Details

Year: 2022
Duration: 14’
Instrumentation: flute and string quartet
Commissioner: Chamber Music Northwest
Premiere: July 2022 with Tara Helen O’Connor, Alexi Kenney, I-Jung Huang, Teng Li, and Sophie Shao.

Broadacre City (2022)

Program Notes

Glass-enclosed dwellings, endless horizon lines, UFO-like helicopters, and three-wheeled automobiles were among many characteristics of “Broadacre City,” Frank Lloyd Wright’s idealized American suburbia. Wright, considered one of the most influential architects in American history, was a proponent of ‘organic architecture’ a style in which homes and buildings are in dialogue with their natural surroundings. Broadacre City was the apotheosis of this philosophy: each American household, regardless of socioeconomic status, would be entitled to one acre of land for a home that would embrace an open terrain. Landscaped highways and airspace for flying vehicles (think: “The Jetsons”) would connect these communities to each other and to workplaces, public service buildings, and larger transit hubs. 

The Broadacre City concept was meant to be impractical, a dream to which architects and city planners could aspire. It was one of six hundred Wright designs that were unrealized or unfinished — over half of his entire output. At Columbia University’s Avery Architecture Library, I was overwhelmed by the countless beautiful, and sometimes deranged designs that, for whatever reason, were commissioned but never built. 

In my new flute quintet, I try to capture the aspiration of Broadacre City and other unbuilt projects that only exist on-paper. Fleeting flourishes catalyze a relentless, driving section filled with rhythmic momentum, and intensity. Over time, this musical “machine” begins to breakdown with the material slowly disintegrating to complete stasis. Remnants of the machine flow in and out of focus, as a ghost of what it once was. Slowly, those remnants find a footing and breathe life into new ideas and different musical contexts — all of which are trying to capture the effect these radical designs had on the consciousness and craft of their creators.