Spinning Music - For Symphony Orchestra (2016)

Program Notes:

When I learned that I would have the opportunity to write a new orchestral work for the 25th and final season of Marin Alsop's tenure leading the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, my first thought was of the sheer physicality involved in conducting and performing the energetic and challenging new music that the festival is known for. Composing would on the surface appear to be the musical activity most divorced from this kind of physical reality, which might be why I often find myself creating musical arguments inspired by movement.

In Spinning Music, these arguments involve both the sensation of spinning outwards, in which brass swells and dissonant circular figures fling musical material outwards from some imagined center, and the sensation of spinning inwards, where moments of predominant harmony create whirlpools around tonal centers. Motivic ideas seem to be in orbit as they return at various points in time, transformed and re-contextualized with each pass.

The act of spinning has both been used for spiritual purposes, such as in the Sufi traditions of physical meditation, or for the creation of fun and ecstasy (in this case I think of Santa Cruz's famous Giant Dipper roller-coaster). My goal in this piece is to evoke a feeling of both a deepening into one's self, and an expansion into the outer world.

Commissioned by the Pacific Harmony Foundation for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music

Duration: 6 minutes