by Casey Welsch, photos by John Shartrand
It's lunch hour. You can tell by the number of people in ties eating and smoking and flirting around the fountains. It makes downtown Omaha look lively, like a city that has something to say. Inside the Holland Center for Performing Arts, the institutional building that houses the office of composer/conductor Ernest Richardson, the scene is less busy. The halls are beige and unmarked — a few people are working in small offices. But Richardson’s office is different.
Sunlight pours in through a wall of windows onto shelves lined with books and records and photographs. Desks cluttered with papers sit unmanned, save for one. At a table in the middle of all this sits Richardson, tinkering with his latest piece on a compositional program on his computer. Long stacks of printed music lay all around him.
Richardson stands up with a smile and extends his hand. He’s an optimistic-looking man. His smile beams, and he’s ready to talk shop.
Richardson has been working with the Omaha Symphony for the past 18 years, but he’s been a musician his entire life. He picked up a violin at 2 or 3.
“My father was a conductor and violinist, and still is,” Richardson says. “When I was about 5 or 6 I already knew I wanted to be a conductor, but my father told me that, in order to do that, I’d have to become the best musician I could possibly become first.
“That’s the real key. Waving the stick around only comes after that.”
Richardson became the best musician he could be starting at Indiana University, and later moving to the University of Michigan. He studied conducting under such luminaries as Samuel Krachmalnick and Gustav Meier, and composition under William Albright.
Richardson is a gem to the Symphony. Individuals who can both conduct and compose on a professional level are rare, and Richardson offers both of these talents to Omaha.
“In earlier times, being a well-trained musician, composing was just a part of that,” Richardson says. “It was just assumed that you could compose decently, but really it’s all a matter of time. With my conducting and other things, I can’t compose quite as much as I’d like to, but if I’m not conducting or fly fishing, I’m probably composing.”
The Omaha Symphony is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year, and Richardson has reached into the compositional part of his brain to write a new, original piece to commemorate the event. The work will be showcased as part of “Spirit of Creativity,” the Omaha Symphony’s upcoming concert Saturday, May 28. The eclectic showcase will also include Bartók’s “Romanian Folk Dances,” Copland’s “Music for Movies,” Barber’s “Capricorn Concerto” and Walker’s “The Light of Three Mornings.” Richardson’s piece is simply titled “Three Scenes for Chamber Orchestra,” (chamber orchestra implying not the full symphony, but a smaller ensemble made up of the Symphony’s full-time players) although nothing about it is simple.
“The scene is more of an emotional context than a specific scene. It’s not trying to depict a particular event,” Richardson says. “It is trying to go through an emotional journey.”
Richardson says the composer's job isn't to simply make pretty music for people to enjoy — it’s to change an audience’s perception of reality.
“We’re an abstract art form, so what we do is kind of shape an emotional reaction to the passage of time,” he says. “Composers can manipulate the sense of time. We can make it seem like it goes fast — stretch it out. Time is our canvas. An audience’s perception of time is influenced by their world, and they come into ours, so there’s a juncture in our timelines.”
Richardson hopes to bend time and minds with his “Three Scenes.” He describes the first scene as dark and aggressive.
“You can imagine it as a chase scene that doesn’t end well for those in the process of chasing,” he says. “It’s pretty unrelenting. It doesn’t stop coming at you.”
The second scene is a dreamscape, ethereal and spasmodic.
“In dreaming, images sort of come and go — they happen and go away. And, when you wake up, you have trouble making sense of what you just saw, because it was just a jumble of images,” Richardson says. “This music does that. It sort of sets a dream state, where you’re not really sure exactly what you’re seeing, and when you think it will go one way, it goes another and kind of gets you into that dream state.”
The third scene cranks up the energy again, and returns to the chase.
“I started off thinking about our bass player and his ability to play both classical and jazz, so the bass line I wrote is influenced by jazz and Caribbean music — not quite jazz, but influenced by it,” Richardson says. “The piece is called a caccia [KAH-chah], which is a Renaissance musical form that has two subtexts to it: sort of a community being together; and the secondary theme is a chase — caccia means ‘chase’ — which can be like a hunting chase, or more of a romantic chase.
“I put together a piece where the orchestra chases itself around, one part sort of chasing after another, both angrily and romantically. I wanted to capture both the gritty and romantic themes in this piece.”
These “Three Scenes” ask a lot from the chamber orchestra. The piece is supposed to be full of feeling and emotion, as well as everything else that makes music, music.
“It has markings like ‘dark’ and ‘depressive’ and ‘relentless’ in it,” says Ann Beebe, lead violinist and associate concert master for the Omaha Symphony. “For the violins, it’s very difficult, there’s lots of notes rushing by all the time, but that’s especially true for new music. We’re stretching the boundaries of the instrument constantly.”
Richardson is confident his players can pull off anything he writes with virtuosic proficiency, although he isn’t exactly sure how Omaha is able to attract and support such a fine ensemble. The fact that a city the size and location of Omaha can thrive with such sophistication in the performing arts is quite a point of question.
“There are theories,” he says. “One is that when the railroad started dumping people here, the culture that grew up here knew it was kind of a trip to go to Chicago or Kansas City, so it developed its own culture. There was a sense that they wanted a cultural experience but didn’t want to go somewhere else. You can see it in the zoo, the art museum, all the theater — they’re all representative of some of the best work that goes on in the nation, not just Nebraska or the Midwest.”
It’s always been this way. Omaha and Nebraska have always had a knack for raising the bar, constantly changing with the times, rising to the challenge.
“When our audience changes, our concerts change. It’s interesting because we’ve changed quite a great deal even since I’ve been here,” Beebe says.
And it’s not just the fine arts that have the boon.
“You look at the indie rock that’s coming out of this area, you look at the music being written in the university, you look at the music the orchestra plays — I think there’s a good environment for that here,” Richardson says. “I think that pressing the envelope is, unusually, a part of Omaha. You might not expect that in the Midwest, but I think it’s part of the culture here.”
With “Three Scenes for Chamber Orchestra,” Richardson is adding his significant contribution to Omaha’s prolific musical heritage, continuing an inexplicable tradition of greatness.
“There’s so many styles of music being written, that I think the orchestra is a primary incubator for new music, for contemporary ideas,” he says.
He’ll have his chance to prove this to Nebraskans at the piece’s premiere Saturday, May 28, at 7 p.m. at the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Strauss Performing Arts Center. He invites all to attend.
Casey Welsch is an editorial intern at Hear Nebraska. He once read part of an Alex Ross book and now thinks he knows something about classical music. Contact him at caseywelsch@hearnebraska.org.
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