Jacob Druckman: 75th anniversary of birth
(July 2003)
While he was justly celebrated during his lifetime, from the vantage point of 2003 Jacob Druckman is emerging as one of the pivotal American composers of the late 20th century. Druckman, who died in 1996, would have turned 75 on June 26. Performers and critics are taking the anniversary year as an opportunity to re-examine his sensual and arrestingly dramatic music.
At Tanglewood, where Druckman studied with Aaron Copland and later taught young composers himself, Robert Spano conducts the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in Summer Lightning on July 21. It was there that Seiji Ozawa led the work's premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1991. Summer Lightning strikes again in the fall when Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic perform the piece on September 24-26 and 30.
Druckman was something of a rarity among composers. His style was personal and unique, and didn't lend itself to imitation. Yet he decisively affected the course of American music. From 1982 to 1986, he was the New York Philharmonic's composer-in-residence, also serving as the artistic director of the Philharmonic's three Horizons festivals. He used the festivals to raise public awareness of the emerging "new romanticism," in which the dry rigor of academic serialism was giving way to "the Dionysian qualities: sensuality, ecstasy, transcendency." His programming, which encompassed figures as diverse as John Adams, Luciano Berio, Morton Feldman, Toru Takemitsu, and David Del Tredici, was highly controversial at a time when 'contemporary music' denoted a rigorous, often forbidding academic 12-tone idiom. Yet the stylistic shift that he noted has since become a fact of musical life.
He was equally influential as a teacher; his composition students included Aaron Jay Kernis, David Lang, and Michael Torke. But Druckman's most enduring legacy remains his music. Observed Leighton Kerner in The Village Voice, "Jacob Druckman became the most important proclaimer of a new romanticism, and practiced what he proclaimed...[His] conjured-up images, the sensitive treatment of the singing voice, the swirling lights and shadows in the orchestral pieces - they added up to a fresher (and yes, newer) romanticism..."
In a comprehensive article titled "The Neo-Romantic," Peter G. Davis assesses Druckman's legacy in the current issue of Symphony magazine. Notes Davis, "Druckman was just 33 when he wrote the composition that brought him wide recognition and the Pulitzer Prize: Windows, first performed in 1972 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Bruno Maderna....He intended to use every instrumental resource of the modern symphony to convey a strong poetic concept, one driven by powerfully evocative imagery." Davis examines the composer's groundbreaking Animus series of works for live performer and electronic tape, his subtle and innovative interweaving of music from earlier eras, and the riveting dramatic quality present in of all his music.
In closing, Davis quotes a comment made by Druckman toward the end of his life: "I see the composers who are my students for instance, very self-consciously moving toward vernacular, trying to make that part of their expression, trying to regain contact with you." Adds Davis, "No composer worked harder to help re-establish that contact than Druckman. If new music speaks more directly and passionately to audiences today, then much of the credit is his."
photo: Vincent P. Oneppo
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