Martin Bresnick in his office at the Yale School of Music. Though an established teacher, he says that “from the very beginning, I formulated my life as a composer.”
CONSIDER this list of prominent American composers: Michael Torke, Stewart Wallace, Daniel Kellogg, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, Christopher Theofanidis. On the surface they seem to have little in common apart from nationality; their music ranges from plush symphonic works and operas to rock-infused post-Minimalist pieces.
Add to that list Marco Beltrami, who has provided scores for lucrative feature films like “I, Robot” and the “Scream” series, and Jack Perla, who won the Thelonious Monk competition for jazz composers in 1997. Now add literally dozens more.
What all these composers share is a teacher: Martin Bresnick, the coordinator of the composition department at Yale, where he has taught since 1976. That extraordinary roster of successful former pupils sometimes overshadows Mr. Bresnick’s own reputation as a composer, with noteworthy commissions and estimable awards to show for his efforts. A calendar on his Web site (martinbresnick.com) documents the many performances his work receives.
Mr. Bresnick turned 60 last month, and the occasion will be commemorated this week by two concerts at Zankel Hall.
On Tuesday evening two of his works will be included in a program by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the house band of the eclectic collective Bang on a Can, founded by his former students Mr. Gordon, Mr. Lang and Ms. Wolfe. Both works appear on a new CD, “The Essential Martin Bresnick,” recently issued on Bang on a Can’s label, Cantaloupe.
On Saturday the Yale School of Music will devote an entire evening at Zankel to Mr. Bresnick’s music, including choral songs, a concerto for two marimbas, a multimedia piece for solo pianist and other works less easily categorized.
“I’ve always thoughtof myself as a composer who teaches,” Mr. Bresnick said recently from Kalamazoo, Mich., where he had just supervised the recording of one of his works. “I never thought of it any other way. The tail has been pinned on me because I do it pretty well, so I certainly wouldn’t step back from it. But from the very beginning I formulated my life as a composer, and this was just one way of sustaining my abilities to work as a composer, because I didn’t have any other sources of money.”
Mr. Bresnick grew up in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers housing project in the Bronx. His musical proficiency became evident at a startlingly early age: he still owns recordings, made on the Atlantic City boardwalk, in which he sang Rossini’s aria “Largo al Factotum” and selections by Tchaikovsky at 2.
After graduating from the High School of Music and Art in New York and the University of Hartford, he came under the wing of John Chowning, a pioneer in computer music at Stanford. Mr. Chowning introduced him to music of the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, an encounter that made a lasting impression.
Mr. Bresnick obtained a Fulbright fellowship to study with Ligeti in Vienna. On arrival he learned that Ligeti was departing for a fellowship of his own in Berlin. Instead Mr. Bresnick studied with Gottfried von Einem, a more conservative Austrian composer. But when he returned to Stanford as a graduate student, he arranged for Ligeti to serve there as a visiting professor in 1972.
“I ended up getting to know him in a personal and very direct way,” Mr. Bresnick said. “His remarkable insights into music and his nonideological approach to making new music were absolutely infectious.”
In Ligeti he had a working model for what he hoped to achieve in his own work.
“Ligeti said that he was interested in having a music that was neither modern nor postmodern,” Mr. Bresnick recalled. “It liberated me to think about a music which would not take up the cudgels of modernism, nor would it be a music that would use tonality in some kind of dreamlike collage system. I had to develop a method of composition that would be sufficiently free but also sufficiently integrally made so that it could support anywhere I wanted to go.”
“Opere Della Musica Povera,” a heterogeneous 12-part cycle that consumed Mr. Bresnick throughout the ’90s, suggests that what unites his works, regardless of idiom or duration, is an interest in exploring the evocative qualities of sound in music governed by rigorous structural rules.
Somehow formality and concision failed to constrain his potent imagination, especially when he treated subjects drawn from visual art, poetry and literature. On Tuesday the All-Stars will present two of those works, “The Bucket Rider” and “Be Just!,” both based on stories by Kafka.
“The beginning of ‘Bucket Rider’ is a solo melody on bass clarinet, written in such a way that it’s basically out of range,” said Evan Ziporyn, who plays clarinet in the All-Stars. In placing the melody at the highest extreme of the low-pitched instrument, he explained, Mr. Bresnick was evoking the essence of a wan character in the Kafka story of the same name.
“Because of where it is, there’s no way for it to not be fragile,” Mr. Ziporyn added. “It’s always going to feel like it’s right on the edge of disappearing.”
Mr. Ziporyn, 47, studied composition with Mr. Bresnick as a Yale undergraduate in 1980. He had earlier played clarinet in Mr. Bresnick’s new-music ensemble Sheep’s Clothing, whose occasional all-night concerts were precursors of Bang on a Can’s daylong marathons.
“There is no Bresnick sound other than in his music,” said Mr. Ziporyn, who now teaches composition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But somehow he’s found a way to make people as aesthetically diverse as Michael Gordon on the one hand and Robert Beaser on the other, and a million miles in between, find their voice.”
A teacher’s mission, Mr. Ziporyn said, is to look at a young composer’s work and determine how best to improve the skills required to achieve it.
Kevin Puts, 34, a composer increasingly well known for his symphonic music, said, “I had come from a background of writing pieces in an intuitive, improvisatory way, where I’d sit at the piano and do whatever I thought should come next.” Mr. Bresnick, he said, emphasized the need for discipline, asserting that everything in a piece had to be logically justified.
“I remember my head spinning after my first lesson with him,” Mr. Puts said, “literally overwhelmed with the possibilities of what I could be doing with my piece.”
Mr. Bresnick credited Ligeti with providing an example in this pursuit as well.
“He was open to just about anything if it could be made with excellence and originality,” Mr. Bresnick said.
He laughed at the suggestion that he might bea late-20th-century equivalent to Nadia Boulanger, the French pedagogue who trained an earlier generation of American composers, including Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Virgil Thomson and Elliott Carter. Instead Mr. Bresnick likened himself to Camille Pissarro, the 19th-century Impressionist painter who supported the work of a succeeding generation, including Monet and Manet, and was also influenced by them.
“Even after all these years I don’t see myself as somebody on a mountaintop with a bunch of tablets,” he said. “I see myself as one of the chosen, wandering in the desert. I’ve just been out there longer. When people come to me for teaching, I think they see that this is a person who has blood on his clothes and has been torn up a bit in his struggle, just as they struggle to achieve something.”
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