—Ansel Adams (1902–1984)

            Famous equally as performers and composers and for their ability to cross over between the jazz and classical worlds, father and son Dave and Chris Brubeck teamed up to pay tribute to legendary photographer Ansel Adams. This spectacular combination of symphonic music with projected images was commissioned by a consortium of seven orchestras—the Stockton Symphony, Sacramento Philharmonic, Fresno Philharmonic, Monterey Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Temple University Symphony Orchestra, and Abilene Philharmonic—supported by Meet the Composer and the James Irvine Foundation.

            A legend himself, Dave Brubeck has led a multifaceted career spanning over six decades. Despite early thoughts of cattle ranching and veterinary studies, he was always involved with music. He changed his major at the College (now University) of the Pacific to follow this love. He and his wife Iola, whom he met there, gave back to Pacific by donating their extensive collection of jazz-related materials, leading to the establishment of the Brubeck Institute in 2000.

            Dave has anchored numerous performing groups—among them the celebrated “classic” Dave Brubeck Quartet of the 1950s and ’60s, his “Two Generations of Brubecks” quartet with three of his sons, an ’80s version of the Quartet that toured the Soviet Union, and today’s highly successful Dave Brubeck Quartet. He has played for presidents here and abroad, received every honor the jazz world can bestow, and reached millions through his music, yet he maintains a hectic worldwide touring schedule while still finding time to compose.

            From jazz standards to classical forms infused with jazz, Dave’s compositions display his lifelong fascination with unusual time signatures, improvised counterpoint, superimposed rhythmic patterns, and simultaneous different keys. His many forays into the classical world have resulted in orchestral works, ballets, oratorios, and numerous other choral pieces. Career highlights include the premiere of Upon This Rock for Pope John Paul II’s 1987 visit to San Francisco and performances of To Hope! A Celebration in Vienna and Moscow. Among his more recent successes are the mini-opera Cannery Row, premiered at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2006 and performed at the University of the Pacific in 2007, and Millennium Intervals, premiered in 2001 by the Stockton Symphony conducted by Peter Jaffe.

            Award-winning composer Chris Brubeck—ASCAP Deems Taylor Award recipient and Music Alive 2005 and 2007 composer-in-residence—has created an impressive body of symphonic work while maintaining a demanding touring and recording schedule with his two bands, the Brubeck Brothers Quartet and Triple Play. His critically acclaimed 2006 CD Convergence features not only this concerto for orchestra but Frederica von Stade singing River of Song and Chris’s second trombone concerto, the Prague Concerto. On the jazz side, the Quartet’s recently released Classified was among the most-played jazz albums of 2008.

            The spring of 2007 witnessed two highly successful symphonic premieres, his Quiet Heroes: A Symphonic Salute to the Flagraisers at Iwo Jima, narrated by Wilford Brimley, and Music Is the Power for vocalist, chorus, jazz combo, and orchestra—his second Music Alive project with the Stockton Symphony, conducted by Peter Jaffe. Their first, the groundbreaking Mark Twain’s World: A Symphonic Journey with Genuine Thespians, was premiered and recorded for commercial release in 2005.

            Brubeck’s Bass Trombone Concerto has been played around the world, recorded by the London Symphony, and televised nationally on PBS. Other orchestral highlights include the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissions of Convergence, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Boston’s Symphony Hall, and Interplay for three violinists playing in different styles, televised across the U.S. in performance by violinists Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg (classical), Eileen Ivers (Irish), and Regina Carter (jazz).

            Chris Brubeck describes the remarkable Ansel Adams: America project from inception to realization:

            “In 2006 I had lunch with Susan Carson, a dynamic patron of the arts in Northern California. She asked me what I thought about the idea of an orchestra performing original music while Ansel Adams’s photographic images were projected in the concert hall. I instantly thought this was a fabulous concept and wished it had been my idea! Ms. Carson met with me because she had been impressed with my innovative collaborations with conductor Peter Jaffe and the Stockton Symphony under the auspices of the Meet the Composer program. Ms. Carson saw (and heard) that I was quite capable of thinking ‘out of the box’ when I wrote the music and script for Mark Twain’s World, which featured actors, not singers, with the orchestra. Ansel Adams: America would offer a different set of challenges. The key ingredient for the whole project was to get permission from the Ansel Adams Trust allowing us to project his photographs and to create music that would enhance the visual experience. We respect the compositional integrity of Ansel Adams’s art, and will project the full and complete images without close-ups, panning, or other video techniques.

            “The merging of music and photography made perfect sense when Ms. Carson explained that Ansel Adams was well on his way to becoming a serious concert pianist until he was seduced by the beauty of Yosemite and succumbed to the lure of photography. This fact inspired me to read the wonderful book Ansel Adams, An Autobiography. In these pages I discovered that Ansel, as a young man, yearned to practice piano while in Yosemite which led him to the old Chickering upright piano at the home of the owner of Best’s Studio. While practicing there, he met, fell in love with, and eventually married the proprietor’s daughter, Virginia Best.

            “In Ansel Adams’s autobiography (which I highly recommend), I was impressed with his philosophical views, beautiful writing, and keen analysis and comparison of musical and photographic techniques. He wrote: ‘Photographers are in a sense composers, and the negatives are their scores.’ He was an artist and thinker whose experiences were as monumental as El Capitan. Growing up in San Francisco, Ansel Adams experienced a variety of historic events that would influence his art—the Great Earthquake of 1906; the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 (which he experienced as part of his unique homeschooling, his father requiring him to go to the Expo every day for a year!), to the building of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges. I thought his story was so interesting that I didn’t want to simply project his photographs, but wanted to try to present his remarkable story to the audience.

            “Ansel Adams evolved in the expansive currents of twentieth-century America. His lifelong dedication to the Sierra Club along with his powerful photographs of the American landscape helped shape the environmental movement in our country. Because of his talent, hard work, and good fortune, he became a pioneer and icon of an emerging new art form. I couldn’t help but think of my father, who grew up as a cowboy in the foothills of California near Stockton. Even there, he felt the artistic influences of a booming San Francisco. These changes in the mid-twentieth century affected both Ansel and Dave, propelling them and their respective art forms, photography and jazz, into the new frontiers of American culture. Recognizing their similar histories spurred me to ask Dave to become part of this compositional endeavor. We had collaborated before and I enjoyed the process immensely. At age eighty-eight, Dave was reluctant to commit to such a big project. My strategy to hook my father and my mother, Iola, into the project by giving them the Ansel Adams autobiography to read, worked!

            “Dave began to write a piano score that was driven in style by Bach and Chopin, immortal music learned and played by Adams as a young man. This music was also part of Dave’s unusual environment, growing up on a ranch where his father was a cowboy, and his mother was a classical pianist who often played Bach and Chopin. Dave’s own style (in part inspired by his studies with Darius Milhaud after World War II at Mills College) evolved to be both polytonal and ‘jazzy.’ This heritage has naturally influenced my compositional language as well. Because the architecture of some of Adams’s photographs was so like the complex structure of a fugue, I suggested to my father that he write one as the heart of this new composition. Dave’s enthusiasm and creativity inspired him far beyond the fugue. He devised many wonderful themes and ideas that we expanded and polished together. Once the piano score was complete, my wife Tish and I began to select additional images to be shown throughout the developing score. Dave, Iola, Tish, and I had many good times together ‘auditioning’ different photographs to be shown with various passages of music. Jeff Sugg, an award-winning visual production designer, met with us and also added his opinions and expertise regarding transitions between the images.

            “When we had a good sense of where we were heading with our concept, both visually and musically, we involved Peter Jaffe, music director of the Stockton Symphony who conducted the premiere. We wanted his input on tempos, orchestration, and harmonic spelling (which is tricky when a composition is polytonal). Thus began a very enjoyable dialogue about every aspect of the final score as I orchestrated the piece.

            “The beauty of Ansel Adams’s photography inspired Dave and me to create this music. We hope you’ll enjoy his breathtaking photographs and the way our new composition surrounds these images.”

                                                                                                        —©compiled by Jane Vial Jaffe

Scored for 3 flutes, 3rd flute doubling piccolo, 2 oboes, 2nd oboe doubling English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, optional contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drums, tenor drum, bass drum, suspended cymbals, crash cymbals, finger cymbals, tambourine, triangle, tubular bells, bell tree, marimba, xylophone, tam-tam, guiro, maracas, shaker, timbales, popper noisemaker, harp, piano, and strings