Timing is everything. To complete his three–year tenure
as composer–in–residence with the Pacific Symphony (an ensemble in Orange
County, California), Richard Danielpour planned to write a large choral work
dedicated to American veterans. The premiere was scheduled for November 2001,
and Danielpour received scores to inspect the morning of September 11. Wishing
also to memorialize that event, he retooled the dedication to include the
terrorist victims. The work was recorded soon after its November performance,
and the resulting CD—An American Requiem (Reference Recordings)—was
rushed for release in January 2002. The piece (or at least its timely dedication)
is thus one of the first commemorations of that horrible September day, beating
Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising by six months and the New York Philharmonic’s
commission of John Adams’ "official" commemoration by a year.

Of course, Danielpour’s music really isn’t about September 11. But it
has been marketed that way, which makes some sense. For the fact is that
"classical" music is currently in a marketing crisis. The ranks of its old
supporters are dwindling. Baby boomers, or those folks who David Brooks has
dubbed "bourgeois bohemians" (bobos), have been raised on rock, television,
and easy listening muzak—genres that generally do not cultivate the skills
required to understand the music of the Western art tradition. While operas
continue to flourish, attendance is shrinking at symphony orchestras, while
outside of a few cities recital series have vanished almost entirely.

With reduced audiences, the organizations of our classical music culture
are finding themselves financially threatened. The situation is most dire
for some smaller regional orchestras. According to the Miami Herald
, the Florida Philharmonic ended its 2001–2002 fiscal year almost three million
dollars in debt. The St. Louis Symphony, one of the most successful and critically
acclaimed American orchestras in the 1970s and ’80s, has been forced to draw
so heavily on its endowment that its future is in question. Even the mighty
New York Philharmonic’s management decided it had either to postpone or curtail
several of its events planned for the 2002–2003 season.

Some orchestras are trying to recapture audiences by changing their formats,
schedules, and even clothes. "Pop" events are now sometimes more frequent
than the classical concerts the ensembles were created to perform. (Amy Grant
is known as the "savior" of the Nashville Symphony, for example, because
of the Christmas concerts she gives with the orchestra.) In England, the
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic has hired a marketing research firm to find
out what audiences want the orchestra to wear. Thinking that the traditional
white tie and tails are out, the orchestra looks forward to hiring a fashion
designer to provide the ensemble with a "new, instantly recognizable image."

Radio stations formatted to classical music are also in trouble. Several
private stations have been sold, their new owners replacing the old play
lists with a variety of more profitable formats. Public radio stations were
once the most important—often the only—source for classical music in many
communities. Yet even here stations have either significantly curtailed their
presentation of classical music or have abandoned it outright for a variety
of "talk" formats. Stations that do retain a classical music format generally
limit pieces to be broadcast to shorter works of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries (which pretty much condemns listeners to a purgatory of Vivaldi
concerto movements).

Publishers and recording companies are also feeling the pinch. There is
little money to be made on Beethoven, whose works are public domain. But
publishers will soon be impoverished as the works of Puccini, Richard Strauss,
Britten, Stravinsky, and even Copland—royalties from which sustain their
firms—also become public property. Classical music has long been a minuscule
part of the business of recorded music. Today that market share is even tinier.
And even among listeners who do value this music, how many recordings of
a Mozart symphony or even a Rite of Spring does one need?

Orchestras need audiences, radio stations need listeners, publishers need
new materials to copyright and record companies new works to distribute.
And as any Wal–Mart manager knows, if the customers don’t like your product,
you don’t change customers, you change the product.

Hence the importance of Danielpour. His music is a perfect product for
an audience of bobos. Like the professional model Viking range in the bobo’s
kitchen, it gives the appearance of substance and sophistication without
any of its requirements—or mess. His orchestration is always facile, his
melodies pleasantly lyric, his harmonies only slightly more acidic than those
of John Williams, and his works are only rarely handicapped by originality.

And the bobos love it. Eager to cash in on his populism, the New York
Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Pittsburgh and San Francisco
Symphonies have all commissioned major works from him, as have Jessye Norman,
Yo–Yo Ma, and Dawn Upshaw. His forty–two published works receive hundreds
of performances every year and An American Requiem is his thirteenth
major work to be released on CD—which isn’t bad for a composer who is just
forty–six.

The Requiem is vintage Danielpour. The composer makes no bones
about the fact that his music is largely derivative, and it’s easy to tick
off the passages in the Requiem where he draws on the work of other
composers: Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, Orff’s Carmina Burana
, Britten’s Peter Grimes, or even Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess
. This isn’t to say the music is bad. Danielpour is a skillful imitator and
in at least one mezzo–soprano and tenor duet he rises above imitation to
approach music that has some real individuality and power.

But such moments
in this hour–long work are the exception. The American Requiem isn’t
bad, and it’s not even uninteresting. It’s just trivial and overblown. The
problem lies perhaps not so much in Danielpour’s pawnshop music as in his
choice and use of texts.

The model for Danielpour’s work is Benjamin Britten’s
1962 War Requiem. In that work, Britten interpolated poems by Wilfred
Owen between movements of the Latin rite to create a sharply hewn indictment
of the barbarism of war. In a similar way, Danielpour takes parts of the
Mass for the dead and the first responsary of the burial service and interpolates
between and within them poems by Hilda Doolittle, Whitman, Emerson, Michael
Harper, and an anonymous writer of a spiritual.

Although Danielpour’s list
of poets is marvelously inclusive (one bisexual woman, one gay white man,
a token straight dead white male, one straight black man, and a "nobody"
speaking for the countless masses of the disenfranchised unknown), the different
voices of the poets together do not always make sense. His use of the liturgical
texts is jejune. Sometimes the relationship between them and the poetry that
interrupts them is strained and superficially considered (for instance, I
doubt that Danielpour intended the strongly anti–gay message created by his
following of Whitman’s homoerotic "O my soldiers, my heart gives you love"
with the "Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis" of the Dies
irae). The Latin texts also seem oddly rootless and nonreferential. Of
course it’s the composer’s right to use them this way if he chooses, but
if the Latin texts are not in some way to remind the listener of both their
antiquity and their liturgical significance it is peculiar to use them at
all.

All of these problems contribute to the work’s lack of focus. Although
the high irony of Britten being able to write a pacifist manifesto only because
so many thousands of Britons died to protect him from fascism wasn’t missed
in 1962 (or even unacknowledged by Britten himself), his antiwar convictions
were real and keenly argued in his art. Britten was deeply concerned about
basic issues of good and evil. And there was no ambiguity about his passion
for those themes in his art. Danielpour may very well be equally passionate,
but his work fails to suggest it. Instead of conviction, Danielpour gives
us facile banalities that ultimately make his work seem trivial.

But trivial
is just fine for bobos—and the orchestras and recording companies and publishers
who go out of their way to please them. Once again: Danielpour’s music isn’t
bad. His Requiem is pleasant, consistently well made, and occasionally
tuneful. Listen to An American Requiem, but just don’t expect
either artistic vision or compositional courage. It’s harmless. It makes
you feel like a savant. And it will probably sell just fine.

Michael Linton is Head of the Division of Composition and Music Theory
at Middle Tennessee State University.