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MARIA
SCHNEIDER
Orchestral Prowess
BY TED PANKEN | PHOTO BY JIMMY & DENA KATZ
In 2005, shortly after receiving her first Grammy for her fourth album,
Concert In The Garden, Maria Schneider pinpointed the significance
of the honor. “It means something more to me than my view of
myself,” she said. “People in the general audience may not be exactly
sure what a Pulitzer is, but they know the Grammy as the ultimate
music award.”
The composer, then 44, added that she had “dreamed of winning a
Grammy” while growing up in Windom, Minn.—an agricultural community
of 3,600 in the state’s southwest corner. “I’d say my speech at home when
nobody was looking,” she said.
But in her brief 2005 remarks, Schneider deviated from the “I want to
thank my mother and father” script of childhood. Rather, she acknowledged
the members of the Maria Schneider Orchestra, an entity since 1992, and
ArtistShare, which released her self-funded Concert In The Garden. Later
in 2005, Schneider would top three categories in the DownBeat Critics Poll:
Jazz Album, Composer and Arranger. In the 2008 Critics Poll, with Sky
Blue (ArtistShare), she topped those three categories again, along with an
honor for Big Band. In this year’s poll, the Maria Schneider Orchestra was
named top Big Band, and its leader once again honored as top Composer
and Arranger.
In 2014, Schneider spoke from the same Grammy podium to accept her
Best Contemporary Classical Composition award for Winter Morning
Walks, which comprises two through-composed song cycles commissioned
and performed by soprano Dawn Upshaw—who also earned a Grammy (for
Best Classical Vocal Solo), as did engineer Tim Martyn and producer David
Frost. For the occasion, Schneider delivered eloquent denunciations of digital
file-sharing and Spotify that were quoted in national media and went
moderately viral.
“I didn’t expect to win, but when Tim and Dawn were announced, I realized
I’d better start thinking of what to say, because this could happen,”
Schneider said a few months later in her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper
West Side. “I feel I’ve been given a position, and I wasn’t going to fritter away
this amazing opportunity. The second I got the award, I decided I’d say
this is legalized theft, which is exactly what it is. Everybody went crazy and
applauded. How long are we supposed to take this?”
It was time to discuss music. “I feel a little guilty,” Schneider said of her
latest Grammy. “All these people push through that classical world their
whole career, and I come in with this big grab. But I’ll take it.” She also
expressed discomfort with DownBeat’s 2014 Best Arranger designation.
“Arranging is a special art, taking a standard piece and reforming it,” she
said. “It’s not the same as orchestrating.”
On Winter Morning Walks, Schneider applies her orchestral prowess to
frame Upshaw’s intuitively penetrating interpretations of two very different
suites. On “Stories,” set to Mark Strand’s translations of five ironic, melodramatic
poems by Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–’87),
she provides the 34-piece St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO) with intricate,
sweeping scores. The title piece comprises nine poems that Nebraskan Ted
Kooser, a one-time American Poet Laureate, wrote while recovering from
cancer.
Oswaldo Gojilov, one of several prominent contemporary composers
who regard Upshaw as a muse, introduced her to Schneider with a gift of
Concert In The Garden in proximity to Schneider’s first Grammy. “There
aren’t many times these days where I actually fall in love with a CD,” Upshaw
said by phone. “But I started to play this one over and over again in its entirety.
It brought me joy at a difficult time in my personal life. Maria’s music has
so much power, so unaffected and even ecstatic; it brings out the best in life.
It was something new for me, and I wanted to hear it live.”
Upshaw attended Schneider’s annual Thanksgiving week residency at
Manhattan’s Jazz Standard, where they became acquainted. During a subsequent
conversation, she began to envision a collaboration. “I thought perhaps
we’d meet someplace neither of us could imagine,” Upshaw said. “I’m drawn
to chiseled musical voices—music that, when I hear it, touches me, and I feel
AUGUST 2014 DOWNBEAT 43