Practice
American Composers Orchestra
About this work:
Practice opens with cinematic flare; the reconfigured chamber orchestra competes in a noise-filled scene. Fleeting and ungainly musical surfaces drown in a sea of rehearsing musicians. Old forms of expression wash by as the music erupts into new configurations. The metal of the industrial revolution gives way to the hyper-metallic noisy bazaar of this contemporary moment. The orchestra plays on, and like a terrible alarm, the orchestral triangles never fall silent.
Secretly bound by technological models, scientific analysis, and resynthesis of traditional orchestral triangles, the musicians in Practice are not autonomous. Harmonically pooling around the din of triangles, they practice conforming to the techno-inspired ambience. Practice does not make perfect, it is a process that generates change; change governed by unseen gravitations and rituals that in the end determine a form.
Practice was composed 'in partnership with The Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at the University of California, Berkeley. The principle software programmer was Matthew Wright, working under specifications of the composer The goal was to build a new computer-based instrument whose core sound is born from hybrids of the orchestral triangles. The new instrument is performed live from the stage through a MIDI keyboard.
American Composers Orchestra commission.
Version: Edmund Campion
Year composed: 2006
Duration: 00:10:00
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice
Instrumentation: 1 Piccolo, 1 Oboe, 1 Clarinet, 1 Contrabassoon, 1 Horn in F, 1 Trumpet, 1 Trombone, 1 Tuba, 1 Timpani, 2 Percussion (General), 1 Strings (General), 1 Harp, 1 Synthesizer, 1 Other Electronic Instument(s)
Instrumentation notes: Clarinet doubles bass clarinet.