Dieter David Scholz, The Canterville Ghost
[Translated from German] Gordon Getty sticks close to Wilde’s work in the libretto he has developed. And then there is a long – I think too long story – of how the ghost is set free by the daughter of the American family. She alludes to the desire to be free, which the two protagonists in Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman feel. Only that with Wilde, or rather Getty, everything ends well.
As far as the music is concerned that Getty has composed for this funny story: Getty’s fortune is, so it can be read, estimated at two billion US dollars. A quarter million Euros in interest rates are supposed to flow into his bank accounts daily. As a composer, Getty is not under any existential pressure to prove any originality or geniality among the guild of composers. He doesn’t have to smarm over the executioners of the so-called new music. The friendly elderly gentleman composes away, happily and breezily eclectic, not to say backward looking (but what does that mean anyway), like many contemporary American composers. It’s quite atmospheric and effective. It’s professional theatre music. Getty admits his idols Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner in the program brochure. And one hears that. So no trace of "New Music", or whatever it’s called. The advantage: This is not the kind of music that hurts anyone. But it definitely isn’t music for eternity either.
Harold C. Schonberg, Plump Jack and The White Election
Mr. Getty's music is not going to strike terror into the heart of Aaron Copland or Pierre Boulez. It is frankly, even defiantly, derivative music, stemming from Mendelssohn, Schumann, Verdi, and Puccini. Some might call it the work of a sensitive amateur. But Mr. Getty feels that he is a composer who can pick up the threads of what he calls ''the grand tradition.'' More and more composers, he claims, are looping back.
Perhaps he is right. The last decade has indeed seen a headlong flight from strict serialism. But Mr. Getty's music leans so far in the opposite direction that professional composers will probably refuse to take him seriously. Audiences, on the other hand, seem to respond to Mr. Getty's simple music and open lyricism. He received a very good press on the West Coast for his most ambitious work, Plump Jack, and critics around the country have had good words to say about his Dickinson cycle. Some well-known artists are beginning to look at that piece, and it has been programmed by several singers, including Mignon Dunn and Judith Blegen.
Plump Jack, with its elements of Puccini and Verdi, might be described as contemporary in the sense that the vocal line is largely recitative, with the orchestra carrying the melodies and commenting on the action.
Chris Pasles, Three Waltzes
Getty...doesn't seem to trust his own lyrical instincts or creativity. He comes up with ideas and gestures that have attractive profiles, but two bars later, he either repeats himself or goes on to something else. The music starts and stops and loses any flow.
Daniel Cariaga, Plump Jack
Though skillfully assembled and, in its Southern California premiere performance, tastefully presented, Gordon Getty's Plump Jack, a work the composer calls "a concert opera," resembles nothing so much as a vanilla cookie: innocuous and undistinctive.
But its first local performance, given by forces of Los Angeles Music Center Opera in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center on Wednesday night, proved fascinating nonetheless....
This is no Falstaff; neither is it an opera. It is, rather, a mosaic, not yet focused, without a central point.
Composer Getty, a longtime arts patron and amateur singer, has been writing music for many years. His song-cycles have been published and performed. He is clearly not without talent nor without sensitivity and sophistication.
His settings of these Falstaffian texts often emerge graceful, musical, canny and comprehensible. Though the six singers in this concert performance showed particular skills at delivering the words, the composer had already made their work grateful.
But no totality grows out of these disjunct and apparently non-continuous scenes. No vision emerges. The musical line remains unarched. Characterizations are not developed, dramatic climaxes unachieved.
Getty's pastel, eclectic modern style--he himself acknowledges his debt to models by Richard Strauss and Verdi--deals competently in recitative. There are no distinctive tunes (other than purposefully borrowed ones, as in the quotations at the top of Scene 3) and no arias; neither lightning nor inspiration ever strikes.
Jeffrey Williams, The White Election
The work has the flavor of the 19th century salon. The writing is strictly tonal, with the occasional dissonance. Mr. Getty has a definite talent for setting text to music in a fluent, natural way, but his skeletal writing for the piano accompaniment lent a monochromatic element to many of the songs. One might call this an astute choice by the composer, in keeping with the style of Dickinson (which a Dickinson-loving colleague calls “close to the bone”). Also, there was a heavy reliance on recitative, which could give the listener the impression that there is not enough melodic material for the great number of poems chosen. One would have to admit, though, that some of the songs were quite striking and effective and could be done independently of the entire cycle. “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed” had a saucy, playful quality; “My First Well Day, Since Many Ill” had the soprano and pianist in perfect union; and “I Like to See it Lap the Miles” had delicate beauty in the piano writing (which proves that Mr. Getty has the ability to write effectively for the piano). Finally, “There Came a Wind like a Bugle” can hold its own with Copland’s setting of the same poem. To this listener, it was the highlight of the entire cycle. The White Election is at once sublime, primitive, clever, repetitive, innocent, morose, and compelling—just like Emily Dickinson herself.