for orchestra
Duration: 6 minutes
A New River (2021) – Premiered by the Louisville Orchestra and Teddy Abrams on September 24, 2021 at Iroquois Amphitheater, Louisville, Kentucky.
A New River is a reworking of an earlier work, Sweet Rivers. The program notes (below) for the latter are valid for this “version.” — DG (2021)
View the full score of A New River here: bit.ly/anewriver (Score and parts rental $150)
Sweet Rivers (2014)
Commissioned by Jason Weinberger and wcfsymphony
Program notes:
The opportunity to write a new work to be premiered on the banks of a river offers a composer many opportunities for associations, from history to religion and spirituality, as well as the works the water has already inspired (Duke Ellington’s The River, The Moldau, Deep River, On the Beautiful, Blue Danube, etc). I could also draw on the cities where I have lived, almost exclusively built on major rivers: The Bío Bío (Chile), The Ohio and The Mississippi. This new work is at the same time all and none of this.
Sweet Rivers takes its name from a shape-note hymn (printed in The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion), but this isn’t an arrangement. This music is a meditation on all rivers, their persistent flow without regard for human events, their functional purpose and importance for our environment. The hymn provides some of the musical glue, pervading the music without being obvious – it’s the trees in the proverbial forest, occurring most prominently with horns heralding a moment in the hymn with the words, “I’d rise superior to my pain, with joy outstrip the wind.” Sweet Rivers is dedicated, with gratitude, to Jason Weinberger and the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony and its 85th season.
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