PROGRAM NOTES

The memories are still vivid from a long-past summer in Brevard, North Carolina — where I spent several months at the music festival there as a teenager. Not only did the thick buzzing of cicadas and katydids always accompany the concerts there, but sometimes it was the music itself: on more than one occasion, I remember sitting on the porch of 100-year old Nan Burt and listening to the sounds of summer while she told stories from her long life. This venerable lady was introduced to me by the assistant conductor at the festival, Robert Moody, who would commission my first orchestral work.

The work uses electronics to bring the white noise of the Southern summer into the concert hall, pairing these sounds with fluorescent orchestra textures that float gently by. “Nan’s Porch” begins at dusk, while the katydids make their chatter. Three orchestral clouds — each inhabiting a different harmony, register, and orchestration — hover in the heavy air, and they ultimately begin to meld together when the cicadas start their singing.

The climax of this movement sends us into “Katydid Country,” when the ambience of the first movement evolves into a bluesy, rhythmic tune. The clicks of the katydids become a beat track over which the orchestra, in a smaller, more chamber setting, riffs on a simple tune inspired by old-time blues. Soaring in the strings over the last breaths of the blues tune, this long-lined melody moves us into “Southern Midnight.” The three distinct textures from the opening return, but now each is brought to life by a phrase of the melody. At the close of this lyrical section, we hover in that strange space between night and day, when only the singing of the first bird alerts us to the approaching dawn. But it is a hot, Southern dawn, both sparkling and heavy, with the air made rusty again by the buzzing cicadas (popularly called locusts). The bluesy tune begins to creep back into the middle register, while above and below figuration buzzes about in different tonalities.

Movement titles:
NAN’S PORCH
KATYDID COUNTRY
SOUTHERN MIDNIGHT
LOCUSTS SINGING IN THE HEAT OF DAWN

PERFORMANCE NOTES

All that is needed is a laptop, two speakers, placed on the left and right sides of the stage, and a few onstage monitors. Included with the rental of the materials is a download link for a simple software sampler that triggers the sounds from the laptop (an additional percussionist or an assistant conductor simply hits laptop keys at rehearsal numbers). The electronic component is simple, inexpensive, and designed to work within a compressed orchestral rehearsal period, and a ‘live’ version of the electronic part can be realized when the composer is present.