flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion (1997)
Live recording — 7.11.97
Aspen Contemporary Ensemble
details
Duration: 10 minutes
Premiere: July 11, 1997
Aspen Contemporary Ensemble at the Aspen Music Festival, Colorado
Winner, 2002 New Music Delaware Composition Competition
program note
Migrations was written for and dedicated to the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. The title refers not only to the migration of birds or animals from one region to another but also to the definition of migration as it appears in chemistry—the nonrandom movement of an atom or radical from one place to another within a molecule.
press
The players capped off the concert with a gripping account of Alexandra Gardner’s Migrations, a pungently attractive ensemble piece. Cellist Ignacio Alcover made strong contributions, while conductor Robert Pound was there to keep it’s bracing effects and textures in balance.
— Daniel Ginsberg, The Washington Post
The festival’s closing work was Gardner’s cinematic Migrations, a potent, 10-minute work whose glissandos on strings and chord clusters on the piano grew more expansive, underscoring a surprising evolution from one musical idea to the next. It was, by turns, highly lyrical music and provocative of thought.
— Edward Ortiz, San Francisco Classical Voice