This weekend Christopher Rouse will get to hear his most popular composition, the Flute Concerto, played by his hometown band, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. A first cousin, once removed, of legendary developer James Rouse, the 59-year-old composer grew up in Mount Washington. He attended Gilman School before going off to college and a career that has won him a Pulitzer Prize, a Grammy Award, and performances of his pieces with nearly every major American orchestra and many European ensembles as well.

But Rouse never lost his love for the Orioles, the "Bawlmerese" accent, and the BSO, and in 2004, after a divorce, he moved from Rochester, N.Y., back to the house he grew up in. He commutes to Manhattan to teach composition at the Juilliard School, but he returns to Mount Washington to work on his commissions. His latest recording is Karolju: Christmas Music From Rouse, Lutoslawski, and Rodrigo (RCA Red Seal) with David Zinman conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Philharmonia Chorus.

City Paper: Is it true that you listen to Orioles games while you're composing?

Christopher Rouse: I can't work in silence, so I write with the TV on. It can't be music--it has to be talking--but my preference is to have something on. So much of what a composer does is just grunt work; the creative decisions are just a small part of it. If I'm doubling a violin line in the flute or repeating an ostinato, I like to have something to keep me company, whether it's a ball game, a news report, or a soap opera. When I have to make a creative decision, I can slip off from the TV in my mind. The problem is when I come back I have no idea what's happened in the game or soap opera because I've completely blocked it out for 15 minutes.

CP: Are you a big baseball fan?

CR: I wouldn't call myself a baseball fan--I'm an Orioles fan. I don't appreciate the well-pitched game and well-turned play by the opposite team. I want my team to win no matter how. In my childhood, there was less to do in Baltimore than there is now, so like many people I developed an allegiance to the Colts and Orioles, and it never left me. I was in the ballpark when the Orioles won the '66 series, and we had season tickets to the Colts during the Unitas days. Now, like all right-thinking Baltimoreans, of course, I despise the Colts.

CP: Have computers made that composing grunt work any easier?

CR: I'm a dinosaur--I still do it all by hand. I ship it off to my producer, and they translate it into a computer. I do enjoy the tactile part of composing, holding the pencil in my hand and pressing it into the paper. Moving a mouse around and going "click, click, click" is not the same. I work hunched over a card table. Because I don't play the piano or any other instrument very well, I can't use them as an aid. I've had to develop an inner ear over the years. I don't hear the music I'm writing until two days before the premiere at rehearsal.

CP: As a baby boomer, was it difficult to be a classical-music fan when all your friends were into the rock 'n' roll of the '60s?

CR: Oh, no, I was never someone who chose classical music and dismissed everything else. I was listening to rock 'n' roll, too. I still listen with some frequency, not so much to current things as to the stuff I grew up on--the Beatles, the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane. I even taught a rock history course at the Eastman School of Music for years. People assume I like rock for nostalgia, and surely that's mixed in, but I don't feel like I'm slumming. I think from the Beatles through the mid-'70s, there's a lot of good music there.

CP: Do you listen to rock differently than you listen to classical?

CR: Rock is not trying to do what classical music is trying to do--the forms are shorter, the chord changes are simpler, everything's simpler, in fact, and it's trying to sell records. But working within those structures, you can create a riff, a chorus, or what-not that hits with the same power I get from Beethoven. And I'm not necessarily drawn to the more complicated rock--I was never a fan of British art rock any more than I am a fan of Theodor Adorno, the German music critic who argued that greater complexity meant greater quality.

CP: When you were an undergraduate at Oberlin Conservatory, it was the tail end of a very severe, academic era of Western art music--shaped by Adorno's ideas and the examples of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. How did you break free of that to write such unabashedly emotional music?

CR: Change was already in the air in the late '60s. George Rochberg led the return to tonality. He'd been doing serial music, but when his son died in 1963 he found he couldn't express what he wanted to feel, so he started using triads and quotes and was drummed out of the army, so to speak. By 1975 things were much more open than they'd been in 1965--it was OK to use triads again.

CP: Did tonality become the new orthodoxy?

CR: It wasn't that people stopped doing 12-tone and atonal music--it was just no longer the party line. I tried some serial music and some graph music, which was good because you should always try something before you dismiss it. But I was more interested in composition as a way to express emotions than as a way to organize musical elements. And I still find some 12-tone composers very expressive--Alban Berg, for example.

CP: Was it liberating to be able to use tonality and melody again?

CR: Oh, no, when anything is possible, things get more difficult. When you have so many choices, much of a composer's work is winnowing all these options till there's a small enough pool of possibilities that you can actually do something. When you can create a work that's quite dissonant at times and quite consonant at others, it's a challenge to make them sound like they belong together. Otherwise, it can sound like a gimmick or a shock effect, jumping back and forth from one to the other. I like to think my pieces have a unity to them.

CP: Why were so many of your early works so loud and so aggressive?

CR: Some people have posited that they came from my love of rock 'n' roll. I did have a percussion piece called Bonham, based on Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks." I was a huge Zep fan and remain one. But one of the problems for composers today is they're expected to do this one little thing they're known for with only small changes for the rest of their lives. In the mid-'80s, while I was writing my first symphony, I realized I didn't want to be known as the person who writes pieces that are louder and faster than everything else. So my first symphony is the opposite--very slow and quiet. I wrote it while I was composer-in-residence with the Baltimore Symphony.

CP: How did you develop such a close relationship with David Zinman, who was the BSO's music director then?

CR: I met David when I was still a grad student at Cornell [University] and he was head of the Rochester Philharmonic. The orchestra came down to Cornell to do a reading of some student pieces, and when I started teaching at Eastman six or seven years later, David remembered my composition--much to my amazement. He programmed one of my early pieces, The Infernal Machine, and commissioned Gorgon.

CP: And he brought you back to Baltimore?

CR: Yes, when he took over the BSO, he remembered I was a Baltimorean, so he asked for me to be his composer-in-residence here. I did that for three years, and even after I left in '89 I was the new-music adviser, looking through new compositions and passing along to David the ones that I thought he'd be interested in. I did that until the [Yuri] Temirkanov era, when, well, there no longer seemed a need for a new-music adviser.

CP: But Marin Alsop is very much in the Zinman mode, isn't she?

CR: There are a lot of similarities. They're both very well-grounded in the standard repertoire, but they have real commitment to both American music and new music. There's an excitement about the way they make music, the way they plan a season, the way they get involved with the community and try to make the orchestra integral to the city. They're full of ideas and always examining old habits to see if they might be changed for the better.

CP: What have you been writing recently?

CR: I've been doing a lot of different things. The last thing I finished, my first ballet, was very neo-classical. But the piece I'm working on now, the Concerto for Orchestra, has a lot of dissonance, not a lot of triads. I'm writing it for Marin--she will premiere it this summer at the Cabrillo Festival in California, then she'll do it with the BSO in November. I don't want to be one of those composers who's known for just one thing, so I want to try a lot of different styles.

Christopher Rouse discusses his work as part of the "Composers in Conversation" series at Theatre Project March 5. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marin Alsop, performs Rouse's Flute Concerto March 7-9 at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.

Christopher Rouse’s 60th birthday season begins with the world premiere of his latest work, Concerto for Orchestra, at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. Commissioned by the Festival, Concerto for Orchestra is dedicated to long-time champion Marin Alsop in honor of the Festival’s administrative leadership, Ellen Primack and Tom Fredericks. Alsop will lead the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra in the premiere performance at Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium in California on August 1.

Best known for his masterful orchestral writing, Rouse has gained particular attention in recent decades for his concerti. Concerto for Orchestra marks Rouse’s twenty-fourth orchestral work to date, eleven of which are concerti. Scored for standard orchestra, Concerto for Orchestra places focus on the skill of ensemble members, with soloistic passages ranging from sweeping lyricism to challenging virtuosity. Rouse departs from standard practice with the work’s form, however.

Says Rouse: “I decided to divide the concerto into connected halves… . The first half would be made up of five rather brief sections - fast, slow, fast, slow, fast - in which the fast parts would share and develop the same musical material, while the slow ones would share and explore different material. The second half would consist of two sections, a slow one and a fast one, each meant to represent a sort of ‘full blossoming’ of the related ideas from their counterparts earlier on. My hope was to draw the listener in more and more as the work progressed, with the final allegro building to a frenzied, almost hysterical, climax.”

Concerto for Orchestra will follow Alsop’s baton to Baltimore for an East Coast premiere on November 21 by Rouse’s hometown players, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Around the globe, Rouse’s birthday season unfolds with performances by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Saint Louis Symphony (Der gerettete Alberich), Dallas Symphony Orchestra (Symphony No. 2), Singapore Symphony Orchestra (Trombone Concerto), the New York Philharmonic and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (Rapture), the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (Friandises), and the Minnesota Orchestra performing the world premiere of Rouse’s Oboe Concerto on February 5. Rouse will be in Minnesota to celebrate the premiere which takes place just prior to his February 15 birthday.

Christopher Rouse: Going to Eleven
Published: July 1, 2008

A conversation in Rouse's home with Frank J. Oteri
Baltimore, Maryland
February 8, 2008—6:00 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Videotaped by Trudy Chan
Video presentation by Randy Nordschow

When most people think of the music of Christopher Rouse, the first thing they probably think of is how loud it is. Some years back there was even a notorious story about an orchestra musician who threatened to sue Rouse for subjecting him to such high decibel levels on stage. Ear-splitting volume is more commonly associated with hard rock than classical music. Rock was a formative influence on this Baltimore native, who as a child was immediately drawn to early rock and roll before his mother turned him on to symphonies, but he quickly grew most fond of raucous 20th-century fare, from Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Once he found his own voice as a composer, the visceral power of rock influenced an over-the-top compositional sensibility which has manifested itself in his two powerful symphonies, numerous concertos, and a massive Requiem which finally received its world premiere last year. His brand new Concerto for Orchestra, which Marin Alsop will premiere at Cabrillo this summer, also promises to pack a wallop.
Inside Pages:

# Harnessing Extremes
# Nothing Against Tradition
# So Much Time

But not everything Chris writes is completely in-your-face. At the 2007 Chamber Music America conference, the Calder Quartet played haunting strains of music sometimes at the threshold of audibility. In that crowded hotel conference suite you could hear a pin drop. Everyone stood still, including me. I came in late but had to stay until the end to find out what they were playing. When I learned that it was from the Second String Quartet by Chris Rouse, I was mildly stunned. That a composer I had known for years and had come to admire for his raucous percussion pieces such as Odoun Badagris and Bonham and the intense Second Symphony could also write music as subtle and fragile as this completely made me rethink his music. I pored over scores and was startled by how meticulously detailed they were—even the most cataclysmic passages.

Luckily, after many years of casual banter, I finally had a real in-depth musical discussion with Chris over dinner later that year. While sipping Black Russians—Chris's favorite drink, which is somehow fitting considering that it is mellifluously sweet and also packs a wallop—we discussed everything from how great the band Moby Grape is to how Regietheater has destroyed opera. We realized we had a lot of common ground. By the end of that evening, I convinced him that when we finally could schedule a time to record a conversation for NewMusicBox, we should do it over Black Russians and be equally unbridled. So one Friday night in February, that's exactly what we did. Our heated conversation, like Chris's music, was effusive and multi-tiered. Like Nigel's amps in This is Spinal Tap, it seemed to "go to eleven."

—FJO

© NewMusicBox

Regarding his ballet score, the composer writes:



“Friandises” (French for “bits” or “morsels”) was composed on a joint commission from the New York City Ballet and the Juilliard School (on the occasion of its centenary). Although a number of my concert works had been choreographed over the years, this was my first opportunity to compose music intended from the start for physical movement. The result is akin to a baroque French suite in five movements that contains no specific narrative elements.

The initial Intrada is the least “French” in conception, intended as something of a clarion call for the remainder of the piece. The Sicilienne makes use of the dotted rhythm common to this dance, while reference to over-the-bar syncopations make the third movement recognizable as a Passepied. The Sarabande is the most reflective of the movements, and it often either stretches or condenses that dance’s traditional 3/2 meter. The finale is a lighthearted Galop meant to end the work with a large dose of razzle-dazzle.

"Friandises," after the French word for delicacy or morsel, seems a misnomer for Peter Martins's latest ballet and its commissioned score by Christopher Rouse, which received their premieres from the New York City Ballet on Friday night at the New York State Theater. The music, conducted by Andrea Quinn, is big and orchestral, with lots of shimmering strings, gleaming brass and thudding kettle drums. The choreography often sends its 20 dancers across the stage so fast and so forcefully that the general effect is of a blur of fluid but carefully defined movements, rather like Gjon Mili's strobe photography of dance from the 1940's.
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Paul Kolnik/New York City Ballet

Daniel Ulbricht and Tiler Peck in "Friandises," a world premiere.

Pièces d'occasion, they were created in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Juilliard School, where Mr. Rouse, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, also teaches. And the score will be used again by Adam Hougland for a dance for the school's "New Dance/New Music" program this month at the Juilliard Theater. Mr. Martins may have had in mind the youth and aspirations of young dancers like those at Juilliard and in the City Ballet when he cast "Friandises," whose performers include some of the company's most promising youngsters.

Mr. Rouse took as his form a five-part Baroque French dance suite, and while the choreography makes no clear allusions to sarabandes and passepieds, the fast sections do alternate with slow sections that look almost like deconstructions of the speedier passages. The women, led by Tiler Peck, become more delicate then, their arms like tendrils prettily reaching out around them. As "Friandises" builds from jazz-inflected ballet to razzle-dazzle technical display, Mr. Martins increasingly reveals the men, led by Daniel Ulbricht, as the young pyrotechnicians that most of them are.

The new work suggests Mr. Martins's deftness at shifting his dancers through fluidly swirling, staggered patterns. But the dancers look tethered, particularly the men in their jumps. Precision is fine, but the too-neat placement of bodies in space in "Friandises," no matter how fast the music, is another matter. Ms. Peck's fresh spunk and the brash way Mr. Ulbricht occupies stage space are missing here, as are the individual movement styles that give their dancing color and texture. Given the piquant individuality of most of City Ballet's rising stars, the ensemble nature of "Friandises" is a disappointment.

Two of those young stars, Ashley Bouder and Andrew Veyette, were in exciting top form in role debuts in Balanchine's insouciant but challenging "Donizetti Variations" on Saturday afternoon. Bouderites cherish the young ballerina's habit of decisively falling in her first performances of a role, and here she not only fell but slid across the stage on her rump. What followed was just as remarkable: steely all-American technique and daring refined and made even more exciting by a look of almost Gallic ornamentation.

Mr. Veyette is the perfect empathic, gracious classical partner, and he and Ms. Bouder look very good together. A little looser plié would be reassuring. But he is the rare dazzling technician who knows the importance and beauty of simplicity. To watch him develop promises to be one of the great pleasures of coming seasons.

Carrie Lee Riggins and Teresa Reichlen, both seen in role debuts on Friday night, have been around longer but seldom fail to catch the eye. The quietly imposing Ms. Riggins stood out for her held balances and immaculately clear dancing in Balanchine's haunting "Divertimento From 'Le Baiser de la Fée,' " in a lead cast completed by Megan Fairchild, Joaquin De Luz and Amanda Edge.

Ms. Reichlen did not dispel the memory of a cheeky Suzanne Farrell leading the "R.C.A.F." and "Wrens" sections of Balanchine's deliciously improbable precision-drill ballet, "Union Jack." Perhaps no one could. But Ms. Reichlen's long sassy legs and tossing head suggested a frisky, sensual near-abandon that worked well, too.

City Ballet performs through Feb. 26 at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center; (212) 870-5570 or www.nycballet.com. "Friandises" will be performed again on Wednesday night and on Feb. 23 and 25 (matinee).

Orchestra

* Gorgon (1984)
* Phantasmata (1981/85)
* Phaethon (1986)
* Symphony No. 1 (1986, awarded the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award in 1988)
* Iscariot (chamber orchestra, 1989)
* Concerto per Corde (string orchestra, 1990)
* Symphony No. 2 (1994)
* Envoi (1995)
* Rapture (2000)
* The Nevill Feast (2003)
* Friandises (ballet, 2005)
* Concerto for Orchestra (2007/08)
* Zhyzn (2008)

[edit] Orchestra with soloist

* Violin Concerto (1991)
* Trombone Concerto (1991, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1993)
* Cello Concerto (1992-93)
* Flute Concerto (1993)
* Der gerettete Alberich (percussion, 1997)
* Seeing (piano, 1998)
* Concert de Gaudí (guitar, 1999)
* Clarinet Concerto (2001)
* Oboe Concerto (2004)

[edit] Voice(s) and orchestra

* Karolju (chorus, 1990)
* Kabir Padavali ("Kabir Songbook", soprano, 1997-98)
* Requiem (baritone solo, chorus, children's chorus, 2001/02)

[edit] Wind Ensemble

* Wolf Rounds (2006)

[edit] Chamber music

* Ogoun Badagris (percussion ensemble, 1976)
* Quattro Madrigali (eight-voice choir, 1976)
* Ku-Ka-Ilimoku (percussion ensemble, 1978)
* Mitternachtslieder (bass-baritone and mixed ensemble, 1979)
* Rotae Passionis (mixed ensemble, 1982)
* String Quartet #1 (1982)
* Lares Hercii (violin and harpsichord, 1983)
* Artemis (brass quintet, 1988)
* Bonham (percussion ensemble, 1988)
* String Quartet #2 (1988)
* Compline (flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet, 1996)
* Rapturedux (cello ensemble, 2001)

[edit] Solo works

* Little Gorgon (piano, 1986)
* Ricordanza (cello, 1995)
* Valentine (flute, 1996)