Night Parade by DAVID BRUCE

"Smart and engaging.'" New York Times
"a swaggering, energizing orchestral showcase" San Diego Union Tribune

Many of the things we find most fun and exciting are also a bit dangerous. Indeed whether it's the rollercoaster, the hi-wire act at the circus, bungee-jumping, or any number of sports, it’s the danger itself that gives us the 'thrill'. When I was asked to write an orchestral showpiece for San Diego Symphony, I thought about this, and how similarly, many of the orchestral pieces I find most exciting and fun do also contain - to a greater or lesser extent - hints of darkness and danger mixed in. Think, for example, of the way the waltzes at the start of Ravel's La Valse gradually spin out of control to its violent thud of an ending.

There can be something inherently scary at some primal or subconscious level about a hundred or so people making a big noise together as they do in an orchestra - indeed, several instruments in the orchestral percussion owe their origins to the desire to awaken just such anxieties in the Turkish Janisary bands. So this was my starting point here - to write something that was full of thrills, but thrills that constantly threaten to spill over into something darker.

The idea of the 'night parade' pervades the piece in several quite specific ways. In as much as the piece is a 'night' piece, it is very much a city night - with the kind of weird shadows that you see under neon light. I became obsessed by the idea of musical shadows and throughout the piece you will hear an object followed by a darker copy of itself, or sometimes multiple fading versions of the original object in quick succession. The modern city can also be felt in other ways - a certain industrial colour and texture, full of clanking and honking; and also perhaps in the filmic 'cuts' that sometimes happen in the music.

Aside from these cuts however, the 'parade' is a useful new metaphor I have found for how my music progresses - you could call it 'parade form'. I have always enjoyed the kinds of pieces where we feel like we are flying over an ever-changing landscape that roles beneath us, never looking back. But my own music usually has too much rhythmic emphasis for that metaphor, it's roots are in dance. As such a parade seems much a much closer and better analogy for the way my music moves. There is a sense of a succession of ideas, dances or displays, but in some way they are all moving 'along the same road'.

David Bruce, June 2013