Promise and Peril (2015)
For flute, clarinet, violin, and cello, 5′
| Score Sample | Digital Edition PDFs Score and Parts $30.00 | |
Hear Loretta Notareschi speak with Hubert Ho about Promise and Peril on a podcast in preparation for a performance by the Dinosaur Annex New Music Ensemble in Newton, MA in November 2024:
About the Music
In early 2015, The Playground Ensemble commissioned several professional and K-12 composers to write a piece for the Denver Biennial of the Americas, happening in July. Each older composer was paired with a younger one to mentor and was encouraged to relate his or her piece to the mentee’s piece. All composers were asked to contemplate the stated themes for the Biennial, which were centered around the idea of “Now!”
My mentee, a wonderful young woman named Katina Jakel, began by exploring an online instrument called the Virtual Piano at virtualpiano.net. This instrument takes input from the computer keyboard, producing a note for each alphabetic key pressed. Katina took some of the theme words from the Biennial and plugged them into the Virtual Piano, and then sent me the resulting pitch patterns. We both took musical inspiration from these, as well as from other words associated with the Biennial themes. A few that I used included B-G-G (“now”), B-B-C (“art”), and F-G-C-C-E-F-C-D (“community”). I also found the Biennial theme of “promise and peril” particularly fruitful, suggestive as it is of more and less musical tension. In writing the piece, I asked myself how musical materials of such differing tensions could interact? How could they be layered? How could they influence each other? Other words that provoked me musically included “revelation,” “complex,” “convergence,” and “migration,” with each suggesting rich musical metaphors involving texture, counterpoint, motivic transformation, and metrical reinterpretation.
LKN