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Music | All-Star Orchestra
Course: Music | All-Star Orchestra > Unit 3
Lesson 16: Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Avanti!"Avanti!": Composer and her work
Want to join the conversation?
- What about copyright? The composer of "Avanti!" said she took some music from a previous piece of fanfare. Is there a date in which a composer can use other composer's pieces?(2 votes)
- I believe she took the "Avanti!" from a composition of her own.(7 votes)
- What was that instrument at? The one on the right that was a sort-of brownish-maroon that almost looks upside-down. 3:02(2 votes)
- That is a contrabassoon. It is the bassoon an octave lower. Also called bass bassoon.(2 votes)
- Is Avanti! its own separate piece or is it in its own collection?(2 votes)
Video transcript
- I've known Ellen Zwilich I
guess first as a violinist, not as a composer at all. When I was 18 and she was
probably a similar age, we both played in the
American Symphony together with Leopold Stokowski. In fact, Ellen was a wonderful violinist, and I got to know her quite well. We were very close friends. She actually produced one of
the last recordings I ever made as a trumpet player. She wrote a trumpet quartet that, when I was teaching at Juilliard, I had some of my students play. I've premiered a lot of
pieces of hers over the years, and she's remained a dear
friend all these years. So clearly, when I was interested in asking composers I've known for a long time to write pieces for my last year's music
director of the Seattle Symphony, I asked Ellen. - The piece I wrote
called Avanti! is taken from a larger piece of mine called Fanfare
Reminiscence and Celebration, and that piece actually has
18 offstage brass players. So I compressed the score a bit, and I added a little bit of this and that to the Fanfare movement, and I thought Avanti!
was really a good name for a piece for Jerry
'cause Jerry will be jumping into the next thing with
both feet, you know. - Avanti! Move on. Move on to the next chapter. Let's get going, and that's
how well she knows me. (upbeat music) - I'm against the idea
of telling somebody, "Listen for this, or listen for that." I prefer the open ear, the willing ear it's sometimes called. You start a piece. Now, the curiosity
should lead the listener what's gonna happen next? (upbeat music) When I'm writing a piece for orchestra, I always have a full score in front of me. I do all my sketching on full score. Now, maybe I'll change, I'll add an instrument or
take one away or something, but I like to have the feeling of this whole orchestra
sitting in front of me, and now that I work on computers, I still do it that way exactly. All my sketches are on the full score. (upbeat music) I just love writing instrumental music, and I love writing for
orchestra because it's so... I mean, I always say the
orchestra's like a jellyfish. It's not a single organism. It's a collection of organisms that sort of magically work together, and just the beauty of the
way the jellyfish moves, and when you think about
it, it's not one thing, but it registers as one thing, and that's that marvelous moment where everything sort of gels, and the orchestra becomes one giant thing, larger than the sum of the parts. (upbeat music)