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LA Composers Project 2013: Jeffrey Parola

By Nick Norton | 03/19/2013
On April 19 and 26, What’s Next? Ensemble will be putting on their fifth annual Los Angeles Composers Project. It’s a Boston Court this year, in Pasadena. We’ve got eleven composers with pieces on the two shows to look forward to, so New Classic LA has decided to interview all of them, one at a time, about the pieces they’ll be having performed. We start the series, right here, right now, with Jeffrey Parola.

The name of your piece being performed at LACP 2013 is:

Parola headshot

Qualms & Misgivings 

[Scroll down for audio]

Tell us about it.

Qualms & Misgivings was written in 2011 while I was studying with Frank Ticheli at USC. It was my first year at USC, and I wanted to try something different, so I decided to change up my compositional process by composing away from the piano and using alternative notion. I had a vague dramatic narrative in mind while composing the piece, where I envisioned two groups of characters, each group suspicious of the other. But these groups are inherently similar, and their suspicions lie in the subtlety of their differences. I chose musical material that represents this tension of similarity versus difference, namely whole tone and octatonic sonorities. “Wrong notes” begin to impede on the whole tone texture, which causes a friction that ultimately leads to a quarrel that leaves the characters heaving-and-hoing in the final measures.

Favorite X : Y

Favorite musical moment in LA: watching the LA Phil play Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie live at Disney Hall.

[Editor: I went to this concert, and it completely blew my mind. One of my favorite musical moments in LA as well].

Here’s the piece:

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