“VTW was written in 1995, while I was studying at the conservatory in Ghent, Belgium. Unfortunately, there is no good English translation for the Dutch title, but it refers to the fact that I was living in my third country at that point (I am from the Netherlands, and had also lived in the US before that).

Nowadays, I tend to write with a bit of a groove, based on minimal and pop music and jazz, but VTW was inspired mainly on the music of Frank Zappa (although hard to tell) and especially Astor Piazzolla. It also has elements of film music in it.

Finding musicians to perform it during a school recital proved to be rather difficult. People tended to think it is really difficult to play because of the many meter changes. We had situations during rehearsals where violinists or bassists burst out crying (I hereby apologize to them), but once they got the hang of it, they all found it a fun piece to play and “not as difficult as they thought”.

I never got a good recording, because during the aforementioned school recital, the tape of the DAT recorder ran out halfway during the performance of the piece and it hadn’t been played since.

This performance by the Fauxharmonic Orchestra has all the musical expression and nuances I could ask for, resulting in a very accurate rendition of my composition. I’m taken by how well all the tone-colors are played (harmonics, phrasings and vibrato, spiccato, glissandi, et cetera), as well as the natural feel of accellerandos and ritenutos.”

“I now have a killer performance of my quartet, that I can’t wait to show to everyone!”
 - Emiel Stöpler

About Emiel Stöpler

Summer Nights Passing
flute, harp, string orchestra

About Frederic Glesser

Performed by The Fauxharmonic Orchestra,
Conducted by Paul Henry Smith

“Man, this is absolutely dynamite!

You have done a fantastic job of capturing all of the nuance of the piece - the variety of the percussion, the string divisi, the mutes - all of it is here. I can’t imagine how many hours of work went into this. I just want to congratulate you on your frighteningly accurate representation of the piece.”

– David Heuser
Associate Professor of Composition at University of Texas San Antonio,
Winner of the 2006 Fauxharmonic Orchestra Composition Contest.

While composed in an atonal idiom, it contains hints of the classical music of Java, the raga of India, the baroque concerto grosso, and other sources that attentive listening will discover, blended together within a coherent artistic statement.

Awakening is not program music in the sense of following a specific story line. However, as its title suggests, the music does evoke a movement from darkness into light, from dreams to consciousness. Listeners have described their experience of listening to it in terms of an individual awakening, nature’s revival after winter, creatures evolving over eons, and an entire world spinning into the morning.

To learn more about Ludwig Tuman’s background and music, or to view the score of Awakening online, click here.

About the winning composition

Listen to the Fauxharmonic Orchestra performance: A Screaming Comes Across the Sky

“A Screaming Comes Across the Sky” was commissioned by the Immanuel and Helen Olshan Texas Music Festival for its “New Texas Overtures” season in 2005. The title of the piece is the first sentence from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. The piece was premiered in 2005. One reviewer of that performance wrote:

David Heuser’s ‘A Screaming Comes Across the Sky’ was a shot-in-the-arm beginning. … Heuser’s music certainly matched the title through its intense, driving rhythms and thunderclap-loud outbursts. This was all-American music at its most dynamic and visceral. Yet the piece by the University of Texas-San Antonio composer was well-crafted and smartly orchestrated … The music continually engaged mind and body as it careened along.

— Houston Chronicle (July 2005)

About the composer

David Heuser is associate professor of theory, composition, and electronic music at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Heuser’s music has been performed by various groups and individuals and on festivals and conferences throughout the US and abroad. He has won a variety of awards, grants and commissions including an ASCAP Young Composer Award, many ASCAP Standard Grants, a First Music commission from the New York Youth Symphony, an Immanuel and Helen Olshan Texas Music Festival “New Texas Overture” Commission, and the Delius Composition Contest Chamber Music Award.

More about David Heuser

Honorable Mentions

The following outstanding compositions were selected by the judges for hornorable mention:

About the contest

The Fauxharmonic Orchestra’s international composition contest was established in 2005 to help foster new orchestral composition, and to showcase digital orchestral performance. The contest winner receives a $1,200 prize and a recorded performance by the Fauxharmonic Orchestra.

This year’s contest involved eighty-six entries by composers from the US, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Canada. Judges for the 2006 contest were:

Emily Doolittle, composer (bio)

Markand Thakar, Music Director of the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra and the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra; Co-director of the graduate program in orchestral conducting at the Peabody Conservatory of Music (bio)

Herb Tucmandl, CEO and Founder, Vienna Symphonic Library, the world’s pre-eminent maker of digital orchestral instruments and performance systems (bio)

Paul Henry Smith, Music Director of the Fauxharmonic Orchestra, a digital orchestra ensemble devoted to producing recordings of orchestral music, new and old, of the highest artistic caliber.

Digital thoughts — Paul Lansky

For the past fifty years computers have played a role in musical composition. The significant recent change is that the technology has now moved out of composition studios and into the performer’s hands.

He found this most distressing … to the point where he has spent several months and a large amount of money building a digital orchestra and creating his ideal performance of his own work.

He’s documenting his quest in quasi-blog style here: The Concerto Project.