This piece was composed beginning in January of 2014, when I was a junior in high school, shortly before my 17th birthday. My friend, Joe Heyman, to whom the piece is dedicated, challenged to make a New Year's resolution to write a symphony as my next great work, following providing an original score to the winter play at my school only a month before. At first I was apprehensive to take on the task, doubting my abilities as a composer at such a young age. But I accepted and began work.

The primary motive in the piece (beginning at rehearsal B) is based upon a motive I wrote for the winter play in a scene involving a tornado. And the rest of the piece fell into place around it in only a few months of consistent composing and orchestrating. By the time April came around, I was mostly done composing the first movement of what was then supposed to be a four movement symphony, and spent the rest of the year orchestrating the first movement, and editing it and editing it and editing it. As I began composing material for subsequent movements, eventually composing enough material to form a full symphony, I realized that the first movement was complete. That it any further material added to it would diminish the effect of the action packed ending.

The piece later donned the title "Musicentric," which to me is a fun mash up of "eccentric music." The piece opens with a somber clarinet solo, playing all alone, until friends join in. The lyrical period is then passed to the piano and French Horn to add a new color and sense of mystery before the whole ensemble joins in to develop the shadowy whisper of the solo before they explode from the darkness is a hectic transition to the primary motive. The piece then takes on a sine wave of activity, going back and forth between tense, soaring, action filled melodic lines, and soft and somber moments, ending with a restatement of the solo in a brighter key.

I hope you enjoy Musicentric!

Jason C