Sounds like home

"One of the best ways of identifying the South is by listening for it in casual conversation — where the place has been, where it's going, whether things are getting better or worse than the excruciatingly well-remembered past."

-- Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America

If it's true that everything we need to know in life we learn early in childhood, then Jennifer Higdon should be well-versed in all things Atlanta. Though she was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Higdon spent her first 10 years amid the lush green neighborhoods of Lenox and Mason Mill.

In those days, becoming a musician was far from Higdon's mind. The grade-schooler's attention was mostly directed at playing with her brother Andy in the creek that ran through her front yard, enjoying the city's ample green space, and bicycling on Sundays.

"My memories have to do with the amount of trees, the nature presence in Atlanta, but also being on the front edge of art," says the 39-year-old composer.

This week, Higdon returns to her old hometown for the premiere of "City Scape," her three-part work for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, a 30-minute musical portrait inspired by her early memories of the city. It's the first piece commissioned by the orchestra since Robert Spano became music director in 2000, and the ASO's first commissioned premiere since 1996.

That "City Scape" wound up being about Atlanta came as a pleasant surprise to the ASO brass.

"After we asked her to do this piece, we had no idea she was going to come back to us with a piece about Atlanta," says Spano.

Some of Higdon's earliest memories include landmarks along Peachtree Street near her home — especially the old Buckhead Sears & Roebuck building and Lenox Square, back when it was an outdoor mall graced with modern sculptures of characters from the stories of Joel Chandler Harris. She also remembers Atlanta's skyline — or more specifically, its abstraction. Her father, a visual artist, was hired to create a model of it.

"Dad did something for Southern Bell — a replica of the skyline out of yards and yards of telephone wire," she says.

"[It made me] hyperaware of what the downtown skyline looked like."

Back then, "skyline" meant "downtown." But Midtown, home to the ASO's current and future performance halls, now has a notable presence of its own that barely existed during Higdon's time in Atlanta. These days, the Woodruff Arts Center campus is surrounded by high-end condos and office towers, a mix of postmodernism and restorations that mingles classy restaurants, bars and clubs with a stable Ansley Park neighborhood that has somehow survived the lurch from the early 20th century into the new millennium.

The ASO's business offices sit, ensconced in an inconspicuous building, across Peachtree from the arts center. On a recent day, ASO artistic administrator Frank Dans settles into his chair. He notes that, although Higdon spent her early childhood here, it was not a factor in offering her the commission.

"I'd like to say we knew this — and we probably did," says Dans. "But I don't think we were thinking about her in that context."

The basic terms of the ASO commission were for Higdon to write a multi-movement symphonic piece of some 30 minutes in length. "We wanted a big piece," Spano says. "For our first commission after such a long pause, we wanted to go all out."

And there were other conditions. The ASO requested three movements that could be performed together or alone. They asked that one of the movements be a "concert opener," and that another be composed for use in youth-oriented concerts as a lesson in musical form. All of which offers practical benefits for both orchestra and composer. Too often, commissioned works are premiered and then set aside. But composing for multiple uses affords the piece extended exposure (and hence, more income for the composer through performance royalties), and stretches the value of the orchestra's commissioning dollar, providing vital ammunition when budgeting for new works.

Spano says he'll be taking the first movement, Skyline, on tour in Florida this spring. That's an additional half-dozen performances alone. Meanwhile, the third movement, Peachtree Street, will be performed another 18 to 20 times for teaching purposes.

"In effect," says Dans, "over the next two seasons, instead of getting only three performances of her piece, she will get upward of 30 plays of at least part of her piece."

The Woodruff Arts Center has seen its share of change over the last 30 years — not least of which is the impending construction of the Atlanta Symphony Center, facing 14th Street. Long before a gleaming nest of skyscrapers occupied the area, 14th Street was known as "The Strip." In the late '60s, it was Atlanta's Haight-Ashbury, a sketchy, offbeat district largely populated by college students, hippies and bikers — a far cry from the tidy corporate towers and cultural institutions of today.

"There used to be a big rubber Jesus on the side of one of the buildings," Higdon recalls. "It was gargantuan. I always wonder what they did with that thing."

Higdon's family came here in 1963. Her parents had friends who'd moved to Atlanta from Brooklyn, and the city was a good place for her father to pursue work as a commercial graphic artist. It was also reasonably close to Jennifer's grandparents in Tennessee.

At the time, Atlanta's arts community was still mourning the loss of 122 local arts leaders and patrons in an airplane crash outside Paris a year earlier. The tragedy so moved the city that it assembled its major arts organizations under the auspices of the new Woodruff Arts Center in 1963. That same year, the 18-year-old Atlanta Symphony became one of the original divisions of the new Atlanta Arts Alliance.

During this time, artists and art students were frequent guests in the Higdon home, especially in the years after her father began teaching as a part-time adjunct instructor at the Alliance's College of Art. The Higdons introduced their children to an array of cultural experiences: ballet, art galleries, museums, film festivals, rock concerts in Piedmont Park, and more. Jennifer was 8 years old when she first heard the Atlanta Symphony, her first taste of a live orchestra. She doesn't recall what was on the program, but the performance made an impression on her.

"We sat in the balcony," she recalls. "It's not that it was just loud, but it was so different from what I was used to hearing that I was amazed by the sound."

Musically speaking, Higdon was a late-bloomer. She taught herself to play flute at home as a teenager after the family moved to the rural town of Seymour in eastern Tennessee. At first, Higdon — who played percussion in the school band — kept it a secret from teachers and classmates. Then she surprised everyone by asking to audition for a spot in the band's flute section.

Higdon began studying music seriously as a flute major at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where she also began composing and developing conductor skills. Higdon first met Robert Spano at Bowling Green in 1985, and she later attended his graduate-level conducting seminar.

"Even then, at such a young age, he had such obvious and large talent," Higdon says. "He managed to convey to us the seriousness of our chosen profession — [that] it's a calling and a responsibility."

Higdon continued her graduate studies in composition at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where one of her teachers was noted American composer George Crumb, known for visually fascinating scores and colorful, mystical-sounding works such as "Ancient Voices of Children" and "Echoes of Time and the River." Crumb's music is closely tied to his growing up in West Virginia — the Appalachian landscape of hills and valleys, and the culture and spirituality of the people largely isolated within them.

Getting back to one's roots was one of many lessons Higdon learned from Crumb.

"[My heritage] happens to be split between the Appalachian region and Atlanta, so I had both the metropolitan and the rural in my childhood," Higdon says. "I recall the energy, impressions and feelings, colors and smells of the respective regions. I have a hyperawareness of color, both from studying with George Crumb — who is so famous for it — and from being around graphic and fine artists."

Higdon compiled more and more experience as a conductor, gaining insight into what works and what doesn't when scoring music for large ensembles. Already armed with masters and doctorate degrees, she was looking to continue her studies, with a handful of possible destinations under consideration. Then Spano — who was with Philadelphia's Curtis Institute at the time — had his say.

"He locked me in his office until I agreed to go to Curtis," says Higdon. "He really felt strongly that it was the smart move."

Higdon has been a professor of composition at Curtis for almost 10 years.



Higdon's credits as a composer over the last decade are extensive — commissions, grants and awards, recordings, residences. She is busy — so busy, in fact, that she supports herself primarily by writing. She had seven premieres last spring alone. "A lot is happening in a short period of time," she says.Higdon typically gets a half-dozen new commissions each year, and her schedule is so booked that she can't take any new commissions for pieces to be performed any sooner than the 2005-'06 season.

Through it all, Higdon's affiliation with Spano continues. This summer, Spano conducted Higdon's "Concerto for Orchestra" (commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra) at the annual convention of the American Symphony Orchestra League. Two years earlier, he was behind the podium for the premiere of her "Blue Cathedral," with the Curtis Institute's orchestra, which commissioned the work to commemorate its 75th anniversary. Just this year, Spano and the ASO recorded "Blue Cathedral" for the Telarc label.

The inspiration for "Blue Cathedral" sprang from Higdon's loss of her brother, Andy, to melanoma at 33. Her parents gave Andy the middle name "Blue," while "Cathedral" refers to the structure's status as a symbol of stability and hope.

Happier times form the basis of "City Scape," its down-to-earth themes tied to childhood memories and Higdon's perception of the changes that have taken place in Atlanta in the intervening years. (Higdon hadn't been back to the city until about three years ago; since then, she's visited Atlanta on several occasions.)

The work's first movement, Skyline, celebrates Atlanta's changing cityscape, colored by the image of her father's wire sculpture. The second movement, river sings a song to the trees, is a tone poem, a remembrance of the proliferation of green around their Lenox home, the beloved creek in the front yard, and the woodlands behind a second home on Mason Mill Road.

"I thought of the opening as kind of an homage to nature," says Higdon. "But a little bit is almost a call to worship."

The third movement, described as "a playful rondo," is called Peachtree Street. Higdon remarks that, while much has changed along the thoroughfare, it remains a vital artery — one that is essential to the city's livelihood and identity.

While the two outer movements are blatantly energetic, the second is slower and subtler. But there is still a sense of forward motion.

"I'm carrying the listener on a journey, so I'm not satisfied to just sit on a long tone," Higdon says. "It has to be a long tone that's changing colors somehow — especially in the middle movement, where nature is such a prominent thing. It seems that when I was writing this piece, I always had very concrete images in my head of different aspects to Atlanta. It somehow makes it easy to write, having those images there."

So why Higdon? One can point to the fact that her music has become a hot item on the orchestra circuit. Still, in spite of their long friendship, Higdon suggests that Spano waited for her to mature as a writer, even though he could've easily started programming and commissioning her music sooner.

"I was a flute player when I met him, and in the most infant stages of becoming a composer," she says. "He was smart enough to allow me to come into my own before we actually worked together as composer and conductor."

While its Atlanta peg is a plus, it's hard to predict how Higdon's "City Scape" will resonate with local audiences. The common wisdom is that Atlanta orchestra patrons are less sophisticated than most. But others say that's changing. Local audiences are becoming more receptive to new music — reasonably sophisticated but generally suspicious of a steady diet of potentially thorny experiences. In a nutshell, like most classical music audiences around the country, we're comfortable with familiarity, and slightly fearful of the unknown.

During Robert Shaw's lengthy tenure from 1967-'88, the ASO won awards for its adventurous programming on multiple occasions. But there have been stretches where new music was less frequent. The ASO's current agenda — to feature more new and American music while not neglecting the past — seems like a healthy middle ground.

Special "outside" funding for just that purpose can ignite an orchestra's interest in commissioning new music. But funding for "City Scape" came directly out of the ASO budget (the exact fee is confidential). The move amounts to a significant first step in a more proactive commissioning strategy.

"We have to make a statement initially that we are committed," says Dans.

That statement is going to have to carry over to a potentially reticent audience, whose response could influence board and donor decisions about future commissioning. Preparing the audience to really understand what is going to be played involves a huge commitment on Spano's part — one that includes a series of videos to introduce works by living composers just before the orchestra performs them.

"I can't get the dead ones to do interviews," Spano quips. "But we're doing them with the living composers."

Higdon's video was shot in September, and will precede each of this week's concerts. And an hour before Thursday's concert, there will be a live question-and-answer session with the composer.

This initial string of "City Scape" performances does have one huge advantage: its world premiere status.

"We could crystallize it in the sense that a piece only happens for the first time once," says Spano. "There's a tremendous kind of excitement about that, in and of itself."

Even so, Higdon has mixed feelings about the premiere.

"It does feel like I'm coming home," she says. "It feels like a love letter of sorts. I also have a tiny bit of melancholy, because I associate Atlanta with Andy, my brother. I can remember so clearly being in the Woodruff Center with him on so many different occasions to attend concerts, the ballet — even going to art shows in the complex. So there's an emotional tug there that weighs heavily on the heart."

music@creativeloafing.com