A commission is like a pebble thrown into a pond. Its ripples expand in everwidening circles and go far and wide. Its creations enrich the world in such great measure beyond one’s imagining, and bring immense beauty to multitudes of people.
On a glorious day in 1988, Meet The Composer, Reader’s Digest, and the National Endowment for the Arts created the most ambitious commissioning project in the history of music, a project that changed the course of American music and dramatically altered the landscape for American composers.
A cascade of new works poured forth as a result of this project — 280 works for jazz ensembles, choruses, orchestras, soloists, theaters, film, opera, and chamber ensembles ring out across America and abroad. And the project’s impact has spread ever wider, inspiring countless new dance, theater, film, and other projects.
Premieres in towns and cities nationwide, initiated by local sponsors with enormous pride and community involvement, reawakened our music society to the power of commissioning music. In St. Louis, Missouri, an ebullient new work for the Compton Heights Community Band, River City Brass Band, and Royal Hawaiian Band, commissioned by the PS Gilmore Society and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and composed by Jay Chattaway, was premiered in April 1992. The musicians then boarded a bus and traveled to locales across the USA to perform this splendid new work. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams, commissioned with support from the Meet The Composer/Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program, received its first performances. Max Roach’s music theater work The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson, composed through this program, premiered at the San Diego Rep. Tania León’s De Color was first heard at Northwestern University, Fred Ho’s The Journey Begins and The Journey Home at New York’s Public Theater.
The scope of new works, the democratic inclusive panel process, the openness embracing all idioms, the powerful reawakening of the idea of commissioning music by organizations big and small — all this has created a groundswell unprecedented in American music. Factories, unions, museums, churches, synagogues, dance companies, theaters, large and small institutions now commission works to celebrate, to honor, to mark public occasions and to replenish and renew music in all its forms of expression.
Walt Whitman’s prophetic lines “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear” expresses the richness and abundance of this project.
Today, we commonly celebrate men and women who have made outstanding contributions to the beauty of the world and humankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life — Mother Theresa, Martha Graham, Charlie Parker, Nelson Mandela, Georgia O’Keeffe, to name a few. Then let us also celebrate the composers and their collaborators whose works, created through the Meet The Composer's Commissioning Programs, bring the power of music to audiences far and wide.
I salute our partners in this landmark project: Reader’s Digest, America’s premier people’s publication; The National Endowment for the Arts, America ’s chief advocate and funder of the Arts; and my colleagues at Meet The Composer.
May Meet The Composer’s support of commissioning prosper and endure. And may music in all forms delight audiences, touch the hearts of listeners, and replenish people’s spirits all over the world.
