June in Buffalo

DF: It was a very big philosophical change, which was based on the way I assessed the field as a young composer myself at that time.

When I was in California, I was like a lot of other younger composers. I didn’t really feel that I’d had a good performance of my work until I was about 28 years old. It was mostly student performers or conservatory faculty members who didn’t care at all about playing a younger composer’s work. Though I could understand why people didn’t want to spend the time on a young composer’s work, I thought it was really difficult for me and every other young composer I knew to evaluate what we were trying to do. I took a look around, and I saw that there were only a few other opportunities for young composers to have strong performances of their work. Those were places like Aspen, Tanglewood, Davidovsky’s summer program at Wellesley and the summer program at Yale (the latter of which I was fortunate enough to attend). But those programs were extremely selective and almost entirely Ivy League, so the majority of younger composers around the country were kind of stuck, particularly the composers on the West Coast.

So I began a series of concerts at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, which lasted two or three years. I was given some venture capital and programmed some young composers and some senior composers who were friends of mine. Then, when I moved to Cal State Long Beach, I formed the Summer Composers Institute, which was meant for West Coast composers to work with senior composers — the two who started it with me were Bernard Rands and Donald Erb — and we brought together this group of really great performers and ensembles to perform their works.

By the time I moved to Buffalo, the June in Buffalo festival had been dormant for a long time. So I proposed that I bring my vision and restart the festival, but under the terms I’m outlining here. I considered Feldman a friend and had great respect for him, but we had differing views on what it meant to be a young composer. He did not believe young composers deserved to be presented in the way that I was presenting them. He thought they should sit at the feet of the geniuses and catch any pearl that might fall from their lips. So the old June in Buffalo program did not feature performances of young composers’ music; they just sat in seminars and the concerts were portrait concerts of individual faculty composers. It’s a very different philosophy about how one teaches and how one helps young composers develop.

DF: When I arrived, despite promises to the contrary when I interviewed, there was absolutely no money. So I had to do everything with zero budget, and I had to raise the funds completely those first years. I was able to find some interesting solutions, and the budgets started to stabilize after the third or fourth year, particularly when I became the Birge-Cary chairholder and could dedicate resources. I am proud that even from the beginning there was never one year in which there was a deficit.

Also, the first year we had to work hard to get applicants. I had to call around a lot. Very soon, though, we began to attract a large pool of applicants, allowing us to be very selective about who we decided to invite.  And the festival fairly quickly became an obvious success.  And now, there’s not a week that goes by where I don’t see another new festival imitating JiB. There are loads of them out there now — even some of our former student assistants for JiB are copying us. It causes me to think about what the field might need next, since such events have proliferated now to the point of near-absurdity.

DF: There was a New York New Music Ensemble performance of an amazing work by Jacob Druckman called “Come Round,” which is really one of his great pieces. I just remember that the performance (at JiB 2000, conducted by Harvey Sollberger) was absolutely hair-raising! And a few years ago (2013), Charles Wuorinen conducted the Slee Sinfonietta in a performance of his chamber cantata, “It Happens Like This.” That was a really great performance. Having the composer here conducting the group was really very special.

But there are so many of them, it’s really difficult. So I'm singling out just a couple which were absolutely breath-taking.

DF: Right, and that’s being programmed because we really wanted to get that piece in the festival. Jake Druckman was a big part of the early years of JiB; he came quite a bit and he was extremely supportive of me and also supportive of the festival.

DF: One of the hallmarks of the way I program the week is that I don’t bring in people to be on the faculty with all the same viewpoints — in fact, I actually deliberately select people so there will be some friction between ideas, so that students might get input that’s 180 degrees opposite from one master class to the next. I mostly enjoy very diverse groups of composers working together because you can learn the most that way if you have a strong, individual, internal motivator and your own vision to follow. If you’re looking for consensus, JiB is not necessarily the place for you.

DF: In 1988, I wrote these solo pieces that are known as the Crossfire series: One of them is “BoxMan” for trombone, and another is a solo violin piece called “Another Face.” Those were pieces that were supposed to be done with video walls. We actually managed to do them here before they were done in Huddersfield and Vienna and some other places. So we brought in the video walls and mounted the production of those pieces, which was very difficult to do in those days. Moving 24 television sets — which were extremely heavy — and setting them up as walls and then doing all the programming and the performances was really a trip. But the pieces were great in that format and they worked extremely well, so that was a big highlight for me. The performances by trombonist Miles Anderson and violinist Karen Bentley were extraordinary.

Otherwise, any time I hear my string quartets played is great. For example, a few years ago (2013), JACK astonished me by playing the living hell out of my second quartet, “Stuck-stücke,” and that was really gratifying. Of course, the Ardittis play it extremely well, but to then have a next-generation quartet pick it up for the first time and play it absolutely brilliantly, that was wonderful!

DF: There have been a lot of initiatives over the years; I've tried to do a lot of different kinds of things. Years ago, we had an emerging ensembles program, so groups that were just coming out of conservatory or had just formed in New York were invited to come and be resident ensembles at the festival. For example, Brad Lubman had a group when he was at Stony Brook called the New Millenium Ensemble, which had just formed, so I invited them to come. The Meridian Arts Ensemble was another one of the original groups that came under those programs, and there were lots of others. We also tried a couple computer-music initiatives. And then we did some thematic programming for a number of years, where we looked at specific interactions between, for example, music and text, and so forth.

The Performance Institute is another initiative. It's something that we’re piloting right now to see how it might work, and it could be a nice broadening of the festival.

DF: First of all, I’m really looking forward to seeing so many of the faculty members. The composers who are coming are people who have been really important to the festival over the years for a variety of reasons. These are many of the people who have been here the most, who have been the most supportive and probably the most performed — with the exception of Martin Bresnick, who has only been to the festival once before. I’ve known him a long time and he’s an extremely important teacher and composer, so this is a great opportunity to bring him back to fulfill the mission.

DF: I don’t know that I think in those terms. If I had to answer that, I’d say that we’ve probably done performances of around 700 or more young composers’ pieces, and those performances and the help that we’ve given to people over the years, I think has been really important to the profession.

I’m extremely grateful to the University at Buffalo and Buffalo arts organizations, as well as our donors, university patrons, audiences and composers — both student participants and faculty members — who have participated and supported this endeavor over the years. Without that support, we certainly would never have gotten off the ground. So it’s very gratifying to continue to feel that Buffalo is a place that supports work that is innovative and hopes to advance the conversation about the ongoing developments in the field, whatever they may be.