FusionFest is an annual Orlando bash lasting two days on Thanksgiving Weekend. I was commissioned to produce the” Opening Spectacle” for both days.
Scored for Brass Band (British), Chorus and African Drums, my goal was simply to create exciting music fitting for our city – something to capture its attitude and magnitude. As in the previous year, I chose to use my “Fanfare Orlando” as its musical base, which contains a repeating hook sounding like “Or-LAN-do”.
The excellent Brass Band of Central Florida, under the leadership of Gareth Pritchard, was the core ensemble. Dr. Pritchard and a cornet duet, hundreds of feet away on a distant stage, wore my updated Haptic Distance Metronomes to keep everything synchronized with the much farther distant train horns. The University of Central Florida’s Grammy winning choral leader, Dr. Redding, led the festival’s Diversitastic Choir. The African Heritage Ensemble from the University of Florida in Gainesville added a layer of exotic sound and intimacy to the music. On top of all of these musical forces, I included five of my remote train horn apparatuses – 3 on the Mayor’s Balcony across the city block on Orlando City Hall and two from the more nearby Dr. Phillips Center for the Art’s building’s DeVos Balcony.
FusionFest is always full of color, energy, music, food, dance, crafts and faiths of the world: all represented by the citizens of Orlando, Florida: what I’m told is the most diverse city in the world in the respect of the number of c0untries from which its immigrants derive.
This is a rough mock-up from Dorico of the Opening Spectacle FusionFest2022 Fanfare created just for the African Drummers (not for public distribution) so they could become familiar enough with the music to enter on their own.
I hope to get a good studio recording of this composition in the future. This score is only half of the ensemble. The train horns at the bottom of the page were actually located many hundreds of feet distant from the band, choir and African drummers.