Festival celebrates tour of a generation

August 06, 2007|Jeremy Eichler, Globe Staff

This year's installment of Tanglewood's annual Festival of Contemporary Music was devoted to the "Generation of '38" -- a group of composers born in or around that year, many of whom have reached a certain sweet spot in their careers. They are young enough to remain vital but old enough to have gained prominence, recognition, and the ears of both large institutions and a certain segment of the listening public.

John Harbison, himself a '38er, directed this year's festival, and Judith Tick was its consulting scholar, providing an erudite three-part program essay weighing the social, political, and artistic influences that have molded these composers through the decades, from the Vietnam War and feminism to the emergence of the post-war European avant-garde and the powerful focus on serial composition at certain universities in the 1960s.

Those who have reasonably sought a more forward-looking direction for festival programming may have been unconvinced by this highly retrospective approach, a summing up more than a breaking of new ground. It is disappointing that, across all the concerts, only two young composers had their work featured. But taken on its own terms, the conceit at least had impressive numbers to bolster its case. Those born in or around 1938 include William Bolcom, Joan Tower, Philip Glass, John Corigliano, Charles Wuorinen, David Del Tredici, Charles Fussell, Olly Wilson, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, and many others. In fact, the most suggestive aspect of this theme is the sheer volume of important composers to emerge from this generation, a phenomenon that, as Tick suggests, may be partially attributed to the robustness of music education in the public schools at that time, and the number of distinguished émigré musicians who fled Hitler's Europe and landed on American shores.

But beyond their sheer numbers, these composers have migrated in such diverse directions that it becomes almost impossible to speak meaningfully about the generation as a whole. In a way, the festival's theme worked best when posed with a question mark, or in other words, when taken as a reminder of the way artistic free will and the sheer contingency of life seem to trump any notion of social or generational determinism. Many of these composers picked up similar ingredients through their upbringings and educations, but they welded them into unique alloys with properties all their own.