“My main project last year was Clunker Concerto, a percussion quartet concerto for junk car and orchestra, commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra. In the piece, a mock car is broken down into its constituent parts, revealing a diverse arsenal of unusual and surprisingly robust “junk” instruments. Rather than use the junk primarily as percussive objects (that is, as things that make loud sounds when you hit them), I treated them as I treated the orchestral instruments: as complex instruments with their own unique timbres and idiosyncratic performance techniques. (For example, I developed bowing/fingering techniques that turned fenders and hubcaps into fully chromatic instruments.) By focusing on these nuances of the junk, I found many ways to organically blend them with the orchestra, expanding the latter’s sound palette in rich, other-worldly, and wacky ways. In Rome, I will substantially expand and revise the piece in preparation for its studio recording in 2012, and perhaps, make a small chamber version of it with Roman junk. I will also complete several commissions for shorter chamber and solo works.”
Current
Rome Prize Fellows and Projects
The American Academy in Rome awards the Rome Prize to a select group of artists and scholars, after an application process that begins in the fall of each year. The winners, announced in the spring, are invited to Rome to pursue their work in an atmosphere conducive to intellectual and artistic freedom, interdisciplinary exchange, and innovation. The 2011-12 Rome Prize winners are listed here with a brief project summary in their own words.
To download the brochure from the Rome Prize Ceremony held in New York on 13 April, 2011, announcing the 2011-2012 Rome Prize winners click here.
Musical Composition
Associate Professor of Music, University of California, San Diego
“I will devote the residency fellowship to completing 2 compositions: a sextet co-commissioned by Southwest Chamber Music and Cicada Chamber Players, and a Chamber Concerto for 15-20 players commissioned by the Callithumpian Consort. My approach to composition has been driven by a few central concepts, including a technique that I call ‘One-Note-Polyphony’, and my long-standing fascination with the heterophonic music of Inner Mongolia. These two projects offer me the ideal instrumental forces to further explore my ideas.”
