Only in America.
I've made this point before, but Karel Husa is one of the most American stories in all of music. No American composer wrote more emotionally difficult music. His language is basically the language of Schoenberg around 1910. His music is as lacerating and technically difficult as Wozzeck. It speaks to the trauma of the entire European experience in the 20th century. And yet it found huge success here. How? Because it's written for Concert Band. This is a composer who found success by using the language of Erwartung and Pierrot Lunaire in the ensembles of John Philip Sousa.
Only in America!
Concert Band is, I believe, the future of American orchestral music, and has been for a hundred years. It is so underutilized by American composers who should know so much better. It is the least fashionable ensemble and yet it practically guarantees performances. It is still a blank slate waiting for an American Haydn to completely recreate American classical music. The repertoire is still so underdeveloped that it still subsists on arrangements of orchestral and pop music, and the original music is still the general purview of such august names in music history as Frank Ticheli and H. Owen Reed. Orchestras may die out, but the marching band will always be the most sophisticated musical ensemble in every small American town. There will always be three to five rehearsals every week in the autumn, where it will always take the time to figure out how to perform music in 7, 9, and 11 while moving in formation during halftime.
Only in America.
Jim Svejda, whatever his political nuttiness, is as musically knowledgeable as a summer day is long, and he routinely referred to Husa as the greatest living composer. I didn't agree - there are always far too many claimants, but he knew whereof he spoke. This is perhaps the only composer in the world who threaded the needle with the golden thread sought by nearly every composer of his Cold War generation: he wrote the most complex atonal music, and was beloved for it.
Only in America!
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