whirlwind
Composed in 2011
For orchestra
Duration: 5:30
Instrumentation: picc,2,2,2,bcl,2/4,3,3,1/timp/3pc/hp/pno/str
What spurs us to write music? Certainly the process is difficult, even maddening at times. Abstract thoughts swirl in our heads; ideas of sonorities and rhythms come unbidden; flashes of motives and timbres glimmer and then disappear like an unreachable mirage. The activity of ideas builds up its own pressure, like a storm brewing in the mind and body. Yet music escapes slowly, painstakingly; a silent and steady drip of note after note. When this massive storm is released, when the orchestra erupts into sound and the force of vibrating air takes on its own life and travels out into the world, surely the music takes on as many meanings as there are people to hear it. And when those abstract thoughts penetrate the minds of new people, when again the ideas begin to swirl, when the sonorities and rhythms engage new mental capacities and still remain ineffable and mysterious, when something heard becomes something dreamed anew, are we not all composers?
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Whirlwind was awarded first prize in the Greater Bridgeport Symphony Emerging Composer Competition, and was given its public premiere in November 2018 by the GBS with Maestro Eric Jacobsen conducting.
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First Performance: November 10th, 2018
The Klein Memorial Auditorium
Greater Bridgeport Symphony;
Eric Jacobsen, conductor
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