Andy Wen Recital
Premiere of two new compositions specially composed for this occasion : a composition by L. A. Logrande titled « Scattering Light », and a piece by Robert Boury titled « Desseins Secretes ».
Biography
Andy Wen is an Associate Professor at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, a founding member of the Arkansas Saxophone Quartet and plays Principle Saxophone in the Little Rock Wind Symphony. He has performed in 24 states and 11 countries on 3 continents. His performances include concertos with bands and orchestras, solo recitals, and chamber concerts. He has premiered four concertos and has recorded two CDs, Apparitions and Apparitions 2, through Emeritus Recordings. Andy presented the first saxophone recital in the National Concert Hall in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1992 and was the 1990 MTNA National Collegiate Artist Competition winner. He has premiered over thirty solo and chamber compositions. Wen is a Conn-Selmer Clinician and studied with Londeix, Rousseau, Fischer and Reilly.
More information
I will premiere two new compositions specially composed for this World Saxophone Congress.
The first premiere will be a composition by L.A. Logrande titled “Scattering Light” for Soprano Saxophone and Piano. The scattering of sunlight, where radiation is sent in all directions, accents our visual perception of our world. Without changing an object, haze, clarity, distortion, color and fade, are created as air molecules, like oxygen and nitrogen, scatter particles.
In composing Scattering Light for saxophone and piano, I wished to explore this process as it might pertain to sound. The saxophone can be obscured, gilded, overwhelmed, or contented, as it passes through the piano’s shimmering, bouncing, or sustaining particles.
The second premiere will be a composition by Robert Boury titled “Desseins Secretes” for soprano saxophone, reverberation, and DVD images. For several years now I’ve been interested in the ancient composition technique, Soggetto Cavato, (carved out subject) invented by Zarlino. At first only vowels were used that corresponded to solmization syllables ( ut re mi fa sol la), and this produced diatonic subjects for polyphonic compositions for Renaissance composers like Josquin. But now we have heard music from all over the globe and there is no need to limit ourselves to the diatonic scales. I used world music scales in Secret Designs for solo Soprano Saxophone, written especially for this congress at the request of my colleague Andy Wen.
The names I chose to correspond to the alphabet placed under these world music scales were the common names of moths from Arkansas. Sometimes I used the more poetic Latin names like, Samea Cecropia and Telia Polyphemus. The rhythms I attached to these resulting pitches were chosen by intuition. However, by playing each melodic phrase a couple of times, the notes themselves dictated an appropriate rhythm to my inner composer. The result is a human trying to enter the world of the night-wings.