In 50 years as a composer, no compromise

Composer Charles Wuorinen is having a busy season, with seven premieres, including one tonight in Rockport. (Nina roberts)

A video interview with the American composer Charles Wuorinen posted on the NewMusicBox website offers a snapshot of general reaction to his music. With a segment of Wuorinen's Third Piano Concerto playing in the background, a series of words that have been used to describe his works quickly crowds the screen: difficult - modernist - rigorous - impenetrable - gnarly - imposing - severe.

Quick cut to a shot of the composer himself. "Don't forget 'thorny,' " he says with a slightly disdainful grin. "And 'angular.' "

It's a clear indication of his unconcern with what he calls "the silly descriptive terms" that get attached to his music. His indifference is a lesson borne out of long and somewhat bitter experience. "In my youth I was described - sometimes unfavorably, sometimes favorably - as a dynamic and exciting composer," he says during a phone interview. "Then came the sort of populist phase of new music, which we're still in, and all this became a problem for some people."

The "all this" refers to a large body of musical works that Wuorinen, 69, has been writing for more than 50 years. His intricately crafted music is written in a musical language descended from Schoenberg's 12-tone technique, one that generates the form and harmonic structure of a work from an ordered set of musical notes. Even his admirers often note his music's multilayered complexity. He is an unapologetic defender of high art and culture and an often caustic critic of the hold that "populism" has exerted on the music world over the last few decades, making him appear sometimes as an isolated figure defending an outmoded aesthetic system.

Cutting against that lonely image, however, is the fact that Wuorinen seems to be busier than ever. Already this season he has had six new works premiered, and a seventh will be unveiled tonight: his Second Piano Quintet, performed by the Brentano String Quartet and pianist Peter Serkin at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, which commissioned the piece.

Massachusetts has lately become a kind of Wuorinen Central, thanks largely to the efforts of James Levine, a major champion of his work. The Boston Symphony Orchestra's music director has led several of the composer's scores over the last few years, including the premieres in Boston of the Fourth Piano Concerto, with Serkin (in 2005), and the Eighth Symphony (last year).

To underscore the absurdity of what he calls the "journalistic adjectives" used to describe his works, Wuorinen points to two reviews of a recently performed work. "One critic described it as 'arbitrary and charmless,' " while he paraphrases the other estimation as "beautiful beyond measure. Now, which is it?" he asks rhetorically.

If his works have sometimes met with perplexity, his commentary has made him a flashpoint in the ongoing disputes about what new music should be and how it should accommodate its audience. Wuorinen has been a fierce critic of genres such as minimalism and neo-tonalism for being, as he put it elsewhere, "art indistinguishable from entertainment . . . something that can be enjoyed without any commitment to the source." The idea that audiences can only appreciate what he considers a dumbed-down form of art is, he thinks, simply pandering to a low, if not the lowest, common denominator.

Although Wuorinen is critical of the music, he has always been careful never to mention specific composers by name. Indeed, his real target seems to be what he construes as bad faith among those who influence and direct the organizations that bring new music to the public, and thus function as a barometer of elite culture. "We're talking about people who simultaneously want the benefits of what's perceived as high culture, but who also want to be commercial," he explains. By excluding what he considers serious music on the ground of its supposed inaccessibility, "they set up a straw man and say 'Oh, the public won't come. And so we can't do this, we can't do that.' What they're doing is saying, 'I'm afraid to stand up for this.' "

He is quick to add that there are exceptions - most notably Levine. Asked what it's like to have him as an advocate, Wuorinen responds, "One word: glorious. I mean, the performances he's given me are just the best." He is similarly salutary about Serkin, whom he calls "a very great pianist. I couldn't ask for a better interpreter."

Indeed, Wuorinen is "still scribbling away," as he puts it. Among the large projects on the horizon, the most notable is an opera based on Annie Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain," for which he is in discussions with New York City Opera. (One early notice of the project came on the blog of New Yorker music critic Alex Ross under the headline "Gay 12-tone cowboys.")

He is asked what advice he might give to a neophyte coming to his music for the first time. He is, in fact, often asked to address audiences on just this topic. His answer is like his music - uncompromising and unwilling to pander.

"Nothing that I could possibly say in two minutes or two hours could really make a big difference, so let's not pretend," he says. "The only thing to do is to relax, not worry, and do with the thing you're about to hear whatever you do with music as a whole. Don't worry about hearing it in some kind of allegedly correct way, because there isn't any. One of the marvelous things about music is that there is no right way to listen." For information: 978-546-7391, rcmf.org

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The New England Conservatory announced on Wednesday that it had concluded its seven-year Gift of Music capital campaign. The fund-raising effort - which was initiated under former NEC president Daniel Steiner and completed under current president Tony Woodcock - raised $115 million, exceeding its goal by $15 million. Among the major contributions were three gifts totaling $20 million. One of those, a $5 million endowment, will support the new Director of Orchestras faculty chair, the first occupant of which will be incoming conductor Hugh Wolff. www.new englandconservatory.edu/give

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