conductor

This work was commissioned by the Whatcom Symphony Orchestra as part of their contemporary music commissioning program. It was composed in the late summer and early autumn, 2010.

Composer's note:  In this work, the first movement uses two Basque melodies (one of which is a Basque lullaby whose text contains only Basque nonsense words) for the first group and a "Bulgarianized" version of a Hungarian folk melody for the second in this short sonata form.  The second movement is an arrangement of a 14th century melody by Guillaume de Machault, and the last owes something to Scandinavian folk music (the obscure title refers to a favorite Finnish dill-infused salad dressing that I like to make on occasion).

In writing a work for large orchestra, the main problem that presented itself was such: that for all the twentieth century techniques that deal with material (i.e. structure or pitch classes), for the most part we are stuck with the same timbres. Admittedly, composers such as Bela Bartok, Gyorgy Ligeti, and George Crumb have made much progress in the use of instruments and instrumentation. However, apart from some accepted new ways of employing instruments, a romantic size orchestra in the twentieth century still sounds, to my ears, like a romantic size orchestra.

I felt that trying to change this fact was a bit like trying to alter the universe, so instead of attempting to invent a “new” sound, I aimed to highlight the similarity of acoustic sounds between twentieth century and late romantic material (keep in mind this work was written in the last century!!)