"Good for a kid?"-or just good?

See more about MusicaNova Orchestra of Scottsdale at
www.MusicaNovaAz.org

Doing music by a child has some interesting factors, and it has me thinking about how we perceive a piece of music. Graham's piece is very interesting in that it is inconceivable that an adult could write it, and yet it is full of very sophisticated-read adult-things. But the pictures it conjures up are strictly from a child's imagination, and the whole idea of this fictional world he created-so like a real world and so not-is absolutely part of a child's brain.

The adult part is that he really hears the sounds of the orchestra very well and he knows what each instrument sounds like in each range-in this way he is better than most adults, including some very famous composers. He also seems to know the rules of orchestration, which he figured out from copying out scores and sitting in the middle of the orchestra. It is pretty surprising how well he figured this out, given that it seems to be very hard to learn for many people. And the work is structured very well, and in a way that we adults all understand. When the back eyewall of the hurricane hits he uses the figuration from the description of the front eyewall in retrograde motion, a perfect way to indicate that the winds are now coming from the other direction!

But the story, the word pictures and even the musical choices-sophisticated as they are-are so bound to a child's world view that I simply cannot imagine any adult writing anything like this. So in a way saying "it is a good piece for a kid" is kind of like saying a Schubert Symphony is a "good piece for a Viennese"-only a kid could have written Hurricane Abigale, just as only an Viennese of his time and place could have written a Schubert Symphony.

And that is really cool!

Buy tickets for this concert at Scottsdale Center Box Office. Tickets for the fundraising event on Friday January 8th where Graham will talk about his piece are available at
www.MusicaNovaAz.org .