Ruins Upon Ruins

In writing Ruins Upon Ruins, I set about creating a form that would best represent the creation/destruction cycle, but would also provide a way of building on top of exisiting musical structures. I decided to find a way of creating a city of music from scratch, then systematically destroying it. In this way, I could build a new city in a similar way on top of the old one. As such, I needed to come up with symbols to describe creation and destruction in order to make this process meaningful. The concept of creation I associated with energetic music, upward gestures, fanfares, symmetrical structures, and most importantly a “tessellation” motive in the clarinets that begins each creation cycle (a nod to the mosaics of ancient cities). With destruction, I assigned often opposite features: downward gestures, slower tempi, low, muddy percussive figures, asymmetry. From time to time, fragments of the ruined city would show up in a weakened form.

Ruins Upon Ruins was written as part of the Alexander Zemlinsky Composition Prize and was premiered by the Cincinnati Conservatory Concert Orchestra under Aik Khai Pung.