Steven Gellman has been a fixture on the Ottawa music scene for so long that it's tempting to imagine that the University of Ottawa, or at least its Music Department, was built around him. Yet his public profile has been diminishing in recent years. Gellman scores, once a staple of the Ottawa new music scene, are seldom programmed any more.

That's about to change in a big way, at least for one evening, when David Currie leads the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra in Gellman's Universe Symphony on 24 January. Hailed as a masterpiece in the mid-80s when it was new, it requires large forces and is expensive to perform. In fact, it hasn't been performed since 1991.

I spent an evening chatting with Gellman, an exceptionally friendly man and genial conversationalist. We discussed the Universe Symphony, but I was interested in learning how he had become the composer he is and what might account for his relative neglect in recent years.

Starting young

Like most musicians of his stature, Gellman started young. He remembers visiting an uncle's cottage when he was four. There he found a piano and began playing on it. While he may not have shown the precocity of Mozart, he made music that sounded beautiful to his mother. "I cheated," he recalls. "I only played the black keys. I didn't know that would make it sound better, but they looked more interesting to me."

He wanted piano lessons, but his mother didn't think he was ready. When she did think so, he was eight and more interested in baseball than music and didn't think much of the lessons idea. "My mother bribed me, promising me a set of drums if I would take piano lessons for a year." He never did get the drums. After the first year he was utterly hooked on the piano, and on music generally.

Subsequent studies with Dr. Samuel Dolin included two lessons a week, one for piano and one for theory and composition. "In two years we went from Renaissance polyphony to twelve-tone," he recalls. By fourteen he was writing a piano concerto which he himself premiered with the CBC Symphony just a year later. in 1964, when he was all of sixteen, he became the first Canadian to win the BMI Award. (BMI is an international music organization based in the United States.)

Further studies followed with some of the most eminent international composers of the time including Persichetti, Berio and, at the Conservatoire in Paris, Olivier Messiaen. In 1970 his Mythos for flute and string quartet wone him the UNESCO prize for "the best work by a composer under the age of 25."

Back in Canada

Gellman has been a professor at the University of Ottawa for the better part of thirty years, and composed extensively. The Universe Symphony enjoyed numerous performances in the late eighties and very early nineties. Andrew Davis and the Toronto Symphony performed it in a trio of concerts in 1986. Pianist Jon Kimura Parker, who was playing the Brahms Second on the same program was so impressed that he commissioned Gellman to write a piece for piano/synthesizer, Keyboard Triptych with which he toured Canada, the United States and Britain. In 1987 Gellman was named Canadian Composer of the Year.

The Universe Symphony

The Universe Symphony is a five-movement work for large orchestra and live electronics. "Actually, in the original version about a quarter of it was preprogrammed," he concedes, "but this time I'm reworking it for today's technology and all the electronics will all be done by two live synthesizer players."

He used electronics in a handful of other pieces but says he eventually gave up the practice. "I noticed when I listened to the recording of the first Universe Symphony performance a few years afterward that the effect sounded dated. I realized that whenever I wrote for electronics, the music would be tied to the technology of the day and not really carry well into the future. Isn't it ironic? Instruments from a hundred or two hundred years ago don't sound dated, but yesterday's technology does."

He describes the symphony as beginning with the feeling of "emptiness forming." The first movement is slow and spacious. The second is a Moderato and the third sweet, human and short.

The fourth movement is a traditional scherzo, but synthesizer-driven and inspired by rock. The fifth is a kind of transformation. It goes backward through some of the material, ending at the beginning, more or less. It begins with the end of the first movement, and finally coalesces and dissolves into the state of awe of the beginning.

On being an Ottawa composer

Despite his impressive achievements and an enviable public acceptance of his music, Gellman's recognition is not as wide as it once was. Why? According to him, "You can't live in Ottawa and be considered a national composer," and he may be right. You don't have to live in Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver. Lots of smaller centres will do. You can even live on the shores of a wilderness lake if you make a big enough point of it. But Ottawa just doesn't cut it. (See note below.)

Along with most contemporary composers, Gellman has had to contend with a great deal of indifference to his work. "I've been profoundly discouraged at times," he admits, " and have fallen into some black moods." Nevertheless, his position at the University of Ottawa has ensured financial security and provided him with the freedom to compose without a slavish dependence on grants and commissions. And he does continue to compose.

Among other things, he's been working on an a capella madrigal and a concerto for violist Rivka Golani which, he admits, will have to be "shopped around" to orchestras. These will doubtless be worth waiting for since, as Gellman puts it, "In my compositions of recent years, when I say something, I really mean it."

Note: Some years ago I wrote an enthusiastic review of a new work by Peter-Paul Koprowski and followed it by writing, "The next item on the program was by a real composer, Igor Stravinsky. You can tell real composers two ways: They are dead they are not Canadian." Going by the experience of several local composers, I might have added, "They neither live nor work in Ottawa, nor do they often visit."

When the National Arts Centre Orchestra chose three more or less resident composers two or three years ago, Gellman was not even approached. Neither, as far as I know, were any other locals. To appoint an Ottawa composer might undermine the NACO's efforts to be reckoned Canada's national orchestra, after all.