John D. McDonald

Solo Flute

Composer's Note:

Working for over fifty years in his Chicago studio (a revamped 1909 electrical substation), Richard Hunt became one of the country’s most prolific and celebrated public sculptors. As an African American living in the US, he dealt deeply with concepts of “freedom of mind, thought, and imagination.” A close friend and patron of composer T.J. Anderson, Jr,, Professor of Music Emeritus at Tufts University, Hunt’s sculpture Planar Mountain graces the Lower Campus Road entrance, donated in honor of Anderson. 

This flute solo explores the blending and bridging of the natural (field-like) and the industrial (planar) that characterizes Hunt's work. The idea of “forming, bending, stretching, cutting, and twisting metal parts” helps shape the music, embracing Hunt's "vision of the future that is unlike past futures.”