Paul Seitz, composer
  • Home
  • Paul Seitz Music Publications
  • Events
  • Bio
  • Opera
  • Recordings
  • Projects
  • School Visits and Clinics
  • Featured Composition
  • Commissioning Music
  • Contact
  • Past Featured Compositions
  • Links
  • guitarandlute
  • Paul Seitz Music Publications
  • >
  • Concert Music for Professionals and Advanced Students
  • >
  • Orchestral Music
  • >
  • In Beauty, symphony orchestra, complete materials

In Beauty, symphony orchestra, complete materials

SKU:
$50.00
$50.00
Unavailable
per item
for symphony orchestra COMPLETE SET (Score and parts)
pc, 2 fl, 2 ob, E hn, 2 bsn, cbsn, 4 hn, 3 trp, 2 trb bs trn, tba, timp, 3 perc, hp, strings

duration: c. 14 minutes (2 movements)
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Google+
Add to Cart
Program Notes:

            This piece, In Beauty, was written as a commission by a remarkable amateur, community, orchestra, the Henderson Symphony Orchestra of Henderson Nevada, led by Taras Krysa, director of orchestras as UNLV where I was teaching music theory and composition.  I was asked to compose a piece that would relate, somehow, to the indigenous peoples of the Southwestern United States.  Since moving to Nevada, I had visited the Navajo Nation several times and become quite interested in Navajo art which I found both wonderfully successful as art and equally so as an expression of metaphysics, particularly the concept of Hózhó – an  experience that combines beauty, harmony and the balance of contradictions.  I was not knowledgeable about Navajo music but also was not interested in evoking any particular musical idiom in this composition.  Another approach came to mind when I recalled that Morton Feldman used to discuss compositional elements, gestures, asymmetry of form, etc., in his music in connection with the antique Turkish rugs he loved and collected.  And so I decided to try composing a piece in which the formal design and all of the individual musical elements were created in response to features I observed in two particular Navajo rug patterns.  Because each rug design, like so much Navajo art, expresses the concept of Hózhó, it was possible to compose a piece in two movements, played without interruption, in which each movement is primarily concerned with a particular rug, but both movements, and the entire form, seek to explore the abstract experience of Hózhó.