Venture Capitalist Takes Role as Valley Arts Patron
by Richard Scheinin
from the Mercury News (San Jose, CA)
Beethoven had Archduke Rudolph of Austria to underwrite his composing habit. Two centuries later, composers Ingram Marshall, Kenji Bunch and Kevin Puts have found a patron in Kathryn Gould, a Menlo Park venture capitalist who believes Silicon Valley can become a catalyst for new music and a capital of the arts.
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An avid amateur violinist who gives recitals for CEOs at her Peninsula home, Gould is plowing $375,000 into a "Magnum Opus Project" for the commissioning of nine new orchestral works to be played over three years by the Oakland East Bay Symphony, the Santa Rosa Symphony and the Marin Symphony. Locally, she also plans to pour $150,000 into the commissioning of six new compositions to be premiered over three years, beginning next March, at Villa Montalvo in Saratoga by name artists, including the Eroica Trio, violinist Joshua Bell and the Kronos Quartet.
"I love music and I like to make things happen," said Gould, a one-time college music major who is a general partner of Foundation Capital, the VC firm. "We talk a lot in Silicon Valley about being a center of creativity and we compare ourselves to Florence in the Renaissance. And yet every great civilization has an artistic legacy. We don't yet have one coming out of Silicon Valley."
The first three orchestral works are to be premiered next year, a source of real excitement for Marshall, a former San Francisco Conservatory of Music professor whose previous work occasionally has been recorded, as well as for Bunch and Puts, younger "neo-Romantic" composers based in New York and Texas, respectively.
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Over the course of three years, each piece will be played by each of the orchestras, allowing the composers the unusual opportunity to fine-tune their works -- and giving Bay Area listeners the chance to follow the process by which a new piece of music comes to life. That this is happening during a recession when arts organizations are struggling -- and when San Jose has lost its symphony to bankruptcy -- is a happy shock to conductors, musicians and listeners.
"It's kind of historic," said Jeffrey Kahane, conductor and music director of the Santa Rosa Symphony. "I'm not aware of a commissioning project of this scope, for orchestras at our level, being done anywhere. Just imagine if we could find 10 more Kathryn Goulds around the country," he mused. "We'd have over 100 new works for orchestras. This is one of the most exciting things I've ever been involved in."
The "Magnum Opus Project" is administered through Meet The Composer, a New York nonprofit with a 29-year history of connecting living composers -- often bereft of funds and listeners -- to contemporary audiences. In effect, Gould has formed a consortium with Meet The Composer and the three orchestras to highlight the profile of new classical music in the Bay Area and establish a model that might spread nationally.
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Gould and her collaborators soon will begin looking for three more composers whose works will enter the pipeline the year after next. If all goes as planned, nine new works by nine composers will be performed by the three orchestras over the next five years. This is an ambitious project, adding substantially to the modern orchestral repertory. Add on the Villa Montalvo commissions for chamber and recital artists and the result is "extraordinary," said Elisbeth Challener, executive director of Montalvo.
She and Gould also are negotiating commissions for a piece to be played by the Orion Quartet and another to be written by composer Tan Dun.
Mark O'Connor, the violinist and composer, is writing the piece for the Eroica Trio at Eroica's invitation, and very-hot composer Osvaldo Golijov, whose "La Pasion Segun San Marcos" is an international hit, may rearrange a composition for Kronos, according to Challener.
Challener said agents and promoters are "floored when they hear not only about the concept of an individual who would like to commission an entire body of work, rather than just one or two pieces, but also about Kathryn's idea" of having chamber and recital artists select composers to write for them.
All this is happening because Gould is a classical music lover frustrated by much of the new music of recent decades, which she finds harshly atonal or dully trance-inducing. "I'm always so enthused and full of anticipation when I go to a concert premiere," she said, "and then I hear the music and I'm always dejected. I'm thinking, `Oh my God, is there never going to be another Beethoven or Tchaikovsky or Schubert?' And I turned 50 a few years ago and decided to try and do something about it."
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Gould mentioned her ambitions to Paul Brest, who heads the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and plays viola in a string quartet with Gould. Brest suggested that she contact Meet The Composer whose president, Heather Hitchens, then brought the three orchestras into the plan. Gould's overture coincided with Meet The Composer's own "New Music, New Donors" program which aims at closing the gap between composers and audiences by asking listeners to think creatively about commissions. For instance, listeners may join "donor pools" to support big works or make smaller contributions of, say, a couple thousand dollars, enough to pay a composer to write a new song.
The aim is to "make commissioning the most natural impulse and part of the cultural infrastructure," said Hitchens.
Last June, Gould sat down with Hitchens, Kahane, Oakland East Bay conductor Michael Morgan and Marin Symphony conductor Alasdair Neale and commenced work on "Magnum Opus." All agreed that while Gould would have a strong say in choosing the three winners, everyone would ultimately hold veto power. Over the next few months, they listened to recordings by more than 100 composers who pitched their work or had it submitted by various organizations. As it turns out, Kahane already knew the music of Puts, whose "Marimba Concerto" had been performed by the Santa Rosa Symphony several years ago. The conductors had heard about Bunch, an intriguing musician who performs regularly as a classical violist and also plays bluegrass fiddle. Marshall, whose massive "Kingdom Come" has been recorded by the American Composers Orchestra, was already on Morgan's list of composers he wanted to perform.
Gould remembers "scrubbing the floor in my cabin" near Tahoe when Marshall's music "came on and I went, `Whoa! Hold everything.' He's a dark composer. It's dramatic, compelling, riveting. You're not going to be thumbing through your program notes and worrying about your hair when you hear this music."
Hitchens sees success all around.
Gould is "stretching her ears. This is a woman who really listens."
And, of course, the composers have work.
"Something in my music got to Kathryn," said Marshall, who thinks his upcoming piece may incorporate familiar hymns from childhood along with electronics. "That's why we do what we do. It's not because we want to be avant-garde or clever or the next Beethoven. It's because we want to connect with someone -- and it's wonderful when `the someone' wants to bankroll your next orchestral piece. This is a first for me."
This article was initially published Mar. 18, 2003 in The Mercury News. It has been re-posted with permission.
