Igor Korneitchouk-Tintinnabulation for orchestra by Old King Cole Productions

The title of Igor Korneitchouk’s Tintinnabulation, meaning the frenzied ringing of bells, comes from Edgar Allen Poe's poem “The Bells.” The San Diego-based composer and professor of music at Mesa College uses no singers for the text. Rather, instruments convey the vibrant colors of Poe's words. He evokes the different sorts of bells from the poem – such as the silver bells of sleighs, bronze bells signaling an alarm, funereal iron bells – frequently juxtaposing and interchanging them in a bi-partite fantasy. Tintinnabulation is a 2012 reworking of an earlier Korneitchouk score, From the Bells…, written in the 1980s for brass and percussion octet. When La Jolla Symphony conductor Steven Schick, a celebrated percussionist, requested an overture-like work to open the concert, the choice seemed apt. By the composer's own account, the revised work is almost a percussion concerto.

Born in Spain, of Russian and German descent, Igor Korneitchouk's family emigrated to Cleveland, Ohio, when he was a child. He received his Master's from the Cleveland Institute of Music and a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. In 1989 he received a NEH fellowship to study Jazz at Yale University. He has been awarded grants from UC Regents and AMC for the performance of his Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra, "Desert Flowers." From an American Record Guide review of his first CD by Old King Cole Productions, The Virtual Performer : "Korneitchouk writes with facility in such a dizzying variety of styles -- tonal, serial, minimalist, and much else - that one can almost certainly find something to enjoy.… His style is as virtual as his method." Igor Korneitchouk is currently Professor of Music at San Diego Mesa College. In his spare time he plays in the La Jolla Symphony.