Introducing The Spano Fund for New Music
By Phil Kloer
When Robert Spano was preparing to leave New York City to become Music Director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 2001, he was reading Tom Wolfe’s sometimes snippy novel set in this fair city, “A Man in Full.”
“He described Atlanta as a place where the orchestra has to play ‘Bolero’ every night to satisfy the audience,” Spano recalls with a chuckle. In other words, good luck getting these rubes to sit still for new, unfamiliar music — which happened to be one of Spano’s passions.
“People said, ‘You can’t do new music in Atlanta. It’s not gonna work.’ I chose to smugly smile to myself and say: ‘We’ll see.’”
Twenty years later, as he prepares to depart as ASO Music Director, Spano looks back on a legacy of successfully connecting Atlanta audiences with new music by living composers.
“There are people who will say, ‘I don’t want living composers, I want Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.’ And we have people in Atlanta who say, ‘There’s too much Beethoven; we want more living composers,’” he says.
“We don’t have AN audience. We have multiple audiences. And that’s thrilling.”
When Spano announced his retirement, Ron and Susan Antinori wanted to make sure the ASO’s commitment to new music continued into the future. They established The Spano Fund for New Music with a grant from their private family foundation, The Antinori Foundation.
“The arts create a world in which I want to live,” says Ron Antinori. “Especially music. I’m not overly religious, but I believe that art is God’s doorway into my psyche. If I fund in a direction, it’s because that’s the world I want to live in.”
The foundation primarily supports Atlanta arts organizations. Ron Antinori founded two companies that developed operational software for banks, and Susan is on the ASO Board.
To celebrate and raise more money for the new fund, the ASO will have a concert of new music on Nov. 19, 2021. The special event features works by five members of the Atlanta School of Composers: Brian Nabors, Krists Auznieks, Michael Gandolfi, Adam Schoenberg and Michael Kurth.
The fund will pay for commissions for composers, travel expenses, guest artists, and recording and disseminating the new works. The ASO hopes to expand it into an endowment for commissioning new symphonic works in perpetuity.
“This fund is a guarantee that the orchestra is going to keep prioritizing new music,” says Kurth, who plays bass in the ASO and is also a composer. “I appreciate Ron and Susan so much for their support.
“Robert has a great metaphor,” Kurth continues. “The orchestra needs to be a gallery and a museum at the same time. A museum to present the classics of the past, the canon of celebrated and established works, but also a gallery to keep things fresh.”
Sometime back in the mid-aughts, it was Spano who christened a group of composers he worked with as the Atlanta School of Composers, a name which he acknowledges has caused some confusion.
“It’s a school more akin to fishes than academia: Those who swim together,” he explains.
“When I was hired, we made some decisions how we were going to handle new music. I wanted to focus on American composers of my generation and cultivate real relationships with a few of them. Let’s make them part of our family, make them integral to the ASO.
“About five years in,” he continues, “I realized these composers we’ve cultivated share an aesthetic profile. We talk about the Big Five in Russia or Le Six in Paris, when you hear a shift in the compositional aesthetic at a particular time. I realized that’s happening right here.
“Even though they don’t sound the same, they share an interest in melody, an interest in tonality and an interest in world music or pop music or both.
“We were paying for it, so we had the hubris to say let’s just call it the Atlanta School,” he concludes.
“I love Robert Spano to death,” says Antinori. “When we became aware that Robert was leaving, and there was this Atlanta School of Composers, it could just evaporate. Previous ASO music directors left legacies, and I thought the Atlanta School of Composers would be Robert’s legacy.”
Most of the composers in the Atlanta School are not from Atlanta, although some are. “The important thing is it came out of our soil,” Spano says. “It’s impossible to overestimate how important that is. That’s the most beautiful thing any of us can do, is work from our own soil.”
As Spano prepares to pass his baton to new music director Nathalie Stutzmann at the end of this season, The Spano Fund for New Music is a major indication that his legacy will be lasting. His role in the fund after he departs is not yet crystal clear, and he is fine with that.
“I think Ron and Susan would like me to be involved and I would like to be involved,” says Spano. “But I want to be careful that I don’t over-insert myself. It’s very important to me as the outgoing Music Director to get out of the way to allow my successor to do her work.
“I’m more than happy to play whatever role I can,” he adds. “The beautiful part is the institutional commitment. I could think of no greater gift from a patron of the ASO.”
