treasured and always present, never to be abandoned, never allowed to fade away for any reason that one might imagine as long as one has a say in the matter.
Emma Lou Diemer, one of the U.S.'s leading composers, is professor emerita at the University of California at San Diego. She is presently composer-in residence with the Santa Barbara Symphony.