The Rivers Symphony Orchestra’s opening concert will take place this Sunday, November 13, 2011, at 3:00 p.m. at Christ Church on 1132 Highland Avenue in Needham. This first concert of the season will feature works by Bach, Brahms, Respighi, and Boston-based composer Justin Casinghino. The concert will also feature RSC faculty members Junko Watanabe, soprano; Ana-Sofia Campesino, oboe; and John Emery, violin. Justin Casinghino is a co-founder of the Boston Composers’ Coalition and will maintain a presence at RSC during the 2011-2012 year, culminating in the 34th Annual Seminar on Contemporary Music for the Young in April 2012. Casinghino’s bio is included below along with program notes for his work Contemplation No. 2, which will be featured in Sunday’s RSO performance. For more information about the RSO please call 781-235-6840 or visit www.riversschoolconservatory.org/riverssymphonyorchestra.

Justin Casinghino (DMA, Boston University; MM, Longy School of Music; BM, Hartt School of Music) composes in a variety of genres, striving to create works that are lyrical, rich in harmony and possess a sound structural integrity. Also a performer in the jazz and popular idioms, this influence is often present in his music, but commonly at subtle levels. His studies of composition include work with, amongst others, Gunther Schuller, Lukas Foss, Theodore Antoniou and Richard Cornell. Casinghino has had pieces requested and performed by such groups as ALEA III, the Longy Chamber Orchestra, the Longitude New Music Ensemble, the Contemporary Players New Music Ensemble, the Libella Quartet, the Juventas New Music Ensemble, the Lorelei Vocal Ensemble, Vento Chiaro and the Rivers School Conservatory. Dr. Casinghino is a lecturer in the departments of composition and theory at Boston University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and is the Assistant Director of the Young Artists’ Composition Program at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. He is also the founder and director of the Boston Composers’ Coalition, a group that is dedicated to the collaborative creation, education and dissemination of new American music. A firm believer that pedagogy is an art within itself, Casinghino takes great pride in his students of composition, who have won awards including several ASCAP Young Composer and Downbeat composition prizes, and have earned commissions and performances by the Boston Pops, the Newton Symphony Orchestra, Dinosaur Annex and MYWE. Casinghino performs throughout the New England area on piano, Hammond organ, SATB saxophones and as a vocalist with a number of “popular” genre groups. Samples of Casinghino’s music can be heard at www.jdcas.com, and more information about the Boston Composers’ Coalition can be found at www.bostoncomposers.org.

Contemplation No. 2 is the second in a series of pieces that are each a reflection of a directed technical concept combined with a continuous treatment of a melodic idea combined with a general emotional space. The various “contemplations” do not have anything in particular to do with one another, but are rather a way for me to group this assortment of single movement character pieces. In Contemplation No. 2, composed for full orchestra, the technical impetus for the work was to experiment with selective suspension and decay of certain pitches. In a sense, sonorities in the piece are presented and when the next sonority enters, some members of the original chord linger, mingling with the new sound, but do not necessarily become a part of it. For me, this is similar to the way color and light can stay in one’s eyes while another image comes into focus. The shadow of the first image remains, eventually fading into the distance beyond the second. This idea of lingering sonority unfolds as a melodic motive is reworked throughout the piece in a reasonably obsessive manner. The contextual interactions of this melodic material are continuously skewed by the surroundings of each new section, playing with the progressively altering mood of the whole.