So I’m hard at work on Some Assembly Required, a new work for the Iowa State University Symphony Orchestra.  They’ve just posted their 2010-2011 season as part of a new website, and Some Assembly gets top billing.  So I’m returing the favor by linking the site here.

Some Assembly Required is turning into quite a piece.  The idea of construction, assembly, and craft looms large in my mind as I work.  Seemingly unrelated bits of material brought together under the umbrella of a ten minute rhapsody for orchestra.  Moments of highly rhythmic activity bump up against sweeping, broad-beamed violin lines.  Structured materials right next to aleatoric passages.  And yet the hope is that it all works together somehow.

This idea of “putting it together” (to quote Sondheim) works on so many different levels; large sections (of, say, a minute or more) can be reordered in a number of ways.  So too can gestures or motives of a bar or less.  How do they change over time?  How does their reordering, or reconstruction change their impact?  How does repetition heighten or make insignificant a musical moment?  All thoughts that bring various degrees of frustation, elation, success and (in the mind of the composer) failure.