Music by living composers is faring well

Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider Photo: Murat Eyoboglu / Murat Eyoboglu Photo: Murat Eyoboglu / Murat Eyoboglu Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Music by living composers is faring well 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

A few months ago, a little whoop of delight went up in certain online corners of the classical music world. The North Carolina Symphony had announced its 2015-16 season, and the schedule was chock-full of music by living — in fact mostly young — composers.

It truly is an impressive schedule, especially for an orchestra that probably isn’t on the radar of most observers nationwide. The coming season will include world premieres by Sarah Kirkland Snider and the orchestra’s resident conductor, William Henry Curry; recent orchestral works by Caroline Shaw (winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize), Andrew Norman, Sean Shepherd, Nico Muhly and Gabriel Kahane; and even pieces by a couple of more well-established figures, Aaron Jay Kernis and John Adams.

Drab season

Now, you could turn around, as some commentators did, and use that track record as a stick with which to beat bigger and more established organizations. The San Francisco Symphony — to take just one example not remotely at random — is planning a particularly drab season for 2015-16, focused to a surprising extent on traditional repertoire by the same old familiar dead guys. And there are a handful of other notable American orchestras that don’t seem to recognize the extent to which their artistic reputations are tied up with their interest in the culture of our own time.

But if you take a panoptic look around the American orchestral landscape — as I did the other day, digging up the coming seasons for 25 of the nation’s most prominent orchestras and scanning them for the work of living composers — it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the state of contemporary orchestral music is now far better off than it was 20 or even 10 years ago.

The New York Philharmonic, even amid all its worries about renovating its concert hall and finding a new music director to succeed Alan Gilbert, will be offering no fewer than five world premieres in the coming year (including one from Norman), as well as significant works by Magnus Lindberg, Per Norgard, Tan Dun and Gerald Barry. The Los Angeles Philharmonic has commissioned new pieces from Louis Andriessen, Arvo Pärt and (yet again) Norman. The Chicago, St. Louis and Baltimore Symphonies are all faring well in this department, with healthy proportions of music by living composers scattered amid the inevitable torrents of Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky.

The dark-horse standout in my informal survey? That would be the Detroit Symphony, which only a few years ago seemed to be teetering on the brink of the abyss in the face of horrific deficits and fierce labor strife.

Yet the coming season, the eighth under Music Director Leonard Slatkin, promises a remarkably lively and varied lineup, including six world premieres by such composers as Gabriela Lena Frank (the orchestra’s composer-in-residence), Mohammed Fairouz, Tod Machover and Snider again.

And there are other notable standouts scattered across the musical map — some of them in surprising places. The Utah Symphony, for example, will unveil Norman’s new percussion concerto and a new score by Muhly. Daniil Trifonov, the young Russian piano virtuoso whose keyboard skills have recently captivated the world, turns out to be a composer as well — he’ll perform his Piano Concerto with the Pittsburgh Symphony.

Bates premiere

This is hardly to suggest that the musical news is all good. In San Francisco, as I say, the orchestra is content with a commissioned premiere from Mason Bates, along with a piece by Jörg Widmann and a short curtain-raiser by “New Voices” participant Ted Hearne. There are other orchestras, too, where new music seems to be more an afterthought than an artistic priority.

Even more troubling, as always, is the concentration on the music of white men to the exclusion of almost anyone else. And “exclusion” is not putting the matter too strongly — the number of living and dead female composers represented during the San Francisco Symphony’s entire 2015-16 season can be counted on the fingers of, well, no hands at all.

Other organizations aren’t doing much better. That long list of premieres in New York? All of them are by male composers. The situation is the same in St. Louis and Cleveland and (if you focus on the main orchestral series rather than the new-music and chamber programming) Los Angeles. The female composers whose work is getting wide exposure — Frank, Shaw, Snider, Anna Clyne and a few others — tend to show up in multiple venues.

Still, for all this grumbling and nitpicking, the overall picture is enormously heartening — especially in contrast to the more or less mutual disregard that characterized relations between composers and orchestras not that long ago.

For decades, the most important and innovative composers tended to avoid the orchestra, and vice versa. The exceptions often had specific causes, such as John Adams’ 1980s stint as the San Francisco Symphony’s composer-in-residence, which put an orchestra at his disposal on a regular basis.

And now look — composers in their 20s and 30s are flocking to the symphony orchestra as a vehicle for their musical ideas, orchestras are embracing those ideas and giving them an airing, and audiences are at least interested in what’s going on. Does that sound like the old contemporary-music battlefield that so many of us grew up with? Not to me it doesn’t.

Golden age?

On the contrary, we may well be witnessing the beginning of a new golden age of orchestral composition (the brilliant young critic and musicologist Will Robin made this case recently with a 24-hour marathon of 21st century orchestral works on the online radio station Q2 Music). And the key is that mutual support system, in which composers can tackle this demanding assignment with the assurance that orchestras will be there to bring their efforts to life.

It looks as if that is beginning to happen. And as North Carolina goes, so goes the nation.

Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic. E-mail: jkosman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman