Ellen Taaffe Zwilich has heard Episodes in her mind since she began composing it. Saturday, she will meet it as a fully realized work.
By JOHN FLEMING
Published February 20, 2004
Composing must rank among the most challenging of creative acts. How does Ellen Taaffe Zwilich go about it?
"The thing I love about writing is the imagination of the final product as you're just sort of sitting there in your own little room with a computer screen in front of you," Zwilich said. "The projection toward that performance, in my mind, is very exciting."
Saturday, Zwilich will realize the completion of her Episodes for violin and piano when violinist Itzhak Perlman and pianist Rohan de Silva premiere the work at Ruth Eckerd Hall.
Zwilich, a symphony orchestra violinist before devoting her life to composing, worked out Episodes on her fiddle before sending it to Perlman and de Silva.
"So it started out as mine, then it became theirs, and on (Saturday) it becomes everybody's," said Zwilich, who in 1983 was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in music, for her Symphony No. 1.
Writing a piece of music and then turning it over to performers, she said, "is sort of like sending a kid off to first grade, and then next thing you know, they graduate from college and have their own life. It's a very bizarre and interesting experience, being a composer."
Episodes was commissioned for the 20th anniversary of newly renovated Ruth Eckerd Hall by Ray and Nancy Murray, a Clearwater couple who have been supportive of the musical community in the Tampa Bay area. Zwilich, who grew up in South Florida and now divides her time between New York and Pompano Beach, was a logical choice for the commission.
Zwilich and Perlman, who knew each other slightly, met before she began to work on the piece.
"We had a little chat," said Perlman, who had not played any of Zwilich's music before this. "I just told her my wish list as to what the piece might be like. I believe that the violin is a singing instrument, and therefore I wanted some sort of vocal quality to the piece. And I'm a great fan of music that has a rhythmic quality. So those are two things I mentioned to her."
Zwilich was inspired by the idea of having the legendary violinist play her work. "I'm very much stimulated by a commission and knowing who is going to perform it," she said. "Just hearing his sound in my mind and imagining him playing the piece was a turn on."
Composer and violinist seemed to be on the same wave length. Episodes, a two-movement work running about 12 minutes, combines elements of song and dance.
"The first movement is very singing, in a kind of modern American way, and the second is very dancey," Zwilich said. "It's a celebration of these two aspects. I just thought of it as a salute to this double nature of the fiddle."
Perlman got the score several months ago. "It's a fun piece," he said. "It is not totally, outrageously avant garde. This is something that is quite accessible, and I like that."
The violinist, who will also play works of Beethoven, LeClair and others on his program, has not performed a lot of new music. He mentioned works by Earl Kim and Robert Starer as among the few he has premiered. His advocacy of Episodes ensures that it will be widely heard.
"I'm going to play it all over the place," he said. "I'm always looking for stuff. If you find something good, play it. As a matter of fact, I'm playing it the next night in Naples."
Zwilich, who turns 65 in April, has one of the highest profiles in contemporary music. Rituals, her work commissioned for the Nexus percussion ensemble and orchestra, will be premiered in March by Memphis' Iris Orchestra, Michael Stern conducting.
Her Symphony No. 3, premiered in 1993 by the New York Philharmonic, with former Florida Orchestra music director Jahja Ling conducting, will be played in August by the Philadelphia Orchestra at its summer home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
Zwilich has taken up the cause of music education in recent years. She grew up at a time when learning music was central to a good public school education. At Coral Gables High School, she was first trumpet in the band and concertmaster in the symphony orchestra. She was student conductor of the marching band, which allowed her to try unorthodox composing ideas.
"There were a few double takes when I did arrangements with celesta and English horn for marching band during football games," she said.
She laments the loss of music in schools and is amazed at how quickly things have deteriorated. In Coral Gables in her day, the high school had a music building with practice rooms. There were two bands, an orchestra and two choruses. Today, the music program is a shadow of what it was.
"We've gone from having a great deal of music available in the public schools to having very little of it, and this includes places like New York," she said.
"The thing that's so sad about this is not that you're missing the training of professional musicians but that an enrichment in people's lives is just not there. When you think about most young people now, everything they know about music, they know from somebody who is selling them something, not from their own experience."
Zwilich went to Florida State University when it was known more for the arts than football. Ernst von Dohnanyi, the eminent Hungarian composer and pianist who taught at Tallahassee until his death in 1960, drew talented faculty and students to the nationally recognized music program.
"I kind of knew what an extraordinary experience I was getting, but I was also very young and innocent," she said. "I had letters from Dohnanyi, and I threw them away because I'd read them. He drove me home from school on Tuesday afternoons. It was a good time."
Dohnanyi, whose music was out of fashion for decades, is enjoying a big revival these days. The shifting reception provides a lesson for Zwilich.
"As a composer, you don't have control over the ebb and flow of the times," she said. "There are times when you'll be in favor, and there are times when you'll be out of favor. You just have to write your music."
Preview
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's Episodes premieres with violinist Itzhak Perlman and pianist Rohan de Silva at 8 p.m. Saturday at Ruth Eckerd Hall, 1111 McMullen-Booth Road, Clearwater. $45, $52. (727) 791-7400.
