Jazz Virtuoso James Carter Premieres Roberto Sierra's Saxophone Concerto in Detroit
Mark
Stryker Detroit Free Press 13 October 2002
(See program guide)
Composer Roberto Sierra chuckles
as he recalls his first meetings with James Carter, the Detroit-born
jazz virtuoso who will give the world premiere of Sierra's Saxophone
Concerto this week with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
Sierra, 49, had been so impressed by Carter's recordings that he traveled
to the Blue Note, a Greenwich Village jazz shrine, to hear him in person.
The controlled fury of Carter's improvisations and his breathtaking
technique convinced Sierra that he had found the lead voice for the
nascent saxophone concerto that had been winking at his muse.
Still, not all great improvisers can handle the written intricacies
of contemporary classical music. So Sierra wrote several samples with
very strict rhythms and other challenges for Carter.
"He just sight-read them all like they were nothing," says
Sierra, telling the tale over lunch in the cafe at the Whitney Museum
of Art. "It was really amazing."
The confluence of Sierra, Carter and the DSO is one of the most eagerly
anticipated premieres in recent DSO history. The piece has attracted
national and international attention, with orchestras in Miami, Germany,
Amsterdam and England expressing interest.
The project resonates on many levels, beginning with Sierra —
born in Puerto Rico, a leading composer of his generation and part of
an emerging group of Latino composers whose music often incorporates
Latin-American vernacular influences into a classical aesthetic.
The concerto — whose four movements include allusions to Latin
clave rhythms, episodes of jazz improvisation and a surreal boogie-woogie
finale — ties into recent trends toward crossbreeding of styles
in classical music.
Then there's Carter, 33, a bona fide star, whose stylistic flexibility
and energy have endeared him to jazz critics and fans while his charisma,
youth and rambunctious attitude have helped win him a following among
the editors and readers of Rolling Stone.
Carter played some classical music when he was growing up, particularly
when he studied at Interlochen. Still, he says, learning Sierra's piece
has been "virgin territory" and a "serious challenge."
He's been touched that Sierra has been a willing collaborator, tweaking
certain passages based on Carter's suggestions.
"I'm very much flattered because there are many other things he
could be doing than working on a piece for me," says Carter.
For the DSO, the Sierra-Carter project reflects the orchestra's twin
goals of reaching out to a broader audience and shaping an artistic
identity unique to Detroit. The DSO has expanded its jazz programming
in recent seasons to cozy up to the city's jazz heritage. By signing
on to the Sierra concerto as the commissioning institution, the DSO
has upped the ante on its commitment.
The idea for the piece, however, originated not as a half-baked marketing
ploy in a conference room but as an artistic impulse in the mind of
an important composer. In other words, this is no vulgar crossover stunt.
That DSO music director Neeme Järvi will be on the podium rather
than a guest conductor underscores how seriously Järvi and the
orchestra take this project.
Teacher and student
Sierra has a deep resume. He teaches at Cornell University and has served
as resident composer with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Milwaukee
Symphony. His chamber music is especially well represented on CD, and
his recent orchestral work Fandangos has found an ardent champion in
conductor Leonard Slatkin, who has taken the piece on tour with the
National Symphony Orchestra and programmed it with the BBC Symphony
in London.
Sierra's music is typically splashed with sun-dappled colors, vibrant
harmonies, clear melodic direction and percolating rhythms; even when
not specifically drawing upon Latino traditions, his music packs a percussive
punch. He conjures up abstract textures and dissonance — a reminder
that one of the first modern composers Sierra was attracted to was the
French mystic Olivier Messiaen and that Sierra spent three years studying
with the Hungarian master György Ligeti in Hamburg, Germany, in
the late '70s and early '80s.
But formalism rarely trumps Sierra's earthy communicativeness. It surely
is no coincidence that melody and harmony were also central to Messiaen,
and for all of Ligeti's brilliant craftsmanship and high-modernist abstraction,
his music is rich with emotional expression. Ligeti specifically encouraged
Sierra to explore his Latino roots.
"He urged all of us to find our own voices," says Sierra.
"He was fascinated by Latin rhythms, and that also came into his
music; even in his biography, he mentions me as one of the students
who was important at the time in terms of bringing new languages to
him."
Sierra was born in Vega Baja, where he grew up on mambo records, salsa
and other popular forms. At 14, he became fascinated with the family
piano and began picking out tunes by ear. He started lessons at 15 and
progressed so rapidly that at 16 he entered a pre-college program at
the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music.
Sierra entered the conservatory as a pianist but later drifted into
composition. His training was traditional; the heroic cellist Pablo
Casals, a product of the 19th century, was still directing the school.
Sierra remembers performing at a birthday celebration for Casals at
the master's home and choosing to play Ravel's Ma Mere L'oye.
"I think it was music he really hated," says Sierra. "It
was too modern."
But advanced students did get their hands on canonic music by early
modernists Stravinsky and Bartók, and Sierra heard Messiaen on
records. Later studies in London and Europe introduced Sierra to contemporary
voices like Pierre Boulez, Morton Feldman and Elliott Carter.
Music of the peasants
Today, Sierra says he feels connected to two main traditions: the pluralist
mainstream of contemporary American composers and the elder group of
Latin-American composers like Argentinian Alberto Ginastera and Brazilian
Heitor Villa-Lobos, who pioneered national styles.
But Sierra says he also feels he is a part of a first generation of
Latino composers he considers a branch of the American tree; his peers
include such composers as Robert Rodriguez and Miguel del Aguila.
Sierra says it's natural that these composers should assimilate Latino
vernacular music; after all, composers as far back as Bach, Handel,
Mozart and Schubert transformed folk melodies or dances.
"Even Beethoven's 'Pastoral' Symphony is, dare I say, hick music,"
says Sierra. "People say, 'This is Olympus,' and I say, 'No, it's
the music of the peasants put in a wonderfully orchestrated and thought-out
way and with more complex harmony. But the rhythms and smell of it is
the music of the peasants and the German countryside."
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