COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: KEVIN DAY, "CONVERGING SPECTRUMS"
Our collaborative concert in October with the Zenith Saxophone Quartet opens with a premiere by MCI composer Kevin Day entitled Converging Spectrums, a multi-movement work whose first movement will be performed. This piece is an exploration of various different concepts that the composer elaborates in greater detail below:
"The idea to write this new piece for saxophone quartet just suddenly came to me one day. Often times, inspiration just comes to me at random moments and this piece was no exception. Having written for saxophone quartet in the past, it was nice to write for an instrumentation again that I was familiar with.
The concept for Converging Spectrums was the idea of having different spectrums of color and sound combine, twist, change, and ultimately, converge. There are many things you can do with saxophones to change the color, and so that was something I wanted to explore with this piece. I wanted to push myself to see how I could write for this concept and effectively communicate what I was hearing in my head.
A big challenge for this piece was finishing the entire thing. I was working on two different commissions at the same time (a concerto and a high school band piece), and so it was hard for me to focus on writing the other movements without this saxophone quartet work sounding like the other two pieces. With this piece, however, I wanted the audience to just listen to how its musical ideas weave in and out, and how its melodic ideas change shape.
I hope to have the completed work finished by 2019."
-Kevin Day
