Details on the Budapest concert

Since the beginning of August, I’ve been working on a new piece for the Hungarian Chamber Symphony Orchestra. It will be a fifteen-minute piece for strings, and the title is Letter to Hungary. With this concert, the HCSO is launching their “American Composers’ Podium”, a series of concerts and hopefully other events that will help promote the work of American composers among Hungarian audiences.

The concert will take place on November 18th at the Italian Institute in Budapest. Other composers featured will be Malcolm Hawkins and Sara Doncaster. You can read full details on the American Composers Podium on the HCSO’s stunning new web site .

More on the First Movement

This is a follow-up to the last entry about the HCSO piece (still untitled). I outlined what the overall structure of the piece as it looked about a week ago, but there was little detail on each of the movements.

Last week, I really only had about 12 bars for the opening of the slow first movement, but now it’s nearly complete, and will be more than 5 minutes long. The result is a mainly contemplative opening movement that builds into a wild cs�rd�s (a fast Hungarian dance), and then recedes back to reprise the main slow theme of the beginning.

As described in the earlier entry, the movement opens with a pentatonic melody played by the two violin sections divided in five parts in the form of a homophonic choral. This original tune is interlocked with the opening phrase of the Mad�rka, mad�rka tune, which never manages to proceed beyond that. The interplay develops into a more contrapuntal texture with a few tense moments, giving way to a new theme.

The new theme is is an E minor tune with a slow, pulsating accompaniment. This is actually a tune I made up about a year ago, when I thought it would be fun write a Hungarian folksong. (I don’t know how convinced the Hungarian audience will be, but I like it.) The tempo increases and builds up to boot-slappin’ fast dance. I’m trying to imitate the string playing in Hungarian folk band music, but also trying not to sweat it too much; authenticity is not one of my goals. The E minor tune returns in the final movement in a major variation that is somewhat less Hungarian, but probably more interesting.

Yet to be worked out is the transition back to the contemplative opening chorale, which ends the movement.

Anatomy of an unfinished piece

Well, I’d promised myself that September 1st would be when I stop sketching and start fleshing out and orchestrating the HCSO piece. I was hoping to have an end-to-end sketch of the whole piece to work from by now. I almost do. Good enough, I guess.

The big outstanding question for me at the moment is whether this is a multi-movement work or just one big movement. I’m leaning toward four movements, some played attacca. The material isn’t quite unified enough to to hold one movement together. I have to come up with names for the movements, though, which is a bit of a drag.

Here’s what I seem to be working with now:

New Chamber Orchestra Commission

Toward the beginning of August, I was invited by the Hungarian Chamber Symphony Orchestra to compose a new work for string orchestra to be performed in November 2005. This is for a special program of American repertoire called the “American Composers’ Podium”.