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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > May > 21 > Entry
Indie classical group Audio Inversions awards, and premieres, a new composition
The foursome of adventurous indie classical musicians who make up Audio Inversions are only too happy to put their money where their mouths are.
On Friday, they’ll premiere the third recipient of their annual composition competition, which awards $750 to the winning score and most importantly, gives the new music its premiere.
On Friday’s program is the winning piece, ‘Lou’ by Baljinder Singh Sekhon II, and also compositions by Delvyn Case, Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki, and Audio Inversions’ composers-in-residence James Norman and Anthony Suter. Expect an eclectic mix of sounds ranging from mixed chorus to saxophone duets to percussion orchestra to chamber ensembles.
We caught up with Audio Inversions’ composer Norman for a few questions.
What inspired you to start a composition competition?
James Norman: Composers today need all the help they can get to find opportunities for their music. And too often truly special music will sit on the shelves of young (and sometimes experienced) composers because the right performance opportunity has not made itself available. The goal of our competition is to continue promoting the most outstanding musical works and composers, with the added hope of engendering a love of contemporary music in a new audience. One of our main objectives has been to seek out lesser-known and underplayed composers and their compositions, regardless of the styles they represent, and it is our hope that this competition will aid us in our search.
What kind of musical trends did you see emerging based on the competition entries?
We received entries from over 100 composers and nearly 300 total works submitted (we encourage composers to submit more than one work) from 12 different countries such as Turkey, Greece and Japan. The great thing about this competition is that we get a snapshot of the various musical trends influencing young composers. However, if this competition has taught us anything, it’s that people are writing music in all styles — serialism, post-minimalism, post-modernism, neo-romanticism — you name it, all the major trends of the past century, although, it’s tough to ignore the growing trend of electro-acoustic composition. With each new year of the composition we find more and more works that strive to integrate this new soundscape into their compositions.
What was it about what winning composition that made it the winner?
Norman: After incredibly long sessions of studying scores and listening to the recordings, ‘Lou,’ by Baljinder Singh Sekhon II, truly began to stand out amongst its peers. It’s an incredibly mature work and beautifully written for cello and percussion orchestra. ‘Lou’ is a modern homage to Californian composer Lou Harrison, whose music was the very model of diversity and the global reach of classical music as many of his works included the music of non-Western cultures, such as Javanese-style gamelan music. And like Harrison, Sekhon has woven the traditions of Eastern and Western music together into something completely unique. We are thrilled that we are honoring a composition that is not a only the work of an extremely talented up-and-coming composer, but that we get to perform what we consider to be a great work as well.
Audio Inversions’ Fourth Season Finale
When: 8 p.m. Friday
Where: Rollins Studio Theatre, Long Center, 701 W. Riverside Drive
Cost: $15 ($10 students)
Info: www.audioinversions.com
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By Graham Reynolds
May 21, 2009 12:28 PM | Link to this
looking forward to this show.
-graham