Little Symphony (2024)

for Orchestra

I took AP Music Theory in my junior year of high school, and, having learned the “rules” of music, I spent the next few years obsessed with breaking all of them, exploring a more dissonant harmonic idiom.  Although I had a handful of good ideas, I had not quite gotten the hand of the craft involved in writing in such a style, and so a lot of the music I wrote (yes, I do still have it, and no, I don’t intend for it to see the light of day) ended up being frankly aimless.  It gradually dawned upon me that whatever I was trying wasn’t working out in the way that I wanted it to.

This work was the first piece that I used to explore a more consonant harmonic tongue.  Originally scored for wind quintet and piano, it was intended to be an homage to another work for the same instrumentation by Francis Poulenc.  However, as I wrote I found (much to my delight) that the piece had developed its own musical voice, and although I did not know it at the time it contained the seeds for what would become my compositional vocabulary as it is today.

In its original form the work was a bit over-written, and so I thought it fitting to flesh out the instrumentation into a small orchestra.  Considering this piece was the earliest version of what my music sounds like now, I might consider it some of my musical juvenilia, however I do not consider it without merit, and it certainly has some moments of optimistic charm.

Duration: 8 minutes

The Sextet for Winds and Piano was completed in January of 2020, and revised and orchestrated as Little Symphony in June of 2024.