Logan Promenades

Shulamit Ran

2014

Trumpet in C (2)

Composers and architects often remark on the kinship between the fields of music and architecture. On my first visit to the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2012, walking around and taking in this beautiful space that had already then begun a life of such grand promise, I found myself thinking that space, like time, exists in the universe independently of human intervention. But an architect, and a composer, can turn space, and time, into concrete, "living", "breathing", "forms". The vast and abstract concepts of time and space, almost beyond human comprehension, thus are transformed into meaning. My Logan Promenades, composed in celebration of the opening of the Logan Center on October 11, 2012, pays a modest homage to this notion. Intended not so much as a concert piece but as a sound-celebration, it can be performed in or outdoors, in an enclosed space or on two balconies, its joyful noise—melodies and intertwining lines carried by two trumpets happily bouncing off each other—proclaiming the onset of festivities.

—Shulamit Ran