Radial Play 2014
date completed
2014
duration
6'
orchestration
large orchestra
instrumentation
3333-4331 - 2hp.pno.4perc-strings)
commission
Carnegie Hall for The National Youth Orchestra of the USA
premiere
July 2014 in Purchase, NY
Program Note by Samuel Adams
I wrote Radial Play for the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America, a group of one hundred and twenty teenagers from around the country, whose talent and enthusiasm yielded brightly-hued and exciting performances of the work.
The commission was originally intended to be a ‘concert opener,’ a brief and energetic statement that would show off the full forces and youthful exuberance of this group. Although the music indeed radiates a particular extroversion, I abandoned this simple approach in favor of a crafting a challenging, mercurial study of orchestral color and texture—one that aims to assign new and unfamiliar roles to the young musicians, hopefully demonstrating that orchestral music can be a fluid, forward-thinking art. In Radial Play, the harps—not the percussion—are the music’s heartbeat; the brass gasp pitch-less exhales; the violins create burt of distorted noise with, as indicated in the score, ‘scratchy, nasty’ gestures.
The music itself is made of quickly shifting, kaleidoscopic counterpoint, which orbits a static, nuclear F sharp. First with the two harps, then with the vibraphone, piano and flutes, then brass, and finally the whole ensemble, the counterpoint expands and contracts around the center pitch, moving its way through each instrumental group, its skeins gradually wrapped and woven into moments of dense and chaotic activity. In the last breath of the work, the counterpoint extends itself to the thresholds of the orchestra’s range, snaps, and quickly dissolves.
- Samuel Adams
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press
"Mr. Adams describes the work as being built from contrapuntal “objects,” each one with a musical element circling a central pitch. The objects collide, evolve, expand and such, he adds. But for the listener, at least this one, the piece unfolds with a restless, narrative sweep in a cram-packed, pungent harmonic language. Zigzagging lines pile up to create a din of intensity, only to thin out, settle down and end uncertainly. Mr. Adams received a rousing ovation."
New York Times ↗
“The Adams piece, Radial Play, with its glittering bursts of color and texture arranged in dense skeins of counterpoint that project out of a single note, was a welcome thrust into 21st-century music, and a piece that deserves to make it onto other orchestras' programs in the seasons to come.”
NPR ↗
