Bill T. Jones (Artistic Director/Co-Founder - Ann Arbor District Library

ecent Flute Concerto, like his Piano Concerto,
which the Chicago Symphony played four years
ago, is a prime example of Dalbavie's unique brand
of modernism, steeped in the concerns that have
preoccupied composers for centuries yet expressed
in a language that would have been unrecognizable
only a few years ago.
Dalbavie's training is defined by avant-garde big
names and cutting-edge trends. His composer's
voice was initially influenced by "spectralism" a
compositional style of the 1970s and 1980s
that is based on a rigorous, computer-derived
exploration of timbre (the color of sound) and
then at the technology-based world of IRCAM,
the music research temple in Paris launched by
Pierre Boulez. He also worked with John Cage and
Merce Cunningham in London in 1980, with Italian
pioneer Franco Donatoni in Sienna four years later,
and he studied orchestral conducting with Boulez
in the late 1980s.
Beginning with his earliest works, Dalbavie
became known for writing music that explores color
and texture. His scores are often characterized by
a complex layering of foreground and background,
like several stories all unfolding simultaneously. (He
once compared the technique not to Proust, who
moves back and forth between past and present,
but to the American soap opera Dallas, which had
obviously infiltrated French television at the time.)
He also is fascinated by sound and acoustics
and in the way music relates to the performance
space. His first concerto, for violin, composed
in 1996 Dalbavie's first composition without
electronics planted individual members of the
orchestra within the audience. "The idea," he said at
the time, "was to take a very conventional form and
put it into space, destabilize the form." Concertate
II suono (which was commissioned by the Chicago
Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra to honor
Boulez's 75th birthday) carried the idea further,
placing chamber groups of instruments throughout
the concert hall. Dalbavie has compared the idea
to seeing Mantegna's celebrated fresco Camera
degli Sposi (The bridal chamber) in Mantua, which
covers not only the walls, but the ceiling as well:
"You're in the painting," he has said.
But beginning with Color in 2002, Dalbavie
moved away from composing these spatial works
to concentrate on pieces that investigate sonority
and texture from the confines of the conventional
orchestral stage and to refine his ideas of musical
"development." In Dalbavie's recent scores,
UMS Chicago Symphony Orchestra
including the Piano Concerto performed in Chicago
in 2006 (with Leif Ove Andsnes, its dedicatee, as
the soloist), the music is in a constant state of
transformation of one sound or one idea evolving
into another.
Dalbavie's standard composing method
literally behind closed doors is very much his
own. "I have the piece finished before I write," he
told The New York Times a few years ago:
Of course, the detail changes as I work. But I
am the contrary of Boulez in that, because he
starts with a little motif and sees what he can
make of it, and the motif grows, like a plant.
With me the piece arrives like a block, after
a certain time. I'm a little like the Japanese
painter who would spend months waiting and
then do a picture in three seconds. Of course,
in music three seconds is not possible. You have
months of work to do. But still, I don't discover
the piece progressively. Suddenly it's there.
While writing his Piano Concerto five years
ago composed after extensive study of the most
famous piano concertos of the past Dalbavie
formed strong ideas about the relationship between
the solo instrument and the orchestra. In the end, it
was the traditional "classical confrontation," as he
put it, that he chose to avoid. The Flute Concerto
is a further exploration of the idea that the two
do not so much face off or argue, as in many of
the most dramatic concertos in the repertory, but
coexist in an ever-changing world. The flute and
orchestra begin and end playing together, and in
between there is constant interaction.
Dalbavie's fascination with color still runs deep
throughout this work, reflecting his earlier stance
as a "spectralist" (he told The New York Times
that "spectralist" composers work like Monet,
who broke down colors into components. "We
de-compose sound and then redeploy it," he
said). The Flute Concerto, like much of Dalbavie's
more recent work, also shows an occasional
unexpected affinity with certain elements of so-
called minimalism the gradually shifting patterns,
the sense of stasis. And, after years of focusing on
color and harmony, Dalbavie has begun to turn his
attention to melody "I started with vertical music
and I have moved progressively towards horizontal
music," is how he has put it. (A new chamber
work, Melodia, which Dalbavie has described as a
"symbol of my evolution," was premiered in New
York in December.)