Year: June 2019
Instrumentation: Double Guitar Orchestra (Electric & Classical/Acoustic), Electronics

6 Electric Guitar parts, 6 Classical Guitar parts, ideally at least 3 musicians a part.

Duration: 9:00”

Performance History: Premiered at the 21C Guitar Festival on August 28th, Ottawa, Canada by the 21C Guitar Orchestra.

About:

Esau’s Hunger is a reference to the Biblical scene in which Esau, hungry for food, sells his birthright to his younger twin Jacob in exchange for a meal. The story reveals not only Jacob’s deceptive nature, but the carelessness with which Esau despises God’s gift for him, selling it to gratify his insatiable desire for what is material and short-term. This piece – and the poem which inspired it – uses Esau’s appetite as an analogy for the desire for wealth that fuels our destructive use of resources; short-term gain that impacts both the lives we have been given, and the creation in which we live and have responsibility over.

The musical material is primarily noise-based. The two guitar orchestras are combined with electronic parts to create four landscapes, the textures taking inspiration from the sounds of the natural world and the sonic qualities of machinery. Most sections are notated in a free tempo, which results in mass crowd textures as each musician performs the material individually.

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