The Composer, The Conductor, And The Universe

There’s a burst of strings that gets TJ Cole’s To The Universe going. Smooth as silk, but fierce. Horns build to the ceiling. Woodwinds howl, the longing call of something in the distance. An organ, warm and full-bellied as Sunday morning, builds and builds in layers, until you don’t think it can build anymore. There’s something big and magical here, drenching the whole room in sound. And then, in just about four minutes, it’s over.

Cole’s To The Universe is part of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra’s (NHSO) 125th Anniversary Opening Night, set for Thursday evening at Woolsey Hall. The program, which doubles as School Night at the Symphony, will also feature Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Antonín Dvořák’s Concerto in A Minor, and Engelbert Humperdinck’s prelude to Hansel & Gretel. It is Maestro William Boughton’s last season with the organization before Alasdair Neale takes over next year.

For Cole, the concert is a journey into familiar but uncharted territory. The 25-year-old composer grew up in suburban Atlanta and now lives in Philadelphia, where she moved in 2012 to study at the Curtis Institute of Music. Last summer, the NHSO reached out to her “kind of out of the blue” with a potential commission: a fanfare that had to include organ, and be done by the October season opener. That gave her about a month to write. She hesitated: it was a big project for a short amount of time. But her interest was piqued by writing for organ. So she jumped in.

Reached by phone Thursday morning, NHSO Executive Director Elaine Carroll called Cole's work "exciting" as the symphony looks back at its first 125 years, and braces for many more in a changing environment. Earlier this year, incoming Music Director Alasdair Neale had been the one to suggest Cole's work to the symphony (she has done commissions for the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, where he is the conductor). Carroll and Boughton listened to her previous pieces, and found that something clicked. 

"I personally love the idea that the 125th anniversary fanfare is by a young composer with a great new voice," said Carroll, noting the use of Woolsey's traditional organ in a contemporary piece. "It has something of where the symphony is going as we entered a new era." 

Over the summer, Cole started to compose not on the page, but looking at Rockwell Kent’s 1918 To The Universe, an oil-on-board painting that lives at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the piece, a man stands with his back to the viewer, completely naked and raising his left arm out before him. A glass rests in his fist, toasting a wide starry sky and expanse of land below. Everything is tight and muscular: calves and heels touching, back and biceps rippling, butt rounded, like a ripe dimpled apple.

From the first time she saw it three years ago, she fell for the painting because it was funny and irreverent. Here was this guy—maybe god, looking down on all his creation—faced with the enormity of the universe. He turned the German Rückenfigur, the figure in his coat with his back to the viewer, staring longingly over the abyss, on its head. The world of To The Universe was so big and so beautiful. He’d drink to that.

“I sort of wanted to capture the feeling of the Rockwell Kent painting when I first saw it,” she recalled in an interview Wednesday night at Woolsey Hall. “That it was refreshing somehow, but also very celebratory and warm. I didn’t think about the form or anything. It was just highlighting certain moments.”

But the painting was only the beginning of her work. From there, she spent time with the piece in her head and on the page. She had never written for organ, but loved the idea of it soaking the piece slowly, creeping up on the instruments like dawn before taking over. She found herself writing and rewriting the beginning, only to return to what she’d had in the first place. Then there was the piece’s genre. The NHSO had asked for a fanfare—the bouncing, bombastic favored form of marches and victory parades—but no one had said it couldn’t be a little different.

“I wanted to make something that had the same sort of celebratory feel, but more lyrical and flowy,” she said.

And it is, with references that bridge contemporary and canonical. There’s a propulsive, synthy nod to the beginning credits of “Stranger Things,” a handful of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Fordlandia. But there’s also that sense of epic celebration, as instrumentals build and organ comes in churchy, and then piles on layers like the rich, discordant singing of a congregation. 

Now, she added, she’s excited for New Haven to hear it—and to appear on a bill with three dead male composers. In the past few years, she’s seen a trend that she doesn’t like: symphony orchestras push all of their women composers into one annual concert, or all of their living composers into one concert, or all of their living female composers into one concert. And then, assuming they’ve done their due diligence, they don’t pull them out for another year.

Instead, To The Universe chatters and converses with the other works: the fantastical, epic world of Scheherazade as she spins stories into gold. A dizzying, emotive Concerto In A Minor, on which members of the NHSO will be joined by violinist Chad Hoopes. And the polite, fanciful prelude to Hansel & Gretel, where horns are so delicate in the beginning you think they may be afraid of offending each other. The concert also begins with the nation’s most epic fanfare—a raucous, jubilant Star-Spangled Banner from guest conductor Dr. Keith Churchwell, vice president and executive director of YNHH Heart & Vascular Center/Transplantation Center.

Back outside Woolsey, Cole packed up for the night as rehearsal on Concerto In A Minor unfolded inside. Hoopes’ violin trilled, wailed and sang at the front. Woolsey's signature resonance and reverb, an echo that kept on going, sounded even outside its closed doors. 

“It’s really cool to see this hall, and to hear the organ in this hall,” she said. “Definitely the organ.”

The New Haven Symphony Orchestra (NHSO) kicks off its 125th anniversary season, the last under Maestro William Boughton, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Woolsey Hall in downtown New Haven. For tickets or more information, visit the organization's website. To listen to an excerpt from the piece, click on the audio below.