April 14, 2009
Contact: Sara R. Leonard
Concert and Production Manager
413/542-2195
AMHERST, Mass.—Amherst College senior David Marenberg will present California Symphony, his senior thesis in music composition on Sunday, April 26, at 7 p.m. in Buckley Recital Hall in the Arms Music Center on the school’s campus. The concert is free open to the public.
California Symphony is a series of four interconnected reminiscences of Marenberg’s coming of age in California. The movements become musical photographs, reflecting both the natural beauty of California and the vigor and awe of youth. It attempts to engage listeners by allowing them to not just gaze out of a car window at the Sierra mountains or simply play with their friends in the sand, but to also examine their own pasts and acknowledge who they have become. Exploring a wide range of orchestral colors and musical forms, California Symphony is a nostalgic but resolute appeal to the child for rejuvenation.
The four-movement symphonic suite will be performed by members of the college’s orchestra and concert choir, as well as other musicians from the Five Colleges. The piece is both Marenberg’s honors thesis in the department and a cumulative product of compositional study under the music department faculty; it will be conducted by Daniel Curtis ’08 and will involve almost 50 musicians in total.
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