Garages of the Valley

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Garages of the Valley is a single-movement orchestral composition by the American composer Mason Bates. The work was jointly commissioned by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. The world premiere was performed on March 6, 2014 in Stillwater, Minnesota by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra under conductor Scott Yoo. The European premiere was performed on June 30, 2015 in Ingolstadt, Germany during the opening concert of the 2015 Audi Sommerkonzerte Festival by the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra under conductor Donato Cabrera. The piece is dedicated to Dutch conductor Edo de Waart. [1] [2] [3] [4]

Orchestra large instrumental ensemble

An orchestra is a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music, which combines instruments from different families, including bowed string instruments such as the violin, viola, cello, and double bass, brass instruments such as the horn, trumpet, trombone and tuba, woodwinds such as the flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon, and percussion instruments such as the timpani, bass drum, triangle, snare drum, cymbals, and mallet percussion instruments each grouped in sections. Other instruments such as the piano and celesta may sometimes appear in a fifth keyboard section or may stand alone, as may the concert harp and, for performances of some modern compositions, electronic instruments.

Mason W. Bates is a Grammy award-winning American composer of symphonic music and DJ of electronic dance music. He is best known for his usage of electronics in his orchestral works. The second-most performed living composer in the United States, he has worked closely with the San Francisco Symphony, as well as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra where he worked as composer-in-residence. In 2015 he was named composer-in-residence of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and recently had his contract renewed for another two years though 2019-20.

Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra non-profit organisation in the USA

The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO), is a full-time professional chamber orchestra based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In collaboration with five Artistic Partners, the orchestra's musicians present more than 130 concerts and educational programs each year in over 14 venues throughout the Minneapolis/St. Paul Area. They are regularly heard on American Public Media's nationally syndicated radio programs "Performance Today" and SymphonyCast.

Contents

Composition

Garages of the Valley is composed in a single movement and has a duration of roughly 10 minutes. It was inspired by the garages in Silicon Valley that "housed the visionaries behind Apple, Hewlett Packard, Intel, and Google." Bates wrote in the score program notes:

A movement is a self-contained part of a musical composition or musical form. While individual or selected movements from a composition are sometimes performed separately, a performance of the complete work requires all the movements to be performed in succession. A movement is a section, "a major structural unit perceived as the result of the coincidence of relatively large numbers of structural phenomena".

A unit of a larger work that may stand by itself as a complete composition. Such divisions are usually self-contained. Most often the sequence of movements is arranged fast-slow-fast or in some other order that provides contrast.

Silicon Valley Region in California, United States

Silicon Valley is a region in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology, innovation, and social media. It corresponds roughly to the geographical Santa Clara Valley, although its boundaries have increased in recent decades. San Jose is the Valley's largest city, the third-largest in California, and the tenth-largest in the United States. Other major Silicon Valley cities include Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Redwood City, Cupertino, Santa Clara, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale. The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the third-highest GDP per capita in the world, according to the Brookings Institution.

Apple Inc. Technology company; developer of consumer electronics and multimedia platforms

Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. It is considered one of the Big Four tech companies along with Amazon, Google, and Facebook.

The imagined music of these tech workshops begins hyper-kinetically yet sporadically, filled with false starts. It soon flashes into a quicksilver world of out exotic textures and tunings that is informed by the music of Frenchman Gérard Grisey (whose imaginative orchestrations sound electronic but are completely unplugged). The exhilarating finale reflects the infectious optimism of the great inventers of our time, who conjured new worlds within the bright Valley’s dark garages. [2]

Gérard Grisey

Gérard Grisey was a twentieth-century French composer of contemporary classical music. His work is often associated with the Spectralist Movement in music, of which he was a major pioneer.

Instrumentation

The work is scored for an orchestra comprising three flutes (2nd doubling alto flute, all doubling piccolo), two oboes (2nd doubling English horn), two clarinets (2nd doubling E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet), two bassoons, two French horns, two trumpets, one or two percussionists (on marimba, wood block, sandpaper blocks, djembe, suspended cymbal, bongo drums, glockenspiel, triangle, xylophone, bass drum), and strings. [2]

Western concert flute Transverse woodwind instrument made of metal or wood

The Western concert flute is a transverse (side-blown) woodwind instrument made of metal or wood. It is the most common variant of the flute. A musician who plays the flute is called a flautist, flutist, flute player, or (rarely) fluter.

Alto flute type of flute

The alto flute is a type of Western concert flute, a musical instrument in the woodwind family. It is the next extension downward of the C flute after the flûte d'amour. It is characterized by its distinct, mellow tone in the lower portion of its range. It is a transposing instrument in G, and uses the same fingerings as the C flute.

Piccolo small musical instrument of the flute family

The piccolo is a half-size flute, and a member of the woodwind family of musical instruments. The modern piccolo has most of the same fingerings as its larger sibling, the standard transverse flute, but the sound it produces is an octave higher than written. This gave rise to the name ottavino, which the instrument is called in the scores of Italian composers. It is also called flauto piccolo or flautino.

Reception

Reviewing the world premiere, Rob Hubbard of the St. Paul Pioneer Press wrote:

<i>St. Paul Pioneer Press</i> newspaper based in St. Paul, Minnesota

The St. Paul Pioneer Press is a newspaper based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, primarily serving the Twin Cities metropolitan area. Circulation is heaviest in the eastern metro region, including Ramsey, Dakota, and Washington counties, along with western Wisconsin, eastern Minnesota and Anoka County, Minnesota. The paper's main rival is the Star Tribune, based in neighboring Minneapolis. The Pioneer Press has been owned by MediaNews Group since April 2006. It no longer includes "St. Paul" as part of its name in either its print or online edition, but its owner still lists the paper's name as the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The paper also calls itself the St. Paul Pioneer Press on its Facebook page and its Twitter page.

It's a very engaging piece with a programmatic pulse, beginning with an opening theme that stutters, stops and restarts a few times, just like a faltering machine making its maiden voyage (a Silicon Valley startup of a different sort). But get going it does, the strings sometimes voicing the kind of melancholy layers found in Samuel Barber's harmonies. The work eventually becomes a driving foxtrot reminiscent of John Adams (another Bay Area product).

Samuel Barber American composer

Samuel Osborne Barber II was an American composer of orchestral, opera, choral, and piano music. He is one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century; music critic Donal Henahan stated, "Probably no other American composer has ever enjoyed such early, such persistent and such long-lasting acclaim."

John Adams (composer) American composer

John Coolidge Adams is an American composer, clarinetist, and conductor of classical music and opera, with strong roots in minimalism.

San Francisco Bay Area Conurbation in California, United States

The San Francisco Bay Area is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo and Suisun Bay estuaries in the northern part of the U.S. state of California. Although the exact boundaries of the region vary depending on the source, the Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Governments to include the nine counties that border the aforementioned estuaries: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, Sonoma, and San Francisco. Other sources may exclude parts of or even entire counties, or expand the definition to include neighboring counties that don't border the bay such as San Benito, San Joaquin, and Santa Cruz.

Hubbard added, "The work demonstrated Bates to be a composer with a vivid imagination. You're likely to be hearing a lot from him in coming years." [3] Elaine Schmidt of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called the piece "effervescent" and lauded, "the piece began with short bursts of melodic and harmonic activity that eventually coalesced in an engaging work that's somehow full of positive energy." [4]

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References

  1. ↑ Scheinin, Richard (December 31, 2013). "Composer Mason Bates energizes symphonies with electronica". San Jose Mercury News . Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  2. 1 2 3 Bates, Mason (2014). Garages of the Valley: Program Note. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  3. 1 2 Hubbard, Rob (March 6, 2014). "Bates' 'Garages' gets the play it deserves". St. Paul Pioneer Press . Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  4. 1 2 Schmidt, Elaine (January 17, 2015). "Milwaukee Symphony blends fresh, familiar in engrossing program". Milwaukee Journal Sentinel . Retrieved July 18, 2015.
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