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| Composer Nico Muhly Photo: Ana Cuba |
The Utah Symphony’s Dawn To Dust release features three new world premieres. Find out about Nico Muhly’s work Control (Five Landscapes for Orchestra) and watch/listen to a preview from the Utah Symphony:
Control (Five Landscapes for Orchestra) is a sequence of five episodes describing, in some way, an element of Utah’s natural environment, as well as the ways in which humans interact with it.
The first part (Landform) begins with a texture of strings, interrupted by forceful chords. A solo oboe works slowly on top of this process and is itself interrupted by a progression of aggressive chords that slowly ascend, presented at two different (but close enough to rub against one another) speeds. These ascending forms become more seismically unstable, and a trio of pitched percussion (xylophone, marimba, and vibraphone) creates a more mathematical grid; here, as in many other places in Control, I tried to reference, however obliquely, the music of Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), whose visionary work Des Canyons aux Étoiles (1972) deals with Utah’s landscape and the spiritual possibilities found therein. The section ends as it began, but somehow changed, observed by the pitched percussion and subtly transformed.
The second part (Mountain) imagines a mountain in the summer, with various insect-like punctuations from the winds, and a heavily fragmented string section, with small groups of players and soloists splitting from the crowd. A solo viola and solo violin spin simple melodies under and over this texture, sometimes as plain as a single note displaced over all possible octaves. We end with a slightly ominous tuba and piano bassline suggesting, perhaps, that there are other uses for mountains than purely organic ones.
Part three (Beehive) deals with Utah’s history of technological innovation being used to control the landscape. I tried, in various places in this piece, to use the orchestra to convey what must have been the pioneers’ shock at the wild shapes and colors of the land- scape; here, that landscape is fully gridded, plotted, and divided and put to agricultural use. The key here is a productive busyness: Utah claims one of the first telegrams ever sent, and, more recently, some of the first fiber internet connections; industriousness is built into the pioneer wagons, the early plows, collective grain storage, charity, education, missionary work, and an ever-changing relationship to technology. Morse-code-like rhythms dominate the first half of this movement, and suddenly, a trio of trumpets take over, echoed by a trio of oboes, then flutes, then various chimes and bells. We end with a solo cello above a busy grid of triangles and woodblock.
Part four (Petroglyph & Tobacco) begins with the simple, aggressive rhythms of stone-carving, hocketed between different families of the
orchestra. Eventually, a melody emerges, a Ute song. It is too easy to project a romantic ancientness to the music of Native Americans; in this case, the song was used when begging for tobacco: post–European contact evidence for the modern malleability of Native American cultural traditions. Similarly, next to a petroglyph, we see modern graffiti, or, graffiti from 90 years ago (Rulon Rushton, 1929, making his mark on history). The landscape and its inhabitants are in a constant dialogue.Part five (Red Dust). I’ve spent a good deal of time in the St. George area in southern Utah, and one of the most striking elements of the landscape is the outrageous red color everywhere: it’s visually inescapable. More notable, though, was the way the red dust permeated my hair, my clothes, my shoes, and the carpet in my motel. I flew to London the day after a long hike, and when I took off my socks, a confetti of red dust landed on the ground: the Utah landscape had followed me halfway around the world. We can control the land- scape, but it has a way of reminding us of its permanence. This section turns a simple chord progression into clouds, shifting forms, and is made of many moving parts.
—Nico Muhly
Dawn To Dust
World Premieres of Three Works Commissioned by the Utah Symphony
Utah Symphony
Thierry Fischer, Music Director
DAWN TO DUST contains live recordings of three significant and adventurous works by leading composers Augusta Read Thomas, Nico Muhly, and Andrew Norman. World-renowned percussionist Colin Currie performs on Andrew Norman’s “Switch.”