From the Original Score, by Andrew Norman:

“Switch is a game of control. Each percussion instrument is a switch that controls other instruments in specific ways, making them play louder or softer, higher or lower, freezing them in place, and setting them in motion again. The soloist, dropped into this complex contraption of causes and effect, like the unwitting protagonist of a video game, must figure out the rules of this universe on the fly, all while trying to avoid the rewind-inducing missteps that prevent their progress from one side of the stage to the other.

Instead of being broken into traditional movements, Switch exists as a system of different “channels” each with its own unique sound world, that are flipped between by the playful (and devious) snaps of the channel-surfing slapsticks at the back of the stage.”

Insights from SoSCC:

For me, Switch as a game of control provided an analogy to cell signaling cascades in cell physiology, with gene expression, transmembrane signaling, protein synthesis and protein trafficking, protein degradation, and all cellular events being subject to both “master switches” and proximal effectors. Control varies in space and time. The local and global effects are in effect orchestrated within the cell.

A more accessible and powerful analogy is the analogy of the orchestra as the body, the whole organism:

• Orchestra = body
• Individual instruments = cells
• Sections = tissues
• Percussion = nervous system
  • Soloist = brain trying to just keep up
  • Three percussionists at edges of orchestra = peripheral nervous system

While the electrical signals via nerves are very fast acting; chemical signals transmitted via circulation or between cells are slower acting. Imagine listening to all the chemical and electrical signals in your body at once – you can’t! You need to be able to switch channels to make sense. In Switch you hear your brain on traffic, while eating, while snoozing, while resting, while exercising, when agitated, when serene, and so on…

This suggests a new role for SoSCC: to give music a metaphoric basis to assist audiences in fully experience and understanding new music, using the framework of the familiar. Both Andrew and I provided many metaphors for experiencing and understanding Switch – video games, TV, pinball machine, cell physiology and biochemical signaling, and the orchestra as an organism.

There will be more to come in the next blog. The experience of attending rehearsals all week, interviewing the composer privately and in public, have been transformational to me personally. A few highlights are featured here, with rehearsal photographs and the signed full score, SoSCC’s first landmark major co-commissioned premiere with the Utah Symphony. I cannot describe how privileged I feel to be part of this project, and how grateful I am to Music Director Thierry Fischer, composer Andrew Norman, and soloist Colin Currie for including me as part of their team.