When Given a Choice

Alvin Singleton has emerged over the last two decades as one of the most accomplished and sought-after American composers of symphonic and chamber music. WHEN GIVEN A CHOICE is the composer's article of faith in the possibilities of improvisation. This faith is not blind, since the composer has longtime experience with the approach from the jazz he admired and played in his youth to some 10 major "classical" works he's created utilizing the written/improv interface over the years. Of his youth he writes: "Growing up in the Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York, where my heroes were jazz musicians, I thought that a musical score was some sort of blueprint or map designed by a composer/ arranger to be developed by the musician during a performance. As a teenager, I was impressed by how improvisation influenced the inner workings of a song and added to its spontaneity and excitement." Singleton's early study and admiration of such jazz masters as Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Mingus, and Ornette Coleman has clearly guided his compositional experiments with an appreciation of the immediacy and freshness of the performer's artistic imagination. Singleton has approached the challenges of improvisation in many different ways (all at the service of making good-sounding music). The challenges of improvisation in such traditionally classical settings are many, not least of them the fear of failure often felt by even world-class "reading" musicians and singers. Good performers always hew to a commitment to fulfilling the composer's scored wishes. But some musicians have more of a gift for improvisation than others. Moreover there's the aesthetic question "what if we make a wonderful performance we can by definition never duplicate?" WHEN GIVEN A CHOICE is a one-movement work, written-out traditionally for most of the orchestra, with "improvisation boxes" affixed to the parts of various soloists and ensemble groupings within the orchestra. In those boxes are series of stemless notes and verbal instructions guiding the chosen players as to the specifics of their improvisation challenges (or "opportunities," as Singleton might have it). Indeed, the work's greatest performance demands probably lie with the conductor, who must not only keep the baton moving a tempo for the main orchestra, and call in and cut off the improvisers at the right times, but also make musical sense of it all Singleton's experience with performers assures him that they can all make contributions of power and beauty to a score of his that is set up for anticipating problems and maximizing the probability of positive results. He even delights in the fact that no two performances will ever be the same. Singleton is saying "When Given A Choice, take it." (Carman Moore)