DESCRIPTION:
Michael Torke's joyous Fiji for Chamber Ensemble performed by Shenandoah Conservatory's Edge Ensemble, an ensemble made up of a combination of faculty and students. Performance took place March 1, 2014.

The performers are:

Stephen Key, oboe I (faculty)
Alejandro Davila, oboe II
Garrick Zoeter, clarinet I (faculty)
Danielle Confletti, clarinet II
Ryan Romine, bassoon I (faculty)
Timothy Woerner, bassoon II
Earl Yowell, percussion (faculty)
Demi Barber, percussion
Colin Maher, percussion
Stephen Readyoff, percussion
Colin Fowler, percussion
Hanbing Jia, violin I
Jingjing Nie, violin II
Erin Reilly, viola I
Bridget Olsen, viola II
Clyde Shaw, cello I (faculty)
Thomas Valdez, cello II

The composer writes of the piece:

In Fiji, each of the six woodwind instruments play exactly the same thing as each of the six stringed instruments. I like the sound of those doublings, and I like the reinforcing effect. Four percussion players create a samba composite (which derive from original African sources), "glued" together by repeated eighths of a shaker instrument. These rhythms are in turned doubled by the woodwind/string pairs, and out of these resultant arrays melodies emerge.

Like the recent pieces, Two Girls on the Beach, and Blue Pacific, this piece has a sunny, "humid" sound. But very much like the pieces, Bliss, and Rapture, I assign pitches to the rhythms, having that one to one correspondence drive the logic of the piece. This kind of thinking actually comes from the earlier Four Proverbs, where I assigned syllables to pitches whose invariance created its own sound.

But in a certain way, the piece's true antecedent is Adjustable Wrench, where I start with a pop rhythm that is not my own, but then try to give it my own context and development to personalize it.

Fiji was commissioned for Ensemble 10/10, the contemporary music group of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, by Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008.