Concertos
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Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
Approximately fifteen minutes in length, featuring a piano soloist and orchestra, and driven by melody, this concerto is somewhat traditional in form and orchestration but new in style and harmony. Its spatial, neo-tonal harmonies support the ebb and flow of various gestures; some quite reserved, others ominous and foreboding. Using Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 as a model, and others as influences, it introduces and develops themes through melodic fragmentation and transformations such as the transposition, retrograde, and inversion of intervallic patterns. The overall organization of tempos in this three-movement work holds true to the traditional concerto model which features a fast first movement, slow second movement, and fast third movement. |
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Celebrating the Quatro
In the winter of 2017, a doctor where my wife works lent me a unique Venezuelan instrument from his home country called the quatro. It has four strings and is tuned similarly to the ukulele, except the fourth string is an octave lower and its home key is D Major. Before giving it back to him, I recorded this mini-concerto that features the instrument in the foreground called "Celebrating the Quatro". The work was composed "backwards"; that is, beginning with an improvised version created using a MIDI controller, ProTools11, MOTU Symphonic Instrument, and the recorded audio of myself playing the instrument. From there, it was written out onto the score so that it can be performed in the concert hall. This process, however unconventional, was useful for me to showcase the sound of the instrument in a short amount of time (three hours). |
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