This summer, Waters answered a call for scores for The
Spontaneous Combustion New Music Festival, and his piece for solo flute was
selected as one of five winners in the category.
Waters’ score was selected from an international pool of
composers, many with professional experience and years of formal compositional
training. At age 17, Waters is the youngest composer to have a piece selected
for the festival.
Waters’ score, titled “Tinted,” is inspired by Emily
Dickinson’s poem, “The Tint I cannot take—is best.” During summer 2017 Waters
attended the North Carolina Governor’s School Instrumental Music Program, where
he first encountered Dickinson’s poem and began composing his piece.
“It’s basically about the beauty in small things in
life—the beauty of love, of nature,” Waters said. “I used that as an
inspiration for the composition and the structure and tonality…at the end of
the piece, the flutist whispers the last stanza of the poem into the flute,
which is a really cool thing I’ve seen done before and wanted to use. It makes
a wispy and cool timbre that I really like.”
The Spontaneous Combustion New Music Festival (SCNMF) is
a new festival that will tour the west coast in January and February 2018.
According to the SCNMF website<https://scnmf.org/about/>,
the festival aims to be “an exciting new concept for bringing talented
up-and-coming performers specializing in new music to new audiences.”
According to Waters, “Tinted” will be played at
performances in Eugene, Oregon; Santa Cruz, California; and Los Angeles,
California. He is excited to hear the piece played professionally and hopes he
can make it to the west coast to hear a live performance this winter.
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