Katherine Balch (born 1991)
Katherine Balch was born in San Diego. She has an M.M. from the Yale School of Music and a D.M.A. from Columbia University. Her website states that her music “captures the magic of everyday sounds, inviting audiences into a sonic world characterized by imagination, discovery, and textural lyricism.”
This is New Geometry, originally composed for an octet in 2015 and then revised for 13 players in 2016.
The title comes from Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, concerning the discovery of a fractal math to explore the details of an apple leaf. The composer elaborates:
In my piece, I play with the opposite process: zooming out from and amplifying compact gestures through the harmonic trajectory of the piece, which passes from microtonal to chromatic to diatonic landscapes. The harmonic broadening loosely guides simultaneous trajectories of registral expansion and rhythmic diminution.