Music by DANIEL DORFF |
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Article about Daniel Dorff in Fanfare Magazine July/August 2013 by Peter Burwasser |
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These
are not the words of some naïve wunderkind. Composer Daniel Dorff's
grasp of musical history is as sophisticated as can be. Even in this era
of grand musical eclecticism, Dorff has been exposed, at a very close
level, to an extraordinary diversity of styles and approaches to his art
form. A formative period in his career occurred in graduate school, in
the late 1970s, where he studied with the legendary University of
Pennsylvania triumvirate of George Crumb, Richard Wernick, and George
Rochberg. He also studied with Karel Husa, Ralph Shapey, Henry Brant,
and, in his high school days, extensively with Elie Siegmeister. By
1985, he had become a full-time editor at music publisher Theodore
Presser Company. "The interesting ironic twist was that most of my
teachers, including Richard Wernick, Ralph Shapey, and George Rochberg,
are published by Presser. I was putting the red marks in the scores of
the very guys that were doing the same thing to my music as a
student." It's all the more remarkable that Dorff has been able to
guide his artistry through a particularly stormy period in musical
history and still emerge with his own voice fully intact. This is a
circumstance that the composer himself takes for granted, even as the
cardinal rule not to imitate one's teachers is often violated. In
many ways, Dorff's entire life has led, step by step, to his current
position in the world of music. He was a kid whose parents never had to
tell him to practice (he still plays bass clarinet and saxophone). He
taught himself basic harmony with Beatles fake books. As a teenager, he
and his friends played Stravinsky on the boom box at the beach. As for
his job at Presser, now vice president of publishing, he says that "I
think I was born to work there. As a child, I got into trouble for
correcting my teachers' grammar. I must have been really obnoxious." Maybe
a nicer way to say it is that Dorff has always possessed a firm
self-confidence, especially his conception of his personal voice. His
music has always been tonal, following such heroes as Copland, Ravel,
and Barber. When Dorff entered Penn, such material "was not taken too
seriously in academia. I was patted on the head, and told I didn't
have a voice yet. But it was the other students who didn't have a
voice. They all sounded like their teachers. Everyone worshiped either
the traditionally atonal
music of Elliott Carter or the eclectically atonal music of George
Crumb. But the avant-garde then was at least 20 years old, and wasn't
really avant-garde anymore." This
attitude was already well formed at this point in Dorff's creative
life. "When I was 17 and only composing for half a year, I went to the
Aspen Music Festival, surrounded by graduate-level composers from the
major conservatories who knew what was expected of them in 1973. Elliott
Carter came to our seminar class for a generous session of critiquing
everyone's work samples. I offered a movement I'd just written,
which, coincidentally, is the Ballade from Dances
and Canons on
the Perennials CD (track 21). Carter gave me a stern lecture on not
writing pretty melodies in 1973 in a world that has seen war atrocities,
saying I was living in Schubert's Vienna to be writing music like
that. I politely but confidently replied that Schubert lived a terrible
life of suffering whereas I was a spoiled bourgeois from Long Island,
and that following Carter's logic of necessarily depicting one's
world, I should be writing Schöne Müllerin and
Schubert should have composed atonal expressionism. My older and wiser
classmates gasped, but little by little I heard that many were shocked
that I dared to be honest. "Many
of my composition teachers commented that I was surprisingly honest in
my music. I don't understand why they found this surprising or rare. I
am expressing myself, not expressing them. That's why I do this as my
life's work-for my sake, not for other composers' prejudices. I
hope they're writing honestly, not trying to impress the media and
their colleagues. Why would anyone go into this career if it isn't out
of a self-contained vision? "A
few weeks later, Virgil Thomson heard the same Ballade that offended
Carter, and Thomson announced to the entire composers' seminar that
'young Dorff is the only talented one in the bunch.' Even at 17, I
knew that meant I was the only one with his aesthetics, and that
Thomson's praise was as meaningless as Carter's criticism. I always
asked teachers 'never mind about the style, is it a good piece?' and
it seemed like that was an impossible conundrum in the 1970s. I was
either a teacher's pet or else not taken seriously. It was about the
polemics of style, not the craft of composition." The
late Rochberg was an especially important mentor. "He told me a
wonderful story that had a profound effect on me. According to George,
when he was faculty advisor for the student composers' concerts at
Penn, a woman (whom he'd seen in the audience frequently) came up to
him and said 'Professor Rochberg, I come to all the student concerts,
and if your students were engineers, I wouldn't drive across their
bridges.' What a profound metaphor. I bet she'd drive across
Brahms's bridges, or Rochberg's, or Messiaen's. It's not about
the style, it's about building a musical structure. While I was a graduate
student at Penn, my sister was also there as an undergraduate in
architecture. One of the freshman assignments was to build a chair out
of corrugated cardboard that a 250-pound professor could sit on. To
pass, they had to figure out how to design the structure to make the
force of his weight support the chair's engineering. Just like putting
musical patterns together." Rochberg's
influence on Dorff continued after the elder composer's death; "Last
summer I was having trouble starting a flute sonata and wanted to
conceive a 20-minute, three-movement structure. I went to George's
grave in Valley Forge and let my imagination have a conversation with
him. The sonata started flowing wonderfully that night, and you could
drive a truck across it." After
grad school, Dorff took Crumb's advice to spend some time away from
academia. "I took an apartment in Center City [Philadelphia] to do
some freelance work and be alone with my imagination. Then, I think by
mistake, I was asked to write a musical for the sixth graders at the
Greenfield School. I'm pretty sure they had me confused with someone
else with a similar name who was already writing children's music. I
took the gig anyway, which was to set students' poems in a rock and
roll style. It was so refreshing to not be self-conscious and just
write. It opened up a dam, just as Crumb had predicted. I was thinking
phrase to phrase, rather than note to note." Thus
was born Dorff's unexpected career as one of the most performed
composers of children's music in the country. "I started to get a
reputation as someone who could write both seriously and tonal and be
genuine about it. The poet-in-residence at Young Audiences of
Philadelphia, Frank McQuilkin, was looking for someone to write an opera
with. Stone
Soup was
my first commission, and it ran for 21 seasons, which makes it the
longest running opera in Philadelphia history!" And on it goes;
Atlanta Opera is performing it about 50 times this season. Dorff's
ethos as a composer of children's music is to appeal on a number of
levels of sophistication, but not to lecture about the music, such as
Britten does in Young
Person's Guide to the Orchestra. His
1985 work for the Sacramento Symphony, Billy
and the Carnival, for example, features
every instrument in the orchestra, but no pedantry. "It has the big
smile points and catchy tunes, but goes deeper, just like Rocky
and Bullwinkle appeals to kids but has
hidden jokes for the grown-ups. It accidentally teaches about
orchestration." Dorff's
breakthrough came in 1996, when he responded to an open call for a
composition for mixed octet and narrator from the Minnesota Orchestra.
"I responded to a call for a new commission and won, leading to the
commission to compose 'Three Fun Fables,' from Aesop. The Aesop
stories are engaging, but the real moral of Three
Fun Fables is
that it's fun to go to classical music concerts. They have played it
over 100 times and also commissioned a follow-up, Goldilocks
and the Three Bears, which they have also
played over 100 times. I made an orchestral version of the 'Tortoise
and the Hare' segment, which we did with the Haddonfield Symphony [for
which Dorff is the current composer-in-residence] with [Olympic track
star] Carl Lewis as the narrator. The Philadelphia Orchestra then
commissioned me to complete the orchestration for the other two fables,
which Sawallisch premiered at a children's concert." That was in
2000, and since then the orchestra has performed his music on further
children's concerts and commissioned five more works for their Sound
All Around series. The
children's music continues to be produced, upon commission, at a
steady pace. One work of note is Blast
Off, which was underwritten by
Lockheed-Martin and premiered in Haddonfield with astronaut Kenneth
Reightler as narrator. Dorff asked the veteran space traveler if he was
nervous about the performance. His response; "Well, I've flown in
outer space many times, docked with the Mir, and I was on the shuttle
mission that supposedly had UFO sightings. I'd say today is a low risk
mission." Dorff has appreciated that unique perspective ever since. Dorff's
special engagement with children's music has taken place concurrently
with his unabated contributions to the "grown-up" repertoire. His
newest CD, Perennials,
is a wonderful showcase for his career to date. The music actually spans
his entire mature career, and displays a remarkable consistency in the
composer's way of creating music. As early as his experience in Aspen,
he was "creating repertoire rather than trying to make a bold
statement about music." That year, he won his first competition for
writing, and considers it significant that the judges were not
academics, as is often the case, but fellow musicians. "Musicians
really like playing my music out of genuine enjoyment, not because
it's the right thing to do. I have a few piccolo/piano recital pieces
that have become standard recital repertoire and are mandatory
selections at many competitions. Piccoloists play these because it's
music they want to play, not because it's new. "I
get commissions and prizes from performers, and not from new music
organizations who ironically and hypocritically think atonality is new
since it's been around for over 100 years. There have always been both
streams, and I went through decades of being told I'm not a composer
yet because I'm still using a key signature, and that Barber, Copland,
Rutter, and other neo-traditionalists don't really count." The
clear, honest and beautifully crafted esthetic of Dorff's music is a
crisp reflection of his goals as an artist. "I don't consider myself
naïve, and I have many friends and colleagues who are composers and
professors with a wide variety of musical languages, and my listening
tastes are wide-open. I love Beethoven and Brahms and wouldn't
consider writing like them because that's not my musical imagination.
Likewise, I love the music of Schoenberg, Messiaen, Crumb, and many
other recent modernists and I wouldn't consider writing like them
either, because that's not my musical imagination. I like to create
beauty and warmth in my own language, and that has nothing to do with
what year a piece is written in, just how it sounds. Music sounds how it
sounds, and chronology is irrelevant to the actual piece itself." The
music on this disc spans 36 years in the career of Daniel Dorff, from
1975 to 2011. So this is a retrospective, in a way, and yet there is a
remarkable consistency of style and quality in his writing. The core of
Dorff's influence, by his own admission, is the French tradition of
woodwind writing, which favors lyrical phrasing and natural pacing.
Dorff has studied with some of the most adventuresome composers of the
second half of the 20th century, including George Crumb, Richard Wernick,
George Rochberg and Ralph Shapey, but his own voice is unabashedly tonal
and accessible. Much of his material was specifically written for his
many musician friends. Dorff prides himself on creating musical material
that musicians really enjoy playing, and that shows in all of this
music, which is favored with delicious performances. Besides
the stimulus of the players, Dorff, who contributes the charming notes
for this release, also recounts some amusing circumstances that resulted
in the music on the program. Two
Cats, for example, was written for a
fundraiser for the Dutchess County, New York Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals, and is a witty dual portrait of a 20-pound tuxedo
cat and a petite Bengal. The Pastorale is
an ode to that ancient tradition of singing for one's supper; Dorff
wrote it as wedding music for a friend who regularly played at the piano
bar of a popular Philadelphia restaurant, Frög,
thus the subtitle, Souvenirs
du Frög. Interspersed
in this compelling mix are four elegant arrangements of Bach Inventions,
which introduce a nicely contrasting baroque texture to the essentially
Gallic sensibility. There
are no thunderbolts of innovation in this collection, but simply very
satisfying, beautifully crafted works, delectably performed. If you need
those thunderbolts, look elsewhere. If you think you might enjoy a rich
soufflé of wonderfully conceived and executed chamber music, dig in.
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