Rep Hub
SNO's home for substantial works by emerging composers, featuring SNO's commissioned repertoire.
Mark Fromm | Andrew Boss | Nicole Murphy | Jonathan Russell | Andrew Posner | Martha Horst | Natalie Draper | Nicholas Bentz
Natalie Draper
“....a tense, darkly colorful churn...”
“...dissonant melodies that build into a unified spiral...”
“The scoring is expert; nothing is too thickly rendered. There is a poignancy to Draper’s writing that makes one want to hear more...”
Timelapse Variations
Timelapse Variations is a musical reflection on the time-lapse technique in film. I have always been fascinated by how change and growth are perceived in time-lapse videos. Visuals are sped up, but the overall effect feels almost glacial—the film becomes a reflection on transition, a meditation on the passage of time itself. In this way, Timelapse Variations offers a sweeping soundscape, with several sections, all incorporating a variety of processes of gradual change.
Pulsing repetitions, glissando strings, and fragmented melodies are threaded throughout the entire duration of Timelapse Variations. Individual pulses offer an analogue to the individual frames used in time-lapse films. Music builds in intensity through dynamics and orchestral layering. Dense sections are juxtaposed with softer sections, with the soft music offering a reduced, stripped-down reflection on what was heard previously. About halfway through the piece, the fragmented melodies expand and become threaded together into counterpoint. The counterpoint eventually coalesces into an extended unison melody in the flute and the second violin, peaking on a stratospheric G. Churning processes continue after this point until finally there is a gradual stripping away of the layers. By the end of the piece we hear pulses traded back and forth between the clarinet and the flute. The flute ends the piece with a breathy attack on C, leaving the listener in silence.
REP HUB
Mark Fromm | Andrew Boss | Nicole Murphy | Jonathan Russell | Andrew Posner | Martha Horst | Natalie Draper | Nicholas Bentz
The piece is scored for:
flute
oboe
clarinet, bass clarinet
bassoon
horn
2 percussionists
piano
2 violins
viola
cello
double bass
“Natalie Draper’s Time Lapse Variations is at once a cheekier and somehow more nostalgic affair; from the beginning, I hear strains of Ives and Schoenberg, polyrhythm bolstering gorgeous pantonal harmonies and shards of chromatic counterpoint.”
Press
KALW 91.7 (December 16, 2016). "486 :: 16 December 2016 :: Symphony Number One". Music from Other Minds.
Clarke, Colin (April 2017). "CD Review: More" Fanfare.
McCabe, Bret (December 16, 2016). "Recent Peabody graduate tackles man-made environmental destruction in mournful composition". Johns Hopkins University Hub.
Medwin, Mark (April 2017). "CD Review: More" Fanfare.
Smith, Tim (February 10, 2017). "A sampling of recent Baltimore-centric classical, jazz recordings". The Baltimore Sun.
Woolever, Lydia (February 8, 2017). "Music Reviews: February 2017". Baltimore Magazine.
About Natalie
Natalie Draper is a composer based in Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Her music has been programmed by several festivals, symposiums, and conferences, including GAMMA-UT, MusicX, SEAMUS, the Charles E. Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music, and the Tanglewood Music Center. She has worked with a variety of ensembles and performers--recent collaborations have involved the LUNAR ensemble, the Omnibus Ensemble, Symphony Number One, Baltimore's Occasional Symphony, and Strathmore Artist-in-Residence Kimberly Kong. Her compositions have received prizes and recognition, including Second Prize in Peabody's Virginia Carty deLillo competition and First Prize in the Prix d’Été competition. Draper has been a resident at the Ucross Foundation and was a composition fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center in 2015. She is a theory and composition instructor at Levine Music, a community music school in Washington, D.C. Draper is currently pursuing her doctoral degree, studying composition with Oscar Bettison at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University.
For more information, visit nataliedraper.net.
“Visuals are sped up, but the overall effect feels almost glacial—the film becomes a reflection on transition, a meditation on the passage of time itself.”
Timelapse Variations was featured by NASA in a story that reached most major global news outlets. Watch the video:
Related
Award-winning composer Natalie Draper had her Symphony Number One collaboration, Timelapse Variations, featured by NASA. The video has already reached tens of thousands of people through published articles by CNN, Smithsonian Magazine...