Tobias Picker
Old and Lost River
By the time he was eight years old, Tobias Picker shared something with Mahler and Mozart: he knew he wanted to be a composer. While not quite as precocious as young Wolfgang, Picker did begin a correspondence with composer Gian Carlo Menotti, who encouraged the boy to write operas. He entered the preparatory division of the Juilliard School of Music in 1965, and went on to the Manhattan School of Music in 1972, where he studied with composers Charles Wuorinen and John Corigliano. His first commissioned work, Sextet No. 3 (1977), met with critical success, and was followed by works for violin, keyboard, a violin concerto (1981), and his first symphony, premiered by the San Francisco Symphony under Edo de Waart in 1983. He finally heeded Menotti’s advice and wrote an opera, Emmeline, which premiered with the Santa Fe Opera in 1996; this was followed by Fantastic Mr. Fox (1998), Thérèse Raquin (2001), and An American Tragedy (2005). Picker is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Charles Ives scholarship, and an Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has received commissions from the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, the BBC Proms, the Munich Philharmonic, and many others worldwide.
In 1985 Picker became composer-in-residence for the Houston Symphony, where he conceived the “Fanfare Project” to celebrate Texas’ sesquicentennial in 1986. Twenty composers, including Elliott Carter, John Adams, Steve Reich, John Williams, and Marius Constant, were invited to write short pieces, and most composed true fanfares. Picker himself, however, went in the opposite direction, writing the quiet and introspective Old and Lost Rivers. He describes the work as follows:
“Driving east from Houston along Interstate 10, you will come to a high bridge which crosses many winding bayous. These bayous were left behind by the great wanderings over time of the Trinity River across the land. When it rains the bayous fill with water and begin to flow. At other times–when it is dry–they evaporate and turn green in the sun. The two main bayous are called Old River and Lost River. Where they converge, a sign on the side of the highway reads: ‘Old and Lost Rivers.'”
Like the rivers it depicts, this work wanders gently through its musical landscape, with widely separated, meandering melodies for strings. Several critics have cited a resemblance between this piece and portions of Copland’s Appalachian Spring, in its understated nature and deceptive simplicity. Peter Goodman in New York Newsday wrote: “Just think ‘Aaron Copland’ … To this American tradition, add richness of orchestration and a sense of timelessness, with a slow-moving thread of melody meandering through like a river in bayou country… It is lush, skillfully written, very artful, and very cinematic in orientation.”