Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony are visiting Ann Arbor this week as part of their American Mavericks Festival, a celebration of 17 living and passed American composers ranging from Mason Bates to Charles Ives. The orchestra is giving four concerts starting this Thursday (3/22) and Sunday (3/25) and will be joined along the way by incredible soloists like Jeremy Denk, Jessye Norman, Joan La Barbara, Emmanuel Ax and others.

Ann Arbor is one of three stops in the Symphony’s centennial tour (the others being Chicago and New York), and their residency coincides with the University of Michigan’s second annual American Orchestras Summit, which features presentations by composers, musicologists and leaders in the world of American orchestras.

Sam Richards, a colleague of mine in the Michigan composition department is covering the Summit, and will be live-blogging during its presentations over the next three days. Additionally, I will live-tweet the presentations, performances and the conversations the students here have planned with Mason Bates and Jeremy Denk.

You can find Sam’s first post on the Summit here, and he also created a nifty ‘family tree’ connecting the ‘Maverick’ composers featured in this week’s upcoming concerts.

If you’re interested in reading my tweets regarding the various music and conversations I witness and participate in this week, follow me @garrt.

When I was notified of my participation in last year’s highSCORE Festival in July 2011 , I had no idea how pivotal this would be for my prospects as an aspiring young composer. The highSCORE Festival attracts very high caliber composer participants representing leading music educational institutions throughout North America and Europe. The faculty of the highSCORE Festival 2011 included Giya Kancheli, Christopher Theofanidis, Paul Glass, Giovanni Albini and Amy Beth Kirsten, to name but a few. In addition to several private lessons and group master classes, we had the opportunity to hear our music performed in wonderful medieval church acoustics in various venues in the ancient city of Pavia, which has roots dating back to pre-Roman times.

I was lucky in that I heard three of my pieces performed live during the course of the festival: Aftermath for solo guitar (Omar Fassa, guitar), Sanctus for string quartet Quartetto Indaco) and My Beloved for horn and piano (Corey Klein, horn; Ethan Braun, piano). The latter two were world premieres and have since received subsequent performances and Aftermath will be appearing on the next highSCORE CD, recorded by Omar Fassa.

Like many composers I don’t hesitate to work on pieces after having heard them performed. This was the case with Sanctus, in which I found some sections to be very effective, and others less so. I rewrote the piece over the six months that followed the festival, and submitted it to a competition for new works for string quartet, announced by the Villiers Quartet in London. Sanctus is one of six compositions chosen from among over 50 submissions that was selected into the semifinal round by the ensemble.

The friends that I met at the festival encouraged me not only to continue to compose for them, but also to apply to some of the top schools in the United States, where I have long desired to continue my studies. I was recently notified of my acceptance to my top choice school – purportedly one of the most exclusive schools in America.

Giovanni Albini has been extremely supportive of me and my undertakings since the end of the festival. Being a member of the highSCORE New Music Center is a great opportunity open to all past participants of the festival. I have been in constant communication with the highSCORE New Music Center, notifying them of my career developments, some of which they have posted to their news feed, which is viewed by industry people throughout the world.

I highly recommend any aspiring composer to apply to the highSCORE Festival. It is a great place to expand one’s perspective, travel, make lifelong friends and be exposed to living new music legends. As the winner of the 2011 highSCORE Prize, I will be returning to the highSCORE Festival 2012 free of charge and I look forward to reconnecting with the highSCORE faculty and meeting new colleagues.   The application deadline for this year’s Festival is April 15.

At a dinner party in the Hamptons attended by your correspondent many years ago, the late and legendary editor Willie Morris averred–this was at a point in the evening when his beverage had been refreshed several times–that “things would have been a lot different if the South had won the war.”  I assumed he was being ironic but the notion came back to me other night during the first of two concerts organized by the Library of Congress in tribute to Dina Koston, a prominent force in DC classical music for many years who died last year and– along with her husband– left the Library an endowment called the Dina Koston and Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music.  The thought  I had:   So,  this is where new music might have gone if there had never been a Terry Riley or Steve Reich or Philip Glass,  if there had been no Internet or cheap recording technologies to allow almost anyone to circumvent the musical “establishment,” if a few of the trains to Princeton had not been diverted to New Haven (to mangle Wallace Stevens), if “high modernism” had prevailed in the marketplace of music ideas the way it did in academia.

Before you academy types pounce, let me be clear that I’m not making a value judgement about “quality” (whatever that is but I know it when I hear it).  The concert, which featured the superb Cygnus Ensemble  playing Dina Koston’s final composition—paired with the short play called Ohio Impromptu by Samuel Beckett that inspired it–a premiere of the endowment’s first commission and several other new pieces, was brilliantly staged and performed and thoroughly entertaining.  (Charles T. Downey has his usual bang-up review here. )

Nor am I suggesting that the living composers whose work was performed at the concert are old-fogeys who never crawled down from Uncle Milton’s knee.  But, several of them were bounced there a few times and their journey into heresy is one of the things that distinguishes their later work. From what little I know about Dina Koston, I’m fairly sure she would have hated Frank Brickle’s Farai un vers (which he calls Neo-Medieval Psychedelia) and David Claman’s Gone for Foreign, both of which are warm, witty and thoroughly non-dogmatic.  Harder to understand was the selection of Mario Davidovsky as the winner of the Koston-Shapiro fund’s first commission.  His Ladino Songs were solid and elegant but the seventy-something winner of the 1971 Pulitzer Prize and many other honors is hardly in need of additional recognition.  (They could have given the award to George Crumb, whose Ancient Voices of Children should have won the 1971 Pulitzer.)

For New Yorkers, the good news is that an extension of the Library of Congress/Cygnus Quartet  program, called Sounding Beckett, will performed here at the Classic Stage Co. on two weekends in the Fall–(Fri-Sun): September 14-16 and 21-23.  Three Beckett pieces will be staged–Ohio Impromptu, Footfalls and Catastrophe–and each will have two new works composed in response to it  commissioned for this occasion by The Dina Koston and Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music.

But, enough music politics.  What surprised me most pleasantly about the visit was what a lively and ambitious concert program the Library of Congress maintains.  Most concerts are staged in the LOC’s Coolidge Auditorium, a comfortable mid-sized venue, that was filled both nights I was there.  Anne McLean, who runs the concert series (with only a couple of people to help), is a warm and generous woman with an empathy for composers. musicians and other lost souls.  She  spotted me alone leaning against a pillar slurping my noodles at the reception, and pegged me for the Sequenza21 publisher and a man who needs a lot of hugs these days.  I really like this woman.

Life is competitive and composers are as competitive as anyone else–sometimes even more so. This thought came forcibly to mind when I heard two of the three composers–Stefan Cwik and Neil Rolnick (the third, Philip Glass, wasn’t even mentioned)–discussing their pieces with New Music Ensemble artistic director and conductor Nicole Paiment minutes before she and her musicians played three of their pieces as the concluding event of the BluePrint Transcending Senses Series at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. When it comes to cattiness, composers often make the Beverly Hills Housewives look like fluffy little kittens.

Which is not to say that the music that followed didn’t have its charms. The opener Eight Miniatures for Chamber Ensemble (Hommage a Stravinsky) by Stefan Cwik (1987- ) was one of the winning works in the 2010 Bassoon Chamber Music Composition Competition, performed here by bassoonist Paula Brusky–who served as a midwife in its realization–Michael Williams, flute, Stephanie Bibbo, violin, and the always super Keisuke Nakagoshi, made a strong case for Cwik’s collage of Stravinsky pieces. These included bits from L’ Histoire du Soldat (1918), with Bibbo’s lean, mean, superbly dry fiddling — the Suite Italienne (from Pulcinella) (1932 ), with a kind of running commentary of stamping chords from Le Sacre (1911-13) beneath. The quartet’s playing of Cwik’s “appropriations ” from Stravinsky were elegant, witty, even touching.  Stravinsky used to say that life, meaning manners, is artificial , and of course was famous for writing pieces from behind the mask of his own persona. What that means is anyone’s guess, though Cwik’s pieces, judged from a cursory look at his site, seems to look–and sound better–when he hides.

Neil Rolnick (1947 – ) came off as charming and extroverted while Cwik seemed academic and reserved–he wore a black suit while Rolnick wore a “work shirt” and blue jeans. His equally arming and transparently scored Ansomia for full forces was a big–over 30 minutes–well-constructed and well-performed piece which exploits the “congnitive dissonances” between the senses–in this case smell–to witty, though far from profound effects. Oliver Sacks and Michael Nyman have, of course, made mini-careers from their supposedly deep– i.e easily marketable “findings”–from the disjunction between “seen,” “remembered”, and “heard.” Rolnick’s effort was amiable–he manned his MAC stage right which interacted with the orchestra, orchestral soloists, and singers–Maya Kherani, soprano, Carrie Zhang, alto, and Daniel Cilli–baritone–in real time–though a planned 160 minute version with orchestra, singers, plus projections, sounds like a long, and not necessarily more enlightening adventure.

The New Music Ensemble’s reading of Glass’ Concerto for Harpsichord (2002) should have been the highlight of the program, but harpsichordist Christopher D. Lewis’s reading lacked spirit and it didn’t help that Paiment’s obviously under-rehearsed band was clumped from middle to stage right. The first 2 of the piece’s 3 movements are in a reflective but never static–E minor, and C minor and its G major final movement should go off like a Mannheim Rocket and bring down the house. But Paiment’s ministrations failed to differentiate and bring out Glass’ charming , gracious and imaginative humors–he knows his Baroque from the outside in. The ensemble’s timid “projection,” if that’s the word–made Glass’ changes sound arbitrary, so that his quotes from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Arjanjuez and Bach’s D minor Fantasia–a steal from Muslim Spain–went up in smoke. It doesn’t matter whether Glass’ concerto is a “worthy successor” to the De Falla or Poulenc, or a competitor to the Gorecki, or Nyman. But you don’t treat the work of any composer, and especially one of Glass’ importance, like a side dish.