A Long Hard Look at a Good Swift Kick [2008]
For micro-tonal orchestra (3 3 3 3 - 3 3 3 1 - strings)
Duration: ca. 11'
For micro-tonal orchestra (3 3 3 3 - 3 3 3 1 - strings)
Duration: ca. 11'
Listen:
First performance: February, 2009 by the USC Thornton Symphony - Donald Crockett, conductor
Honorable Mention, the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute Readings, 2009
Anyone who's spent time at a summer music festival has probably at some point encountered the phenomenon of the chamber music marathon. After sitting through hours of Hadyn, Mozart and Beethoven string quartets one July (combined with a viewing of Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead around the same time), I began playing around with an idea for a piece. The best image that I could come up with to describe this concept was as follows:
You’re in a car, and all the presets on your radio are tuned to stations that are basically playing different versions of the same piece of music; and for whatever reason, the radio is constantly jumping back and forth between the stations. My feeling was that in such a scenario, you wouldn’t so much be listening to a piece of music as you would be almost floating around the edge of it, looking at it from different angles, and maybe lingering over – or even obsessing over and taking apart – those spots that caught your ear or moved you in a particular way. The music would be three-dimensional - with not only a "front" that faced the audience, but a back and sides that faced away.
I began working on A Long Hard Look at a Good Swift Kick with the hope that I could explore some of these ideas of musical perspective through acoustic instruments. To convey the mechanical dissonance of the different-but-similar radio stations, the orchestra is asked to split up into three smaller but identical ensembles that are slightly out of tune with each other - an eighth-tone apart, to be exact. Like the protagonists in the Tom Stoppard play that inspired the piece, our heroes seem to be repeatedly trying, with some difficulty, to get through a small section of a well-known work - in this case, a few minutes of Beethoven's fourth symphony.
Honorable Mention, the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute Readings, 2009
Anyone who's spent time at a summer music festival has probably at some point encountered the phenomenon of the chamber music marathon. After sitting through hours of Hadyn, Mozart and Beethoven string quartets one July (combined with a viewing of Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead around the same time), I began playing around with an idea for a piece. The best image that I could come up with to describe this concept was as follows:
You’re in a car, and all the presets on your radio are tuned to stations that are basically playing different versions of the same piece of music; and for whatever reason, the radio is constantly jumping back and forth between the stations. My feeling was that in such a scenario, you wouldn’t so much be listening to a piece of music as you would be almost floating around the edge of it, looking at it from different angles, and maybe lingering over – or even obsessing over and taking apart – those spots that caught your ear or moved you in a particular way. The music would be three-dimensional - with not only a "front" that faced the audience, but a back and sides that faced away.
I began working on A Long Hard Look at a Good Swift Kick with the hope that I could explore some of these ideas of musical perspective through acoustic instruments. To convey the mechanical dissonance of the different-but-similar radio stations, the orchestra is asked to split up into three smaller but identical ensembles that are slightly out of tune with each other - an eighth-tone apart, to be exact. Like the protagonists in the Tom Stoppard play that inspired the piece, our heroes seem to be repeatedly trying, with some difficulty, to get through a small section of a well-known work - in this case, a few minutes of Beethoven's fourth symphony.