Follow… (2023)

for string orchestra

Duration: 3’

Premiere: (scheduled) May 28, 2023, Oakville ON

Commissioned by the Oakville Symphony Youth Orchestra: Philharmonia, Caron Allen (Music Director), with support from the SOCAN Foundation

Programme Note:

“When I began to conceive this piece for the Oakville Symphony Youth Orchestra: Philharmonia, I knew that I wanted to create something that would not only have an exciting and somewhat frenetic energy for their musicians, but also challenge them with potentially new musical ideas and techniques.

 The piece is constructed of various canonical phrases and gestures, with the musicians essentially having to play “follow the leader” – one section will begin, and the remaining players will successively imitate this shortly after. With this idea, I chose to write in a way that these close imitations quickly produce a melodically dense texture, where individual voices and phrases disappear into the greater mass of sound. As this texture takes over, any semblance of individual line is lost within the ensemble and becomes one singular machine, seemingly moving in unison.

These sections are broken up by a sparser texture of interlocking and energetic bursts of sound. The different voices are again imitating and responding to one another, with rhythms fitting together in puzzle-like blocks. As the piece progresses, these two main musical ideas alternate back-and-forth, with a constant driving energy that pushes continuously to the very end.

Follow… was commissioned by the Oakville Symphony Youth Orchestra: Philharmonia, and Music Director Caron Allen, with support from the SOCAN Foundation.”