New Life for the Invalid

By Michael Walsh

Every successful composer comes to a point when his career reaches a critical mass, when the awards, commissions and appointments snowball and the transformation from obscure academic to mainstream professional is complete. That time has arrived for John Harbison. The New Jersey native's reputation has been growing steadily, but two recent events should serve to give him greater recognition. Last month Harbison, 48, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music; this month his Symphony No. 2 received its world premiere in San Francisco. Prestigious as it is, the prize only certifies what many in musical circles were already aware of. The symphony, however, boldly proclaims an important voice in an art form that has been declared dead more often than the Broadway musical.

A kind of winning eclecticism has prevailed in recent Pulitzer awards, mirroring a two-decade trend in contemporary composition. Since 1980 there have been prizes for neoconservatives like David Del Tredici, committed serialists like the late Roger Sessions and unabashed proponents of tonality like Stephen Albert.

And now for Harbison. His music is approachably tonal without being obvious; a Harbison tune is less a hummable melody than a strongly profiled motif designed to forward the musical argument, not seduce the ear. His structures are sturdy,his orchestration is crisp and clean. Yet this is not the dread "Princeton School" music of baleful repute, the arid note spinning that often characterizes the works of Ivy League composers like Milton Babbitt. Harbison, who as a teenager played jazz piano and who at Harvard led the Bach Society Orchestra, is an academic with a heart.

The new piece, commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony for its 75th anniversary, is a 20-minute essay divided into four movements, each with a quotidian title: "Dawn," "Daylight," "Dusk" and "Darkness." Such tone painting is not surprising, for Harbison's music generally contains a strong theatrical element, reflected in his predilection for opera and song cycle. The symphony, however, is not some Americanized La Mer (whose first movement is titled "From Dawn to Noon on the Sea"); the sun may come up and the sun may go down, but it never sets on his cool rational spirit.

Yet there is much that is evocative in the new work. In the preludic "Dawn" the themes gradually emerge and coalesce, blaze luminously and then recede. "Daylight" is a scurrying scherzo marked by buzzing strings, hiccuping brass and chattering woodwinds. The slow movement, "Dusk," is the work's emotional center, a lambent watercolor of uncommon beauty. After this, the finale comes as something of a letdown. The symphony's clear textures give way to a muddiness that cannot be entirely justified by the "Darkness" sobriquet. Harbison rejected his first draft as too light in mood, but the symphony now ends diffidently rather than blackly. Without firm cadences to rely on, audiences have trouble enough knowing when a new piece is over; at the first performance, skillfully conducted by Herbert Blomstedt, it was not immediately clear when the last light had flickered out.

This, though, is a relatively small matter. Better to celebrate the rise to prominence of Harbison and fellow Symphonists Albert and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, who won her Pulitzer in 1983. Like Broadway, the symphony is a fabulous invalid: there is nothing wrong with it that a few good works cannot cure.