Jared Miller: Luster

Описание: Winston-Salem Symphony
Michelle Merrill, Conductor
Recorded Live, November 2023

About composer Jared Miller and "Luster":

Jared Miller was born in Los Angeles in 1988. Shortly thereafter his family moved to Burnaby, British Columbia. He pursued his undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia. He later pursued a Master of Arts and Doctorate at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where he studied musical composition with Samuel Adler and John Corigliano. In 2014 he became the composer-in-residence at the Victoria (BC) Symphony, a position he held for three years. He taught composition and music theory at Dalhousie University in Halifax before taking an appointment at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in 2022. According to his website, Miller has won numerous awards for composition that include a 2012 ASCAP Morton Gould Award, the 2011/12 Juilliard Orchestra Competition, three SOCAN awards for young composers (2011, 2015 and 2019) and SOCAN’s Jan V. Matejcek Award for Excellence in New Classical Composition in 2020. His Luster is the result of a commission for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble that gave the work its world premiere on June 15, 2018 with the DSO under the direction of Robert Spano.

Jared Miller kindly provided the following comments about Luster:

“When I received this commission to write for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, I immediately knew that I wanted to pay homage to the city’s vibrant musical past. After all, in addition to the DSO’s world-class music making under Leonard Slatkin over the past decade, Detroit is known for its invention and/or cultivation of many popular music genres including Motown, rap, and rock music. Upon reading more on the musical history of Detroit, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that one of my favorite musical genres – techno music – was also invented in Detroit. The sound-world of Luster is inspired by the thumping bass, instrumental colors, reverberation effects and multi-layered rhythmic texture that is found in techno, house and EDM music from the past 35 years.”

The piece begins with an aura shimmer for two flutes, producing a kind of echo effect, backed by high-pitched harmonics in the strings and wonderful colors emanating from the percussion. The shimmer grows in intensity as it spreads throughout the orchestra. As it reaches its climax, the tempo increases as new ideas are introduced, punctuated by complex rhythmic patterns. The dynamic level drops as the shimmer continues to take on new aspects. The reverberation effects in the flutes returns, along with the string harmonics, rounding out this highly engaging short showpiece for orchestra.

Program Note by David B. Levy/Jared Miller, © 2023