“It looks like an upright Hoover vacuum cleaner, and sounds like—well, it doesn’t really sound like anything else you can think of,” writes Georgia Rowe in Tuesday’s (9/19) Mercury News (San Jose, California). “The OOVE (rhymes with groove) will play a central role in this week’s California Symphony concert. The orchestra under music director Donato Cabrera opens its 2017-18 season Sept. 24 … with … Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 and Barber’s ‘Knoxville: Summer of 1915,’ both featuring soprano Maria Valdes…. But the most unusual work on the program is ‘YTTE (Yield to Total Elation).’ Written by San Francisco composer Nathaniel Stookey, it features the OOVE, a sleek, electro-acoustic stringed instrument made of metal and wood…. The instrument produces sound when the performer—Stookey, in this concert—approaches it with an electromagnet. That activates the OOVE’s four strings, causing them to vibrate. Pitch is determined by sliders…. The OOVE is a kind of cousin to the theremin, another ‘no-touch’ instrument with otherworldly sounds…. ‘YTTE’ … was commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony and [premiered] in April, 2016. Cabrera has since conducted it at the Las Vegas Philharmonic, where he is music director. The California Symphony’s performance will be its first with full orchestration.”
Posted September 20, 2017
