Symphony 7

Symphony #7 was commissioned by the New England Philharmonic, was written in 2017, and premiered by the Philharmonic on April 27, 2019, conducted by Richard Pittman. Each of the four movements is a tone poem on one of the four elements.

The first movement written was Water, whose opening came to me in a dream. Of course, after writing down that opening, I realized I needed to lengthen it with an insertion. The music sort of depicts the path of a spring on a mountain trickling and then flowing into a stream and into a river and into the ocean. There are sparklies in the mallet percussion representing sunlight gleaning off the water.

II. is a tone poem about Air, III. is about Earth — which has a lot of piano-to-forte gestures on single notes — and IV. is about Fire.

The recording is from the premiere.

ziodavino · Symphony 7

Penalty Box

 Penalty Box was written for Holly Roadfeldt, and was my first so-called post pandemic piece. It was written in May-June, 2021, right after covid mandates were lifted in Massachusetts.

I had originally shared on social media a picture of myself gesturing during a Brandeis colloquium, and I titled the post "Illegal Use of Hands." At this giddy post-pandemic point, it seemed it was a good title and premise for a piano piece. Then, naturally, it occurred to me that other sports penalties could serve as the idea for short piano pieces, I made a list of a lot of them, and eventually I wrote two more.

Holly and her husband Kirk did a multicamera video of it, after Holly had performed it several times, and here we have it.