The 2018-19 season announcements for American orchestras have, for the most part, presented a bleakish picture of the state of the art. One index of backward thinking is a lack of female composers. If an orchestra is programming few female composers, it is almost certainly playing little new music, since any serious consideration of the music of our time would have to include a large number of women. If an orchestra is programming no female composers — as is the case, in announcements so far made, for the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony, and the Houston Symphony — something is very wrong. (Chicago has yet to announce its MusicNOW series.) Lisa Hirsch, a longtime monitor of such trends, is keeping tabs; Zoë Madonna muses intelligently on the wider issues, providing a link to a wise Twitter thread by Douglas Shadle. All this relates to issues I brought up in my Florence Price column last week. A lack of non-white composers is another index of backward thinking. If an orchestra is confining itself to music of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, the lineup is going to be as white and male as an alt-right torchlight parade.
The Detroit Symphony is one notable exception to this trend, having included five women among twelve living composers in its 2018-19 season. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, not unexpectedly, is another. America's leading orchestra announced today its centennial season. It also unveiled a new website, causing me some dismay, but I'll leave that aside for now. (The latest iteration of my perpetual complaint about orchestra websites can be found here.) The orchestra has, first of all, commissioned more than fifty pieces from a splendidly diverse group of composers: Julia Adolphe, Daniel Allas, Timo Andres, Julianna Barwick, Eve Beglarian, Ethan Braun, Carolyn Chen, Anthony Cheung, Billy Childs, Unsuk Chin, Christopher Cerrone, Ann Cleare, Donnacha Dennehy, Paul Desenne, Natacha Diels, Bryce Dessner, Francesco Filidei, Ashley Fure, Philip Glass, Adolphus Hailstork, Arnulf Herrmann, Anders Hillborg, Vijay Iyer, George Lewis, Michelle Lou, Dylan Mattingly, Nico Muhly, Jeffrey Mumford, Hitomi Oba, Gabriela Ortiz, Hermeto Pascoal, André Previn, Ellen Reid, Yann Robin, Christopher Rountree, Tyshawn Sorey, Miroslav Srnka, Christopher Stark, Steven Takasugi, Tina Tallon, Toivo Tulev, Pēteris Vasks, Freya Waley-Cohen, George Walker, Kamasi Washington, Lotta Wennäkoski, Julia Wolfe, and Pamela Z. A few of the bigger offerings: a piano concerto by John Adams, with the delightful title Why Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes; new orchestral pieces by Thomas Adès, Louis Andriessen, Steve Reich, and Andrew Norman; the US premières of Kaija Saariaho's harp concerto Trans and Tan Dun's Buddha Passion; and a Chinese-opera piece by Du Yun.
Perhaps the most significant gesture of the entire season is the long-awaited revival of Meredith Monk's masterpiece ATLAS, under the direction of Yuval Sharon, completing his three-year term as the LA Phil's artist-in-residence. Sharon will also direct Cage's Europeras 1 and 2 — a project that ties in with a season-long concentration on the work of Fluxus. Esa-Pekka Salonen will lead a nine-day Stravinsky festival and begin a multi-season exploration of the music of the Weimar Republic (as he is doing at the Philharmonia). Zubin Mehta and André Previn return to their former stomping ground; Michael Tilson Thomas begins a deeper association with his hometown orchestra. Something I'm particularly excited about is a theatrical version of The Tempest, with Sibelius's extraordinarily inventive late-period score; this is an undertaking by Susanna Mälkki, the Phil's principal guest conductor. Gustavo Dudamel will be much in evidence in a season-opening LA Fest, which includes evenings devoted to Andrew Bird, Moby, and Herbie Hancock. Benjamin Millepied choreographs a new Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet. A series of programs examines the music of William Grant Still in the context of the Harlem Renaissance. Eric Owens and Lawrence Brownlee sing a program of spirituals and arias. There will be installations, projections on the exterior of Disney, a celebratory street festival stretching from the hall to the Hollywood Bowl. Mark Swed, in the LA Times, risks hyperbole when he writes, "No orchestra has ever come close to the ambition of this centennial season." But it's hard to think of an immediate counterexample.
