“The Reading Symphony Orchestra will present, as the centerpiece for Saturday evening’s concert … Joel Puckett’s ‘Short Stories,’ ” led by Music Director Andrew Constantine, writes Susan L. Pena in Tuesday’s (10/16) Reading Eagle (Reading, PA). The 2013 concerto for string quartet and orchestra will feature “the RSO String Quartet with concertmaster Christopher Collins Lee and Eliezer Gutman on violins, Daniel Brye on viola and Peter Brye on cello. Puckett, who is chair of music theory, ear training and piano skills at Peabody Conservatory, said his work was inspired by the literary construct used by Chuck Palahniuk in his novel ‘Haunted,’ although it has nothing to do with the content of the novel…. In the beginning of ‘Haunted,’ signs show up in a town inviting people to join an artists’ colony. Next, Puckett explained, ‘you get a story or poem about one of the people who shows up, and then you get a story or poem by that character. That’s the structure of the book.’ … Puckett believes …that ‘you can tell more by implying a story than you can by explicitly explaining everything,’ accounting for his oblique titles and suggested connections between movements and vignettes.”
Posted October 19, 2018
