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MobileSymphony lands another live one
Cindy McTee is the second contemporary composer on the SSO schedule
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SPRINGFIELD — Imagine your college-age daughter calls home and tells you that, after talking with a man at a party, she’s decided to go live with him for a while in Poland.
In 1974, this could’ve meant one of three things — that she’d taken that freshman philosophy class too seriously and was planning to defect; that she secretly was working for the CIA; or that this man was actually a world-renowned composer who wanted to take your daughter under his wing.
Either way, there weren’t much in the way of wet T-shirt contests behind the Iron Curtain, so have fun, dear. Say hi to Party Secretary Gierek for us.
But in the case of Cindy McTee, whose “Symphony No. 1: Ballet for Orchestra” will be performed this weekend by the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, the composer was Krzysztof Penderecki, who’d burst onto the world stage the previous decade with “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” and “St. Luke Passion.” (Titles that don’t exactly scream “party time with American coeds!”)
McTee was to have been the second of five contemporary composers — meaning, not dead — to visit Springfield as part of the 2009-10 SSO season.
But her partner’s health problems this week mean she’ll now be represented in music only on Saturday’s program.
Still, for the SSO, this risky endeavor already is paying off.
Last month’s season opener with Lowell Liebermann and his second piano concerto resulted in the largest audience for a season opener since 2002.
Now comes the music of a composer who once sat at the feet of one of the last century’s giants.
At the time, 35 years ago, 
McTee was a junior composition major at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., when Penderecki came to be a guest composer at the school.
One thing led to another and, wouldn’t you know it, one night at a reception, he asked her to come live with him — that is, to come to communist Poland to teach English to his family in exchange for lessons at his dining room table in orchestration and 20th century techniques.
“This was in 1974. A very, very dark time in Poland. The Iron Curtain was well established,” McTee said recently. “I thought he’d had a little too much wine to drink.”
He hadn’t.
“I had to give it a couple of second thoughts,” she said.
For the next year, she got to shadow Penderecki most everywhere he went.
“I learned a way of life from him,” McTee said. “The seeds were planted. I learned a little bit about how to do it and where the pitfalls are, but not all of them. It gave me a little bit more courage to give it a shot.”
McTee has been a professor of music at the University of North Texas since 1984.
“I usually compose no more than one or two pieces a year. That’s been fairly consistent,” she said. “Composing is kind of my night job.”
But as a composer, McTee has evolved from Penderecki’s apt pupil to an artist with her own voice.
“When I was his student,” she said, “I used his music as a model. I was writing in the style of the person I most admired. That happens as a student. You might learn technique, but it might not express who you are.”
For starters, McTee is more influenced by jazz.
Her “Symphony No. 1,” which premiered in 2002 at the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra, has a walking bass line and shades of rumba.
For what it’s worth, the symphony also samples a bit of melody from Penderecki’s “Polish Requiem.”
The jazz influence comes, not only from her own parents, who played in a dance band, but her first piano teacher, who couldn’t actually read music.
Improvisation became essential from the beginning, even when she started accompanying the high school choir.
“When we’d play Brahms, I continued to improvise, much to the chagrin of the director,” McTee said. “Composing is kind of improvisation, only you write it down. You have to invent it from someplace.”
The guest artist
In addition to the music of Cindy McTee, Saturday’s concert also features the virtuosity of Cleveland teenager Chad Hoopes.
The 14-year-old violinist will perform Saint-Saens’ “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso” and Lalo’s “Symphonie espagnole.”
He’ll have mighty big shoes to fill on the Lalo — back on Feb. 15, 1953, some guy named Isaac Stern played the same piece with the SSO.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
How to go
What: The Springfield Symphony Orchestra
When: 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 7
Where: Kuss Auditorium
Tickets: $24 to $48 adults, $12 to $36 students, with a limited number of $15 adult tickets and $10 student tickets. Visit springfieldsym.org or call (937) 328-3874.
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