Echos

ECHOS was commissioned by the ECHO Chamber Orchestra to be premiered in their 2020-2021 season. The composition ECHOS is not simply named after the beloved orchestra for which it was composed. It refers to how the opening melodic lines return again and again in an almost improvisatory fashion, ‘echoing’ one another in various permutations. While the season for its initial performance was cancelled due to Covid, the work on this piece was not at all. In fact, in January 2020 the orchestra’s musicians worked with me in doing live webinar workshops on the work in progress. We invited the Zoom audience to purvey the inner workings of how a piece is composed, while also sharing about the qualities of the instruments in ECHO. (This is a technical feat that seems Zoom commonplace today but, in January 2020, was still avant guard.)

I wish to say thanks to all the ECHO players who participated in those web workshops, for their input was invaluable. Special gratitude goes to percussionist Christian Foster Howes for his wisdom in my final edits. I can also never thank enough composer Dan Becker, for his continued musical counsel and support. Finally, this piece is dedicated in loving memory to Richard Taruskin, the titan musicologist who unexpectedly passed away in 2022. I’m so grateful for all the insights and comments he gave me about this piece as I finished it. He was a brilliant, acerbic, thoughtful, kind, and sometimes insufferable man. He was my mentor, my former professor, and my dearest friend. You are deeply missed, sir.