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Work Overview
Sinfonietta was written in August 2020. I didn't know then, but it was the pandemic's grimmest time. No vaccines in sight; apocalypse plausible. Like Ray Bradbury's characters memorizing burning books, I wrote Sinfonietta as a commitment to remember music, mine and others. I live near the Navy base in Sydney. During lockdown, the Navy band was part of my sonic environment. Hymns, bugle tunes, hay-making songs, sonatas. Not sure how long we had before the end-times, I piled my music upon its music, sometimes four tunes simultaneously, and I thought of the dense yet lucid style of Charles Ives, how he survived being infected during the influenza epidemic of 1 91 8-1 9.
The title comes from Berio's Sinfonia, another work of crammed allusion. Everything is too brief; nothings lasts its season. Writing Sinfonietta reinforced my belief that everything is one and belongs together, and the ills of the world come from falsehoods that anything needs to be kept apart from anything else. After August 2020: vaccines. Then I knew that the last viral crisis that I lived through, HIV, could have been solved this way but wasn't - 1 3 vaccines in the first year alone, versus no vaccine after 45 years.
Work Details
Year: 2020
Instrumentation: Flute, oboe, clarinet in B flat, bassoon, 4 horns in F, 2 trumpets in B flat, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani, strings.
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