Flute Concerto

Written in 2019 for flute and orchestra (20 minutes)

Original Program Note

What is the situation of the solo/concerto? Here, the situation is (in some way) about communication, but somehow also about pressure, idolatry, social structures, and social pressures. The soloist is the icon, or the idol, the role model with the ensemble their disciples. This metaphor might be the “ideal” romantic statement of the situation, but there is a balance or responsibility of ego. Is one leading, or is one being lead? Is this love, or is this social pressure? Are there cheers of support, or is this a crowd of unrealistic expectations? I don’t think this piece provides any answers, but I do intend to ask those questions. There is virtuosity in how we deal with connecting through time. How we express individual units, and individual significance at even the smallest units.

Thoughts on the Piece

I wrote the Flute Concerto and How Little is Within basically at the same time while staying with Antoine Beuger for a month in Haan, Germany. While I was with Antoine, we were discussing the materiality of music: what does it mean for people to be interacting with one another. These conversations would later go on to be an important factor in a most of my work, but also a significant section of my dissertation, which you can read here.

With these pieces, I was thinking about what it means to be alone; what does it mean to be a soloist; what does it mean to be performing with another person or people? Then thinking bigger: what it means to be in an orchestra; what does it mean to be part of the collective; with the concerto, what does it mean to be the singular – the soloist in front of the collective. I was reading a lot of Deleuze, Lacan, and Christopher Small – if you’ll excuse the pretension – and I think a lot of this interest comes out in these works. Musically speaking, I have a real and deep interest for the concerto as a genre and as a concept. I think it teaches us a lot about what it means to be together and can reveal a lot of things about the relationships we have with one another.

We think about the “situation” of a musical performance - or the relationships of people interacting with each other in a musical performance - the concerto is an interesting space because we have the simultaneity of a gigantic collective (an orchestra), which, in many ways is a collective of individuals represses their individualism into a cohesive group while we highlight this guest off and someone who is usually not actually a regular member of this group. We give this individual unique attention, but in a lot of ways, we often expect a concerto to have some sort of virtuosity in exchange for that attention. Because of this, I think that a concerto has a lot of really interesting metaphors and things to say about capitalism and power structures, etc.  

Still, we can approach this genre in a different way. One thing I was really interested in doing with these pieces was finding a way of refocusing was that attention might be on. So, rather than thinking about virtuosity, what if we think about attention, focus, and sound.

Throughout both the Flute Concerto and How Little is Within, the soloist actually doesn’t do very much - only playing a handful of tones with a collective force behind them, supporting them in the vast ocean of sound. This is a very different situation than watching somebody shred like Tchaikovsky or something and it’s a different sort of listening and it’s a different sort of performance. It’s a different sort of virtuosity and a different relationship between the audience the soloist and the soloist and the ensemble, as well as the soloist and ensemble and conductor. I thought a lot about this stuff - probably too much to talk about here. I recommend Chapter 3 of my dissertation, where I start going off about Lacan…

These are things that are really important to me and things that I haven’t finished thinking about and I hope to continue in the future.

From a more personal point, How Little is Within was the first time I had the opportunity to collaborate with Júlia Coelho, somebody I’ve worked with a lot, and I’ve had many great musical adventures with – including my concert-length “O Tempo fora do Tempo” a song cycle for Pierrot ensemble. The Flute Concerto was chance for me to work with Alaina Clarice, somebody who has been a champion of my music for a long time and somebody I’ve gotten to collaborate with on dozens of pieces. You’ll hear her on many, many recordings of my music, especially if it has flute. In fact, it’s almost certainly her if it has flute... Having a space for us to work together to such a big scale as a concerto is something special; I was able to put a show together an orchestra of my friends and really see what this community looked like. I think about the concert where we premiered these pieces (with myself conducting) as probably a proof of concept that something like my dissertation Codex Symphonia; a huge group of friends could be put together into an orchestra. Myself and my friend Rachel Whelan did a double-feature this night where she had performed all of her voice music and then we had an intermission, and then these two pieces. It was a great night that I’ll remember family for a long time.