November 21, 2002
Concert celebrates 27 years of UW composer’s work
Most people get a cake for their birthday; Diane Thome got a concert for hers. Of course, since she wrote all the music to be played in the concert, there’s a bit of a question as to who is giving whom a gift. The audience will certainly receive one at Contemporary Group: Celebrating Diane Thome, slated for 7:30 p.m. Monday, Dec. 2 in Meany Theater.
Thome, a professor of composition and chair of the composition program in the School of Music, turned 60 this year, and her colleagues gave her a “wonderful surprise party.” A little later, it occurred to Joel Durand, director of the school’s Contemporary Group, that Thome had been teaching at the UW for 25 years. So what better way to celebrate both milestones than with a retrospective of her work.
The program spans 27 years of Thome’s music, although she’s been composing for much longer than that. In fact, Thome reports that she wrote an opera as a preteen and convinced the other children on her block to perform it. And unlike most kids who get piano lessons, she didn’t complain about practicing. Instead, at the age of 12 she asked her mother to find her a composition teacher. “And it’s one of the great gifts of my life that she did that for me,” she says.
Looking back, Thome thinks she just wanted to have her music presented, and as a kid, she couldn’t think of any reason why it couldn’t be done “Kids aren’t beset with thoughts like it’s impossible, I can’t do it, who would listen — that comes later,” she says. “There’s this wonderful purity and hopefulness and confidence.”
By the time she went off to college, Thome had heard her music performed many times as she entered and won composition contests. But it wasn’t until years later that she wrote pieces she considers keepers. For this concert, she chose music that represents different time periods in her life and different styles.
“It includes electronic pieces and acoustic pieces, pieces for solo instrument and for large chamber ensemble, as well as pieces with choreography,” she says. “So this is a program with variety.”
It’s also a program with symmetry. Each half of the concert opens with an acoustic work written fairly early in her career. Pianismus (1981) is a piano solo to be played by Deborah Dewey, while The Yew Tree (1979) is for soprano and large chamber ensemble. Kathryn Weld is the soloist and Jeremy Briggs-Roberts will conduct.
The acoustic works are followed by pieces for computer-realized sound with a live soloist. Bright Air/Brilliant Fire features Sarah Bassingthwaighte on flute, while Estuaries of Enchantment features Rebecca Henderson on oboe. The concluding work in each half is a solo electronic piece with choreography by Shannon Hobbs.
It was natural that Thome should get involved with electronic music, although by the time she began she already had received classical training at the Eastman School of Music. And she did her graduate work at Princeton at a time when it was one of only two places in the country where one could study computer synthesis.
“So I had this great opportunity to learn about computer synthesis when it was in a pioneer phase,” she says.
Thome’s doctoral dissertation, in fact, focused on the structural characterization of the sound domain. She explains it this way: “We take as a given the distinct quality of a flute, a clarinet, a piccolo or a trombone — that’s timbre. But if you were in the role suddenly of the instrument designer, you could potentially create anything. So that presents an opportunity to reconceptualize this domain of sound, and I was very fascinated by this possibility.”
In other words, the writer of electronic music has the opportunity to create not just the song or the concerto or whatever he or she is writing, but the orchestra itself.
Thome has written quite a bit of electronic music since her days at Princeton, and she says the first step is always to decide on her “palette of sound” — her orchestra. This tends to make electronic music more time consuming to write, but Thome cautions that it’s not a good idea to make qualitative generalizations about electronic vs. acoustic music.
“I always tell audiences, never make the mistake of assuming the medium is the message,” she says. “You can write boring music using the most fancy electronics and you can write boring music using the most wonderful orchestra. So it’s not the medium that determines the quality of the music.”
In fact, in spite of her fascination with electronics, Thome still writes acoustic music. Two weeks after the UW concert, for example, a new acoustic choral piece commissioned by The Esoterics and based on a Latin text will be premiered.
Regardless of what she’s writing, Thome says she always thinks the next piece is the most exciting. “I find the creative process to be engaging and exhilarating in an absolutely essential way,” she says. “And I think it’s wonderful to have colleagues and students with whom to share this because all the people doing this have a certain amount of passion about it. It’s not an easy thing to do in the ordinary practical sense. You’re not doing it because you want to make a million dollars. You’re not doing it to impress people. You’re doing it really because it helps you to become who you are.”
Tickets for the concert of Thome’s music are $8, $5 for students and seniors, and are available at the Arts Ticket Office, 206-543-4880.
