Miguel Angel Corzo is giving a background on the music here at the conference. All of the music is from students at his conservatory, the Colburn Institute.
He thought it’d be a good start to talk about one piece, called Gran Tourismo. In his view these conferences really are about a sense of discovery, a sense of looking around, taking a trip, going in different directions. It is tourism. Gran Tourism is the name giving to the cars racing around.
The piece wa by a living composer, a 28-year-old man here at the conference, Andrew Norman. He was inspired by three things: th sense of discovering futuristic art, the sense that there was an incredible opportunity to pick up on an Italian theme combined with a modern approach, and finally his roomate had a game called Gran Tourismo.
It is performed by 8 violinists from the Colburn school. The piece is a race, everyone is trying to beat everyone else. It has a complete sense of perfection in that everybody has to follow everbody else — it is performed without a conductor. Everyone has to be listening to each other. At the very end when you think it’s finished, it picks back up again.
The Entertainment Gathering 