I ran a Google-search this week (to be honest, I don’t even remember what I typed into the search field) and I came across this article, “Ten Young Composers Who Are Redefining Classical Music,” HERE. The first name on the list is Missy Mazzoli, so I decided to listen to a work by her this week. I also thought I’d just go down the list for the next nine weeks and listen to works by these ten composers. One caveat: I’ll be taking a break throughout most of October as I’ll be on a road trip down historic Route 66; therefore, I’ll be able to listen to works by six of the composers between now and the week of September 26, and then I’ll finish up with the final four composers starting the week of October 24. For this week, I selected Mazzoli’s “Sinfonia (For Orbiting Spheres).” I’ve been able to listen to the work once so far, so I plan to listen to it a few more times, and then I’ll post my comments and rating soon. Stay tuned. I know you’re familiar with that old adage, “you can’t judge a book by it’s cover,” so I suppose an extension of that saying would be not to judge a piece of classical music by its title, but I think I did just that. I’m not quite sure exactly what I was expecting, but I was expecting something a little more spherical and a lot more orbital (whatever that means).
Much of the work did sound somewhat outer-spacey, but the piece did not evoke heavenly bodies (though, to be fair, the title does not stipulate that the orbiting spheres are perched in the heavens) nor did it suggest movement in a circular course. There were hints throughout the piece of circumgyration created by chromatic slides that intimated the Doppler effect, though more often than not the execution was just the receding half of the effect and not the approaching shift in frequency. As a result, the motion of the piece seems more like a wobbling sway through a dreamscape rather than the spatial geometry of an orbicular rotation. Okay, let me get past my perceived incongruence with the work’s title. What if Ms. Mazzoli had just called it “Sinfonia No. 1,” would I have liked it any better? I’m not sure. The sinfonia begins with a quiet hum and soft, sliding glissandos in the strings as the orchestra builds to dissonant chords, though it is never cacophonous. At times the piece nears the sound of instruments warming up on stage, albeit with a little more harmony and structure -- like the texture of a murmuration of birds. Well, murmurations of birds are interesting to watch -- and this murmuration of reverberations was interesting to listen to -- but I don’t think it would be a “go to” piece when I want to hear classical music. Once again, as I've stated with some recent pieces I've listened to, I think this piece would move up my scale were I to hear it in a live performance.
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A New Hope:As the header above says, each week I will listen to a piece of classical music that I've never heard before, and then I will report out what I thought about it. Archives
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