So let's talk about Christopher Rouse today. For as long as I've been here, he was a presence around Baltimore, unmistakable either in the concert hall or at Peabody or anywhere else, and occasionally a controversial one. I always heard some grumblings from Peabody student composers about how ungenerous he was to them, though many other composers of every age group clearly felt very differently, including some at Peabody. But grumbling always how the new generation does about the old. By the time I started moving in the circles of Baltimore music professionals, Rouse was the definition of the musical establishment. He was a Falstaffian physical giant with the apposite beard and gut which seemed to grow larger every year, whose personality and music operated in perfect harmony with his presence.
He was a true Baby Boomer, highly erudite on a seemingly infinite number of subjects, but whose knowledge of rock music was as fearsomely encyclopedic as his knowledge of the standard repertoire, a son of enormous privilege whose uncle, Jim Rouse, was an even much bigger presence around Baltimore who designed Columbia, Maryland, perhaps America's most famous planned community which one Slovak friend of mine often described as 'the last Communist state.' Ironic perhaps, because by accounts I heard, Christopher Rouse was one of classical music's few avowed right-wingers.
Was Rouse a truly great composer? Well, are any of us? But he was truly very, very good. Excepting John Adams, he had no peer among his generation of Americans in his ability to write for the orchestra, and the orchestral commissions came flowing to him right up to the end. For every American orchestra, his music was practically furniture adorning its season. And it was probably the Baltimore Symphony and David Zinman who rocketed him into whatever mild stratosphere American composers can ever be launched.
The rock influence in his music was everywhere. Those dark, gothic orchestral sonorities that were clearly composed with Phil Spector's wall of sound in his ears. I don't know how much of what he wrote had depth beyond the noise, but it was certainly memorable dark comedy. American audiences are rarely appreciative of new music, but it wouldn't surprise me if orchestras found it enormous fun to play.
I don't remember the name of the work, but a couple years ago, Marin Alsop premiered a work at the BSO that was dedicated to her. It was utterly different from anything I'd ever heard from Rouse: quiet, elegiac, truly spiritual music. We should have known that something was changing at a very fundamental level.
I think Der Gerettete Alberich (a percussion concerto that crosses themes by Wagner with rock drumming - I was at the world premiere - in 1996?) and Karolju (a suite of original Christmas carols modeled on Carmina Burana) are my favorite Rouse pieces. Rouse wrote an enormous amount of music, and I won't claim to have heard anywhere near everything, but Rouse could orchestrate the phonebook interestingly, and he had a special talent for knowing how to incorporate older composers' material - whether parody or tribute, and there's a little extra affection in those pieces. Maybe it was because at his heart he was, like many of us, a music lover, and his music was the outpouring of deeply devoted fan.
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