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- Ellen Reid
Body Cosmic (2024)
- Chester Music Ltd (World)
Commissioned by Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Het Concertgebouw N.V., Orchestre de Paris, Carnegie Hall. Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra
Commissioner exclusivity applies
- 3.2+ca.2+bcl.2+cbn/4.3.3.1/timp.3perc/hp/str
- 15 min
- 10th December 2025, Philharmonie de Paris, Paris, France
- 12th December 2025, Musiikkitalo Concert Hall, Helsinki, Finland
Programme Note
Body Cosmic is a meditation on the human body as it creates life and gives birth.
The first movement, Awe | she forms herself unspools a melody against the pulse of an ostinato, reflecting the surreality of creating new life, so common and yet so astonishing. Dissonance | her light and its shadow explores the conundrum of bringing new life into the simultaneously beautiful and crumbling world, moving between big splashes of smearing brass and tumultuous percussion and moments of warmth and blazing beauty.
This piece was written in response to my own experience with pregnancy and childbirth, a period of time that coincided with my dual residency at the Concertgebouw concert hall and with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Spending time in Amsterdam, working in the Concertgebouw’s storied halls, activated over a hundred and forty years of music-making, is a looming presence in this work. Thank you to the incredible musicians of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, whose generous artistic contributions rang loudly in my mind’s ear as I wrote this piece.
Ellen Reid 2024
Scores
Reviews
"Showcasing Reid’s remarkable gift for color and uncommon orchestration, Body Cosmic was warmly embraced by both conductor and orchestra and deserves further listening."
"Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Reid notes that it takes “light and shadow [to] explore the conundrum of bringing new life into the simultaneously beautiful and crumbling world”. She is referring to her experience of being pregnant and giving birth while undertaking a prestigious residency at the storied Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. But it could also serve as a metaphor for Sunday’s life-giving concert at Washington Performing Arts, which opened with her richly textured new orchestral work Body Cosmic…… Reid’s evocative sound-world, by turns evanescent and disturbing, liquid and filmic, was given space to breathe by the Concertgebouw, which has the collective intelligence to create unparalleled sonic subtleties."
"..Ellen Reid’s Body Cosmic is a 15-minute tone poem about pregnancy (the first movement) and birth (the second). The work begins with soft, airy slipping, the sense of something quietly seething and forming. A simple lullaby-like melody, plucked out on the harp, is taken up by the flute and repeated again and again.
The sound grows in the second movement, with an insistent bell in the background and a mood of increasing emergency; yelps swell to roars. There’s a blast — then everything drops out except for a note from a solo violin.
Out of the vast ensemble, a single voice soars: the emergence of a precocious, untested young thing.."
"Mäkelä led an impressive account of this innovative score, releasing all the colors in its eerily distinct soundscape."
More Info
- Amsterdam welcomes Ellen Reid World Premiere
- 12th November 2024
- Ellen Reid's new orchestral work 'Body Cosmic' to receive its World Premiere in Amsterdam.