Conducting her own composition is part of Wittry’s master plan to make symphony Hall more of an emotional weather center. Over 12 years in Allentown she’s introduced a classical guitar quartet and Shakespearean actors, sense-surround concerts a season of works chosen by musicians and listeners. In 2005 she left the podium to play viola during the third movement of Faure’s first piano quartet; it was the first time she had performed in public in nearly seven years.
Wittry is hardly the only composing Christening conductor. Mahler’s fifth symphony, which she’s scheduled to direct in Allentown in April, was premiered by the composer himself in 1904 in Cologne. What makes “Mist” fairly different is that it’s not only Wittry’s first public work, it’s her first major finished work. She’s come a long way since writing arrangements at the University of Southern California in her native Pasadena.
“I didn’t compose because I felt I had nothing to say,” says Wittry from the home in West Orange, N.J., she shares with her husband, artist Rick Peckham. “There’s such a legacy ahead of people who have had things to say. The last few years I wasn’t finding new music. I was hearing things in my head that I had to put down because no one else was writing the same way.”
According to conventional wisdom, new composers start with an etude, a sonata or some other reasonable, workable work. Wittry trampolined into a symphonic piece because a symphonic orchestra is her main instrument. “I don’t hear it on a piano, I don’t hear it in a trio or quartet,” she says. “I don’t hear it any other way.”
Needing concentration to write for 62 musicians playing 23 instruments, Wittry returned to a favorite oasis: a villa owned by a Swiss foundation on the Italian island of Elba. Previously, she had stayed there for a conductor’s workshop and to write parts of “Beyond the Baton,” her 2007 book for conductors. This time she wrote on a Bosendorfer piano in a living room all to herself. She and her husband, who painted in a cottage on the estate, ate meals made by an Italian cook. There were no annoying distractions: no television in English, no Internet connection, nothing to do but work, relax and reflect.
Wittry had picked the title “Mist” before the Elba sabbatical. Confidence in her choice strengthened as she watched the morning sung mingle with clouds, fog, haze and yes, mist over the Tyrrhenian Sea. Unconsciously or not, she strained the seductive scene into her score.
The melody in “Mist” floats in fragments until near the end, when it becomes almost whole, nearly graspable. A sighing crying trumpet appears every now and then to add nervousness. Some measures are free form, without a fixed meter. A rainstick imitates slurring water; water emptied into a pan imitates a heavier downpour. At press time Wittry and her crew were still debating the size of the pan and the height of the pour.
A misty motif is played by violinists, each with a slightly different voice. Wittry modeled the approach after a rising line from John Corigliano’s Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra, which he wrote for the film “The Red Violin” and which she conducted in 2005 with the Allentown Symphony and soloist Elizabeth Pitcairn, owner of the 1720 “Red Mendelssohn” Stradivarius that inspired the film. He added polyphonic strings to enliven the scene in the movie, to make the violins on a shop ceiling seem to speak.
Even the diminished chords that cycle through “Mist” have a harmonic history. Wittry has long liked diminished chords for their flexibility, sight dissonance, and watercolor wistfulness. In fact, she said she’d be one when Michael Tilson Thomas, one of her conducting teachers and star of her conducting book, asked her and other conductors what chord they’d be. They all looked at him as if he had three heads when he chose a flat 15th. Wittry can’t even remember conducting a flat 15th, which she thinks has too many notes and too little freedom.
To make “Mist” more tangible, Wittry wrote many directions in English rather than traditional Italian, even though the work was written in Italy. Her commands tend to be every specific; her extra pauses, or fermatas, last from seven to 10 seconds. Being on the same page, she points out, allows musicians and conductors to be more precise and passionate.
“I want everyone to take risks, to not be tied up, to let the music come to life,” says Wittry, who has judged works for the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. “I think the biggest fault of some conductors is that they’re very mechanical, they interpret the page literally. Young conductors are particularly guilty. They think that everyone has to be right. In my piece the idea is to go for the overall shape of phrases. Singers know that; conductors forget that.”
Unlike many novice composers, Wittry wrote “Mist” by hand and paid someone to copy it by software. Composing by computer, she insists, is sterile and stifling. “I like the look, the feel, of the hand-written score,” she says. “It breathes differently. Look at the original manuscript of Bach’s unaccompanied [violin] sonatas: they give you the shape of the line; they help you give them life.”
Any composer will tell you the hardest part of a new work is finding a second performance. Sponsors and players, like parents and priests, are naturally more excited about christening than rechristening. Wittry tried to make “Mist” more marketable by making more playable. She doubled the winds to attract chamber orchestras. She removed a contrabassoon part to attract large ensemble unwilling to pay for an extra wind not as popular as a bassoon, and English horn or even tuba (according to Wittry, “Mist” doesn’t fit the current season of her other group, the Norwalk Symphony Orchestra; she expects she’ll conduct it in Connecticut in 2009-2010).
Wittry laughed at a proposal for her next Allentown adventure: conducting the orchestra while playing viola. She envisions something more consuming and less radical. What she has in mind is a second conductor’s bible, this time listing the tricky, “crash-and-burn” spots of 100 standard works. Also in her periscope is a witty history of music with nasty contemporary reviews of pieces treasured for eons.
“I always like new challenges,’ says Wittry. “Once I open a door, I usually go through it.”
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