English Deutsch Français An introduction to Rouse’s music by Mark Swed
His music has been called anguished. It’s also been called outrageous. In a series
of big, dramatic orchestral works, including two symphonies and the Pulitzer Prize winning
Trombone Concerto, Christopher Rouse has produced some of the most cathartic of
American symphonic music. In creating these pieces, Rouse has helped renew the tradition
of the great American symphonists. Yet it is not out of character that he has also written
Christmas carols nearly unmistakable for the real, old thing – except that the texts,
as translated, are nonsensical. Nor is it surprising that he once composed an orchestral
escapade entitled
Bump, describing "a Boston Pops tour in Hell."
Christopher Rouse’s music is often a music of obsessive intensity and
single-mindedness, yet the most natural way to describe the composer is through extreme
similes. He is a composer for whom a love of Greek mythology and a devotion to amusement
parks are not incongruous, and where the deepest, most serious expression is often
leavened with sparkling humor. For instance, he describes the process in his
Symphony
No.2 – whereby the innocent, chirpy music of the first movement is filtered
through a heart-wrenching Adagio movement into a dark, aggressive, and violent Finale
– as the idea of "Bambi becoming Godzilla." All of these contradictions,
however, find their expression through Rouse’s mastery of his medium. His method of
working is a case in point: eschewing sketches, he prefers to let an entire piece take
shape in his mind, generally proceeding to write a single copy in full score.
Born in Baltimore in 1949, Rouse is one of the first American composers to have
incorporated, uncontrived, the range of the musical experience typical of his generation.
His academic credentials include undergraduate study at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music
and graduate study at Cornell University, where he earned a D.M.A in composition in 1977;
George Crumb, Karel Husa, and Richard Hoffmann were among his teachers. His generational
credentials include participation in the music of his era – the world of ’60s
rock ‘n’ roll.
Rouse, consequently, became known in the ’70s and early ’80s as a composer
able to fuse that formal training with the raucous spirit of rock. He became known for
very loud, energetic, and dramatic music often programmatic in intent and occasionally
humorous. Though most familiar as a composer for orchestra (Rouse served from 1986 to 1989
as Composer-in-Residence of the Baltimore Symphony), he was equally able to channel his
ear for rich textures and big, colorful sounds into chamber music, including percussion
music and music for mixed ensembles. As Professor of Composition at the Eastman School of
Music, he also gets a line in the reference books for having given the first accredited
course at a major music school on the history of rock.
In the mid-’80s, however, Rouse’s music took what seemed like a surprising
turn, moving from fast and wild to slow and introspective. In a series of large orchestral
works, his two symphonies and several concertos, Rouse has explored the adagio while
embracing more traditional musical forms and a more traditional harmonic language, as if
the Beatles were pushed aside for Bruckner. But in fact, the seeming sea change now can be
seen more as an evolution. A fast and aggressive score such as the 1984
Gorgon is
not just an orchestral show-piece but, through its downright savage intensity, a metaphor
for facing the gorgons of life without being turned to stone.
With his
Symphony No.1, winner of the 1988 Kennedy Center Fried-heim Award,
Rouse made a conscious attempt to write an antithesis of Gorgon – music less
dissonant, suffused with slow somber Romantic gestures, the rage of the earlier world
turned to reflection. But Rouse’s adagios, like Mahler’s and
Shostakovich’s, are dramatic ones, perhaps even as dramatic as his prestissimos. In
his
Trombone Concerto, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and winner of the
1993 Pulitzer Prize for Music, Rouse memorialized Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland
(both of whom died while Rouse was writing the score), assigning the trombone an almost
theatrically elegiac character.
Rouse carries the dramatic notion of soloist pitted against orchestra to a typically
striking extreme in his
Violoncello Concerto, written in 1992 for Yo-Yo Ma, and
commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The cellist, here, is as human being; the
orchestra, murderer. After a fast and violent first movement, in which the solo instrument
screams and dies, the work ends with an extraordinary adagio. Representing the nanosecond
of life fleeting, it includes some of the most tense, arresting, and climactic slow music
of our time.
That adagio, like all the adagios of Rouse’s music, is one of wonder. Rouse has
observed that his music of recent years has been music of leave-taking, often of family,
friends, and colleagues who have passed away. But it is also a music of catharsis,
survival, and a celebration of being alive. Hence even the controversial
Karolju,
Rouse’s old-fashioned Christmas carols in garbled foreign languages, becomes both an
unfettered manifestation of this wonder, as well as being a more fettered farewell to the
innocent wonder of childhood. It reminds us that, just as Rouse at his darkest is also a
composer with a love for light, at his lightest he never forsakes the real world for a
falsely ideal one.
Mark Swed, 1996
(Chief critic of The Los Angeles Times)
