narrator-speaker(s)

A consortium of orchestras, including The Idyllwild Arts Academy Orchestra, the Salt Lake Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, the Mansfield Symphony and the University of Utah Philharmonia have commissioned the Schumann Trilogy to celebrate the bicentennial of Robert Schumann’s birth in 2010.  The trilogy was premiered at the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles by the Idyllwild Arts Academy Orchestra, Peter Askim, Music Director on May 8th, 2010.  It is comprised of three pieces -- Figments and Fragments, Cool Night and Genealogie -- which can be performed together or separately.

The composer's own voice is memorialized on the playback tape, which features a speaker (electronically processed voice) having a "conversation" with the orchestra about electronic music and the various sounds that can be synthesized (a la mid-1970s), as a friendly jousting back and forth between the tape and the instrumentalists in the orchestra. Requires a tape operator to stop and start a CD or computer audio files at precise moments in the score.  

A mammoth multi-media -musical theater work in 6 sections (Prologue, The Sounds, The Land, The People, The Idea, Epilogue) for orchestra, 2 bands, chorus, dancers, electronic tracks, narrators, visuals (film and slides). Any new production of this work would require new visuals representing the current state of the technology. The narrative is entirely from the poetry of Walt Whitman, which is recorded by the narrators on the electronic (CD) tracks. The work is a celebration of America's Bicenntenial in 1976; the majority of the sounds on the electronic tracks are short excerpts from American music of the previous two centuries, the remaining sounds were created in an electronic music studio. The CD for all the sound tracks is intact and available. The chorus does not sing text, but rather specific vowel-consonant combinations to melodies from other american music.most of the live music is not difficult, but the mounting of the production would be a formidable challenge.