Meet the Composer
David Balakrishnan in residence with Orchestra Nashville
Composer David Balakrishnan was in residence with Orchestra Nashville (formerly known as Nashville Chamber Orchestra) from 2005-2008.
Over the three years, Balakrishnan composed three new works for chamber orchestra and three works for string chamber ensemble, two of which featured the Turtle Island String Quartet, an ensemble Balakrishnan founded and performs with.
Balakrishnan helped design and participated in the premiere of a new music festival, and extensive outreach and community engagement activities spearheaded by the orchestra. He also assisted in strengthening the ensemble's cross-genre performance practices and helped in the development and production of a recording program.
David writes:
"Chops." "Sticky Bow." "Carnatic Fiddle Groove." "Jazz-Rock Fusion." "Georgia Shuffle." These are some of the terms that appear in the sheet music the I have presented to the musicians. They are signs of an evolutionary process that is sweeping the string world, along with the names of Mark O'Connor, Edgar Meyer and Bela Fleck. They are signs, I believe, of the need in the classical community to expand the stylistic parameters of classical forms while remaining deeply rooted in the great European Tradition from which these forms evolved. This is why the Turtle Island String Quartet was created. The Nashville Chamber Orchestra also shared this belief, and our unified goal was to expand these musical boundaries so that orchestra string players will someday be able to draw from fiddle bowing techniques to create rhythmic groove, to swing in various jazz idioms and to eschew the Italian opera singer approach to vibrato.
Read more about David's commissioned works in MTC's Commissioning History: