Foundation Music (for orchestra)

This past summer I had a month-long residency at the Creative Kids Education Foundation in Bel Air, California, and one of the projects I worked on there was an overture to a short operatic film for the Portland 48-Hour Film Festival. I subsequently expanded that into a new piece for large orchestra, which was recorded last week by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Gier in the conservatory’s beautiful new Lenfest Hall in Philadelphia.

Score

New recording: Piano Quartet

A new recording is available of my piano quartet “slowburn/fastburn” (2011). It was premiered by a quartet from the Curtis Institute, presented by the Penn Composers Guild.

(mp3 download)

Amalia Hall, Zoë Martin-Doike, Eric Han, Vivian Cheng

Viola sonata studio recording

I’m excited to post the brand new studio recording of my Viola Sonata, “the dreams we dream for the city of roses”. Recorded in December at Oktaven Studios in NYC with Jessica Meyer & Steven Beck, engineered by Ryan Streber. Streaming audio & download link are below.

For those in Philadelphia, they’ll be giving the Philly premiere next Thursday (10/13) at 8pm in Amado Hall on campus at Penn.

Download

ALSO: Video from the recording session is available on YouTube.

New Recording: Missa Brevis

Finally getting around to sifting through recordings from the 2010–2011 season. Here is the complete audio from my Missa Brevis for the Virgin of Guadalupe. I’m conducting the Choir of St Mary’s Episcopal Church accompanied by an ensemble of excellent musicians from the Curtis Institute at the Philadelphia Cathedral in December 2010.

Festival Mass recordings, first installment: Gloria

Below is a recording of the Gloria from my Festival Mass that I conducted last month in Philadelphia. The whole thing ran about 75 minutes, so I think I’ll post excerpts over the next few weeks.

For the enthusiasts, a score is available here.

The Choir of St Mary’s Episcopal Church and the Choral Scholars of the Philadelphia Cathedral are joined by soloists Sara Ann Mitchell, Julia Teitel, and Ricky Torres-Cooban and musicians from Temple and the Curtis Institute.

Festival Mass for the Great Vigil of Easter

Monday, April 25. 8pm. Philadelphia Cathedral (38/Ludlow)

World premiere: Festival Mass for the Great Vigil of Easter. 

Choir, soloists, brass, strings, percussion, organ. 70 minutes.

Choral Scholars of the Philadelphia Cathedral
Choir of St Mary’s Episcopal Church
Players from Curtis, Temple, &c.
Composer conducts.

NYC recording session: Viola Sonata

I had a wonderful recording session this weekend with Jess Meyer and Steve Beck from counter)induction at Oktaven Audio in NYC. I’ve thrown together a short video with clips and stills from the session as well as a bit of rough-edit audio. I can’t say enough what a thrill it is to be able to work with musicians of this caliber; it’s the sort of experience that makes a composer want to write more, and to do so with a level of care and attention to detail commensurate with that of the players. Artistic collaboration, at its best, brings everyone up a notch or two. Hopefully a finished cut will be available sometime in January. Until then, enjoy my debut as a film director.

New recording: Sextet: Water Music (2010)

 

A new recording of my Sextet: Water Music (2010) is now available. The piece was commissioned earlier this year by the Syzygy New Music Collective, and was performed this weekend at Penn by musicians from the Curtis Institute of Music. [Arbitrary water-photo taken in Santa Cruz, CA Nov. 2010].

Enjoy!

Missa Brevis preview…

Here’s a sample clip taken from a dress rehearsal yesterday. Also, great write-up from Penn Communications here.

Choir of St Mary’s with musicians from the Curtis Institute:

Getting closer…

From the press release for the upcoming premiere at the Philadelphia Cathedral on Dec. 13:

Scott J. Ordway’s “Missa Brevis for the Virgin of Guadalupe” was commissioned by St Mary’s Episcopal Church, Hamilton Village as part of its New Music for Sacred Spaces Project. It will be sung for the first time as an integral part of St. Mary’s Festival Mass celebrating the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe on December 12 at 11 AM, and will receive its premier performance at Philadelphia Cathedral the following evening, December 13, at 8 PM at Philadelphia Cathedral. The public is invited to either venue.
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With crucial support for its first year from the Philadelphia chapter of the American Composers Forum and the Office of the Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, St Mary’s has designed New Music for Sacred Spaces to promote the creation and performance of contemporary music for liturgical use. In addition to Ordway’s two large-scale mass settings, the program provides a context for the composition and performance of new music for sacred spaces by other composers from the St Mary’s community and throughout the Philadelphia region, of which five—four Feast Day anthems composed by Ordway, Daniel Fox, and Thomas Ward and one ordinary congregational setting of the Mass by Professor Tsitsi Jaji are being used at St. Mary’s this fall—have been offered to date.

From the composer:

The Missa Brevis for the Virgin of Guadalupe is a response to my travel and research in Mexico City in the spring of 2010, made possible by research support from the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. It is my musical expression of the tremendous warmth, beauty, and friendship that I found there, but haunted always by the specter of terrible violence and tragedy. As a foreigner, this duality was both shocking and poignant but, as I would come to learn, lies at the heart of the story of Guadalupe. She is an expression of unqualified love, tenderness, and compassion, risen in an historical moment of unchecked destruction and conquest, and she remains a symbol of this duality at the heart of contemporary Mexican culture. This new setting of the Mass is my exploration of this complexity, and it is an article of personal and spiritual compassion at a time when sustained dialogue and cultural empathy between our two North American states is so desperately needed.

The music itself reflects both the austere severity of Mexican Baroque architecture and the exuberant chaos of North America’s largest metropolis. And the scoring— the choir of St Mary’s Episcopal Church will joined by amateur and professional singers from throughout the region as well as instrumentalists from the Curtis Institute of Music—embodies the inseparability of faith and community-based collaboration in Latin American spirituality.