for three
Instrumentation: String Orchestra
Purchase: Purchase
Duration: 5:30
Story: Written for Alexandra Gilroy Golden and the Clovis East Orchestra for the World Projects 2025 New York International Music Festival.
I’ve always loved watching basketball. To really excel at basketball requires a mix of athleticism, teamwork, balance, practice and repetition, and poise under pressure – in short, the same qualities that make a great musician. The best basketball players in the world make the game look like art in motion.
Like seemingly everyone else on the planet, I love watching Steph Curry. His recent performance in the Olympic finals game, where he went 8 for 12 from three-point range and pretty much singlehandedly sealed the win for the US against France, was vintage Curry – poetic, powerful, artful, and beautiful. I wanted to see if I could turn Curry’s art into music.
So, I took Curry’s shot chart from that game and with the help of YouTube timed out when and where all of his makes from three-point range happened. Then I assigned a pitch based on a rising sequence of notes (D, E, F#, G#, A) to each of the five zones on the court and made a rhythm based on how long it was in between each Curry make, with longer times between getting longer rhythmic values (like shots 2-3, and shots 4-5).
This little melody became the basis for all of the melodic ideas in For Three, and I tried to revolve the whole piece around it. Throughout the piece, it shows up in its original form, transposed, inverted, and sped up and slowed down.
The other primary organizing idea is really, well, just a terrible Dad joke – since the iconic announcer call when Curry shoots is, “Curry, for three!” I tried to alternate pretty much every measure of the A sections of the piece between 4/4 and 3/4 (get it? For three? Four three? Sorry, it’s super lame, I know, but I’m a Dad – I can’t help it).
There’s some other basketball imagery in there too – the piece itself is in a three-part form ABA, the repeated Bartok pizz’s that mark the beginning and end of several sections are meant to sound like swishes, several sections of the piece feature long rising lines that are meant as a depiction of the phrase, “pulling up,” when Curry suddenly launches up into his shooting motion, etc.
Purchase: Purchase
Duration: 5:30
Story: Written for Alexandra Gilroy Golden and the Clovis East Orchestra for the World Projects 2025 New York International Music Festival.
I’ve always loved watching basketball. To really excel at basketball requires a mix of athleticism, teamwork, balance, practice and repetition, and poise under pressure – in short, the same qualities that make a great musician. The best basketball players in the world make the game look like art in motion.
Like seemingly everyone else on the planet, I love watching Steph Curry. His recent performance in the Olympic finals game, where he went 8 for 12 from three-point range and pretty much singlehandedly sealed the win for the US against France, was vintage Curry – poetic, powerful, artful, and beautiful. I wanted to see if I could turn Curry’s art into music.
So, I took Curry’s shot chart from that game and with the help of YouTube timed out when and where all of his makes from three-point range happened. Then I assigned a pitch based on a rising sequence of notes (D, E, F#, G#, A) to each of the five zones on the court and made a rhythm based on how long it was in between each Curry make, with longer times between getting longer rhythmic values (like shots 2-3, and shots 4-5).
This little melody became the basis for all of the melodic ideas in For Three, and I tried to revolve the whole piece around it. Throughout the piece, it shows up in its original form, transposed, inverted, and sped up and slowed down.
The other primary organizing idea is really, well, just a terrible Dad joke – since the iconic announcer call when Curry shoots is, “Curry, for three!” I tried to alternate pretty much every measure of the A sections of the piece between 4/4 and 3/4 (get it? For three? Four three? Sorry, it’s super lame, I know, but I’m a Dad – I can’t help it).
There’s some other basketball imagery in there too – the piece itself is in a three-part form ABA, the repeated Bartok pizz’s that mark the beginning and end of several sections are meant to sound like swishes, several sections of the piece feature long rising lines that are meant as a depiction of the phrase, “pulling up,” when Curry suddenly launches up into his shooting motion, etc.