Syzygy: A Mouthful and an Earful

“New classical music” may sound like an oxymoron, but Rice’s Syzygy concert series has spent 30 years promoting just that: classical music written by living composers.

“Our motto is, ‘If the ink is dry, we shouldn’t play it,’” Shepherd School of Music’s Art Gottschalk says with a laugh.

The series was introduced in April 1976 with a single concert. It quickly grew to two concerts per year, then to six, and today, Syzygy is considered a leading source in Houston for cutting-edge, new music.

Gottschalk, professor of composition and theory who joined the Shepherd School faculty in 1975, explains that the concert series got its name from the dual meaning of the word syzygy. In astronomy, it means an alignment of the planets, but in poetry, syzygy refers to the use of meters in opposition to each other. “We liked the ying and yang of its meanings,” he says, recalling that the founders of Syzygy deemed it fitting for a concert series of new classical music.

Usually the concert series features music that was written within the previous year or two, notes Shi-Hui Chen, assistant professor of composition and chair of the Syzygy committee, but this year’s 30th anniversary series has a slightly more “mature” focus. The anniversary series is honoring the heritage of the Shepherd School by featuring the works of two of its founding members.

One of those founders was Paul Cooper, a prolific composer who died in 1996. His composition Requiem, written in 1978, will be performed on March 28, 2007, by Shepherd School faculty members Clyde Holloway and Richard Brown. Another of his compositions, Verses, written in 1991, was performed in October by the Patterson Duo, guest artists of the Shepherd School. The Patterson Duo also performed Entre Nous, a composition written in 1988 by Ellsworth Milburn, who retired from the Shepherd School in 1998.

But the new-music series isn’t forgetting its roots. In fact, the March 28 concert that will feature Cooper’s work also will serve as the Southwest United States premier of a new work, Synchronism No. 12, by Mario Davidosky.

Rice is one of 10 U.S. universities that have joined together to commission the new work for bass clarinet and electronic sounds from Davidosky, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer. He is composing the new piece while in residence at Rice during fall 2006, and his residency will feature discussions with students about the compositional process. The work will premier nationally at the spring 2007 conference of the Society of Electro–Acoustic Music in the United States.

Other new music that will be performed at the series includes work for symphonic band, which is unusual because the Shepherd School does not have a symphonic band. Members of the faculty, as well as student performers, were assembled for the band, which will perform A Parliament of Owls, written by Sam Jones, composer-in-residence with the Seattle Symphony at the March 28 Syzygy concert.

The Syzygy concert series is important, Gottschalk notes, not just for the exposure it gives to new music but also because of the learning opportunities for Rice students.

“New music is the hardest to play because no one is really familiar with it,” Gottschalk says, “so the concert series is a great learning experience for our students.” Not only do students—who, along with faculty, are the primary Syzygy performers—learn first-hand the challenge of playing new music, but students in the composition program at the Shepherd School also benefit greatly from hearing the new works of their instructors. Another benefit is that the series also is used as a venue to invite musicians to Rice as guest performers and professors, and they often have significant interaction with students.

Over the years, the series has featured some “incredible” music, Gottschalk says, including some that has become widely known and played, like Bolero by Ravel. Yet it’s often hard to attract audiences to new-music concerts, admit Gottschalk and Chen, because most of the time nobody ever has heard the music before.

But, Gottschalk points out, 17th century audiences had never heard Beethoven’s compositions either. “It’s only been in the 20th century market and industry of music,” he says, “that the audience has come to believe that classical music is defined as that written by dead white Europeans.”

—Dana Benson