Mike Svoboda
Far From Home
for Brass-Quartet and Orchestra
Composers Notes
Are we not all quietly hopeful for and curiously digressing from and persistently searching for and ambitiously progressing towards and lightly deviating from and insistently striving towards and steadily expanding from and stubbornly confronting with and repeatedly attempting to find a hopefully redeeming place we can call home?
persistently searching, curiously digressing, ambitiously progressing, lightly deviating, insistently striving, repeatedly attempting, quietly hopeful, steadily expanding, stubbornly confronting, hopefully redeeming
Far from home is for those who are quietly hopeful for, curiously digressing from, persistently searching for, ambitiously progressing towards, lightly deviating from, insistently striving towards, steadily expanding, stubbornly confronting with, and repeatedly attempting to find a hopefully redeeming place we can call home.
Mike Svoboda
The trombonist and composer Mike Svoboda was born 1960 on the island of Guam, grew up in Chicago and came to Germany with the help of a BMI Award to Young Composers in 1982. His eleven years as trombonist and assistant with Karlheinz Stockhausen during the 80s and 90s proved to be of eminent importance for Svoboda's musical development. Including the collaboration with Stockhausen and other composers such as Peter Eötvös, Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm, Martin Smolka, David Lang, and Frank Zappa, Svoboda has premiered over 400 works for trombone at major festivals throughout the world.
Mike Svoboda returned to composition only after ending his work with Stockhausen and has since received commissions, mostly for works spanning an entire concert, from festivals and opera houses such as the ECLAT festival Stuttgart, The State Opera Hannover, The National Theater Mannheim and the State Opera in Stuttgart. Major festivals have invited him to be artist or composer-in-residence. Often involved in his works as a soloist or with his own Mike Svoboda Ensemble, he composes across the borders between popular and classical music, high culture and entertainment, combining – through the use of text and various musical styles – both traditional and avant-garde.
