Classical Works Spotlight #615--Cindy McTee

[erik]

One of America's great female composers of our current age is in the Classical Works Spotlight with a space-age symphonic poem about of the great scientific minds of all times.

Cindy McTee: EINSTEIN’S DREAM

One of the most prominent of all modern-day female composers in America, Cindy McTee, born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1953, had a vast musical education that stretched from her time at Pacific Lutheran University all the way to Krakow University in Poland; and along the way, she had teachers like Bruce MacCombie, Jacob Druckman, and Krzysztof Penderecki. She began composing in the late 1970s, starting with smaller chamber pieces, then working her way up to works for wind bands, and, by the turn of the millennium, for full orchestra. One of her greatest works was the single-movement symphonic tone poem “Einstein’s Dream”, which she composed in 2004 under a commission for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and their music director Andrew Litton. Inspired by the great Albert Einstein’s theories on quantum physics and the bending of light waves that revolutionized sconce in the middle part of the 20th century, even as the world was at war, the work is unusual not for being relatively short, at around fourteen minutes in length, but for being scored for full string orchestra, suspended percussion (including cymbals), and computerized music. Beginning with a Bach-inspired modern fugue, the work moves through various interstellar and interspatial constructs, ending on an E Major chord pondering the vistas of space and time. “Einstein’s Dream” received its first recording in 2012 for the Naxos label with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under its music director Leonard Slatkin, whom McTee married the previous November.



Detroit Symphony Orchestra/LEONARD SLATKIN (Naxos)

Included:
CIRCUITS
SYMPHONY NO. 1 (BALLET FOR ORCHESTRA)
DOUBLE PLAY

Special YouTube video:

[egoodstein]

Thanks-- I'll listen as sounds interesting. I've only heard of this work, not the work itself. And I've heard just a bit of her chamber music-- which has a spacey/microtonal dimension but also nice lyrical passages as I recall. Certainly, an interesting musical pedigree of teachers/mentors.

[erik]

For me, this work has always had the same interstellar feel as Joaquin Rodrigo's 1976 composition "A La Busca Mas Alla" (In Search Of The Great Beyond); and with its liberal sprinkling of computerized musical effects, that feel gets enhanced just that much more (IMHO).