On May 6, the California Symphony will premiere like a broken clock by Composer in Residence Katherine Balch. Music Director Donato Cabrera will conduct the premiere, the first of three planned commissions by Balch during her three-year composer residency at the orchestra from 2017 to 2020. The title of the work is taken from a Joanna Newsom song, “In California.” Balch says the lyrics piqued her interest in “off-kilter, delicate tapping/clicking rhythms” and inspired her to create a set of digitized wave forms of the sound of the chiming of a grandfather clock, which she manipulated for like a broken clock. She describes like a broken clock as “sputtering, ticking, clanging, summoning the minutes and seconds that jitter and dance.” Also on the program will be Sibelius’s Symphony No. 3 and Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with soloist Haochen Zhang.
Posted April 23, 2018
