As a preview to the Seattle Modern Orchestra’s November 3 concert, Andrew did an interview with King FM’s Second Inversion. Click here for the full interview, and here’s a snippet:
Second Inversion: How did the collaboration between you, Gloria Cheng, and Seattle Modern Orchestra come about?
Andrew Waggoner: My relationships to Gloria and to Julia and the SMO are representative of what I love most in my compositional life: the chance to work over many years with small and intersecting groups of close friends who are also beautiful artists. Gloria and I met in 1989 when I went to Los Angeles for concerts with the L.A. Phil. Soon after that we started working together on a range of projects, including two large-scale solo piano pieces I composed for her and the durable, collaborative L.A. series Piano Spheres. She also picked up another piano piece that I had written for myself as a kind of compositional etude and gave its first performances, just because she liked the piece. Everything she does, from her Grammy-winning disk of Stucky, Salonen and Lutoslawski, to the concerto she’s premiering with the SMO, is a labor of love, which is one of the main things I love about her…continue reading