Music08,
latest edition of the
There will be master classes and free public
performances in Werner Recital Hall, Corbett Auditorium and the Great Hall of
Tangeman Student Center, where the festival will conclude June 22 with the
It may be the last hurrah for 12-year-old
MusicX, discontinued last fall, effective in 2009, along with virtually
all of CCM's summer programs, including AccentX for talented high school
musicians (held concurrently with MusicX), the Opera Theater and Festival of
Lucca, Italy (founded by the CCM opera department) and instrumental and vocal
workshops of all kinds. Excepted were
programs offered through the CCM Preparatory Department and the
Instead of complaining, however, when MusicX fell to
the budget ax, founder/artistic director Joel Hoffman took a cue from Dick
Tracy:
“My strategy for the future of the festival
is inspired by the way police detectives work
If there’s a crime to be solved, the logical and intelligent way to go
about it is by looking at every pathway that looks like it has the potential
for being the right one. You follow each
pathway, without favoring one over the other, and in time, one will emerge as
the right one.”
To insure the continuation of MusicX, one of
CCM’s windows on the world, Hoffman investigated several possibilities.
The first, to keep the festival in
A new administration, led by incoming CCM
dean, Douglas Knehans, takes over in September.
Still, "it’s not as if an enormous pile of money is being handed to
CCM just because he shows up,” said Hoffman...
“He has to go out and find it, and nobody in that position would make a
commitment to continue something that’s been cut, or make any commitment for
the future until that person has grown to understand what it means to do it or
not to do it. By the time he (Keeshan)
might conclude that it’s a program worth supporting, it would be too late for
me to organize it with the kinds of people I bring.”
The roster of MusicX guest composers since
1996 reads like a who’s who of contemporary music: John Harbison, John Corigliano, Frederic
Rzewski, George Rochberg, Augusta Read Thomas, William Bolcom, Milton Babbitt,
George Crumb, Aaron Jay Kernis, Michael Torke, Bright Sheng, Louis Andriessen,
Chen Yi, Kaija Saariaho and Michael Nyman, among others. For a complete list of guest composers and
MusicX programs, visit www.ccm.uc.edu/musicx
and click “archives.”
Another possibility is the Hindemith
Foundation in
“A third possibility would be to do it in
Another possibility would be to transfer the
festival to another American university.
“I would love for it to stay here.
On the other hand, the school has made it very clear that it’s not a
priority.”
Hoffman, who heads the composition
department at CCM, doesn’t argue with what he calls “a choice” by the CCM
administration. “It’s based on the understanding
of what in times of financial difficulty, are the elements of the core of the
program. At a certain point, the person
and people in charge are the ones who are responsible for defining what that
core is. If they say the core doesn’t
include new music, then it doesn’t, at least at CCM. I don’t agree with that choice, but I respect
it because it’s either this group of programs that gets preserved and others
jettisoned, or some other configuration.
“I just want to say one thing: this is
happening at a time when the number of people who applied for this festival
from all over the world, was so much more even than last year. A lot of people know about
Still, for Hoffman personally, "the
real value of the festival is something different. With the single intention of trying to bring
a group of people to Cincinnati, some of whom pay to be here and some of whom
get paid to be here, I will have assembled a crowd of about 40 people -- not
counting all of the CCM graduate students which makes it around 120 -- who have
various kinds of formal and informal interactions. What does it for me is that so many times in
so many different ways, much later I find out that collaborations or
relationships have been formed that lead to really good things."
Hoffman sees it as "setting up a whole bunch of chess players on a board. I kind of guide the game to some extent but a lot of it has to do with things that are completely un-orchestrated by me, and they lead to wonderful things."
As for the future of MusicX: "By the beginning of September, I need to either accept that it's not going to continue, or at least not any time soon, or I need to have made a decision as to where it's going to be and then just work on it that way."
For information about Music08, including a complete schedule of programs, see www.ccm.uc.edu/musicx