Sigma Alpha Iota

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES by the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, the Ford Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Northwest Area Foundation. More than 75 composers, performers, and presenters representing a wide variety of styles converged on the Twin Cities. The Festival offered nine concerts at the Walker with performances of works by Laurie Anderson, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, David Bryne, Philip Glass, and Pauline Oliveros, as well as sound installations at various locales. Brian Eno, for example, premiered his "Music for Airports" at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport during the festival. A number of Forum members also had works performed at the Walker and elsewhere throughout the city, including Eleanor Hovda, Barbara Korb, and Libby Larsen. This event certainly increased the national visibility of Forum. Carol Barnett recalls that she was too busy during the Festival to attend any of the performances, since her developing career as a composer had to "time share" with two additional talents she employed in making her living: being a professional flutist and working as music copyist. "I spent the whole New Music America week deep in a copying job for Gerald Near, and probably didn't get to any of the concerts!  It was one of those times when being a monk in a cell scratching away on staff paper did not feel so good.  But, the festival was very definitely a high point in the Forum's history. It increased our visibility and spurred us on to the next challenges." Another major leap came with a McKnight Foundation grant in 1981, which enabled the Forum to offer annual fellowships for local composers and, eventually, residency opportunities that invited composers living outside of Minnesota to propose residencies in the state that involved the creation of specially-crafted musical works for diverse local communities. Paulus remembers that meeting vividly. "We all sat down at this big mahogany table," he recalls. "There was a Playwright's Center person, a Loft [literary center] person, a modern dance ensemble – six different groups. And I was the Composers Forum. We each had one piece of paper in front of us, and it said, 'Each of your groups is going to be given $50,000 a year for the next six years for fellowships." And that's how fundraising worked. The program just sort of We learned how to talk to people who did not call themselves musicians, who didn't study music in college, who didn't know the technical terminology. We learned to talk to them about composing – the energy of composing, what it's about. Libby Larsen expanded … It was that recognition from major foundations that gave the Forum credibility." Carol Barnett agrees that the arrival of the McKnight Fellowship program was landmark moment in the young Forum's development. "It was validation of our stability and an acknowledgement by a major funder that we were here to stay.  The fact that it continues to this day is to everyone's credit.  This program gave us all something to strive for. I think I applied for a McKnight Fellowship about 15 times before I finally snared one!" By the mid 1980's, Paulus and Larsen had become adept at clicking with potential funders – even those for whom the works of Shostakovich (who died less than five months after the Forum's incorporation) was still "new music" – by passionately discussing music with those who held the purse strings. "We learned very early on that being able to talk about music and to draw out the music in the people we were talking to was the key," Larsen says. "We learned how to talk to people who did not call themselves musicians, who didn't study music in college, who didn't know the technical terminology. We learned to talk to them about composing – the energy of composing, what it's about." Meanwhile, the list of Forum members was growing, much to Larsen's surprise. "I thought when we started that we'd find 25, 30, maybe 50 composers who were interested in being a part of the group," she marvels, "and of course what I discovered is that there are composers everywhere." They found all kinds of composers with all kinds of needs, so they tailored the Forum's early programs accordingly. Workshops and seminars were held topics ranging from music calligraphy to studio recording techniques and contract and copyright law for composers. In addition to concerts and radio broadcasts that provided exposure for members' music, by 1983 the Forum was offering financial assistance to help composers make recordings: in an era before Kinko's, the Forum office housed photo coping equipment that members could use to produce quality copies of scores and parts of their music; programs like "The Ensemble Reading Fund" and "The Demo-Taping project" helped composers hire musicians to read and record their scores; and, at a time well before digital recording and MP3 files would arrive on the scene, the Forum office housed cassette duplication equipment that members could use at minimal cost to make multiple copies of their performance cassettes for marketing and direct sales. Visiting national and international composers were invited to meet with regional composers at "Composer to composer" sessions for both formal and informal exchange of ideas and information. In the first ten years of the Forum's existence, these informal sessions included composers of a wide range of styles. A partial list would include the likes of Dominick Argento, William Bolcom, Henry Brant, George Crumb, Donald Erb, Philip Glass, Stephen Montague, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Joseph Schwantner, Gunther Schuller, Elliot Schwarz, Virgil Thomson, Francis Thorne, and Richard Wernick, among others. Composers and Community Early on, Larsen and Paulus also made a conscious decision to run the Forum is a way that was remarkably altruistic. "We made the rule that Libby and I each could have only one work on per season," he explains. "Obviously we wanted to have something on and we wanted to program our own stuff, but we said we wanted it to be fair." FORUM continued on page 18 sai-national.org WINTER 2011 PAN PIPES 17

• Cover