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Kaleidophon (2004-2005)

for String Orchestra

Duration: 8’

Commissioned by the Juilliard Pre-College Chamber Orchestra

Premiere: Juilliard Pre-College Chamber Orchestra (cond., Julien Benichou), New York, January 2006

A kaleidophon is best enjoyed as kind of leisure instrument, where moment-to-moment colors and sound combinations are the point.  The listeners may find kaleidophon’s musical ideas returning from time to time (but always a bit differently), and may even get a blurry glimpse of gestures recognizable from older musics, but these are purely coincidental (or possibly even supplied by the listener), since the language here is one of organic change playing itself out in real time, never the goal-directed rhetoric of the symphonic language of centuries past or the post-modern impulse to make new things from old ones.  Have a peak - you never know what you might find if you listen through a kaleidophon. 

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