String Orchestra Version
Wind Ensemble Version
String Quartet Version
Instrumentation: String Orchestra (also versions for Chamber Orchestra, Wind Ensemble and String Quartet)
Duration: 4’30’
Program Notes:
My first time hearing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was the fuzz-guitar and drum-machine-driven version by the art-punk band Birdsongs of The Mesozoic. It totally blew my mind. This was music that spoke my language! Growing up listening to, loving, and playing many different types of music – including classical, avant-garde jazz, garage rock and my triumphant one-day stint in a hair metal band – I never wanted to choose between the so-called “refinement” of classical music and the full-on energy of punk music.
In writing The Raw Heart of the Spinning World, I wanted to surrender to the kind of music that had always set me on fire – music of seething power and brutal emotional honesty, with nothing held back. Music that was unceasingly real, whether tender or violent, whispering or wailing, searching or screaming.
The words in the score trace its inner trajectory: hushed, prayerful; raw, biting; surrendering; spiraling, swirling, dizzying; burning, urgent… Written in times of great tumult and uncertainty, the music is propelled by both emotional vulnerability and centrifugal force, the center barely holding… and then not at all.
The Raw Heart of the Spinning World was commissioned by the North Carolina Chamber Music Institute. The Next Festival of Emerging Artists presents the string orchestra World Premiere as part of the 2022 Season.