This month I reconnect with several longtime musical partners in summery locales, where works new and old will be brought to life by some of the finest musicians I’ve worked with. These trips are in the midst of a few months focused on composing and storyboarding The Making of the Orchestra, a multimedia work premiering next season. After holing up in the studio on this piece all summer, it’ll be nice to reconnect with old friends in warm places.
The Philadelphia Orchestra brings Anthology of Fantastic Zoology to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York, reprising my largest work after performances last season in Philly and at Carnegie Hall. I love this orchestra and its amazing maestro Yannick Seguin-Nazet. When the Philadelphia Orchestra first invited me to perform Alternative Energy with them several years ago, I went with both excitement and curiosity. This iconic orchestra’s storied history, both within classical music and in the popular imagination (cf Fantasia), might have given me some trepidation about introducing techno beats and electronic sounds on their stage. I’ve been inspired to see how many venerable orchestras and maestros have embraced the electro-acoustic soundworld of works such as Liquid Interface and Mothership, but it’s always slightly intimidating to first step onstage with a legendary orchestra. There’s a bit of sizing up that goes on.
With Philly, it became instantly clear that both maestro and musicians were ready to jam. This orchestra is lucky to have the famed Curtis Institute supply it with a steady stream of young dynamos. That exuberance comes through in their vivid playing and, of course, from the Yannick’s podium. He’s a rare blend of world-class conducting power and adventurous programming, equally at home with the warhorses from the repertoire or pieces hot of the press. Anthology of Fantastic Zoology conjures a bestiary of mythological creatures in symphonic Technicolor, and Yannick pulled some phenomenal textures out of the work from start to finish. As I look ahead to new commissions for both Philly and for the Metropolitan Opera (his other small gig), I’m excited to create new music for him after several years of getting to know each other. He’s soulful and charming.
A few weeks later, I head to beautiful Sun Valley, where Alasdair Neal directs one of the best summer symphonic festivals in the country. The phenomenal Sun Valley Symphony performs free concerts all summer in a stunningly tricked-out pavilion, a kind of Tanglewood or Aspen of the West. I premiered Devil’s Radio in Sun Valley and look forward to a packed week of concerts that includes that piece and several others. The most exciting performance is Passage, a work for mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, orchestra, and electronica sounds. The piece is about the moon landing, combining a setting of a Walt Whitman poem celebrating American exploration with recorded fragment’s of JFK’s iconic moonshot speech. As we look back on the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, it’s worth thinking about presidential words. The aspirational optimism of JFK drove America to great heights – literally – and is sorely missing in today’s discourse.
It’s been a total joy to see this project from its pie-in-the-sky beginnings to production up at Skywalker Ranch with director Gary Rydstrom of Lucasfilm and animator Jim Capobianco of Aerial Contrivance Workshop. We’re building piece about a Sprite that flies inside instruments to see how they work, bursting to life in a beautiful combination of animation and micro-photography of instruments. Keep an eye on my social media feeds later this month for clips from those shoots!
Check out this video of Sasha performing “Passage” with the NSO: