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Score (PDF) 1.78 MB	Audio (MP3) 6.2 MB
	UNT Symphony Orchestra April 2006
	Audio Excerpt (MP3) 2.9 MB
	Richardson Symphony April 2007

 

Program Notes

Design is a concert overture and my first piece for large orchestra. It brings contrasting musical materials together to explore the inherent conflicts created by things which come in twos: slow and fast, soft and loud, and at its core, traditional and contemporary. Combining part of a Renaissance madrigal with a minor third motive (C - E-flat - C) based on an octatonic (eight-note) scale, I brought sonorities from the past and present together around the tonal center of “C,” defined in new and unique ways as my materials allowed.

While the “old” in Design comes straight from the sixteenth-century madrigal Da le Belle Contrade d’oriente (“From the Fair Regions of the East”) by Cipriano de Rore, the “new” was inspired by Jacob Druckman's Windows for orchestra. Druckman modestly called Windows his “first mature work for orchestra,” but its fresh ideas and dramatic, innovative use of instrumental sound garnered him national attention, when it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1972. In this work, Druckman mixes atonal sounds and textures with quotes from tonal passages to create a series of “windows” to the past, through which we hear old music “refracted” through new music.

Following Druckman's lead, clear tonal centers and tight formal structures maintain a sense of unity in my own work as I thread two diverse musical strands into a “design” of past and present. As the piece begins, de Rore’s madrigal and my ostinato-driven music appear one neatly after the other, but only in their “collision” within the music that follows does Design begin to come alive. Near the end, intersections of familiar and modern music grow in intensity, propelling the piece as it unfolds, until one final collision brings the worlds of old and new, and past and present, into harmony.

Design lasts seven minutes, and calls for a large orchestra consisting of piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, two B-flat clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, and tuba, along with timpani, three percussion, and strings.

 

Performances

UNT Symphony Orchestra, April 12, 2006; Johnny Fuller, conductor

Richardson Symphony, April 14, 2007; Anshel Brusilow, conductor

National Taiwan Youth Orchestra, August 20, 2007; Ai-Kuang Sun, conductor