Scott Ordway

PREMIERE

Commissioned by Joshua Halpern and the Cultural Caravan

Premiere: 13 June 2025 at Mountain View United Methodist Church (Boulder, CO)

MEDIA

NOTE

It is the wintertime of 2024 going into 2025. As I look out at the world from my vantage point as an artist, as a teacher, and as a father to two young girls, it would be easy to feel frightened or angry or paralyzed. I would have good reason to do so. My problem, however, is that these feelings are not in my nature.

At the deepest level, I am continually amazed by and in love with the world and the people in it and I cannot pretend otherwise. This feeling that the world is boundless and radiant and that we can move freely through it or rise above it is obviously an illusion. But the feeling remains. And it gets me out of bed in the morning. And it brings me to the piano to create things which I hope will become meaningful to others. And it brings me to the classroom and to the studio where I strive to help other artists find their own voices and the technique through which to express them. And it makes me so happy to be a parent and to share my life with two incredible young people.

When I think, then, of what I want to tell my daughters, they aren’t words of caution to help them endure a difficult world: the world’s difficulties are impossible to ignore. Instead, I want to share with them the irrational but undeniable sense of wonder and joy and possibility that animates me to do those things of which I am proudest: to create, to teach, to explore the world, to connect with people, to take a few risks from time to time, and to be open and uninhibited and free.

As our social and ecological worlds undergo profound transformations, I want to express these ideas now. But my daughters are very young. They may understand them in time, but they will not participate in their full relevance until they are older. And so I want to put them down in a form which means something to me (and perhaps to a wider audience) now, and which may mean something to them later when they encounter them and are old enough to understand.

This project is comprised of a series of letters to my two young daughters and a corresponding series of movements for cello and piano that I composed in response to these letters. I have combined the forms of letters and music because I am a musician and because I want to explore the place where creativity meets the world we all live in.

By integrating these letters into my music, I hope to accomplish two things. I can share this feeling of irrational hope with a wider audience who may need to hear it right now. And I can preserve it in a format which may mean something to my daughters when they are old enough to take something real from it. The project operates on these two timelines: in the immediate present and in a highly uncertain future.

My instincts as an artist and my instincts as a parent are both similar and intertwined: they are expressions of my values and beliefs and aspirations for how good the world has the potential to be. While these letters and the music they inspire are for my daughters, they explore themes of curiosity, creation, and openness that I believe people of all ages and backgrounds might value.

Lastly: I am grateful to create this work in collaboration with Josh Halpern, one of few musicians whose energy, personality, and values match those of this project. In addition to his extraordinary gifts as a cellist, he is a person with a rare and inexhaustible supply of exuberance, joy, and humor. I cannot know with certainty, but I suspect he shares some of the intuitions which compelled me to create this work. Ours is a world which only occasionally rewards sincerity: if I’m to make something that others might find overly earnest, I prefer to do it in good company.

Scott Ordway
May 2025