One Vs. Fifty-four

Trying to finish the second of two pieces for the Hong Kong Sinfonietta’s 09-10 season. I’ve very much enjoyed spending most of the last 12 months writing music for the Sinfonietta. On my end, it felt like an informal residency; I had two commissions for two concerts, almost five months apart, which meant that I got to write a piece (The Queens Gramophone), listen to it being rehearsed, see it performed, and then write a second piece for the same orchestra (The Gestures of Farewell), and be there for the rehearsals and performance. I am pretty sure an opportunity like this won’t be repeated in the future, so I took it on – without really thinking about it too much. And I’m glad I didn’t! Because if I had realized just how much work it would involve to write two entire orchestra pieces in a few months’ time, I probably would’ve just freaked out and called it quits.

The second piece is my fifth collaboration with writer Benjamin Rogers, who’s been really generous in allowing me to mutilate color his words with music, sometimes comprehensibly, other times not. The last piece we did together was called This Evidence, and it used notated speech and speech rhythms as a major part of the piece’s concept. Gestures will do much the same thing, only now exploded to an ensemble that includes a 54-piece (at least) orchestra.

The new piece is commissioned by the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, and is slated for performance on March 4, 2010 at Hong Kong City Hall, as a part of the Hong Kong Arts Festival. The Sinfonietta had asked me to write this piece specifically because their artist associate this year, Jason Lai, is a triple-threat: conductor, composer, broadcaster. (I suppose “broadcaster” could translate in the U.S. as “TV host / personality”.) Yip Wing-sie, the Sinfonietta’s music director, had mentioned how much she liked Walton’s Façades, had remembered that I enjoy working with words, and suggested that the new piece would use Mr. Lai as a narrator, accompanied by an orchestra.

I do like using words, and lately I have been thinking about the medium in terms of its dramatic possibilities. I’m currently working on fashioning *some* sort of program notes for the piece. In the mean time, though, I passed by a few thoughts regarding the nature of “narrator and orchestra”:

“The concerto is a claustrophobic medium. The soloist, ever expressive, ever trying to break free into song, remains entrapped in the front, unable to retreat, unable to advance, one against fifty-four. This dramatic contrast has always fascinated me, the underlying psychology, the way that the orchestra can obliterate, yet support, and yet bring a work into existence – all in a tight-rope balancing act with the soloist.”

You know, that made less sense than I had hoped it would. Maybe it (or something like it) will make its way into the program notes. Time will tell.