Celestial Rings in Buffalo

I will be speaking about Thomas Ades’s violin concerto at the Buffalo Graduate Symposium on Music, 1-2 March 2014:

“Rings,” the first movement of Adès’s violin concerto Concentric Paths, evokes the physical process of planetary motion and it is from this process that multiple time-scales arise: the lower-speed outer-orbits of planetary motion correspond to higher registers of pitch where melodies tend to unfold more slowly. The texture of Rings generalizes passages in Bach’s Presto to a post-tonal pitch process: pitches undergo processes that evolve at different rates, causing harmonies to expand, contract, and explode in hexatonic syzygies.