Hot on the heels of his win at last year’s NZSO Todd Corporation Young Composer programme, for his piece [Inner],Alex Taylor has been named the 2012 NZSO National Youth Orchestra Composer-in-Residence.
He recently landed a spot in the Dominion Post ‘Kiwi musicians to watch in 2012’ list, has just completed a Masters in Composition at Auckland University, under the supervision of Dr Eve de Castro-Robinson and Associate Professor John Elmsly, and has just been named the NZSO National Youth Orchestra Composer-in-Residence.
“It’s an opportunity for me to connect with a talented pool of performers and at the same time push them outside of their comfort zone and encourage them to hear things differently,” Alex says.
“It’s a challenge to fully harness the potential of this group of wonderful young musicians and create something unique and stimulating. Any opportunity to have an orchestral work performed is always both exciting and intimidating.”
The NZSO National Youth Orchestra Composer-in-Residence has been running for more than five years. It gives exceptional young New Zealand composers, such as Alex, the opportunity to write an original work for the country’s pre-eminent training orchestra.
For Alex, composition grew out of performing and playing instruments from an early age and having a “keen and curious ear”.
“I remember my first awkward steps at composition as a geeky 10 or 11-year-old were geared towards a piece about a dancing hippopotamus, absurdly for solo violin! As a kid I loved Tchaikovsky and Beethoven and I still love that music but when you hear something like say Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta or Xenakis’ Pithoprakta, the idea of creating a whole other sound-world, your own personal one, is quite alluring.”
The commission means that Alex will compose a work between 10 – 15 minutes in length for the opening of the NZSO National Youth Orchestra Spring Concert in Christchurch. He will work with established New Zealand composer Ross Harris as the piece develops and also with the concert’s conductor Wyn Davies.
“On one level the whole exercise is a bit terrifying: at the point where you finish a score and parts, it’s rather like falling backwards off a wall and trusting that nearly a hundred of your peers will catch you… Having minutely crafted every detail and invested yourself fully into a work, you then give up all control; you have to trust that they will invest themselves in it too – that’s the only way a work can be successfully realised.”
The programme will include Michael Tippet’s A Child of Our Time and feature the New Zealand Youth Choir.
On 17 and 18 February the NZSO National Youth Orchestra will perform their first concert for 2012 The Sound of Tomorrow.
The NZSO National Youth Orchestra Composer-in-Residence is supported by APRA, the Australasian Performing Right Association.