Meet the Composer

South American composers populate SPO's second NightLights evening featuring Argentine-American composer Alejandro Rutty. His work, The Conscious Sleepwalker Loops, was inspired by the Argentine tango, and they will sample that genre with the work of Astor Piazzolla.

Springfield Symphony Orchestra talk about the works from the stage and give insights into the compositions and their
performance.

Don’t miss the Opening Notes, with composer Alejandro Rutty himself. Performance Prelude and Opening Notes begin at 7:15.

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Program Notes:
Alejandro Rutty
Born March 14, 1967, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The Conscious Sleepwalker Loops
Composed in 2008.
Premiered on March 29, 2008 in Boston, conducted by Gil Rose.
Scoring: piccolo plus pairs of woodwinds, horns, trumpet and trombones, percussion, piano and strings.
Alejandro Rutty

Alejandro Rutty, born in Buenos Aires in 1967, studied composition and conducting as an undergraduate at the Catholic University of Argentina and did his graduate work at Illinois State University and the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he completed his doctorate in 2002. Rutty has taught at Hartwick College, SUNY Buffalo, University of New Mexico, Bennington College July Program in Vermont and Illinois Summer School for the Arts; he is currently Assistant Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is also founder and Artistic Director of the Hey! Mozart Project of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, with whom he was Assistant Conductor from 1994 to 1996. Rutty said of his works, which draw upon a wide range of classical, popular and ethnic influences, that they focus "on the concepts of using techniques of sound manipulation from electronica and dance music applied to delicately expressive music with a component of non-western styles." He went on to explain that his compositions "normally start with trying to imagine an unlikely micro-universe, where things function in a particularly unusual way. I try then to translate that universe into sound, creating a sound world that incorporates disparate materials in a seemingly coherent system. Later, the music is reigned in and I have to make sure that it all becomes playable, but also that this creature allows some of the natural channels of expression to take place." His music has been performed by orchestras and chamber ensembles in Argentina, Brazil, Ukraine, Sweden and the United States, and recorded on the Capstone, Arizona University and ERM Media labels.

Rutty wrote that The Conscious Sleepwalker Loops, composed in 2008 for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, "creates a sonic reality mixing truth and fiction as if it were an intense and vivid half-dream. In it, the truth outside enters into the logic of the inner fictional reality. The outside world brings, among other things, some untrue flamenco, a somewhat truer Argentine tango, and multiple sounds and procedures typical of digitally processed music (cut-outs, echoes, reverberation, flanger [two identical audio signals mixed together, one played slightly after the other], etc.) deceivingly produced only by acoustical instruments. The genres appearing in the piece are made not true to their origins mainly by means of misquotation, exacerbation and unlikely media. It is, however, through all these untruths that The Conscious Sleepwalker Loops attempts to bring the energy of flamenco, the sensuality and rhythmic subtleties of Argentine tango, and the exciting awkward mechanism of electronica to warmly embrace the delicate, powerful symphony orchestra not in dream, not in reality, but in a sharp sleepwalking."