For mezzo and orchestra - Proceed to purchase if you would like to buy a study score.  

Conductor's Score and Performance Parts for RENTAL ONLY.  Please send an email to info@aphramusic.com to request a rental application form.

Approximate Duration: 18'

Commissioned to commemorate the centennial of John F. Kennedy, the work examines the theme of American exploration through the visionary words of Walt Whitman and actual recorded fragments of JFK's "moonshot" speech. The 50th Anniversary of the moon landing is in 2019.

"Passage focuses on exploration and legacy, new pathways to the moon echoed in Whitman’s thoughts on India — a good match for Bates’s forward-looking, computer-enhanced, slightly steampunk aesthetic, which carried the score back and forth from sweetly declamatory passages from Cooke to, at one climax, disco-club levels of sternum-vibrating loudness ... The result was a piece that felt as if it were looking back to the Kennedy era with a kind of wistful nostalgia." - Washington Post

INSTRUMENTATION    

3 flutes (2 doubling piccolo)
2 oboes (2nd doubling English Horn)
2 Clarinets in A
2 bassoons (2nd = contrabassoon)

4 horns in F
3 C trumpets
2 trombone
1 bass trombone
tuba

laptop (see performance notes)
percussion (3 players)

harp
piano / celesta

mezzo soprano soloist

strings