roger allen ward, 1963-. Concerto for Harp and Orchestra, dedicated to Susan Allen and the Symphony of the Canyons. Completed in December of 1997. This is the first performance of the work. Scored for 2 each flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, and trombones, plus tympani, bass drum, 3 tom-toms, triangle, sustain cymbal, crash cymbal, guiro, xylophone, wood block, pianoforte, solo harp, and strings.
In 1996, roger allen ward, having completed his undergraduate work at the University of Oklahoma by earning an almost innumerable string of compositional awards, enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree. He soon struck up a friendship with Susan Allen, who teaches harp at CalArts.
By a fortunate coincidence, it was in the following summer that Symphony of the Canyons conductor Robert Lawson asked Ms. Allen to perform with the orchestra. He wanted to choose a program of American music, so he asked her to select a work by an American composer. However, the harp is an exceedingly difficult instrument to write for, especially in a concerto setting, so her choices were limited primarily to pieces by Walter Piston and Virgil Thomson.
In August, roger allen ward brought a recording of the Piston work to Ms. Allen's home so that she could listen to it with a copy of the score and decide whether to play it. ``I was actually trying to convince her to play the Thomson, which I like quite a bit,'' says ward, but circumstances (and a glass of wine) intervened to produce a very different result. ``We were listening to the recording on the patio, looking at the lights of Santa Clarita, and Susie commented that `This music is completely wrong for California. It's too uptight for us; it's a Boston piece. I want to play something with a California flavor.' In an impulsive moment, I offered to write her a piece myself. `That's great!' said Susie. `It'll be perfect for Santa Clarita.' So I wrote the piece for her.''
Of his music, ward says, ``I don't have to worry about pitch sets or weird notation or any of that funky stuff. I write tonal music. When I have written... [the other] kind of music, it didn't sound like me and my heart just [wasn't] in it. I've chosen to combine two American Music traditions: the sort of pastoral... tradition of such people as Thomson, Copland, etc., and Minimalist-based music [like that of] Reich, Glass, [and] Adams. It seemed to me that those [styles] were meant to be combined... and so I set out to do that about 10 years ago.''
Asked to describe the present work, ward remarked simply, ``Susie's a sassy gal, so I wrote her a sassy piece.'' Incidentally, the opening of the third movement, in which Ms. Allen drums out a pattern on the wooden soundbox of the harp, was her own idea, invented in response to ward's desire for the final movement to have an underlying rhythmic drive. Together, ward and Allen have generated an outstanding example of the sort of composer-performer collaboration that has always driven the development of music, and that will carry us into the 21st century without forgetting the tradition that brought us to this point.
© 1998, Geoff Kuenning
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