Rapido! National Finals. 3 p.m. Jan. 17. A composer roundtable will take place at 2 p.m. $10-$20. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 866-811-4111, atlantachamberplayers.com.
For composer Peter Van Zandt Lane, the third time’s the charm.
The recent transplant to Athens, now on the music faculty of the University of Georgia, registered for the Atlanta Chamber Players’ 14-day Rapido! composition contest twice while a graduate student living in Boston. The competition requires entrants to compose a new work of between four and six minutes set to a specific theme and instrumentation — all in two weeks. Both times, he came up short, not even submitting a final composition.
“You don’t know what you’re writing for or what you have to write until they give you the parameters,” Lane said. “This time, I just thought I had a good idea, and it clicked.”
Lane, the Southeast winner, is now in the finals to be held at 3 p.m. Jan. 17 at the High Museum, along with four winners from preliminary rounds held in the Midwest, Northeast, Southwest and on the West Coast. For the preliminary rounds, the ACP and partner ensembles across the country performed three works from up-and-coming composers.
Lane will be joined in the finals by Kevin Eppich, Louis Cruz, Mark Buller and Kenneth Lim. The composers will hold a roundtable discussion at 2 p.m., followed by a performance of a solo piano composition by Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Music Director Robert Spano, who also serves as one of three judges.
The Rapido! grand prize includes $7,500 to expand the work for a performance by all five participating ensembles; the chance to write a new work for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra; and a two-week residency at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences. An audience favorite prize also will be awarded.
This year, the Atlanta Chamber Players asked each composer to write a theme and variations based on an instrumentation of violin, clarinet and piano. Across the country, 301 composers registered to meet the challenge. Of those entrants, 171 composers completed their submissions. In October and November, three semi-finalists in each region competed for a spot in the finals.
Lane said that, in the past, he’s composed for Rapido! by staying close to his usual writing process — editing as he goes and letting the composition develop organically. This time, he said, he had an ending in mind before he started writing and was able to finish the piece under the wire.
“I think what comes out on the page, with the time constraint, is a little bit more honest and a little bit more unfiltered,” he said.
ACP Artistic Director Elizabeth Pridgen said the tight deadline doesn’t mean the pieces are somehow less complete than they might be with a little more time.
“When people hear what these five finalists have composed, they’ll be impressed with what a creative mind can come up with in such a limited amount of time,” Pridgen said.
Composer Michael Gandolfi will join Spano and composer Libby Larsen on the judging panel. Gandolfi said he thinks the tight deadline can be good for composers.
“For a lot of us, we tend to overthink things, file down an idea to the point where it becomes neutralized,” he said. “Sometimes we do it unwittingly, because we’re afraid something might be too obvious.”
Gandolfi judged the first Rapido! in 2009 and routinely has come back to help out with the competition. He agreed that the pieces he’s heard across the years are all fully-formed, cogent compositions and are not “one-off pieces.”
Each composition is written in a completely different language and has a different feel, so there’s a chance not everyone will connect with every work on the program. But audience members who might be wary of more avant garde classical music shouldn’t shy away, Pridgen said.
“They’re short,” she said. “So, even if something is a little bit more out there, it’s a little bit more out there for five minutes. I think people can handle that.”
