Daniel Nelson's The Rave Chronicles
The Rave Chronicles is the title of Daniel Nelson's concerto for self-playing piano and orchestra, which will be premiered by the Norrlandsoperan Symphony Orchestra in Umeå on April 25. Patrik Ringborg conducts the orchestra and the soloist is Yamaha Disklavier.
Daniel Nelson writes in his work comment:
The Rave Chronicles is the culmination of a long-standing fascination that I have had with mechanical machines, how they look and how they sound. I have sought to transform their grinding industrial sounds into orchestral sounds, with layers upon layers of rhythms playing against each other. It therefore felt completely natural that my first piano concerto would be for a self-playing piano. The solo instrument is in itself a machine, and at the same time acts as the engine that drives the entire orchestral mechanics. The Rave Chronicles can also be seen as a sort of a counterpart to Georg Antheil's futuristic Ballet Mécanique (1924), a piece of film music that was written for sixteen self-playing pianos, and which has often been a source of inspiration for me. Like Antheil, I have sought to link The Rave Chronicles to the idea of music as an expression of motion, where the work title and movement titles are directly linked to the EDM genre (Electronic Dance Music) that permeates today's popular music, and which I myself listen to a lot.
Look at the score
Read more about the concert