THE SIOUX CITY SYMPHONY

Although com­pleted in the spring of 2007, I have yet to show my first large-scale sym­phonic work, The Sioux City Symphony, to a wide audi­ence. I worked on it for about a year, orig­i­nally as a self-commissioned goal of sub­mit­ting it to the 2007 APU Composition Competition and lately, still with­out feed­back, I have been revis­it­ing the piece to hear how my ear has changed, for bet­ter or worse. A lot of time has passed since I fin­ished it and I had to take a big step back and let the work fer­ment. I still remem­ber going mad in my room with excite­ment and frus­tra­tion, often work­ing on it for hours late into the early morn­ing and leav­ing my eyes strained and the mark of head­phones embed­ded into my hair.

I real­ize there is a lot I could tell you about each move­ment, let alone the work as a whole. A state­ment of sorts. This is some­thing that I’ve been wrestling with ever since I started. Addressing that now, all I can say is that for the time being I’m not going to can’t say any­thing more than I already have. I will say that I’d like to share my feel­ings, as tedious and bor­ing as they might be, about dif­fer­ent sec­tions and move­ments, melodic lines, ideas, influ­ences, etc. in the future. I hope you understand.

I don’t expect a lot of feed­back and, to me, that is com­pletely jus­ti­fied. It is hardly acces­si­ble¹ in many aspects, but I must show it to you! I must give it away! Keeping it hid­den² would be much much worse, and self­ish. So I now present to you…

1st Movement: Adagio (3:44)

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2nd Movement: Allegretto (2:31)

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3rd Movement: Andante con moto (3:59)

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¹ I apol­o­gize for the MIDI ren­di­tion and hope it is not too much of a dis­trac­tion. What you’ll hear has very lit­tle to do with the sound. It’s all about the notes.
²Feel free to down­load a copy of the full score as well. (1st Movement — 2nd Movement — 3rd Movement) For me, read­ing scores has become very enjoy­able as well as a way to observe many more details and articulations.