done! + the ninth

I put the finishing touches on Naalah (Cry of Grief) these past two days and sent it off to Texas. it's going to be a really fun piece to hear for the first time because it's so different from pretty much anything else I've written. I used a scale (D-Eb-F#-G-A-Bb-C) I've been in love with since I began to compose (in fact, the first piece I ever wrote, Tone Poem for Piano, Oboe and Cello features it almost exclusively) and I've just been waiting for the proper commission to really commit myself to using it. It's very reminiscent of an Arabic "maqam" so I decided that, since the text came from Pakistan, I would see what I could do with Ghalib's text as filtered by that scale.
















On a side note, if you are a fan of Beethoven's ninth you should check out the Minnesota Orchestra's Grammy-nominated recording. It is, by far, one of the most amazing things I've ever heard.

That being said, their version of the 5th is a paean to the gods. We've all heard the first movement (whether it be in a Looney Tunes episode or a concert hall)...until now. I played it for a professional cellist friend of mine and, afterwards, he claimed he had "never heard that piece before." I know I'm not a devotee of orchestral music but I swear there is something extraordinary about this reading. Osmo and Co. imbue it all with a vitality-or-life-force-or-quickening-or-whatever that I think only happens every once in a while. The proverbial gauntlet has been thrown.

But who cares, right? I'm done with this latest commission (and not a moment too soon) and I will be getting a little publicly and privately feuertrunken this weekend. After which it's on to the February premiere of To Sing You To Sleep as well as an extended work in French for Chapman University.