Tumblebird Contrails
Gabriella Smith (b. 1991)

THE STORY

Tumblebird Contrails (2014) premiered a year after San Francisco native Gabriella Smith completed her undergraduate studies in composition at the Curtis Institute of Music. The Pacific Harmony Foundation commissioned the work from the recent graduate, and Marin Alsop premiered it at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in San Francisco.

As Smith explains, the work expresses the composer’s passion for the outdoors:

“Tumblebird Contrails is inspired by a single moment I experienced while backpacking in Point Reyes, sitting in the sand at the edge of the ocean, listening to the hallucinatory sounds of the Pacific (the keening gulls, pounding surf, rush of approaching waves, sizzle of sand and sea foam in receding tides), the constant ebb and flow of pitch to pitchless, tune to texture, grooving to free-flowing, watching a pair of ravens playing in the wind, rolling, swooping, diving, soaring—imagining the ecstasy of wind in the wings—jet trails painting never-ending streaks across the sky. The title, Tumblebird Contrails, is a Kerouac-inspired, nonsense phrase I invented to evoke the sound and feeling of the piece.”

LISTEN FOR

• Extended techniques in the strings
• Constant sense of motion propelled by gradual rises in pitch and rhythmic punctuations in the percussion

INSTRUMENTATION

Three flutes, three oboes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, strings