New music program will teach aspiring composers all that jazz

A new initiative at Columbia is looking to jazz up jazz with the help of a chamber orchestra.

Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, in collaboration with the American Composers Orchestra, has announced a project called the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute, to take place on campus from July 20-24.

The program, which is currently accepting applications, aims to provide up to 35 jazz composers, selected from all across the country, with the opportunity to learn about composing for orchestra and to study techniques from current luminaries in the classical, jazz, and experimental music scenes.

During the first five days, participants will work with composer-mentors to learn skills such as score reading, arranging for orchestra, and composing according to orchestral notation. Following the instruction period, a handful of especially promising participants will be chosen to work further with their instructors on composing their own orchestral jazz pieces, to be performed by the American Composers Orchestra at Columbia’s Miller Theatre in June 2011.

George Lewis, director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia, stressed the innovation he hopes the institute will foster. “We wanted to encourage an idea-centered, rather than genre-centered, approach to jazz-identified composition while at the same time presenting new musical and aesthetic resources to both the jazz and classical fields,” he said in an e-mail interview.
To achieve this goal, Lewis invited a host of talented musicians and teachers to lead the institute. Among the several notable instructors for the institute is Fabien Lévy, assistant professor in the department of music at Columbia. Lévy briefly touched on the nature of orchestral composition for the jazz composer. “Of course, there is a difficulty in writing for orchestra—but it is a pretty fun topic to write for,” he said.

According to Lévy, the program aspires to facilitate discovery, both stylistically and technically. “The main topic in this summer course is to have students discover a little bit of new music—so, to present all the possible techniques for each instrument, what you can do with the violin, flute, etc., to help those students discover those new techniques,” he said.

Grammy nominee and prominent jazz musician Derek Bermel, who currently serves as composer-in-residence at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, expounded on the interactive challenges that face the jazz composer writing for orchestra for the first time.

“A lot of jazz composers lack access to the kind of forces that composers of concert music and symphonic music have,” he said. “I think our role is going to be to provide them with some guidance about writing for those kind of forces.”

“In the jazz tradition there’s a tradition of working very closely with your performers. In the tradition of concert music, and especially where orchestras are concerned, you have much less time to get to know your performers, if any,” he said. Lévy also cited issues such as preparing parts, questions of interpretation, and music-writing techniques as potential challenges for the jazz composer writing for an orchestra.

In addition to the opportunity to learn the nuances of orchestration and the chance to receive instruction from notable composers, the institute hopes to provide participants with a space to exchange ideas.

Tania Léon, another composer who will be teaching at the institute, said “The best thing about it, I feel, is that … these great minds are going to be dialoguing with each other without any kind of pre-conceptual comparisons of style.”

“In this way I feel it is long overdue,” she said.