Photography by Steven Heller

Issue: Autumn 2003

Musical Chairs

The halls are alive with the sound of music as USC Thornton achieves orchestral critical mass.

Perhaps you hadn’t noticed, but there’s more concert music spilling out of USC than your average mid-sized American city.

We’re not talking professional ensembles passing through on tour. We’re talking home-grown student orchestras bearing the ubiquitous USC Thornton label. In the upcoming three months alone, concert-goers can hear more than two dozen programs by the USC Thornton Symphony, the USC Thornton Wind Ensemble, the USC Thornton Chamber Orchestra, the USC Thornton Early Music Ensemble and the USC Thornton Contemporary Music Ensemble; a series of faculty concerts (the USC Thornton Music Masters Series); and performances by vocal groups like the USC Thornton Chamber Choir, the USC Thornton Concert Choir and the USC Thornton Oriana Choir, and non-classical groups like the USC Thornton Jazz Orchestra and the USC Thornton Vocal Jazz Ensemble. Plus, there are dozens of student trios, quartets and quintets that concertize throughout the year, culminating in mind-blowing 18-hour “chamber music marathons” held over three nights in April and November.

The campus is, quite literally, bursting at the seams with ensemble music – to the point that those charged with scheduling concerts must book Newman Hall and Bovard Auditorium, the school’s main performance venues, a full year in advance.

It’s true that quantity doesn’t always go hand-in-hand with quality, but in this instance there appears to be little trade-off. The USC Thornton School boasts a flagship symphony – currently under the baton of internationally acclaimed maestro Sergiu Comissiona – that’s widely regarded as among the finest in America. Six years ago, Polish composer Henryk Górecki called it the best orchestra he’d ever worked with – this after leading the USC students in a sold-out performance of his transcendent Symphony No. 3. (“Wonderful musicians! Perfect performances!” Górecki raved in a post-concert interview.)

The celebrated maestro isn’t alone in thinking highly of the USC Thornton players. Former symphony director Daniel Lewis, who is credited with cultivating the orchestra to delicate refinement over his quarter-century as its caretaker, recently lunched with a past dean of the respected Oberlin Conservatory of Music. The impartial Ohioan told Lewis that every music academic he quizzes on America’s best student orchestra (and he quizzes them all) without fail, lionizes USC’s symphony.

But the chamber orchestra isn’t about to take a back seat, according to its director, Yehuda Gilad ’80, who calls his ensemble “the best kept secret at USC – unsurpassed in quality, morale, enthusiasm, inspiration.” Better suited than the full-bodied symphony to render faithfully, say, a Brandenburg concerto, the leaner 40-piece chamber orchestra requires student musicians to listen and play better because, as Gilad bluntly puts it, “there’s no place to hide.”

Then there is the roar of approval that greeted the wind ensemble last spring in Minneapolis. Director and USC conducting professor H. Robert Reynolds ’63 had taken his 60-piece ensemble to play for the 1,400-member College Band Directors National Association. Of the eight or so college wind groups invited to perform, USC (the headliner) received the first standing ovation that formidable body has bestowed in years.

So all three of USC’s so-called large ensembles are terrific. What else is new?

Nothing much, says USC Thornton dean Robert Cutietta, his eyes dancing with mirth, unless you consider that “they don’t exist.”

Doctoral student M. Anne Rardin, first violinist in the USC Thornton Early Music Ensemble.		USC Thornton Symphony cellos and basses

Symphony, chamber orchestra, wind ensemble – all three are illusions, an ingenious trompe l’œil (or trompe l’oreille, more accurately). Concert-hall phantasms, they vaporize and reconstitute themselves anew for each program – about 17 times a year.

USC performance majors move through the large ensembles in an intricate minuet choreographed by symphony rehearsal conductor Sharon Lavery MM ’00.

“I post all the seating assignments at the beginning of the semester,” says Lavery, a clarinetist who is also resident conductor of the wind ensemble.

Thus the USC Thornton Symphony that performed with guest artist Lynn Harrell last March in Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme was an almost wholly different orchestra from the one that teamed with guest artist (and USC vocal arts professor) Elizabeth Hynes a month later in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Or with guest conductor and USC professor William Dehning MA ’67, DMA ’71 and the USC Thornton Choral Artists in May’s concert of sacred music by Bach and Handel.

Conductor Donald Crockett rehearses the USC Thornton Contemporary Music Ensemble.		USC Thornton School dean Robert Cutietta with a group of school musicians: ”We stay focused on the fact that we aren’t really here primarily to give concerts, but to educate students.”

The same holds true for the year’s six chamber orchestra concerts, including two running engagements in the pit beneath the USC Thornton Opera. Ditto the four wind ensemble performances and various off-campus gigs, such as the band directors’ conference.

“Every time we give a concert, we scatter the group and start over again,” says Cutietta. “I don’t know of any other school in the world that could do that.”

Here’s how it normally works: Music schools and conservatories hold yearly auditions and put together rosters for their various ensembles; then each group rehearses and concertizes for a season under a principal director.

USC Thornton players do things differently. Lavery’s rotation schedule, posted early in the semester, spells out who’s playing what, when, where, with whom. “If there are conflicts – say I get a viola player who has auditions for graduate school during a rotation – then we tweak it,” Lavery says.

Student musicians rehearse a program six to eight times per concert, don their formal wear for one evening, then stow away their bows, reeds and mallets. When the music stops, everyone rushes to another seat. Everyone except the symphony’s five string principals, that is. Those appointments, which carry stipends, are awarded yearly amid intense competition.

“We are creating miracles here,” says Gilad of the whole orchestral scene at USC, “and doing it on a shoestring.”

To survive in this never-ending game of musical chairs, it isn’t enough to be a quick study; USC Thornton musicians must be technically rock-solid yet aesthetically malleable. They must learn to please not just one, but two, three, four, sometimes even five maestros – and that’s not counting a parade of guest conductors, be they USC faculty, international podium figures (John Williams is coming next fall), or classmates from the school’s conducting program.

Taking all this into consideration, for the ensembles “to be as good as they are is really amazing,” notes Cutietta.

But if the players didn’t rotate, wouldn’t the orchestras be better still? That’s not the point, Cutietta says.

“We wouldn’t do things this way if all we wanted was to have the best entertainment. We stay focused on the fact that we aren’t really here primarily to give concerts, but to educate students. There’s a big difference.”

A music-education expert recruited last year from the University of Arizona to take over for outgoing dean Larry Livingston, Cutietta makes no secret of his No. 1 priority for the USC Thornton School: preparing experienced, versatile, entrepreneurial musicians to compete in an uncertain marketplace.

Indeed, for some performance majors, the minuet doesn’t end with mandatory rotations through two or three USC ensembles. Many also play with the Los Angeles-based American Youth Symphony, among the nation’s finest orchestras for musicians 16 to 25. (Nearly 80 percent of the 90-person AYS 2003 roster consists of USC Thornton students.)

Maestro Comissiona chats with student violinist Yi Zhou at a rehearsal.		Kevin Cooper. doctoral student in classical guitar

And a masochistic few also sign up for elective credit with small ensembles, such as the USC Thornton Early Music Ensemble and the USC Thornton Contemporary Music Ensemble. Look at violist Jon Moerschel ’01, MM ’03 – clearly a sucker for punishment. What other possible explanation for his four-seasons-and-counting with the early music ensemble, not to mention several turns with the contemporary music ensemble?

James Tyler, director of the early music ensemble, offers a more practical explanation: the stockpiling of “more ammunition in a string player’s quiver.” Any violinist, cellist, violist or bassist who can draw a Baroque bow and attack gut strings with gusto – while employing correct technique and an authentic style – has a distinct edge on the orchestral job market, Tyler says.

Early music, it turns out, is a growth industry in an otherwise shrinking classical performance and recording market, where a new repertoire of very old music from Praetorius to Telemann is finding keen audiences.

At the same time, performance aesthetics have reached new heights of purism. “It would be very unusual, laughable, nowadays to hear Bach or Mozart played by a symphony orchestra,” says Tyler. Even later music is not immune to the movement. “The Romantic period is being entirely rethought,” he explains, pointing to a rash of recordings of Beethoven’s works reinterpreted on gut-strung violins and period woodwinds, with tempos and dynamics in step with what the Romantic maestro had in mind.

Also driving USC Thornton students’ seeming self-persecution is the logic of supply and demand. While philharmonics from Chicago to Pittsburgh are wilting in the shadow of high costs and diminishing corporate and foundation sponsors, leaner chamber and Baroque orchestras are springing up like wildflowers. Tyler points to a new professional Baroque orchestra to be unveiled soon in Southern California. (He chuckles enigmatically as he declines to give details.) That’s on top of the 35-year-old Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, one of three top independent chamber ensembles in the country. Incidentally, LACO contains a dozen USC Thornton alumni.

Well aware of these market forces, USC Thornton School officials have been encouraging performance majors, particularly string players, to try their hands at period instruments. Next year the early music ensemble, on a trial basis, joins the symphony and chamber orchestra in the mandatory ensemble rotation for all string players. The school recently acquired four Baroque fiddles to get things underway.

On the opposite extreme, chronologically, lies a second growth trend for classical orchestras: the blooming field of contemporary music. A new generation of conductors, notably the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Esa-Pekka Salonen, has passionately embraced contemporary composers and their compositions as the lifeblood of a living art, if not the last defense against its ossification into a museum relic.

“New music should be an essential part of the diet – normal, not a special event,” Salonen told an audience of young composers, conductors and musicians last fall at Synergy, a one-of-a-kind symposium held at USC. “We are gradually getting back to the, in my opinion, healthy situation when a new piece can be the talk of the town, the highlight of the program,” the Finnish composer-conductor said.

To cut it in Salonen’s orchestra – or in any professional orchestra, for that matter – aspiring musicians clearly ought not confine their repertoire to Brahms and Berlioz; they’d better be equally handy with Arvo Pärt and Pierre Boulez.

That’s where the USC Thornton Contemporary Music Ensemble comes in. Its director, composer Donald Crockett ’74, MM ’76, considers an “old” work something penned before 1985. It is unthinkable for him to program any concert without including at least one West Coast premiere.

“Students in my ensemble learn what it’s like to prepare these brand-new pieces,” says Crockett – himself a prolific composer whose work has been performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, the Kronos Quartet, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. His Celestial Mechanics for oboe and string quartet, commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra when he was that group’s composer-in-residence, took second prize in the 1991 Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards.

Crockett’s rank in the composing world has translated to visits and coaching sessions for his students with the likes of Witold Lutoslawski, John Harbison, John Adams, William Kraft and Steven Stucky, who is the longtime consulting composer for new music to the L.A. Philharmonic. Indeed, as Crockett’s friend, Stucky is the link connecting the philharmonic to the contemporary music ensemble. For three years running, the student ensemble has appeared in the philharmonic’s contemporary music series, the Green Umbrella.

To the untutored ear, new music can sometimes sound like random noise. But professional musicians will tell you that the more abstract, dissonant, multi-layered and rhythmically chaotic a score, the more challenging and, often, rewarding it is to play.

USC Thornton Early Music Ensemble director James Tyler joins the continuo on archlute.		The USC Thornton Symphony and USC Thornton Choral Artists take a bow after a performance at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.

“One reason we believe so strongly in new music,” said Stucky, appearing on a Synergy panel with Salonen and L.A. Philharmonic associate conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya, “is because it’s so good for the orchestra. It keeps [musicians] fast on [their] feet.”

The reasons for this are fairly obvious. With new music, rarely is there a recording to fall back on, let alone a standard interpretation. Just notes on staves. While the audience may not hear a passing mistake, the conductor and composer (who may well be listening in the wings) certainly will.

“It’s exciting to have that challenge. It’s new. It’s never been played before,” says contemporary music ensemble veteran Leticia Oaks Strong ’94, now a violist with the L.A. Philharmonic.

When Strong beat out hundreds of terrifically qualified candidates in 1994 for one of two seats in the viola section, she became the philharmonic’s youngest member. Only 30 violists had made it past the audio tape round. On audition day, from behind a screen concealing her identity from Salonen and the rest of the hiring committee, Strong played her heart out. The judges narrowed the field to 11, then six, then finally just two. Amazingly (in these credential-counting times) Strong, a mere bachelor of music, was one of them.

“I was floored,” she recalls. “It never ceases to amaze me.”

Crockett wasn’t amazed, however.

“I tend to get some of the very best students,” he says of his contemporary music ensemble, “and they very often are quite successful after graduating.”

Later that fall, Crockett went to see his former player on the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Salonen was conducting a world premiere. Strong seemed unfazed: been there, done that.

She hadn’t always felt that way. “I still remember my first concert with the contemporary music ensemble,” she says, taking a break from vacuuming (yes, musicians in major orchestras do housework). “I had never done anything like that before!”

Besides her required rotations through the symphony – she was principal viola one year under Daniel Lewis – and her four-year stint with the contemporary music ensemble, Strong also played Baroque viola with Tyler’s early music ensemble.

Looking back on her education, she says, “it’s great to have a music school that has all these different kinds of music. I think that’s rare. It certainly was incredibly useful for me.”

Ask Cutietta what he sees as the USC Thornton School’s greatest asset, and it’s this diversity he points to. With 17 departments and programs, he says, “we are well situated to accommodate new interests in a student” – be it the freshman who just wants to put in his eight hours a day in the practice rooms, only to find he has other ambitions by junior year; or the theory student who discovers she has fallen in love with performance; or the jazz major who finds himself smitten with opera.

“We can handle all those students. There’s not another school in the country equipped to do all that,” he adds.

Cutietta also feels strongly about preparing musicians for the prosaic side of the profession. “Whether you’re a classical violinist or a studio musician, knowing how the business works has become increasingly important,” he says. “You’re going to have to know about contracts, retirement plans.” Coming this fall: a freshman recording arts class just for performance majors.

When Strong scans the faces of her fellow L.A. Philharmonic players, she can trace quite a few back to college days. Cellists Brent Samuel ’93 and Ben Hong ’94 were classmates. It turns out nearly a third of the L.A. Philharmonic belongs to the Trojan Family: out of 107 players, 23 are alumni; 11 are faculty.

The high ratio may smack of nepotism, but a strict policy of blind auditions rules out that possibility. A top music program, USC Thornton ought – simply by virtue of statistical probability – account for a sizeable chunk of any major orchestra. And it pretty much does. Some young standouts: New York Philharmonic concertmaster Sheryl Staples ’91 and assistant concertmaster Michelle Mi-Kyung Kim ’97. Also St. Louis Symphony associate concertmaster Elisa Barston ’91.

If there’s a hometown advantage for USC alumni with the L.A. Philharmonic, LACO and Orange County’s Pacific Symphony, it’s one of familiarity: many USC Thornton faculty are also musicians in these fine orchestras, having insider knowledge (which they cheerfully pass on to their prodigies) of what each organization’s leadership likes to see in a young musician.

“The walls between our school and the city are really quite transparent,” Cutietta says.

At the same time, the L.A. Philharmonic’s patronage of USC faculty composers is an ongoing affair. In 1990, the critically acclaimed orchestra premiered Crockett’s commissioned work, Still Life With Bell. It has since presented Alleluia: in domo per sæcula by composer and theory professor Frederick Lesemann DMA ’72 and Stephen Hartke’s Ascent of the Equestrian in a Balloon at the Dorothy Chandler.

Salonen has only strengthened the ties between the two Los Angeles institutions. “It makes so much sense for a major orchestra to have a relationship with the primary performance school in its area” says L.A. Philharmonic general manager Gail Samuel ’88, ’89, MBA ’02, herself a former violinist in Daniel Lewis’ symphony. During the inaugural season of Walt Disney Concert Hall – which Samuel predicts will draw the world cultural spotlight to Los Angeles much as the Getty Center opening did a few years back – USC Thornton groups are slated for three engagements in the brand-new facility. The previous season had seen the all-women USC Thornton Oriana Choir at the Dorothy Chandler in performances of Holst’s The Planets. The season before that, Crockett’s contemporary music ensemble had given two West Coast premieres of works by Kaija Saariaho and Augusta Read Thomas.

And in spring 2000, Salonen had come to USC to work with the USC Thornton Symphony in a master class leading up to a new-music concert. On the program were world premieres by three USC Thornton student composers, among them Naomi Sekiya MM ’99.

During the open rehearsal, Salonen was so struck by Sekiya’s Blue Echoes that he promptly commissioned another work for the Ojai Music Festival. Premiered by Sir Simon Rattle later that summer, Sekiya’s piano concerto, Deluge, received the festival’s “Music for Tomorrow” award.

“I think he was surprised by how much he enjoyed it,” says Crockett of Salonen’s first time taking the USC orchestra out for a spin.

Dirk Freymuth ’88, MA ’96		Concertmasters Martin Chalifour (of the Los Angeles Philharmonic) and Rebekka Hartmann (of the USC Thornton Symphony) share a music stand at a Synergy rehearsal.

“Esa-Pekka has really developed as an educator and a mentor,” says Samuel, who accompanied Salonen to the USC Thornton Symphony reading. That role, she says, “is becoming more and more important for him. In fact, that was where the whole Synergy idea came from.”

You could feel it in the air like an electrical current. Something extraordinary was happening that September afternoon in the Bing Theater. Seated at a table behind the second violins, a characteristically intense Salonen took it all in: the sounds issuing from the orchestra, the printed orchestral parts of Clockwise lying under his hand, the broad gestures of the young conductor on the podium. From the front row of the audience, Stucky likewise trained his ears on the orchestra while his eyes scanned the spiral-bound score perched on the armrest between him and its young composer, Steven Burke.

On stage, union card-carrying L.A. Philharmonic members shared music stands with dewy-faced USC Thornton players.

“It literally went: L.A. Philharmonic, USC Thornton. Next stand: L.A. Philharmonic, USC Thornton,” recalls symphony rehearsal conductor Sharon Lavery in patent awe. “Next to every USC player was an L.A. Philharmonic player. Just to physically see the pairing, when you were in the audience, was so exciting!”

Believe it or not, this is a rarity in the music world: professional musicians at the top of their game interspersed with up-and-comers (union rules make such blending very difficult). Yet here they were playing together at the Bing, as part of a five-day event designed to help overcome the isolation between conductor and composer. The idea behind Synergy was to match four young composers with four young conductors and have them prepare a concert of new music.

“This was a landmark event,” says Jesse Rosen of the American Symphony Orchestra League, one of Synergy’s four co-sponsors along with the philharmonic and USC. “It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.”

“Synergy was a great example of how we can all come together in a perfect way,” says Samuel. “Watching the people who were there developing through the course of the week, the relationship between our musicians and the musicians of the USC Thornton School – it really brought everything to a high level. Esa-Pekka loved the experience.”

On day two, as the hybrid orchestra played the first of four rehearsals, Clockwise came haltingly together. There was a heady sense of discovery; the musicians played with ears wide open. Having immersed himself in this music for weeks, hearing it over and over in his imagination, conductor Scott O’Neil (currently associate conductor of the Utah Symphony) listened just as intently. Even Burke was hearing his piece anew. A young composer based in New York, he had dedicated Clockwise to the memory of his mentor, Jacob Druckman, quoting liberally from the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead – a frequent motive in Druckman’s own music. At the work’s center, L.A. Philharmonic concertmaster (and USC Thornton School violin lecturer) Martin Chalifour drew out a sweet, romantic air against a thumping backdrop of creaks and mildly unnerving groans.

Philharmonic violist Leticia Strong was back on her old stomping ground, along with bassist David Allen Moore ’94, cellist Gloria Lum ’79, bassoonist Patricia Kindel ’78, trumpeter Donald Green ’68, ’71 and violinist Barry Socher ’69.

O’Neil gestured commandingly to the sections, riding the sound swells to the edge of control.

“May I suggest something?” Salonen interjected, proposing greater care in bringing together the layers of a fugue-like passage of winds, brass and timpani. The musicians obligingly stripped the passage down to its bare bones for the conductors’ inspection. Just winds. Then brass. Finally, the hybrid orchestra reassembled itself, once more a complex sound machine. The 15-minute work built to a climax. After a pause, the musicians took it from the top.

Two nights later, a crowd that included VIPs Salonen, retired L.A. Philharmonic executive director Ernest Fleischman, current executive director Deborah Borda and Walt Disney Concert Hall architect Frank Gehry ’54 (himself an ardent new-music enthusiast) gathered for Synergy’s closing concert. The evening featured such unorthodox instruments as a hand-cranked siren, the marching feet of the entire string section and a shotgun being cocked – all for a piece titled Ode, drawing on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

But the program’s most ambitious work proved to be Sinfonia delle Ombre, a three-movement tour-de-force inspired by Dante’s Inferno. Newly completed by USC Thornton doctoral student Sekiya, the “grandly orchestrated score produced an inferno of atmosphere, with gripping instrumental effects that ranged from a fragile flute to massive orchestral explosions, viscerally weighed by the thudding bass drum,” wrote Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed in his review. “It is a vast, bold world of sound that Sekiya conveys.”

Yet Swed reserved his most extravagant praise for the evening’s unsung heroes: “The synergistic orchestra … divided between members of the Philharmonic and students in the USC Symphony....

“Had I closed my eyes, I never would have known it wasn’t fully professional.”

Yet there are some at the USC Thornton School who would cavil even with this accolade. Not fully professional indeed!

“It’s nominally a ‘student orchestra,’ but these are all students who, within a few years, will wind up in professional philharmonics,” says theory professor Frederick Lesemann, who chairs the school’s orchestra committee.

Half the players rotating through the various USC Thornton ensembles are working on graduate degrees, he points out. All are seasoned artists on the brink of big careers.

“We have an amazing orchestra,” Lesemann insists. “Every single student in that orchestra is a story.”

Musical chairs, indeed.


USC Thornton School of Music ensembles will make three appearances at the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall during the 2003-2004 inaugural season:

• January 22 and 25, USC Thornton Choral Artists will join the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen in Berlioz’ Tristia.
• April 18, the USC Thornton Symphony under Sergiu Comissiona will perform Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra; Brahms’ Double Concerto (with soloist Ronald Leonard, USC cello professor) and the world premiere of a new work by USC faculty composer Frederick Lesemann.
• April 26, the USC Thornton Contemporary Music Ensemble will present a Pacific Rim program as part of the Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series.

For information on these concerts, go to (www.laphil.com). To find other USC performances online, go to (www.usc.edu/calendar) and select “music” under “Arts and Lectures.”


Bands Of Gold

A rich orchestral history yields to a richer-still quest for musical multiplicity.

The earliest photograph shows a “USC Concert Orchestra” of 25 instruments, including an upright piano and a scuffed-up bass drum that fairly screams “marching band hand-me-down.” The picture dates from 1915, four years before the Los Angeles Philharmonic came into being, and 35 years after USC had first opened its doors.

The germs of a USC symphony orchestra go back almost to the beginning, though. As Pauline Alderman describes in her historical memoir, We Build a School of Music, voice was the centerpiece of USC’s fledgling music program. (“Los Angeles was opera mad,” she writes.) Even so, as early as 1903, there were reports of temporary orchestras improvised to accompany USC’s lavish operas, masses and oratorios.

Los Angeles-bred violinist Arthur Perry made it a permanent fixture as the director of the nascent USC Concert Orchestra. Also head of the violin department, Perry moonlighted as a member of the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra – as did USC cellist Davol Sanders, bassist Axel Simonsen, flutist Jay Plowe, clarinetist Antonio Raimondi and many others.

By 1919, the L.A. Symphony had morphed into the L.A. Philharmonic, attracting noted musicians and renowned conductors. The Hollywood Bowl opened soon thereafter, and it wasn’t long before Tinseltown attracted world-class music figures to compose and conduct for the booming film industry.

Gi-Hyun Sunwoo, MM in clarinet performance, and Rebecca Rivera, MM in bassoon performance.

The pace of USC’s symphony really picked up when composer-conductor Ingolf Dahl joined the faculty in 1945. His taste ran toward the moderns: concerts were liberally sprinkled with Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Lucas Foss, Charles Ives, Walter Piston and Carl Ruggles.

Until his death in 1970, Dahl remained active at USC, teaching composition, conducting and music history. But after 1953 he shared the symphony’s podium with Walter Ducloux. An internationally known conductor, pianist and opera director, Ducloux’s most lasting imprint was establishing the USC Opera.

Mid-century brought a wave of orchestral giants to USC: Ignacy Paderewski, Gregor Piatigorsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Jascha Heifetz and Leopold Stokowski. Dahl’s former student Fredrick Lesemann MM ’61, DMA ’71, now chair of the composition department and unofficial school historian, remembers a delegation of Soviet maestros, led by Dmitri Shostakovich and Dmitri Kabalevsky, visiting in 1959.

But it was under Daniel Lewis, Lesemann insists, that the symphony really blossomed.

“Dan is a very rare individual,” Lesemann says. “A superb musician, yet he was totally dedicated to teaching young people. That’s so very hard to find: a conductor of the highest level of musicianship who has the dedication, who is willing to stay in one place and develop a program.”

“When I came, building the USC Symphony was the most important project I had in front of me,” Lewis acknowledges.

His dedication showed. In his first year at the helm, the group doubled in size, from just under 40 to roughly 80 players. “The talent was there,” Lewis says of the USC performance students of the time. “It was just that many of these people had not been playing in the orchestra.”

In less than 10 years, the USC Symphony (as it was then called) grew to be indisputably one of the four best student orchestras in the country. During accreditation visits by the National Association of Schools of Music, the symphony “always, always got special mention,” recalls Lewis. It was under his baton in 1991 that USC took its first bow at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

When Lewis retired, his larger-than-life legacy proved hard to measure up to. In 2000 the school hired Sergiu Comissiona, a world-class podium figure who holds simultaneous conducting posts with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony and the Jerusalem Symphony.

Although USC’s symphony was now in good hands, much had changed at the music school over the years. The student population had doubled since 1985, from roughly 600 to today’s 1,200. A single orchestra could not do justice to all that talent.

And there was the broader question of educating rounded musicians in the whole orchestral canon. The symphony, with seven concerts a year, could not hope to address the entire literature.

Daniel Lewis ’ farewell concert, 1995

Alternatives began to emerge. The wind ensemble came along in the mid-1960s. The need was obvious: a typical symphonic work calls for no more than a dozen wind parts, but USC currently has 145 wind majors. To rotate them all through the symphony would take two years.

Also, wind ensembles have their own specific repertoire, as do the contemporary, Baroque and classical periods.

The USC Thornton Contemporary Music Ensemble started up in 1976, founded by the late Robert Wojciak DMA ’67. USC composition professor Donald Crockett ’74, MM ’76 took over in 1984. Besides their four annual concerts, Crockett also directs the symphony in a yearly new-music program featuring premieres of works by USC student composers.

In 1986, James Tyler had joined USC’s music history department. An internationally acclaimed performer, Tyler spent his early career playing lute and Baroque guitar with ground-breaking period-instrument ensembles such as New York Pro Musica, the London-based Consort of Musicke and the London Early Music Group. At USC, he lost no time establishing an early music ensemble. The group’s core is 20 string and continuo players, which Tyler fleshes out with vocalists, wind players or percussionists as necessary. The ensemble plays four concerts a year plus off-campus appearances, including engagements in concert series throughout Southern California.

And most recently, clarinet professor Yehuda Gilad revived the chamber orchestra idea in 1998. (It had been attempted and aborted a decade before.)

Gilad, who had studied at USC with Mitchell Lurie before joining the faculty in 1982, inaugurated the USC Thornton Chamber Orchestra as a way to expose students to the vast repertoire written explicitly for the chamber: from Haydn, Mozart and Mendelssohn to Schubert and early Beethoven; from Wagner, Strauss and Stravinsky to Lesemann, Harbison and Hartke. And most especially Bach.

Hence the intricate minuet, the musical chairs.