Reed all over

Modern classical at Bowdoin

By Doug Hubley

For information on the “Reed All About It” series check the listings, or call 725-3321.

CLASSICAL SAX: Kenneth Radnofsky comes to Bowdoin.”

If the current classical offerings are making your eyelids droop, a series starting tomorrow at Bowdoin College might be just the jolt you need.

It’s called “Reed All About It: Woodwind Music for the 21st Century.” It’s distinguished, first, by its devotion to contemporary chamber music, which spells trouble for most presenters. Many people who are otherwise classical fans don’t much like new stuff and so, due to the pesky obligation to sell tickets, it’s either ignored outright or carefully surrounded by works of proven appeal, in the manner of friends propping up a drunk. But Bowdoin, unencumbered by tawdry concerns about admission revenues, can comfortably offer three free concerts of cutting-edge music.

Moreover, if you hadn’t guessed, it’s all music for reeds – or at least two reed instruments, saxophone and clarinet. (A scheduled oboist had to cancel.)

Reed All About It is the brainchild of Elliott Schwartz, Maine’s best-known composer and a professor of music at Bowdoin. The series consists of seven public events over three weeks: the concerts, all at 7:30 p.m. in Gibson Recital Hall; discussion-workshops led by the performers; and a tenuously related February 20 lecture by musicologist Meirion Bowen.

Kenneth Radnofsky may be the best-known of the performers. He is a classical saxophonist who juggles heavy teaching commitments in Boston with concerts all over the place, from Taipei to Oregon to Dresden. He and pianist Yoshiko Kline open the series with a concert Friday, February 16 and offer a discussion-workshop at 10:30 a.m. the following day, also in Gibson.

On March 2, clarinetist Michael Richards and pianist Kazuko Tanosaki present a program of Japanese music, in which they specialize. They return to Gibson at 10:30 the next morning for a workshop. Composer-performer Kate Romano, a rising star in Britain’s new-music scene, wraps the series with music for various clarinets and electronics on March 9. Her workshop is at 4 p.m. March 8 in Moulton Union.

There’s a lot of overlap between new music and music for reeds. That’s partly because recent composers have been scrambling to make up for a tradition of reed neglect during the 19th century. There are dozens of string and piano pieces for every one Beethoven woodwind quintet or Brahms clarinet sonata. “Those instruments weren’t thought of as heroic enough,” says Schwartz, “and they didn’t have the sex appeal that the violin and piano did.”

Hungry for new sounds, 20th-century composers fed their appetites with Asian, African, and American influences — American as in jazz. Those influences often sounded more true on reeds than strings or piano. Too, reeds suited an emerging sonic vocabulary that reflected, Schwartz says, an everyday world “of speed and violent confrontation and sudden changes in focus.”

Radnofsky, who has performed occasionally in Maine, enjoys a reputation based both on sheer musical excellence and the energy he puts into expanding the saxophone literature. And on the way he often does it: Radnofsky founded World-Wide Concurrent Premieres, an organization through which performers chip in to pay composers’ commissions. The resulting works are then premiered simultaneously in many locations, giving them a stronger start than a single premiere somewhere. The 1995 debut of John Harbison’s San Antonio, featured on Radnofsky’s Bowdoin program, involved 43 saxophonists sprinkled all over the globe.

So what you have is many more people actually hearing the premiere instead of just reading about it in the New York Times. “Why worry about who’s first?” Radnofsky asks. “The idea is not that one does the world premiere of a work, but that we as performers aid in the creation and dissemination of music, so that little by little we can inch our art forward.” (Schwartz, incidentally, has joined the long list of composers who have written for Radnofsky, with a concerto scheduled for a non-world-wide debut next fall, in Boston.)

Four of the five pieces on the Brunswick program were written for Radnofsky: Preview, by Michael Colgrass; Big Crunch, by John McDonald; Harbison’s San Antonio, and a sonata by Gunther Schuller. (Those works will appear this spring on the CD Radnofsky.com, on the Boston Records label.) A piece by Luciano Berio completes the evening.

I haven’t heard the Berio, but the others, all written during the past six years, are agreeable examples of a genre that can be thorny. The McDonald may most closely fulfill common preconceptions of new music; written to honor physicist Stephen Hawking, it depicts the birth and death of the universe with appropriate energy and ruckus. The others are more lyrical and evocative: The Schuller drifts through a noirish reverie, and the Harbison depicts a Latino dance party.

While jazz and pop players have parlayed the saxophone into a mainstream emblem of cool, classical sax struggles along on crumbs of attention. Yet the instrument’s basic appeal — its warmth and its resemblance to the human voice — comes through in any genre, Radnofsky believes. “You just have to know what words to say,” he explains.

Doug Hubley, an occasional contributor to Bowdoin College’s alumni magazine, can be reached at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net.