Stre-----tch!! (2014)
Narrator + SATB Choir
6 minutes
commissioned and premiered by C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective
(with conductor Michael Conley and narrator Susanna Su)
3/5/2015 Church of Transfiguration, New York, NY
It was while taking a choral conducting class in the 2013 summer semester with Professor Dominick DiOrio (at Indiana University) that I became truly fascinated by the intimacy and sheer fun involved in the process of making music with a choir. It was also around the same time that I got the idea to write a choral work about warm-up and stretch exercises: I much enjoyed the warm-up exercises with which we always began the class, and that summer was one of the rare periods in my life when I went to the gym regularly.
Drawn to this idea, I took a “postural alignment for musicians” class in spring 2014, hoping to acquire a deeper understanding in stretching exercises. Although we did much less stretching than I had expected, the class still allowed me to become a better person, and More important, to capture ideas to incorporate in the piece.
All my personal experiences I mentioned above (warm-ups in choir, stretch exercises at the gym, and activities in postural alignment class) are combined in this Five minute Theatrical / self-referential piece, in the form of a mock class. The choir does numerous stretch exercises in tandem with the narrator. They also hum, echo the narrator, and most of the time, sing What they are doing. Additionally, the text includes nonsense syllables that can be heard in warm-up sessions. To achieve a multi-dimensional stretch, musical ideas such as glissandi, scales, and spatialization are used. I hope this work will stretch your musical pleasure.
6 minutes
commissioned and premiered by C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective
(with conductor Michael Conley and narrator Susanna Su)
3/5/2015 Church of Transfiguration, New York, NY
It was while taking a choral conducting class in the 2013 summer semester with Professor Dominick DiOrio (at Indiana University) that I became truly fascinated by the intimacy and sheer fun involved in the process of making music with a choir. It was also around the same time that I got the idea to write a choral work about warm-up and stretch exercises: I much enjoyed the warm-up exercises with which we always began the class, and that summer was one of the rare periods in my life when I went to the gym regularly.
Drawn to this idea, I took a “postural alignment for musicians” class in spring 2014, hoping to acquire a deeper understanding in stretching exercises. Although we did much less stretching than I had expected, the class still allowed me to become a better person, and More important, to capture ideas to incorporate in the piece.
All my personal experiences I mentioned above (warm-ups in choir, stretch exercises at the gym, and activities in postural alignment class) are combined in this Five minute Theatrical / self-referential piece, in the form of a mock class. The choir does numerous stretch exercises in tandem with the narrator. They also hum, echo the narrator, and most of the time, sing What they are doing. Additionally, the text includes nonsense syllables that can be heard in warm-up sessions. To achieve a multi-dimensional stretch, musical ideas such as glissandi, scales, and spatialization are used. I hope this work will stretch your musical pleasure.