PERUSALSCORE
Kristin Kuster
2008
Program Note
Lost Gulch Lookout was commissioned in 2007 by conductor John Lynch and received its premiere by the University of Georgia Wind Ensemble in February 2008. Lost Gulch Lookout is refective of the craggy, colorful landscape of Kristin Kuster’s upbringing in Boulder, Colorado. Far from merely nostalgic, however, her forcefully lean and athletic writing style evokes the jagged nature of the raw terrain. Sounds consist simultaneously of hauntingly beautiful sonorities and tense dissonances. Kuster achieves this dichotomy by pairing opensounding perfect intervals (such as fourths and ffths) with a decorating semitone that clashes with both members of the initial intervals. The piece has a modifed binary structure, with the unfurling events of the opening repeated again at the work’s midpoint, with even greater fervor. A cadre of percussion batter away unrelentingly, driving the work through its permutations until fnally the piece implodes, shattering itself on the very rocks it had so immaculately colored.
Kuster’s Lost Gulch Lookout is an outcropping of rock on the razor edge of civilization—set atop precipices near Boulder and the Denver metro area. The visceral, gritty nature of the very canyons themselves are, perhaps, nature’s response to the incessant imposition of humanity into the few remaining unspoiled areas of nature.
-Jake Wallace
Instrumentation
Piccolo
3 Flutes
Oboe
English Horn
3 Clarinets in Bb (3. Doubles Bass Clarinet in B-fat)
4 Horns in F
3 Trumpets in C
3 Trombones
Tuba
Timpani
Percussion (3 Players)
Crotales, Vibraphone, Marimba, 2 Triangles (small, large), 3 Suspended Cymbals, Tam-Tam (large), 5 Woodblocks, 4 Bongos (2 sets of 2), 2 Congas, 4 Tom-Toms, 2 Bass-Drums (small, large)
Harp
2 Contrabass
PERUSALSCORE
Duration: 10'
First printing, January 2024
Copyright ©2008 Kristin Kuster. All Rights Reserved.
Program Note Copyright ©2008 Jake Wallace. All Rights Reserved Published by Just a Theory Press | www.justatheorypress.com