Hey Composer!

   Hey, composer!"
   That’s how neighbors greet Jennifer Higdon on the streets of Philadelphia, she said.
   Higdon, 42, whose Concerto for Orchestra recorded by Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony received four Grammy nominations in December including "Best Classical Contemporary Composition," is one of today’s most popular classical composers.
   She wears the distinction proudly.
   "I think it’s important that music speaks to the audience," she said from Philadelphia, where she is a faculty member at the Curtis Institute of Music. "I don’t want people to feel like they have to know anything about classical music to appreciate it. I try to make sure everything is clear and that the ideas are interesting."
   Higdon’s music is performed over 100 times a year. When her Concerto for Orchestra was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2002 for an American Symphony Orchestra League convention, her picture and a glowing review appeared on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The work has been performed 19 times since, an extraordinary record for a piece of new music.
   Music director Paavo Järvi and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra perform Higdon’s 2000 "Fanfare Ritmico" – a work described by program annotator Kyle Gann as "a miniature ‘Rite of Spring’" (Stravinsky) - on the final concert of the CSO season at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Music Hall.
   Guest artist is pianist Alexander Toradze, who will join CSO principal trumpeter Philip Collins in Shostakovich’s Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings in C Minor.
   Järvi will close with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4.
   It won’t be the first time Higdon’s music has been heard in Cincinnati this year. In January, "Blue Cathedral," an ethereal work written in 2000 in memory of her brother, was performed by the Concert Orchestra at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music led by Brian Cole.
   The appeal of Higdon’s music derives, in part, from its rhythmic vitality.
   "My music tends to be very energetic. Everyone describes it as an American sound. It’s hard for me to hear, maybe because I hear it all the time in my head, but people seem to feel like it communicates."
   Like much of her music, "Fanfare Ritmico" has "a serious percussion presence." With four percussionists playing 26 instruments, plus a timpanist, "it’s a workout," she said.
   A native of Brooklyn, Higdon moved to Atlanta as a child, then to Seymour in rural East Tennessee.
   "Classical music was probably the least present music in our household. There was so little of it that it almost didn’t register. My dad worked at home – he was an artist, which meant there was a lot of music in the background all the time - but normally it was rock and roll or bluegrass or reggae."
   Her favorite, she said, was The Beatles. "Every day my brother and I listened to some of their albums." She taught herself to play flute and played in the marching band at her high school. As a flute major at Bowling Green State University, she was drawn to composition and by her senior year, had decided to pursue it. She enrolled in a graduate conducting class, taught at the time by Spano.
   She earned a Ph.D. in composition at the University of Pennsylvania and an artist diploma from Curtis, where her classmates included Järvi.
   "We had score-reading together. I’m not a pianist so I wrestled with trying to read all the lines. He was a lot better at it than I was."
   Higdon, whose teachers have included noted American composers Ned Rorem and George Crumb, owes one of her breaks to a kitten, she said.
   "One of my fellow composers at Curtis had just gotten a kitten and he was doing copying for the New York Philharmonic. He had done all these parts. They were in ink and were really beautiful. The kitten came up and relieved itself on them and they all ran. He had only two days to copy everything, so I helped him."
   The composer whose music they copied remembered Higdon’s good deed.
   "A couple of years later, she was running a music series in New York and she called and asked if I would like to write a piece."
   One thing led to another – her music has been recorded on over two dozen CDs - and she is in such demand that she turns down 2-6 commissions a month. "I am booked into 2008-09," she said.
   She is also a self-publisher and you can order her music online at www.jenniferhigdon.com.
   A prolific worker, Higdon spends 4-7 hours a day, seven days a week composing (her teaching load at Curtis is light, usually two or three hours a week).
   Her new percussion concerto will be premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in November and repeated at Carnegie Hall in December. She is working on a concerto for piano sensation Lang Lang.  
   She composes in hotel rooms and on airplanes. "I carry a lap top and a mini keyboard. The trick is to keep writing because if you write every day, it keeps the ideas flowing."
   The CSO led by Paavo Järvi performs Jennifer Higdon’s "Fanfare Ritmico," Shostakovich’s Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings in C Minor and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Music Hall. Tickets are $17.50-$73, $10 for students, half price for seniors, at (513) 381-3300 and the CSO website www.cincinnatisymphony.org.
(first published in The Cincinnati Post May 3, 2005)