| I-77 is a five-minute, one-movement composition for orchestra consisting of three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, four horns, three trumpets, two trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, three percussionists, celeste, harp, and strings. The piece is inspired by a trip I took to Charlotte, North Carolina in the summer of 2015. It involved traveling on Interstate 77 for several hundred miles, starting at Ripley, West Virginia and ending in Charlotte.;The concept of I-77 is similar to that of a time-lapse video---the piece will take the listener on a journey over the entire 611-mile stretch of Interstate 77 in the span of five minutes. The individual sections of the piece do not represent specific stretches of the interstate or landmarks along the way; rather, the music acts as an aural representation of the changing landscape and evokes the anticipation and excitement of a journey to a new place.;The goal of the composition is to create a high-energy experience for the audience. In order to achieve this, the work incorporates high rhythmic density and sudden textural and dynamic contrasts. As a general rule, the upper voices of the orchestra are more rhythmically dense than the lower voices. I-77 also experiments with orchestral textures. For example, distinct textures are treated as recurring themes and are varied much in the way that melodic motives are varied. |
