By Anne Kilstofte – IAWM Journal (2001)
Within the span of a heartbeat, the results of a competition can be either exhilarating beyond measure or devastating beyond reason. As musicians we face competition constantly, both internally and externally, either by challenging ourselves—internally, or by challenging our technique—externally. And one source of this external examination is through the vehicle of a contest.
What is most important in these examinations is to grow as scholars and musicians, and that growth is much more defined when the thought processes behind the decisions of who won or lost are fully realized. What further clarifies this professional growth is when it can be learned and passed on through someone else’s experience. It is through such an opportunity that we are able to hear, first hand, from Judith Lang Zaimont about her triumph as Honored Composer in the American Composers Invitational, held in conjunction with the recent 11th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas, in May and June 2001.
Judith Lang Zaimont, a composer of considerable international standing, as well as a professor and scholar of limitless talent and energy, recently received yet another accolade of great merit to add to her collection of honors and prizes, which include a Guggenheim Fellowship, first prize—Gold Medal in the Gottschalk Centenary Composers Competition, First Prize in the Chamber Orchestra Composition contest to honor the Statue of Liberty Centennial, and First Prize in the international McCollin Competition for Composers, which culminated with a performance of that work by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Her music appears on two century lists (Chamber Music America and Piano & Keyboard Magazine), and is the subject of many articles, book chapters and doctoral dissertations. Her works have been performed throughout the world by ensembles such as the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Women’s Philharmonic, the Kremlin Chamber Orchestra, the Czech Radio Symphony and Connecticut Opera. Her music is currently available on Harmonia Mundi, Arabesque, Koch, 4-Tay and Leonarda record labels. She was awarded the 1995 Recording Award—First Prize, by the International Alliance for Women in Music (for the Arabesque CD “Neon Rhythm”), and several of her compositions have been selected for competition repertoire lists, including works for the Carnegie-Rockefeller competition for interpreters of American vocal music, and the General Motors-Seventeen Magazine competition.
She is also a noted scholar and educator. She is the editor-in-chief of the critically acclaimed book series: The Musical Woman: An International Perspective. In this capacity she has received several awards, including the Pauline Alderman Prize. As a teacher (she is professor of composition at the University of Minnesota), she has an ability to communicate her thoughts with clarity and precision. The depth of her analysis is all encompassing. Her energy and uncompromising strength are passed on to her students and lives through their works as well.
The Van Cliburn competition has commissioned new works in the past but has never had a composition competition. Zaimont’s winning piece, Impronta Digitale, was chosen through both composer and performer review and was performed at the 11th Van Cliburn International Competition. This competition has been held every four years since 1962. The semi-final round of the competition, which narrows the pianists from 30 down to 12, is a solo recital program, which is judged not only on performance and technical ability, but also on programming skill. Zaimont’s work was performed by several semi-finalists, as well as by the two gold medallists.
The process that the piece went through is a new one. Many interesting points were raised from both the performer’s and the composer’s perspective regarding composing, programming and the filtering of new music. I had the opportunity to speak with Judith Zaimont about her experience with the competition process from both vantage points.
Anne Kilstofte: Would you give us some background information about the Van Cliburn composers’ competition?
Judith Lang Zaimont: This is the first time, ever, that this type of composers’ competition has been done. It is called the American Composers Invitational, and it ran parallel to the main event—the piano competition. A couple of years ago John Corigliano convened a panel of 50 eminent musicians. (He had been the commissioned composer for either the last round or the round previous to that for the Van Cliburn competition.) The panel decided not to have a single competition piece this time, and everyone was free to nominate composers. Some 40-odd composers were nominated, about 30 of whom submitted pieces. The invitational letter indicated that the piece need not be written specifically for the competition; it could be a relatively recent but not frequently performed work. As it turned out, I believe the four pieces that were finally selected were not written for the competition.
AK: How were you contacted initially, and what were the different stages in the selection process?
JLZ: A letter came, under Richard Rodzinski’s signature as President of the Van Cliburn Foundation, indicating that I had been nominated by a member of the committee to submit a piece for consideration. Everything, from the very first moment, was done anonymously at every stage of the review process. It was a very respectful approach for the composer who may or may not decide to submit. As a matter of fact, I put the letter away for three months and decided I was not going to enter. It seemed to be a prestigious venue, but with too many cutouts. The submission period was very long, close to a year, so that people could, in fact, write new pieces, if they wished. In the end, I thought that I could submit a piece that was already written, but I had to stop and think about the kind of piece one would submit for a piano competition.
At the end of the year 2000, a committee of several composers met in New York to review the submitted pieces. All were played at this review by someone who had been a semi-finalist in the previous Cliburn competition. Then, of the 30 pieces, five eventually were selected and were forwarded to all the pianist competitors. Those five composers were contacted by the Cliburn Foundation, and their publishers were asked to forward 30 copies of each piece. Every accepted entrant to the competition received all five pieces. The composers were still anonymous. The competitors’ review resulted in four of the five selected pieces being chosen for programming by at least one competitor.
AK: So one of the composers did not get chosen.
JLZ: At that point, yes. There was one person whose piece passed through the composers’ review process and was not selected by any of the 30 entrants. That person has not been nor will be identified. This is very interesting to mull over—to think what it means to be given an accolade by your fellow composers, and then, for some reason, to discover that the piece itself did not fit the programming or the temperamental needs of the performers.
The final four composers were identified and written up in the national news media. They were C. Curtis-Smith, Lowell Liebermann, James Mobberley and me. Of the 30 competitors, ten picked my piece for their programs, and I thought there was a good chance my piece would actually be performed at the competition. The 30 pianists were then cut down to 12 semi-finalists. The honored composers were selected only by the music actually performed at the semi-final solo recitals. (The final round is a concerto.) Of the 12 semi-finalists, five picked my piece and performed it. The remaining seven selected and performed Lowell Liebermann’s Three Impromptus. So the four announced composers actually came down to two who received competition honors.
Of the six finalists, three had performed my Impronta Digitale. As it turned out, both gold medallists, Stanislav Ioudenitch and Olga Kern, had selected and performed my piece. Kern’s Harmonia Mundi CD recording of Impronta Digitale was released in September 2001.
AK: Let’s discuss this from the composer’s strategy and why you initially decided not to enter.
JLZ: I felt the odds were against me. Plus, I had neither the time nor the inclination to write a piece for a competition. If I had something in my catalog that was relatively recent and that had the hallmarks of a competition piece, it would be worth the experience to put the piece forward. Even if the piece were not selected, it would come to the attention of other people who might be interested in knowing of its existence.
My background is that of a pianist, so I write idiomatically for my instrument. I had two compositions that might be suitable. The competition required a work of between eight and 12 minutes, thus a shorter movement from a suite would not work. Parenthetically, I would say that two of the four pieces that were selected for the semi-finals were groups of pieces, and it had not even occurred to me that one could submit a group.
AK: With separate movements?
JLZ: Yes, they are separate. I looked for complete pieces, and there were only two that would work. One was Nocturne: La Fin de Siècle, from the late 1970s, which has been recorded and performed around the world.
AK: That would not have been appropriate, since the invitation called for little-performed works.
JLZ: One of the movements from the 1999 Piano Sonata was a possibility. In fact, I submitted the entire Sonata, and the committee sent a letter asking which movement I preferred. I finally selected the last movement. The entire Sonata has been performed a couple of times. Bradford Gowen (on the faculty of University of Maryland, College Park) gave the world premiere at the Phillips Gallery in Washington, D.C., in May of 2000, and the piece received a standing ovation. When Bradford got the music he sent me an e-mail right away to say that he sat down with it at the lunch table and could feel it in his fingers; he said he went right back to his studio to play it. This is someone whose main meat is the Barber Sonata, so he has very big “chops.” He is a winner in the Carnegie-Rockefeller Competition for Interpreters of American Music, thus I knew the last movement worked—that it was “competition-type” music.
Impronta Digitale is difficult to play, technically interesting and very digital. It is really my sounds and my music. Interpretively, it combines the challenges of the Prokofiev Toccata, op. 11, a very brutal piece; the E minor Toccata that closes Le Tombeau de Couperin of Ravel; and the almost unplayable Toccata that Schumann wrote as the last movement of the F-sharp minor Sonata. Having sorted my way through those three pieces during my playing career, I thought I would write my own toccata to be a part of the literature.
AK: Do you often work from the music of other composers?
JLZ: Almost never: in this instance, the earlier toccatas serve only to delineate a high technical and interpretive limit for what “toccata” can encompass. After the lyric second movement of the Sonata comes this eight-minute toccata. There is just one stopping place in it, one place where the pianist can get a point of poise, a little past the golden mean in proportion. Ultimately, I entered a piece that would be a performing and a conceptual challenge for the players.
AK: Overall, what is the Sonata like?
JLZ: All the movements have Italian titles. Ricerca is the first movement, meaning “to re-search, to search again, to find again”; there is a sonata principle embedded in that. The second movement is Canto, and the last movement is Impronta Digitale, which means “digital imprint” [literally], but colloquially, in Italian, it means “fingerprint.”
JLZ: Much of the movement is written on the page in single-line motion. It contains many of my fingerprint sonorities (elements that are essential Zaimont), plus it is very, very, very fast. It is to be played 192 to the pulse—like quicksilver, with much rapid, fugitive movement to it, and then some knuckle busters, and some interlocking hands.
[Interviewer’s Note: Impronta Digitale opens with an “e” held for a period of time before moving into fast, slightly abbreviated, gestural material. The held “e,” in a slight suspension of time, returns several times at the beginning of the piece and throughout the movement in differing guises. The composer gave a brief explanation of the movement.]
JLZ: The toccata proper starts there [pointing to page two], and the question is how to make the introduction fit. It is all about setting this “e,” the very first note of the piece, on board with tension. The entire concept is about a spiral or scroll into the keyboard. Many passages are very fast. They smack into the barline and finish, like feminine endings, right at the end of the measure, and cannot be rounded out poetically. The performer has to touch there and re-set to start the next measure. It is that kind of technical challenge.
The work also has motoric elements and a cadenza. The propulsion does not stop: the music continues at the same relentless tempo throughout. In places, the pianist crosses her hands across her body using the entire keyboard, starting in the bass clef and then moving up. Much inertia needs to be overcome in addition to setting the hands down correctly on the keyboard.
AK: It looks as though it would be fun to play. [In fact, later I played the piece and can verify that not only is it fun to play, it is also very pianistic. Although challenging, it has a certain ease in its playability. It works well for the player because of the structure of the motives and the composer’s understanding of how the hands move across the piano. It is extremely well thought out.]
JLZ: The question then arises, “Who would select this piece?” From private conversations with the players in Texas, I learned that all the competitors played through all five of the proposed pieces when they arrived. They were very serious and very dedicated about adding a piece to a recital program that had been set for years. Because of the anonymity of the process, some of the players were eventually surprised to learn that this particular piece was written by a woman.
AK: Tell us about the strategy of a competition piece from the performer’s viewpoint.
JLZ: Imagine you are the performer. Your program has on it a Beethoven Sonata, a Scriabin Sonata, a big piece by Liszt, and perhaps two Impromptus by Schubert. What are you looking for to fill out that program?
AK: I’d want something really fiery.
JLZ: Ah! In other words, as a player, you feel that your strength is poetry and voicing, and you need something that’s a foil—something explosive and brutal.
AK: Yes, brutal, and something that is really showy. If it is a new piece, it needs to be something that “wows” the judges.
JLZ: What if you are another type of player? You are going to play the Petrushka Transcription (Stravinsky); you program the Prokofiev Visions Fugitive and a Beethoven Sonata. What are you looking for in your program? You need something to fill the Chopin or the Debussy gap. The interesting thing about the two pieces that ended up being programmed in the semi-finals is that my piece is all about strength, and Lowell Liebermann’s Three Impromptus are all about poetry.
Program building is an art: one aspect of the choice element on the performer’s side is that the works chosen and performed by the semi-finalists are almost virtual polar opposites. They were individually selected by each pianist to meet particular programming needs. Because the program booklet lists the recital programs for all 30 competitors, the judges could evaluate the choice of a new piece. Why did the pianist pick this piece? Does it add to the program? In almost no case did I see a pianist select a new piece for a program that already had similar music. The new work was chosen either to fit an emotional note that the program did not otherwise touch in quite that way or to display the performer’s own interpretive and technical strength.
[JLZ showed AK several competitors’ programs, starting with Olga Kern’s.] Olga Kern played two Schubert Impromptus, both books of the Brahms-Paganini Variations, and then Zaimont, the Scriabin Ninth Sonata and the Barber Sonata.
AK: She played quite a bit of lyrical music.
JLZ: Yes. For argument’s sake let us look at the programs of some of the other semi-finalists who played my piece. Stanislav (Stasi) Ioudenitch programmed the Sarcasms of Prokofiev and the Liszt Spanish Rhapsody—that was wonderful! The piece can be a potboiler, and he made it sound like real music; it was extraordinary. Then he played all the Moments musicaux of Schubert, my piece, and ended with Trois mouvements de Petruchka.
Masaru Okada’s was a more conventional program: a Bach Partita, Beethoven’s Sonata, op. 7, my piece, and finally the Liszt Réminiscences de Don Juan. Another who played my work was Wang Xiaohan, a very interesting young man (only 20 years old) who is also a composer. In his program he started with my piece, then Schubert’s Sonata in C minor, a wonderful performance of several of Debussy’s Preludes, and the Bartók Sonata, 1926. These are equally interesting programs all around, with abundant technical and artistic challenges.
JLZ: For the amused composer, sitting in the audience and hearing radically different interpretations of a work that she thought could be construed only in a rather narrow way, the experience brought the knowledge of what it means to send a piece out into the world and have it come back through the minds and the artistry of people who are finished musicians of varying types. After every performance, people came up to me in droves, in the lobby, asking, “What do you think of this rendition?” “How did this one do?” “Who is your favorite?”
AK: What did you say to them?
JLZ: I said I learned something from every single performance, and that is really true. Wang Xiaohan told me that he played the piece purposely under tempo “because the reverberation time in this hall is so long.” Some people said this performance made the most sense to them.
AK: Having heard so many different versions, will that affect how you write in the future?
JLZ: The short answer is no. But I did learn something from every performance. As a matter of fact, my jaw dropped in a couple of places, where pianists refingered passages. Stasi Ioudenitch showed me one place, at one of the climaxes, where, instead of playing two groups of double thirds by “bouncing” them, he took the second group by crossing over to play it with his left hand. A piece of music, if it is going to live, has to be susceptible to different people’s understandings. (This was also true for Liebermann’s piece.)
AK: Did you feel that anybody misunderstood?
JLZ: Yes, but in an interesting way. Despite the “Prokofiev” lurking in the far distance, one competitor played the work as if it were all light and airy. The precise pedal markings, carefully placed on the page, were completely disregarded. And this was a pianist who also memorized the piece! That person made it his own, in his own fashion, and I salute him for that. As I always tell my students, Für Elise lives, whether it is Artur Rubinstein, or the little girl down the street playing it, or the background score to “Rosemary’s Baby,” where it has a different sensibility. It is all part of what a piece is. It is beyond the composer, with its own life (like a child).
AK: As a composer hearing a piece you have written, can you determine whether it is the performer or the piece when there is such misunderstanding?
JLZ: At this competition level, it is definitely a question of the interpretation of a finished artist. Over and over again, I was told by people who had attended many of these Cliburn competitions, that this was, by far, the most finished group of performers that they had heard. Most of these pianists are performing at world-class levels, and are already prizewinners of one or more other competitions.
I had the opportunity to see and hear a video of two interpretations of Impronta Digitale, one by co-gold medallist Olga Kern and one by finalist Wang Xiaohan. Kern’s performance was fiery, a moto perpetuo of energy and fury, absolutely brutal in its devoted concentration and exactitude, except for the lyrical section, just beyond the golden mean, which was tempered with softened expressiveness. In the concluding section the music winds up again and returns to its feverish pitch. Judith had mentioned how “tight” Kern’s performance was—“so tight that it sometimes doesn’t breathe, but it is full of excitement.”
Wang’s interpretation was very different. He produced less tension in the opening “e” statement, but made a clear comparison through the gradations of the “e” statements that follow in the first page alone (there are more than four other references to “e”).
Kern made more of the fire of the motoric line, while Wang used the larger statements, as well as elements of arpeggios that he made into chordal structures (through pedal markings different from the composer’s). Wang was just as adept with the motoric elements, but he kept a sensitivity that translated into more translucent colors, colors that one is not inclined to hear in the Kern performance. Both performances were exquisite in their nuances, but Wang’s made more sense of the directional characteristics, seeming to understand why he was using each end and direction of the keyboard. In the lyrical section, just before the ending, Wang made the elements sound like a chorale with great finesse and delicacy. His accelerando began more slowly, almost in painfully slow motion, but he brought the work to a frenzy as did Kern, and he finished with much broader and bolder ending statements, rather than the fire and perpetual pounding flashes that Kern used.
AK: Do you think the piece will stay in the finalists’ repertoire?
JLZ: I think with Olga Kern, probably yes. I believe Stasi Ioudenitch will play the entire Sonata. He is really a major interpreter. I admired everything he played: such control, and such a nice young man. Mr. Wang was very forthcoming. He said there is a lot of new music he does not like. Both he and Ioudenitch mentioned that they know very little new music by American composers.
These pianists are on the cusp of major international exposure, and already have the attention of the world musical community. They have little room, time or attention to notice new music—basically, that is the issue. The repertoire by which they live and make their mark is 100 years old, more or less, and that poses a real issue for today’s composers. It is nice that our pieces are coming forward on these competitions through required means and required mechanisms, but in monitoring the recital programs of all 12 semi-finalists, the most recent piece, other than the two new pieces, was the Samuel Barber Sonata that Olga Kern played.
AK: Bartók, Barber and Copland seem to be the cut-off for anything they perform from the 20th century.
JLZ: Someone else, who did not get to the semi-finals, had a preliminary recital in which a George Crumb work was played. I am talking only about the 12 solo recitals I heard, in which music employing “newer” constellations of pitch included only the Bartók Sonata of 1926, the Prokofiev Sarcasms and the Visions Fugitive, and the Barber Sonata. Except for the Barber, the “newest” by date, was the Rachmaninoff Second Sonata, played several times, which dates from the early 1930s. In other words, what struck me clearly is the disconnect that these stellar interpreters have with the music being created in their own time.
AK: The problem is the musical void throughout the educational system.
JLZ: That may be part of it. Certainly the studio teacher/student relationship is a very personal one. The music that is introduced to the student is filtered through the knowledge base of the teacher. The music that excited teachers when they were younger or that continues to excite them is what they encourage their students to play.
Where, in this very full diet, is there room for the new syntax, the new sounds, the new notes to be inserted? A competition provides an interesting point of introduction, but only a few new pieces will make their way into any competition. So it is left to composers individually to build the necessary bridges that connect to the interests of the stellar performers, the international superstars of the next generation.
AK: This is just one small bridge, but it is a very important one.
JLZ: It could be very important if the lessons of this competition are taken to heart by the composers. It is not that the players have closed ears. Their minds and their sensibilities are very open, but the pieces need to meet them on performance terms—“vehicle” terms. The new works need to feel good to play. They have to make the instrument sound in ways that players can connect with immediately.
The piano has been re-invented several times by composers who re-imagined the sound of the instrument. And it is very important that the newest music also has the capacity to make the instrument “sound.” Whatever else it contains, the music must do that in order to reach the performing artist.
For me, this was a very enjoyable experience. I think that most seasoned composers have had the very happy circumstance of winning competitions. But the competition’s second stage—to be examined all over again from a very different slant, a very different standpoint, by the performers who need to be satisfied with the music in order to bring it forward convincingly—was the part of the experience that was so interesting.
AK: Something I wanted to comment on was the idea that perhaps composers need not only be taught how to compose—how to bring out their own voices, but also how performers program the various pieces.
JLZ: That is exactly right. What is the piece going to offer to that evening’s complete set of music that is not already provided by Chopin, Liszt, Beethoven, Scriabin or Bartók?
AK: If it has nothing new to offer, the pianist might as well play the Scriabin.
JLZ: And that is what’s happening. If they say, “it’s like this other piece,” then why not play the piece that has a more durable track record? So—if we are trying to reach the major artists of the current and future seasons, it is critical to make a point of assuring the innate “piano-ness” of the piece. The way a piece will be examined, pulled-apart, and inquired into by the artist will not be from a composer’s standpoint but from a performer’s. That musical connection needs to be made; that bridge will come when the piece satisfies both sets of examinations—the composer’s and the performer’s.
Anne Kilstofte is a much sought-after American composer of orchestral, operatic, chamber and choral music and has received numerous prestigious fellowships and honors for her work. Dr. Kilstofte is a full-time composer/publisher as well as an adjunct assistant professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and a guest professor at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. Her work has been heard throughout much of North America, Europe and Asia, and she regularly receives many distinguished commissions from international ensembles. She holds a Ph.D. in Theory/Composition from the University of Minnesota, where she studied with Judith Lang Zaimont and Dominick Argento. She has served on the board of directors of the IAWM since 1997.