Composer nurtures fresh approach to classical music

Forget the stodgy image of stuffy people playing the music of dead European men; classical music is a young art for the new generation of composers and musicians. And both will be on tap with the Utah Symphony's Deer Valley Music Festival.

Under the tutelage of composer Joan Tower and the Muir Quartet, two young composers and two new string quartets will come together to learn, study and — in the end — produce performances of new works.

"It's a fantastic, intimate kind of situation," said composer Joan Tower, "where the Muir coaches the quartets in standard repertoire, and then they play these two new pieces written by these two composers, which are also coached by Muir and me, and so they get to learn something about living composers as well as dead composers.

"I think what we share is very interesting and deeply musical kinds of stuff. What I hope is that when we go more public with it this year that other people will be very interested in what we do. It's kind of like seeing the inside of a movie being made, an inside glance at working with musicians and composers."

Tower, an active composer and professor at New York's Bard College, has been called "one of the most successful woman composers of all time" by The New Yorker magazine. She is the first woman ever to receive the Grawemeyer Award in Composition and has been inducted into the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.

She's been coming to Utah every summer for almost 10 years now, but this is the first year that the festival has been so accessible to the public. Traditionally, they did it in Park City, and mostly for themselves. But this year, for the first time, they'll come down to the University of Utah for a series of lectures.

Topics include everything from "Meet the Composer: Joan Tower" to "String Quartet as a Business."

Tower said she personally hand picks the composers who come each year — usually one female and one male. "There's no submission of applications because it's such a small operation. We've had some very successful results from that, where the quartets go out and play the pieces — either on their hometown or on tour, depending on how active they are.

"Sometimes they even commission the composer to write another piece. So it's been hugely successful in that sense."

Sometimes, a quartet has come in that has been reluctant to play the music of a living composer. "There was this one quartet that came, and they were very resistant to the idea that they had to do this new piece. Well, that quartet is now going around the country commissioning composers right and left and has become established as a group that commissions composers, and we got that started."