Shifting Grounds in the Time of COVID-19
written by Iman Habibi
2019 GLFCAM Lucy and Jacob Frank Fellow, Cycle 9
The morning of Thursday, March 12th 2020, we arrived at Philadelphia’s magnificent 2500-seat Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center, welcomed by a chorus of excited chatter and laughter from children rushing out of their school busses to attend the dress rehearsal of The Philadelphia Orchestra’s first concert of the BeethovenNOW series. My newly commissioned piece, Jeder Baum spricht, was to open the dress rehearsal, and subsequently the three public concerts that kicked off this celebration of Beethoven’s 250th anniversary.
At that time, a few arts organizations around the United States had cancelled or postponed events. Philadelphia had only one known case of coronavirus, and we were barely alarmed. However, as I made my way through the backstage corridors of the Verizon Hall that morning saying hello to several musicians and staff, it was slowly becoming apparent that something was not quite right. Then came the announcement I had feared!
The orchestra’s president and CEO, Matías Tarnopolsky, made an appearance to relay that in anticipation of the city’s upcoming COVID-19 advisory measures discouraging (perhaps banning) gatherings of more than 250 people, the orchestra was to cancel all concerts and suspend all activities until further notice. There was the possibility that the orchestra could go ahead with that night’s performance to an empty hall, livestreaming it instead, but numerous logistical issues had yet to be overcome to enable this on such short notice.
I was naturally devastated. I had spent months working on this project, thinking through every detail, re-examining the concept and my approach to it, writing and rewriting every passage, and preparing the score and parts not just once, but twice. At the same time, it was already clear to me that this was simply the start of a complete shutdown of events in the proceeding weeks, and I was grateful to have at least heard my piece, realizing that the dress rehearsal may be my last chance to experience it for the foreseeable future.
Eight thousand tickets had already been sold for that weekend’s cancelled performances, and my prior experience with livestream told me that if indeed it materialized, it could garner a few hundred viewers before it is removed from the internet, disappearing into obscurity. I could never have imagined that the orchestra would go on to present one of the most moving musical experiences of my life to an empty hall that night, marking a historic performance which would be shared by thousands, heard and seen by hundreds of thousands within the next day, then broadcast multiple times on radios and television stations across the world in the following weeks, symbolizing a beacon of hope at the onset of dark and uncertain times. Nor did I ever imagine that a piece I wrote in an effort to raise awareness towards the climate crisis, while offering a vision of hope for the planet’s future, would find entirely new meaning in light of the COVID-19 crisis. The topic changed overnight; the message remained the same!
The seeds for this project were planted over a year ago. In late 2018, after having completed a cycle at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music (GLFCAM), in which I got to compose a string quartet (Revolution Street) for the amazing Chiara String Quartet, Gabriela Lena Frank asked me to share more samples of my string and orchestral writing with her. Several months later, I received a call from Gabriela, in her capacity as the composer-in-residence with The Philadelphia Orchestra, casually mentioning that she had shared my music with the orchestra and their music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and that the orchestra is interested in commissioning a short piece from me and two other GLFCAM alumni. It took a while for it to sink in! A dream and a career milestone had just been realized, as I received a commission from one of the “Big Five,” and an opportunity to work with a conductor I had admired for more than a decade, since his early conducting years (when I was still an undergrad piano student and a newly-arrived immigrant) in British Columbia.
The BeethovenNOW series planned a unique approach to the celebration of Beethoven’s 250th anniversary. On any average season, Beethoven frequently tops the list of the most-performed composers, with his symphonies and concerti being a standard part of any orchestra’s season. Many orchestras chose to celebrate Beethoven’s legacy by programming even more of his music. The Philadelphia Orchestra decided to go even further by commissioning new music that would highlight the significant global reach and impact of Beethoven 250 years later, highlighting the NOW in BeethovenNOW.
I was one of the four composers commissioned for this series, the others being Gabriela Lena Frank herself, Jessica Hunt, and Carlos Simon. We were each assigned two or three Beethoven Symphonies, and were asked to compose a piece in dialogue with them. Mine were the 5th and 6th; and I found the common thread between those two symphonies to be nature. I decided to write a piece that would allow us to hear the two symphonies in the shadow of the terrifying climate catastrophe in which we live. Moved by Beethoven’s Heilegenstadt Testament, Jessica Hunt’s Climb drew on her own personal experience as someone who, like Beethoven, lives with chronic illness, realizing her symptoms and sensations through aural metaphors. Carlos Simon’s Fate Now Conquers took inspiration from one of Beethoven’s journal entries, depicting the uncertainty of life, and repainting Beethoven’s well-recognized motifs with the brush of his own unique voice. Gabriela Lena Frank’s choral-orchestral piece, Pacahamama Meets an Ode, addresses climate change through the lens of Peruvian indigenous myths, looking at gifts from the past with new and searching eyes.
My needing to comment, in five short minutes, on two classic masterpieces, which combined, took Beethoven nearly five years to compose, is an enormous responsibility. The Philadelphia Orchestra’s commitment to this project was clear from the start, which further highlighted the weight of the platform we had been afforded. In the orchestral world today, there is no time for trial and error. The composer spends months perfecting the score to communicate as clearly as possible in writing, attending to every detail, and eliminating any potential question that could eat up precious rehearsal time. Throughout this process, we are left only to imagine what the piece might sound like when played by an orchestra. Add to that the fact that every orchestra and concert hall sounds different, demanding a different kind of balance, and you realize how impossible it is to achieve one’s goals on first try.
The Philadelphia Orchestra offered a generous solution to this problem. Jessica, Carlos, and I were allowed an opportunity to have our works-in-progress read by the orchestra (conducted by John Adams) in September 2019. We received essential feedback on our work from Gabriela Lena Frank, John Adams, Jennifer Higdon, and the musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and were given an opportunity to revise our scores after the reading session. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this experience to our process, and the extremely positive impact it had on my work. I wish this could be the norm with every new commissioning project!
Furthermore, we were to have two residencies in Boonville, California (home to the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music), one before and one after the reading session, to discuss our works-in-progress, and receive feedback from one another. In the first of these two residencies, we were joined by Maestra Lina Gonzalez-Granados, Philadelphia Orchestra’s Conducting Fellow. Lina’s feedback was immensely helpful, allowing us to examine our scores from a conductor’s perspective. Not only did she provide invaluable feedback on our pieces for the Philadelphia Orchestra, she took the time to get to know us personally and listen to several other works in our oeuvre, thus enabling her to understand and view our new compositions in light of our past work.
Beethoven’s fifth and sixth symphonies were premiered in 1808 in a single concert, along with his fourth piano concerto and the Choral Fantasy, with Beethoven conducting and playing the solo parts himself. Organizing such a feast of new orchestral music would be unthinkable today, but why should it be? Somewhere along the way, a division started between the orchestras and living composers, with the gap widening significantly throughout the 20th century. As a result, many composers today have little experience writing for an orchestra, and little knowledge of the intricate inner workings of an orchestra, a giant of an establishment with its own complex challenges, goals, and aspirations. The role of a composer-in-residence in bridging the gap between the orchestra and composers is indispensible today. Apart from offering generous feedback and welcoming us into her home for residencies, Gabriela Lena Frank, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s composer-in-residence, played an essential role in our communications with the orchestra, helping us navigate a challenging foreign environment. If we are to continue to stay current, to attract a younger generation into the concert halls, and help the development of great orchestral music that will be celebrated 250 years from now, we need to revive the important and necessary relationship between contemporary music-makers and orchestras.
Nothing replaces the experience of a live performance! When I returned to my hotel after that night’s concert, I was incredibly excited to realize that I could still watch a replay of the performance on Facebook Live. But what played through my computer speakers was a mere skin-deep impression of the glorious sound and energy I experienced in the resonance of the empty Verizon Hall, reminding me again why the live acoustic musical experience is simply irreplaceable.
And sadly as I sit down to write this account of my experience with The Philadelphia Orchestra, all my performances are cancelled for the foreseeable future. Yet I am still one of the lucky ones. Of the four composers who wrote for the BeethovenNOW project, I am so far the only one who got to hear my piece. The others have had their premieres cancelled, and having witnessed my colleagues in their process, knowing how hard we all worked on these pieces, I am heartbroken for them. Our industry is in an unprecedented crisis. Gigs evaporated overnight in one of the busiest and most important seasons for musicians, leaving freelance performers vulnerable, and without any means to earn income. Even larger organizations are struggling, with many having to lay off their entire staff and musicians or resort to pay cuts to sustain themselves.
While it is unclear how this crisis might transform us, I have no doubt that we will get through it. And so long as the music we make is relevant, current, genuine and honest, I have hope that it will survive the intervening turmoil. Many on social media commented on The Philadelphia Orchestra’s livestream, expressing how music, as a deep expression of our humanity, unites us in such difficult times. Likewise, nothing could be more reassuring for me than to see that no matter how bad the situation, music remains impactful, able to touch people and communicate its message of hope.
I look forward to seeing you in the concert halls again soon, coming together to embrace this great gift we call music, without fear.
Iman Habibi, D.M.A. (Michigan), is an Iranian-Canadian composer and pianist, and a founding member of the piano duo ensemble, Piano Pinnacle. Hailed as “a giant in talent” (the Penticton Herald) Iman has collaborated with noted ensembles and performers such as The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Dearborn Symphony Orchestra, The Prince George Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Philharmonic Orchestra, Ann Arbor Camerata, musica intima, The Standing Wave Ensemble, The Aventa Ensemble, The Calidore String Quartet, JACK Quartet, conductors Bramwell Tovey, Jerry Blackstone, Marta McCarthy, Leslie Dala, pianist Jane Coop, and vocalists Simone Osborne, Carla Huhtanen, and Peter McGillivray among many others. Learn more from Iman’s bio page.