Yesterday afternoon a new chamber music series debuted in Columbia. Titled "Chamber Innovista" (more on that in a minute), the series at least for the time being is basically another USC music faculty in-house production, but a very welcome addition to the chamber music offerings in town. In recent years USC faculty chamber music concerts have been mostly lumped into the first few Sundays of the concert season in September and early October on the Cornelia Freeman Series, with very little the rest of the year except some occasional chamber music appearances by faculty on the Trinity Episcopal lunchtime concerts or the Baker and Baker series at the Museum of Art. Given that the School of Music has hired new faculty in recent seasons for whom chamber music is a big part of their creative lives, it's great to see this new outlet for these kind of performances spread out more throughout the year. (For now, "CI: Columbia" is starting cautiously, with just a couple of concerts this semester).
If you take into account the world-class concerts of the Wadsworth series at the art museum, then add in the Freeman series, this new Chamber Innovista, the Sterling Chamber Players series at their venue on Senate Street, the Baker and Baker series, and much of what goes on at the Trinity series, Columbia has quietly been transforming itself into a pretty good city for chamber music in all its guises. (Actually, this season at least you can also include the Southern Exposure new music series in that grouping: they presented the Amernet Quartet in September playing Carter and Bartok, and then an ad hoc assemblage doing the Schnittke Piano Quintet in November.)
This is all great to witness, and still, for the sake of the music's future one wishes some of this were being marketed a little more in the direction of, and reaching, some younger and newer audiences. (Exception of course being the aforementioned Southern Exposure, universally acknowledged as being the hippest series of all the above and always a hot, if free, ticket). I've wondered what might happen down the road, for example, with the Wadsworth series at CMA (or Spoleto for that matter) after Charles Wadsworth's retirement; in Columbia at least that looks to be in good hands, as Wadsworth appears to be already bringing cellist Edward Arron in as a kind of Associate Artistic Director and possible heir apparent. A series of that quality just has to be kept going here indefinitely, as an essential ingredient in the city's musical life.
There has been some talk floating around town in recent years of possible chamber music ventures that might be a fusion of USC's finest with other top-level musicians from the touring chamber circuit. In fact, there is starting to be some overlap of those two groups; that's evident for example with somebody like USC bassoon prof Peter Kolkay, who plays regularly with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and who will be a part of the Spoleto chamber gang this May.
From what I understand the "Chamber Innovista" grew out of this impulse; one hopes that the fact that it is a university-generated endeavor doesn't hamper it too much. What do I mean? Well, folks, in academia things are usually decided by committee, if they can be decided at all. By the time everybody gets their hands in on a decision about programming and about marketing the product often gets diluted or bloated or incoherent in its presentation. Now, if you're just happy to present another fine in-house university series and not worrying about bringing that to newer audiences around the Midlands and even wider across the state, it's no big deal. But if Chamber Innovista is aiming for more than that, it might do better to eventually spin off into its own entity, with its own Board and strong artistic and executive leadership.
For one thing, I'm sorry but that name---Chamber Innovista--- is dead on arrival. As is widely acknowledged these days in the industry, the phrase "chamber music" is saddled with associations that do not help in marketing to younger and more diverse audiences. Groups and presenters are falling over themselves trying to figure out ways to remove that phrase from their names and even from their marketing plans. (The negative associations may be unfair and not the real story, devotees of the art form know, but they exist nevertheless as a barrier to getting people to discover that "real story.") If you want to be the distinguished and venerable series in town and be the Such-And-Such-Chamber-Music-Society, well, that's understandable. But to neither keep the name nor lose it entirely gives you the worst of both worlds, and makes absolutely no sense to somebody who doesn't really know much about chamber music. I understand wanting to hook into the new USC/Columbia high-tech/research moniker "Innovista," but adding "Chamber" to that makes no sense and torpedoes the image that I think the series was hoping to go for. Plus it's clunky and does not roll off the tongue. Whether or not this is how it came about, the name has "Committee Decision to Please Two Separate Factions" written all over it. Please, guys, it's not too late since you've barely gotten started: rethink that name!
Secondly, as much as I like the USC recital hall (and acknowledging that there really are not other good options for small or midsized spaces in the area), I hope they think about taking this series off campus and into the city (both Richland and Lexington counties) at least occasionally. And maybe take one of these concerts and make it a touring program, to take around several cities in South Carolina.
That last point came to mind at yesterday's concert as I was listening to the mesmerizing performance of
George Crumb's "Music for a Summer Evening" played by pianists Joe Rackers and Lynn Kompass (full disclosure: she's my wife, and darling, I have NO idea when you had time to practice that piece!) and percussionists Scott Herring and Greg Apple. It was just way too good and wonderful and too much work for them just to do the one performance. That needs to go on the road!
Every time I hear Crumb now, I'm reminded of some of the first performances of his music I heard as a teenager and got very excited about in the mid-1970's. In the narrative we're told today about the revolt against high-modernist, academic, "uptown" music in the '70's it's mostly the minimalists Reich and Glass who you hear about. Not so much Crumb, but I distinctly remember concerts even down in North Carolina where I grew up in the 70's, and the excitement that Crumb's music engendered at that time precisely because it was "a new music you could like," as people around me were saying and feeling then. Maybe because he didn't really have a school of composers follow in his footsteps and also did not launch the DIY composer-performer model the way Glass and Reich did with their ensembles, he's not mentioned as often as part of that larger trend in American music but I think he should be. The music still holds its power over an audience: in the many moments of stillness at yesterday's performance, you could have heard a pin drop (or a piano string plucked, for that matter).
