Performed at Seiji Ozawa Hall at the Tanglewood Music Center by the amazing 2023 Tanglewood Music Center Double Bass Fellows and Armand Birk (conducting).

THOUSANDTH HYMNAL was commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center with the generous support of the Merwin Geffen M.D. and Norman Solomon M.D. New Commissions Fund. It is dedicated to John Metcalf (with additional thanks to double bass players Ashley John Lewis and Callum Duggan).

2023-07-08 0600PM CD1

THOUSANDTH HYMNAL for seven double basses

Ben Morris is a composer whose music tells unconventional stories and crosses genre boundaries. He is Assistant Professor of Composition at Stephen F. Austin State University.

www.davidjohnroche.com

David John Roche’s music is direct, determined, and loud. Strongly influenced by heavy metal, lush orchestral music, and his working-class Welsh background, he has been marked out as a “clear-minded and class-conscious artist” (Culture Matters) and “one of the most energetic, driven, and successful of Wales’s millennial generation of composers” (Tŷ Cerdd). David’s work has been described as “exquisite” (Adam Walton, BBC Introducing Wales), praised for its “ingenious scoring” (The Arts Desk), and complimented for its “passages of intense expressive power” (Thomas Adès). His compositions have been broadcast, televised, and written about internationally to millions of people.

A string of international performances and commissions form the backbone of David’s work: BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, Florence Philharmonic, Zhejiang Symphony Orchestra, Tanglewood Music Center, Psappha Ensemble, and the Solem Quartet, among others.  David has been nominated for an award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been the recipient of an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice Grant and a Lithuanian Arts Council grant. He has just completed an electric guitar concerto for Sean Shibe, Sinfonia Cymru, and Britten Sinfonia, and he is currently finishing his first symphony-length work for orchestra, funded by Aberystwyth University, Tŷ Cerdd, and the Arts Council of Wales.