Fanfare Feature:
A Conversation with Eugene Corporon

BY JAMES REEL

Sousa marches are great fun, but they hardly define the repertoire for wind ensemble. True, not many first-rate works for stringless orchestras were written before the early 20th century; there are a few wonderful pieces by Mozart, Dvorák, and Richard Strauss, but those are the exceptions. The sit-down wind ensemble really came into its own in the second half of the 20th century, a period that produced hundreds of works in every fashionable and unfashionable "ism," compositions good and bad, large and small.

So, Eugene Migliaro Corporon, the director of the University of North Texas Wind Symphony, is no mere bandmaster. He's a serious, skilled, well-reviewed conductor of a wide range of contemporary music and earlier works, sort of a Leonard Slatkin looking at clarinets where the violins ought to be. He's also the mastermind of the Klavier Wind Recording Project, a series that has, since 1989, yielded 21 CDs containing more than 125 compositions by about 100 composers. Every year, Klavier issues two new discs in the collection. In the beginning, the releases featured a lot of 1950s Frederick Fennell/Eastman Wind Ensemble material: Morton Gould's West Point Symphony, Piston's Tunbridge Fair, and the like. But right from the first issue such genuinely contemporary figures as David Maslanka and David Gillingham were also strongly present. These days, the ink is barely dry on most of the scores Corporon records, and the CDs truly reflect the eclecticism of the 1990s, with sounds as downy as a feather pillow and as spiky as a bed of nails.

"We're taking ourselves fairly seriously with this wind-music thing, and not many people do," says Corporon, who refuses to feel like a second-class musician just because he directs an ensemble called "wind symphony" instead of "symphony orchestra." "I'm doing exactly what I want to do, and I think I can make more of a contribution doing what I'm doing than I could with a symphony orchestra. There are so many wonderful orchestral conductors out there who are already taking good care of that repertoire. I believe in this repertoire, and I believe it's worth taking care of just as much as Beethoven and Mozart are. I've done some work with orchestras and opera and musical theater--it was part of my upbringing--and I've also played in orchestras a lot as a clarinetist, but I've really had a keener interest in winds." Corporon is especially attracted to the wind ensemble literature because it's so new. "We are able to interact with composers--actual, living composers!--much more than orchestral conductors do, because we're more concerned with building a repertoire; they're not as focused on that because they've got more repertoire from the past already in place."

Even so, Corporon was not one of those high school band nerds who knew all along that he wanted to work with wind ensembles for the rest of his life. "I always tell students, 'Whatever your (career) plan is now, it will change, so all you can do is keep preparing for change,' and I use myself as an example. I started out to be an orchestral clarinetist; that's what I prepared to do as an undergraduate. I did have some conducting opportunities along the way, but that was a hobby, really, compared to what I was doing with the clarinet. When I graduated I was headed for Juilliard to continue with the clarinet, but I got offered a really good conducting job right out of college, and it turned out to be the perfect thing for me. I had to decide whether I wanted to work with people one at a time, as I would have if I'd taught clarinet, or with groups of people, which of course is what you do as a conductor--a big part of conducting is the people part. I came up at the time when the dictatorial conductor was fading and the benevolent conductor was rising. I played for people who just terrified you into doing what they wanted, and I played for people who facilitated you as a musician, conductors who got what they wanted by patiently helping you grow as a musician while you sat there. So facilitating the musical experience for other people, a lot of other people, is one thing that drew me to the wind ensemble.

"And the sound of it, the cutting edge of the music, excited me. I had played in a lot of contemporary-music ensembles and I'd worked with a lot of good people in that area, and I was getting excited by Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Messiaen and Xenakis and Varèse. The sounds those composers were making pulled me toward the winds. I also love teaching. I've had a number of different professional experiences, and working with students is the real exciting part of this whole adventure for me, versus just going into a professional setting, having five rehearsals, giving two concerts, and everybody playing great but you don't know if you've changed anything. Here, I think I do have a chance to change things. And another thing that's a lot more important to me than it was 20 years ago is that, at age 53, I really appreciate the energy and commitment and drive these kids bring to the music. That's what's going to sustain me over the next years; it's contagious."

What Corporon himself is sustaining right now is a remarkably diverse, polished, and comprehensive series of wind-music recordings. Yet it began inauspiciously with a widely ignored vanity recording. In 1989, when Corporon was teaching at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, David Diamond wrote a piece called Tantivy for the Cincinnati Wind Symphony. Corporon thought the work deserved wide exposure, and he itched to record it. He asked a graduate student named Jack Stamp to serve as producer, and got hooked up with recording engineer Bruce Leek. "We had a great engineer and a very good performance of a great piece;" Corporon says, "but it wasn't on a label and it didn't go anywhere. Then about a year later Bruce introduced me to Harold Powell, who was the first president of Klavier, and he said he might be interested in doing something with the recording, and maybe something beyond that. It turned out that if I could find a way to subsidize each recording, I could decide what to put on it, and we could deliver a completed product to Hal that he would be happy to put out. Well, the CD we did in Cincinnati went very well, and we started to get a direction, trying to record primarily American music and previously unrecorded music, and music that hadn't been recorded digitally. Now it's going full steam, and we record one CD in November and one in April. Next fall we'll be doing number 24. And it's still a nonprofit endeavor for the most part. We have to raise about 30,000 bucks to do each disc, and that's a considerable amount to pull together, but we have complete control over it. And because of that we don't have to make yet another recording of the Holst suites if we don't want to. Actually, I would like to record the Holst First Suite, but I keep finding interesting new pieces that we need to do first. We've really become champions of living American composers, and were doing new music by really important composers. We'll have a premiere in 2001 of Joan Tower's first wind piece, and I'm not sure she would've gotten excited about writing something like this if we hadn't been able to give her some CDs and show her the level we were working at. George Walker has also committed to a piece for us. So composers are keeping track of these wind series--not just ours, but the others that are out there--and they're seeing that we're really serious about getting out their music, with really good performances in great sound."

Interestingly, one of those other CD series Corporon alludes to is Citadel's, with Corporon's longtime producer, Jack Stamp, leading the Keystone Wind Ensemble; those discs, too, are recorded by Bruce Leek with his customary 24-bit live-to-two-track care. Obviously, this is not a viciously competitive endeavor. "Jack Stamp was one of my doctoral students at Michigan State, and we've been fast friends for years," Corporon says. "And for the first CD, Bruce Leek was the only person who really knew what was going on, and he's nurtured us through this whole process. Over the years we've developed into this incredible team, along with Dennis Fisher, the conductor of the Symphonic Band here who's our associate producer. When we're recording, my job is to be emotional and artistic and driven toward the musical goals, and their job is to buzz the phone and tell me it doesn't sound good. They're completely subjective, very critical and helpful.

"We always record after a performance, which helps, but sometimes it's a brand-new work you may have spent nine rehearsals on, but you still have things to fix. So it's a growing process for all of us. And a lot of time we invite the composers to the sessions. That's tougher on Jack than on me, because he's the one in the room with the composer." Corporon maintains that even with the composer looming over the producer's shoulder, nobody comes to blows over interpretive differences. "We make it clear that the producer has the final say because of the limited time," he says. "We have three and a half hours to record a work, maybe 20 minutes' worth of music, with probably five sessions to do a disc. So it has to go pretty fast. There's a lot of negotiation back there, I'm sure. But ahead of time I send rehearsal tapes to the composers, so they have a lot of input up front if they don't like the tempo or phrasing or dynamic shape; that's not something we have to get into during the recording sessions."

The content of each CD depends largely on the North Texas Wind Symphony's obligations during the semester. If the group is playing at a conference where it's expected to perform a great deal of brand-new music, that will be reflected in the next CD's repertoire. During a semester when the group is not traveling, Corporon might relax with some older material, such as Grainger's Lincolnshire Posy, and that's one way a classic band piece can pop up in the Klavier series. "Does the world need another Lincolnshire Posy?" Corporon asks. "Well, the only person out with that piece may be Fred Fennell--maybe with three different groups, but it's still Fred. Now, more and more projects like ours are coining out, and if that means there will be more recordings of something like Lincolnshire Posy, I think that's great. I'd like to walk into Tower Records and see 12 versions of it by 12 conductors, with everybody arguing over the fine points of the different interpretations like they do with the Beethoven symphonies. It gets you to think about these pieces."

Corporon seems to have been putting more and more thought into each CD program. Initially, the discs had a bit of this and a bit of that, and each took its title from the name of one selection, whether that title really applied to the whole package or not. In the past few years, though, each CD has pretty much followed a theme. KCD-11089, for example, is Dream Catchers; it's a combination of reverie and hallucination from such composers as Nancy Galbraith, Walter Mays, Leslie Bassett, Joseph Schwantner, David Gillingham, and Rolf Rudin. Two of those works date from the 1980s, and the rest were completed in 1996. "On collections like these, titles arc important," says Corporon. "That's the problem with marketing these things. It would be easy if each disc had a single composer, because when it says 'Mozart' everyone knows what bin it goes into. But when you have this variety of works, a title is the only thing that helps people identify the disc and remember it." Corporon also takes care with the cover art, which is selected primarily by his wife, largely from up-and-coming Texas artists working in as many different styles as the composers Corporon records. "That's a fun part of this project;" he says, "having my hands on everything, from deciding the program to preparing it, conducting it, editing it, and having input into the artwork."

Cynics may sneer at these as vanity productions, but the artistic level is really quite high--even though the North Texas Wind Symphony is full of college players. The school is in Denton, about 30 miles north of Dallas and Ft. Worth, and part of the same "metroplex," sharing a huge population and highly active cultural community. "We draw students from all over the world," Corporon says. "Only about 20% of the students in the Wind Symphony are from Texas. What recruits for us more than anything these days are the CDs. That's how I sell them to the administration. The cost of a tour is $60,000 to $70,000, going to only six or seven venues. But these CDs cost only $30,000, and they go to thousands of places all over the world. We're beginning to have students come and say, 'The reason I'm here is I heard the CDs and I want to be part of that process.'

"It's such a strong group," Corporon boasts. "Sometimes I wonder if I'm driving them too hard to do two CDs a year, but the students are so excited that they push to play better, and because they're pushing for the recordings that pays big dividends in their daily playing." All this despite the ensemble's constant turnover. "This year my group was two-thirds new;" he says. "That's always a challenge. I'm planning months ahead of time for the sessions, and I'm never sure what our strengths and weakness will be in the year ahead. The Wind Symphony is always a work in progress. So if I line up a piece and then realize I don't have the players for it this year, we'll just do another piece." That means capitalizing on the ensemble's strengths; last year's group had what Corporon calls a "phenomenal percussion section," so Corporon showcased it in Michael Colgrass's Déjà vu (KCD- 1091); this year's pride is the brass section, which should be evident from the contents of the next two releases. As you read this, the group is probably recording a work written for it by Indiana University's David Dzubay, As Filaments of Memory Spin, as well as Steven Gryc's Masquerade Variations and a transcription for winds and three pianos of Percy Grainger's The Warriors.

As eclectic as such programming is, Corporon has returned to certain composers so often over the years that he could now issue entire discs devoted to Paul Hindemith, Vincent Persichetti, and Donald Grantham. By next year Corporon will have recorded the complete wind-ensemble music of Joseph Schwantner, and he suspects that Klavier will be especially interested in compiling all it into a single CD. That would be a nice gesture to collectors, but Corporon's main allegiance is to the composers and the students. "The students are the real heroes of this project," he declares. "They give up their weekends, and they don't get paid except for all the doughnuts and coffee. They could come and just put their time into it, but they put their hearts and souls into it too. Every time the light goes on they play as hard as they can. It's exhausting to watch them. They've come prepared, and they've come committed to do the right job. Those students will be the orchestra wind sections of the future, and I hope that as a result of this experience they'll also form groups like the Sylvan Winds and the Netherlands Wind Ensemble to play this music, just because they've found out that they like it."

Copyright © 2000 by Fanfare, Inc. Reprinted by permission from Volume 23, No. 5 (May/June 2000), pages 104-107.

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