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Located in the USA
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- Missy Mazzoli
Still Life with Avalanche (2008)
- G Schirmer Inc (World)
Programme Note
Composer's Note:
Still Life With Avalanche (2008) was commissioned by eighth blackbird. The piece is essentially a pile of melodies collapsing in a chaotic free fall. The players layer bursts of sound over the static drones of harmonicas, sketching out a strange and evocative sonic landscape. I wrote this piece while in residence at Blue Mountain Center, a beautiful artist colony in upstate New York. Halfway through my stay there I received a phone call telling me my cousin had passed away very suddenly. There's a moment in this piece when you can hear that phone call, when the piece changes direction, when the shock of real life works its way into the music's joyful and exuberant exterior. This is a piece about finding beauty in chaos, and vice versa. It is dedicated to the memory (the joyful, the exuberant and the shocking) of Andrew Rose.
— Missy Mazzoli
Still Life With Avalanche (2008) was commissioned by eighth blackbird. The piece is essentially a pile of melodies collapsing in a chaotic free fall. The players layer bursts of sound over the static drones of harmonicas, sketching out a strange and evocative sonic landscape. I wrote this piece while in residence at Blue Mountain Center, a beautiful artist colony in upstate New York. Halfway through my stay there I received a phone call telling me my cousin had passed away very suddenly. There's a moment in this piece when you can hear that phone call, when the piece changes direction, when the shock of real life works its way into the music's joyful and exuberant exterior. This is a piece about finding beauty in chaos, and vice versa. It is dedicated to the memory (the joyful, the exuberant and the shocking) of Andrew Rose.
— Missy Mazzoli
Media
eighth blackbird
Scores
Reviews
The 30-year-old Missy Mazzoli is the current darling of the new-music world, and her mesmerizing Still Life With Avalanche showed why. Mazzoli writes pulse-driven music based on fairly simple materials but delights in pulling the rug out from under listeners with unexpected shifts of color and strange, elusive harmonies. “Still Life” was more delectable than powerful (think “Still Life With Snow Flurry”) but was still an involving and very moving work.
22nd May 2011
The impeccably balanced, usefully annotated programme began with Still Life with Avalanche (2008), an elegiac essay by Missy Mazzoli. Amid intricate splashes and ripples supported by kaleidoscopic drones, the piece depicts joy and loss in terms of orderly chaos.
1st February 2011
Discography
- LabelCedille Records
- EnsembleEighth Blackbird
- Released1st September 2012