and the Boston Pops in 2010 as the centerpiece of that orchestra’s 125th season. The World Is Different Now will attempt to describe the assassination and its impact with pure instrumental sound. Yet the composer of this work—unlike Welcher, the creators of August 4, 1964, and millions of other Americans—has no direct memories of the man he is memorializing, nor of his tragic death: Conrad Tao is an eighteenyear-old student enrolled at Columbia University and The Juilliard School. The work he will write is for full orchestra, an ambitious undertaking for a composer whose catalogue to date includes nothing larger in scale than a piano concerto with chamber-orchestra instrumentation. Tao, a multiple prize-winning pianist, violinist, and composer born in Urbana, Illinois, first came to the attention of Jaap van Zweden in 2009 at the Singapore Arts Festival, when he performed Rachmaninoff ’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with van Zweden’s Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. Van Zweden subsequently invited Tao to perform with the Dallas Symphony during its 2010-11 season. It was then that the young composer met Aldert Vermeulen, the orchestra’s artistic administrator. “At that time we were looking for a composer for this Kennedy commission,” says Vermeulen. “I didn’t want someone from the older generation who has lived through that time. I thought it would be interesting to have a really young person who’s had no direct experience with Kennedy and comes from a completely different background. I didn’t want another big piece with a chorus and four soloists. I just wanted to give him something small-scale and intense and see what he would come up with.” Tao’s title is taken from Kennedy’s inaugural address. “He was actually referring to the threat of nuclear war,” says the composer. “It was the 1960s, and the Soviet threat was omnipresent. That isn’t quite relevant today, but we still live in a world governed by some non-specific sense of fear. The World Is Different Now is an appropriate title, because it directly responds to what happened immediately after the assassination. “There’s an eerie calm that I’m going for in this piece,” he continues. “I had studied the assassination from a very dispassionate, textbook/Wikipedia perspective. This was a project in which I would be forced to acuteamericanorchestras.org
ly understand the subject. I had to gain an understanding about the event that wasn’t physical. I think that’s what inspired me to write the work I’m writing—a reflection on how that event still resonates in our minds today. In every oral history I’ve encountered, every conversation I’ve had with people who were alive when it happened, what I’ve heard is that there was a seismic shift in the air. It wasn’t just the death of one man but
the death of an era. The death of Camelot, really. In my generation we watch the Zapruder film of the assassination—it’s out there on the internet, making people upset every day. What strikes me as the most harrowing thing about the event and its aftermath was how quickly it passed, and yet how everyone recalls it in slow motion.” CHESTER LANE is senior editor of Symphony.
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