Empty Theater -- Quasi-Concerto for Piano and Str Orchestra (Christopher Bailey) by zipzappoozoo

in 3 parts .... continuous .... "slow" - "fast" - "slow" (sorta).

Begun as a meditation on emptiness, but ended up somewhere completely different.

First part developed out of ideas I tried out in the Walls and Lattices concert done with Collide-O-Scope in 2013. The piano, and the 5 separate sub-ensembles of the string orchestra, play from re-orderable pages of music. All of it swirls around a central harmony, which helps it all to coalesce as 1 piece.

2nd part is an Ives/Carter multi-ensemble kind of thing. I dis-obeyed my rule of thumb (more than 2 musics at once = mud) on more than 1 occasion, and I think it does wander into mud territory a couple times more than I'd be happy with…but still sounds pretty cool.

3rd part is ….Ligeti meets Murail meets Barber meets the Lost soundtrack meets some cathedral bells from Chartres and the 13-train in Paris.

At the very end there is a kind of "hope" chord. I'm not very hopeful about anything really, but it is an oddly comforting chord, I think.