She is particularly impatient with atonal
music, or music produced by minimalist or serialist composers such as John Adams
or Philip Glass. “Suddenly the biggest criticism anyone can make is that
something sounds like movie music, but there is nothing wrong with melody,
harmony or rhythm.”
 | | SHONNA VALESHA'S photography from Alexandra’s Garden, Jack in the Pulpit, V.4. (Photograph by Shonna Valeska 2005.) |
When her 50th birthday arrived in 2000, Gould decided to
search for composers whom she liked and work to advance their careers. Her quest
took her to a nonprofit organization called Meet the Composer, where Heather
Hitchens, the group’s president, was also looking for a method for making
patronage viable in the music world. Together, Gould and Hitchens worked to
identify three orchestras in the Bay Area—the Santa Rosa Symphony, the Marin
Symphony and the Oakland East Bay Symphony—that were receptive to the idea of
having a patron commission work and play an active role in selecting which
composers would be chosen.
“Initially, I think they were very skeptical and
wary of having a patron give them anything but money,” Gould says. “The major
orchestras simply don’t want this kind of involvement, and there is a general
feeling that patrons getting involved in artistic decisions is kind of risky.”
The three conductors, Gould and Hitchens hammered out a model for collaborating.
They would each listen to the work of all the commission candidates and decide
jointly on nine winners, each of whom would be asked to produce one work. Three
works would be commissioned for each orchestra—one per season—and all three
orchestras agreed to play each other’s commissions during the season.
 |  | MU XIN paintings Sunset in
the Yellow Mountains and Cicadas Drone in
Summer Trees. (Photography by John Bigelow Taylor, N.Y.C.) |
Gould
found that her views did not always mesh with those of the conductors. “Some
composers I really liked, but someone else on the panel vetoed. Still, I’ll find
ways to work with them later,” she explains. Sometimes Gould emailed or phoned
Hitchens, looking for guidance. “She’d ask me what she was missing, then go back
and listen again,” Hitchens says. “This is the kind of engaged patron that music
needs. While we don’t want the kind of situation where the music is just what
the donor wants, we may have gone too far in the opposite direction, to the
point where there is no dialogue between the donors, the musicians and
composers.”
Gould has spent about $500,000 funding this particular project,
which she has dubbed Magnum Opus. Thus far, the returns on her investment are
impressive. Kenji Bunch’s work, Liechtenstein Triptych, premiered in Santa Rosa
during the 2003–2004 season. One of the conductors, Alasdair Neale, programmed
the work for a concert with the Sun Valley Symphony in Idaho this past August,
and Jeffrey Kahane plans to conduct it and a second work, Vespertine Symphonies
by Kevin Puts, at the Colorado Symphony in February.
| “The bigger issue is the feeling that you are playing a role in helping the
artists create their best work—and you learn more about their thoughts and work
processes as well. |
More important,
perhaps, is the fact that Gould’s patronage has become an impetus for others. An
anonymous patron has commissioned a series of works in memory of Daniel Pearl,
the slain Wall Street Journal reporter who was also a talented violinist. The
first work, by composer Steve Reich, will premier at the Barbican in London in
October, then be performed at Carnegie Hall. In spite of her organization’s
name, Hitchens is equally amenable to patrons who want to work directly with
performers; she recently helped donors sponsor new works for cellist Yo-Yo Ma
and violinist Midori.
 |  | | TOP: ROBERT Rosenkranz among pieces of his collection. (Photograph by Shonna Valeska 2005.) Bottom: Kathryn Gould started working with musicians after she tired of performances
that she found boring or irritating. |
Midori may agree to play a salon concert for a patron,
but the copyright of any musical work belongs to the composer; hence music
patrons do not actually have the opportunity to profit in the way that visual
art patrons do. “You just have to figure out what kind of relationship and
contact is OK with the donor, the performer and the composer, and make sure that
no one pushes those boundaries too far,” Hitchens says. Gould, who does receive
private recordings of the works she has commissioned as well as copies of the
scores, says she is not interested in financial rewards, but in her connection
with the world of music. Ultimately, however, she hopes to find a way to fund
recordings of the works she has commissioned to keep them alive. Such ideas are
typical of the 21st-century patron’s way of raising the ante, scaling the
business.
Rosenkranz has also expanded his level of patronage by
adding two other artists to his coterie. One of them, Liu Dan, is the artist who
introduced him to Mu Xin. Rosenkranz has asked him to complete a 35-foot-long
ink painting in scroll format on a famous theme in Chinese art and literature.
Branching out from his passion for Asian art, Rosenkranz also decided to support
the fledgling career of photographer Shonna Valeska after being captivated by
her extreme close-up images of flowers that she then digitally manipulated. He
asked Valeska to create a series of photographs in a similar style in the garden
adjoining his East Hampton, N.Y., home. He brought the resulting works to the
proprietor of a garden reserve and gallery in the area. “The photographs ended
up as the gallery’s major display this past summer,” an obviously elated
Rosenkranz says.
“Too much bad
music is being commissioned; the audience cringes and the works
are never performed again—it’s a vicious circle.” |
The level of involvement that today’s patrons take on
varies greatly. Not all patrons are prepared to dedicate the amount of time,
effort and capital that Gould did to her Magnum Opus project—hundreds of hours
of meetings, hundreds more of listening to tapes. A fledgling patron might start
by commissioning a single four-minute solo violin work for Midori for a few
thousand dollars, for example. In Rosenkranz’s case, a busy business life means
he has less time than he might like to spend talking to artists about their
work, but he has not ruled out finding new ways to support artists in the
future. “When you commission work from living artists, you are able to try to
put them on the map or stimulate a great and ambitious work, something that will
last for centuries and become part of art history,” Rosenkranz says. “The
immense satisfaction that comes with that is hard to describe.” Match Makers
Artadia is a nonprofit network that was set up to secure financial
support for artists, arrange introductions to visual artists and channel
donations from patrons into cash grants.
www.artadia.org
210 Eleventh Avenue, Suite
503
New York, NY 10001
212.727.2233
Meet the Composer seeks support from individual patrons for its global
network of both composers and performing musicians in all styles of music, and
introduces their work to interested patrons.
www.meetthecomposer.org
75 Ninth
Avenue, 3R Suite C
New York, NY 10011
212.645.6949
Suzanne McGee is a New York–based freelance writer who reports on topics such
as finance and the art world.
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