NEW SHORT STORIES [2019]

for large ensemble, with piano obbligato [fl (+picc, lato), ob (+eh), cl(+bcl), hn, pf, 2perc, hp, 2vln, vla, vc]

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Written for the Grossman Ensemble.

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Commissioned by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition and the Hanson Institute for American Music.

Premiere March 15, 2019. Grossman Ensemble, James Baker, cond. Logan Center, Chicago, Ill.

DURATION: 14'

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Program note:

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Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez The words of Italo Calvino were on my mind when composing my New Short Stories. In this piece I aspire to convey the qualities that provide music its quickness: above all agility, mobility, and ease. I follow the thread spun by the first gesture (heard on bar one and present in a myriad of ways in the obbligato piano part), losing it a hundred times, finding it again after a hundred more twists and turns, and jumping around from one subject to another. I hope that, the moment my initial “subject” appears in the narrative, "it will already be charged with a special force and become like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships."

New Short Stories was written for the Grossman Ensemble with support from the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago and the Hanson Institute for American Music of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

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Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Secretaría de Cultura, Mexico) with whose support this work was completed.