Backstage: Reading sessions give Princeton University student composers unique opportunity
By Victoria McCabe
On Tuesday, December 11, the musicians of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra will meet in Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium, with four new orchestral works on the docket. But they won’t be rehearsing for an NJSO concert, nor will they be performing for an audience in the traditional sense.
The musicians of the NJSO will meet in Princeton for a day of reading sessions, a unique event in which four Princeton University Ph.D. composition candidates will have the opportunity to hear their works performed for the first time by a professional orchestra.
Michael Pratt, Director of the Princeton University Program in Musical Performance and a former NJSO associate conductor, will conduct the Orchestra in the works of his students. It is an invaluable opportunity for the graduate fellows, he says: “As a young composer, you can write an orchestral piece and not know if you’re going to ever hear it. But these four are going to get that chance. When a work is performed by players on the level of the NJSO, the composers know that anything doesn’t quite work is something that they (the composers themselves) have to [fix], not something the orchestra has to work on . That’s incredibly valuable for them.
“It’s called a reading session, but the NJSO players have thoroughly explored the pieces [by the time of the event]. The musicians are always very conscientious about [the importance of the sessions to the students]. I call it a laboratory, a workshop—it’s not a performance, it’s not even a rehearsal. It’s a chance to hear how [their work] sounds when played at a very high level.”
The composers use the experience to refine and polish their works, Pratt says. After the NJSO reading sessions, the students may revise their compositions and then seek other performances of them.
The NJSO and Princeton University have held these reading sessions every other year for more than a decade. The university takes pride in its celebrated doctoral composition program—Princeton was the first university to award a Ph.D. in composition—and considers the NJSO sessions a tremendous learning tool. Rather than making the composer selections a competition, the faculty biannually choose the four students they feel would benefit the most from hearing a professional orchestra perform their work.
And though the sessions are not open to the public, they are a communal event for the composition program. “Their colleagues, and most of the composition community, come to listen,” Pratt says. “We encourage the composers to bring multiple copies of their score to pass around so everybody can look. It’s a great occasion, and one that is very important to us.”
Pratt makes sure he maximizes the educational value of the sessions for his students. He studies the scores in advance as he prepares to conduct the works, and he meets with each student to gain a greater understanding of the composers’ intentions. “And at some point during the session, I’ll invite members of the orchestra to respond to things they see in their parts and give advice to these young composers.”
The NJSO musicians “make a real impact here,” he says. “In a very real sense, they are doing some teaching.”
The Princeton reading session is one of several initiatives through which the NJSO fosters the education of student musicians. This season, the Orchestra is providing a unique opportunity to student composers through its Young Composers Project (YCP). Over the course of the season, three students—selected through an application process open to elementary-, middle- and high-school students across New Jersey—will participate in a series of one-on-one working sessions with composer Behzad Ranjbaran, the YCP mentor, to develop original works for orchestra. The NJSO will give the world-premiere performances of the students’ orchestral works during the Orchestra’s school-time Concerts for Young People series in May and the “Dancing Around the World” June 1 Family concert.