Michael Kropf '16 has been commissioned to compose Spinning Music, an orchestral work to be premiered at the 2016 Cabrillo Festival. Through John Adams' Pacific Harmony Foundation, Maestro Marin Alsop and Mr. Adams (who taught at SFCM from 1972 until 1984) selected Kropf who studies with David Conte.

Winner of SFCM's 2015 Highsmith Award, Kropf had his piece High Spirits premiered by the SFCM Orchestra in November 2015. In 2014, his composition for chamber ensemble Kinesthesia received an honorable mention at the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composers Awards.

Spinning Music receives its world premiere on August 6 at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.

For Kropf, "When I learned that I would have the opportunity to write a new orchestral work for the 25th and final season of Marin Alsop's tenure leading the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, my first thought was of the sheer physicality involved in conducting and performing the energetic and challenging new music that the festival is known for. Composing would on the surface appear to be the musical activity most divorced from this kind of physical reality, which might be why I often find myself creating musical arguments inspired by movement.

"In Spinning Music, these arguments involve both the sensation of spinning outwards, in which brass swells and dissonant circular figures fling musical material outwards from some imagined center. The sensation of spinning inwards, where moments of predominant harmony create whirlpools around tonal centers. Motivic ideas seem to be in orbit as they return at various points in time, transformed and re-contextualized with each pass."

"The act of spinning has both been used for spiritual purposes, such as in the Sufi traditions of physical meditation, or for the creation of fun and ecstasy (in this case I think of Santa Cruz's famous Giant Dipper roller-coaster). My goal in this piece is to evoke a feeling of both a deepening into one's self and an expansion into the outer world."