Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Carnegie Mellon Wind Ensemble conducted by Denis Colwell.
I - 0:00
Balada's Symphony No.2 (subtitled "Cumbres", which translates to "Heights") was composed between 1970-1, being commissioned by the Carnegie Mellon Symphonic Band and dedicated to its members and conductor Richard E. Strange. It was premiered at Carnegie Hall, New York, on April 18 of 1971, performed by the aforementioned musicians. The piece is written is in an avant-garde idiom Balada started experimenting with back in 1958, when he was still a student at Juilliard and composed a work for strings. Here clustered chords were written to resolve smoothly into intervals or perfect chords.
Since a pioneering meeting in the early 1960s at Columbia University in New York, in which young composers listened to Otto Luening and Ussachevsky discuss the early stages of electronic music, Balada was intrigued by this relatively new kind of "music". Because he could only have limited exposure to synthesizers, he decided that he should take advantage of the experience and use them with traditional instruments. Balada was impressed by the staccatos, the decays, the dramatic range of dynamics the synthesizers could produce. Those effects influenced his instrumental writing in works such as Geometrias No.1 and "Guernica" (1966), but especially in "Cumbres", where he exploited the total expansion of the sound spectrum with total division of the winds and brasses.
To explain the title "Cumbres", one could relate to several titles Balada considered: "Mosaico" was intended to represent the multiple sections that follow each other in a contrasting manner, forming an authentic mosaic of musical sound; "Entrelazos", meaning interweavings, was intended to show that in each section of the work one can find a germ that will become the prominent idea in the next section and this happens through the entire work. "Cumbres", however, better reflects the character of the work, its insistent exploration of the high registers of the instruments, the ascending motion of the music in the climaxes, and above all, its dramatic quality. Present in the work are many highly controlled aleatoric sections which produce an "electronic" effect; cells of cantabile melody; high-to-low cluster chords used at a pianissimo level; and a building-up of mechanistic figures layer on layer. At the very end an irregular rhythmic figure brings the work to a resounding climax.
Picture: Photograph of "Changing Forms" sculpture (1971) by U.S. artist Doris Totten Chase.
Source: tinyurl.com/233hrbc2
Unfortunately, the score is not available.
Carnegie Mellon Wind Ensemble conducted by Denis Colwell.
I - 0:00
Balada's Symphony No.2 (subtitled "Cumbres", which translates to "Heights") was composed between 1970-1, being commissioned by the Carnegie Mellon Symphonic Band and dedicated to its members and conductor Richard E. Strange. It was premiered at Carnegie Hall, New York, on April 18 of 1971, performed by the aforementioned musicians. The piece is written is in an avant-garde idiom Balada started experimenting with back in 1958, when he was still a student at Juilliard and composed a work for strings. Here clustered chords were written to resolve smoothly into intervals or perfect chords.
Since a pioneering meeting in the early 1960s at Columbia University in New York, in which young composers listened to Otto Luening and Ussachevsky discuss the early stages of electronic music, Balada was intrigued by this relatively new kind of "music". Because he could only have limited exposure to synthesizers, he decided that he should take advantage of the experience and use them with traditional instruments. Balada was impressed by the staccatos, the decays, the dramatic range of dynamics the synthesizers could produce. Those effects influenced his instrumental writing in works such as Geometrias No.1 and "Guernica" (1966), but especially in "Cumbres", where he exploited the total expansion of the sound spectrum with total division of the winds and brasses.
To explain the title "Cumbres", one could relate to several titles Balada considered: "Mosaico" was intended to represent the multiple sections that follow each other in a contrasting manner, forming an authentic mosaic of musical sound; "Entrelazos", meaning interweavings, was intended to show that in each section of the work one can find a germ that will become the prominent idea in the next section and this happens through the entire work. "Cumbres", however, better reflects the character of the work, its insistent exploration of the high registers of the instruments, the ascending motion of the music in the climaxes, and above all, its dramatic quality. Present in the work are many highly controlled aleatoric sections which produce an "electronic" effect; cells of cantabile melody; high-to-low cluster chords used at a pianissimo level; and a building-up of mechanistic figures layer on layer. At the very end an irregular rhythmic figure brings the work to a resounding climax.
Picture: Photograph of "Changing Forms" sculpture (1971) by U.S. artist Doris Totten Chase.
Source: tinyurl.com/233hrbc2
Unfortunately, the score is not available.
