"United We Stand (Apart)" is a symphonic work scored for this new concert architecture. Featuring an 88-piece orchestra and soloists from across the globe, this engaging work wrestles with some of our time's greatest challenges. 

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Stochastic, aleoratic, and free-form music have captured the expressive imagination of artists (as well as the sympathetic interest of listeners) since the dawn of modern times.  For over a century artists have strained to touch some true reflection of our current state, to shuffle off the coils of our past by democratizing notes and unchaining rhythms, to express a dissatisfaction with traditions, arbitrary rules, and anything less than complete equanimity, to extoll the preeminence of relativism, and to expose the lack of any center even to the depths of our unstable core. And Music continues to take us to the heart of our deepest questions.

 

With IO we are able to explore these themes like never before. 

 

Can individual freedom hold up in a collective society? Can a melody be fully heard when each musician is playing their own? Can we fully express the struggle of separation without being separated? What is the sound of no center? What does it feel like to foray into the center of a striketone, giving chase to the harmonic series itself?

 

These are some of the issues we are able to grapple with in an IO symphony together… even as we blur the lines between audience and performer.