Ninth Planet announces its season opener, “Snapshots,” featuring the music of 2023 Ettelson Award Winner Pascal Le Boeuf. The program also showcases Danny Clay’s Turntable Drawing No. 16, originally for solo electric guitar and now reimagined for larger ensemble with Giacomo Fiore as soloist. The program takes inspiration from retro audio tropes: from turntables in Shiva Feshareki’s Zohra and Danny Clay’s music to the 80's synth quality of Alex Temple’s genre-bending This Changes Everything! The delicately rhythmic groove of Gabriella Smith’s Anthozoa rounds out the evening for an edgy and upbeat show you will not want to miss!
From composer Pascal Le Boeuf: “Snapshots is a collection of musical impressions. I started composing Snapshots while in residence at the historic home of Aaron Copland. While there, I thought about Copland's generosity towards other artists in his community (particularly Leonard Bernstein), about my own musical community, and about those who had been kind to me as a young musician. As Snapshots developed, it revealed itself to be a jumble of impressions of these individuals.Generous acts pass from person to person reaching from past to present and forming the foundations of musical communities along the way. Our music and artistic identities are a product of these generous acts. Snapshots is a celebration of those individuals whose acts of kindness brought us together.”
Danny Clay’s Turntable Drawings is an ongoing series of numbered works by composer Danny Clay and printmaker Jon Fischer based on a growing collection of hand-molded, playable records. Turntable Drawing No. 16 combines three turntables playing locked-groove records with a score for electric guitar featuring looped chordal fragments. The records are encoded with various sounds: some noisy, some melodic, all pretty low in fidelity. For the version of this piece on Ninth Planet’s October concert, Clay has reimagined the piece for larger ensemble, with opportunity for audience interaction with the records.