I was interested to read Josh Barone's profile of Chad Smith, the Boston Symphony's recently appointed administrative chief. Given Smith's track record at the LA Phil, there is good reason to believe that he'll have a revivifying impact on an institution that once outstripped all American orchestras in its promotion of new music. It struck me that if the BSO wants to engage more seriously with contemporary reality it does not have far to look. Since 2009, Chaya Czernowin, incontestably one of the most significant composers active today, and also one of the profession's most influential teachers, has been based at Harvard. I suspected that the BSO had barely touched her music, but I was still a bit shocked to discover, on consulting the orchestra's performance history, that it has never played a note. The only item in the archive is a 2019 performance of the string octet Anea Crystal at Tanglewood, featuring Tanglewood Music Center fellows. There are, of course, gifted composers all over Boston, but Czernowin is an internationally towering figure. That the BSO has ignored her is a kind of scandal.
It might also be pointed out that the New York Philharmonic has largely ignored Georg Friedrich Haas and George Lewis, two celebrated composers teaching at Columbia. Each has received but one performance, neither involving the full orchestra. Haas's sextet tria ex uno appeared on a Sound ON program in 2019, while Lewis's Rainbow Family was presented at the Horizons festival back in 1984. Lewis will be curating a Sound ON program next season, but it features the International Contemporary Ensemble, not the NY Phil.
