Bobby Ge
Bobby Ge is a Chinese-American composer and avid collaborator whose work, often collaborative in nature, focuses on themes of home, communication, and hybridity. Winner of the 2022 Barlow Prize, Ge has received commissions and performances by groups including the Minnesota Orchestra, the New York Youth Symphony, the Albany Symphony, the U.S. Navy Band, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Harbin Symphony Orchestra, the Sioux City Symphony, Music from Copland House, the Bergamot, Tesla, and JACK Quartets, and Mind on Fire. He has created multimedia projects with the Space Telescope Science Institute, painters collective Art10Baltimore, the Cape May Bird Festival, and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D at Princeton University, and holds degrees from UCBerkeley and the Peabody Conservatory.
I have been increasingly interested in glitches, mistakes, and interruptions in my recent work. It can often be dazzingly entertaining to see such flubs in today’s era of near-lifelike digital imagery, and as graphics still continue to improve, errors become more glaringly obvious. The sudden surrealism of a videogame character’s head suddenly vanishing is simultaneously bizarre and lovable, and I wanted to see how well one could channel that in the context of a purely acoustic piece for piano.
Scherzo, Interrupted is filled with such drop-of-a-hat transitions and unexpected tonal shifts. Modeled after the furious start-and-stop kineticism of Chopin scherzi (particularly the first), this piece reharmonizes and recontextualizes its simple motifs against wild tempo fluctuation, octave transpositions, and dynamic contrasts. I imagined the pianist as a glitching machine, chirping an stuttering over its programming to the point of comic absurdity.
Many thanks to Dr. Mark Stevens for commissioning the piece.