Tag: orchestra

Rat­ing: 3.5 stars out of 5

George Ben­jamin was the San Fran­cisco Sym­phony’s composer-in-residence this month for this year’s instal­la­tion of their Project San Fran­cisco. Truth­fully, I was not famil­iar with Benjamin’s work, but it came highly rec­om­mended by many of my col­leagues, and so I looked for­ward to hear­ing it. I attended the SFS’s final con­cert with Ben­jamin on Sat­ur­day night (16 Jan 2010), where he con­ducted two of his pieces: Ringed by the Flat Hori­zon (1980), the piece that brought him to inter­na­tional atten­tion, and a more recent piece, Duet (2008; see YouTube video below). In gen­eral, while I found Benjamin’s pieces highly com­pe­tent works, I don’t think he lives up to the (per­haps unfairly) high stan­dard peo­ple attribute to him. Con­tinue read­ing “Review: George Benjamin’s <em>Duet</em> with the San Fran­cisco Symphony” »

Instru­men­ta­tion: orchestra
Dura­tion: 12’00
Pro­gramme Note

This piece deals with my inter­est in both tran­si­tional musi­cal mate­ri­als and the tran­si­tive nature of sound itself, which dis­ap­pears almost as soon as it is cre­ated. I have con­ceived the form of the piece as an explo­ration of tran­si­tion, pre­sent­ing numer­ous sounds in motion as they come into and out of exis­tence in time, and show­ing them from sev­eral per­spec­tives so as to allow the effects of time and tran­si­tion to change the very nature of the sounds and sug­gest new meanings.

Desde (2004)
Instru­men­ta­tion: orchestra
Dura­tion: 7’00
Pro­gramme Note

Desde was writ­ten in the sum­mer of 2004 and is my first orches­tral work. In sev­eral of the pieces lead­ing up to Desde, I had begun exper­i­ment­ing with ways of deal­ing with the prob­lem of cul­tur­ally biased musi­cal per­cep­tion, which colours all musi­cal expe­ri­ences. This came about as I com­pared my non-classical music edu­ca­tion with the for­mal expe­ri­ences I received in uni­ver­sity, and I wanted to find ways to com­bine what I felt at the time to be sev­eral often-conflicting meth­ods of hear­ing music.