scored for violin octet
duration 8 minutes
Rewind my life a bit and you might find a particular week in 2003 when I was researching the art of Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla (right) for a term paper, watching my roommates play a car racing video game called Gran Turismo, and thinking about the legacy of Baroque string virtuosity as a point of departure for my next project. It didn’t take long before I felt the resonances between these different activities, and it was out of their unexpected convergence that this piece was born.
Gran Turismo is dedicated to the students of Robert Lipsett, who premiered the work at USC and have since performed it extensively. It is the recipient of the 2005 Leo Kaplan Prize from ASCAP.