Composer on Wheels

"All of a sudden," says Composer William Sydeman, "the stuff has just exploded." The stuff is Composer Sydeman's music, and it has indeed been exploding in the ears of modern music buffs--15 Sydeman premieres in the past two years. Last week Manhattan's Orchestra of America, under Conductor Richard Korn, gave the premiere performance of Sydeman's 14-minute Orchestral Abstractions --the first of five new Sydeman works to be played in January alone.

At 33. Composer Sydeman is understandably pleased by the attention, but he points out that it is the result of "writing music very seriously for ten years." His works have become notable for the variety of their instrumental colors, for their fresh, perky themes and invigorating rhythms.

Because Sydeman believes that it is important to write chamber music before orchestral music ("You get to know all the fingerings, the sounds and ranges of the instruments and how they combine"), his longest instrumental work thus far is a 27-minute Concert Piece for Chamber Orchestra, actually a four-movement chamber symphony. Among his other chamber successes: Seven Movements for Septet, Concerto da Camera for Violin and Chamber Ensemble. As interpreted by the Orchestra of America last week, Orchestral Abstractions was jagged in profile, strong in rhythm and color, the solo instruments, particularly the brasses in the last movement, in fascinating juxtaposition with a curtain of translucent strings. The effect suggested flashes of pigment seen through swiftly running water.

Son of a Manhattan stockbroker, Composer Sydeman studied piano halfheartedly as a child, went to Duke to study business administration but got so involved with writing a college musical that he chucked business in favor of study at

Manhattan's Mannes College of Music. There he decided to become a composer. The work, he admits, does not pay as well as business administration: $600 last year, including commissions.*

Now a teacher of composition at Mannes, Sydeman lives with his wife and two children in a Manhattan suburb. But he is thinking of moving farther out to increase his 40-minute commuting time. His reason: he does his best composing on trains. "If I'm in the studio I want to get out, but if I'm on the train I can just look out the window. After all, Mozart liked to write in a carriage."

*Some older composers are better off--but not much. Veteran Henry Cowell, 64, the composer of 1,000 works, last week confided that "I could live on what I make from music, but not as I care to live--and so I am a professor.'' Cowell's 1961 take from his music: $5,500. He is reputedly one of the eight best-paid composers of serious music in the U.S.

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