Composer and pianist Alexander Lu is a graduate of the Biola University Conservatory of Music in La Mirada, California, where he earned a B.M. in composition and a B.M. in piano performance. He has also studied composition at the Roehampton University in London and more recently, spent the summer of 2006 in the European American Musical Alliance composition program at the Ecole Normale de Musique, Paris. A versatile pianist, Alex has performed solo and with various choruses, jazz ensembles, classical chamber groups, and rock/pop bands in the Los Angeles and Bay Area. He has also been featured as pianist in various film scores. Alex's music has been performed by the San Francisco Conservatory Chorus, Pasadena Young Musicians Orchestra, South Bay Children's Choir, West Hollywood Chorale, among others. He is currently pursuing a masters degree in composition under David Conte at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Enzo Garcia has been a professionally performing musician for 10 years. He is a singer and a songwriter who accompanies his voice with guitar, accordion, 5-string banjo, harmonica and saw. His abilities as an instrumentalist, sideman and solo performer allow for him to adeptly present his material as a soloist or a bandleader. Over the course of just a few years, San Francisco-based Enzo Garcia has released nine albums of original reworkings of traditional and original kid's songs, and leads a popular local family folk music show every Sunday morning, Breakfast with Enzo.

Desires is a one-movement piece for string orchestra. It was written in 2006-2007. It is basically in sonata-allegro, with a fast first theme and a slow second theme, with many transitory themes in between. As with practically all of my pieces, it breaks into a fugato towards the end: I can't resist.

Free Form (for alto sax and chamber orchestra) was composed in 2004. The concept of water was central to this composition. The piece begins in six-eight meter with a placid water scene. The alto sax plays a lyrical melody over a rolling accompaniment in the strings and horns. High-pitched splashes of percussion accentuate the cadences. The tranquil music gradually intensifies. Timpani punctuations lead the music into the next section. A rocklike accompaniment begins the Allegro. Peaceful water has been transformed into powerful waves. A jazzy sax melody soars above. Fragments of the tune are heard in the upper strings and horns as the music progresses. The Allegro grows intensifies then transforms into a softer, contrapuntal middle section. Bluesy, chromatic melodies are passed from alto sax through the orchestra. Finally, consonant clusters of sound are heard to return the music to the main theme. The original sax melody returns, but the string accompaniment is slightly altered, as a water scene might be different at another time. Shortly, this section leads into an energetic coda. The music rises, grows in complexity, then finally holds on a fortissimo chord. Free Form concludes dramatically with a rapid sax passage and loud accents in the orchestra.

Trap Door 'is a dream like story of an American soldier in Iraq, and the music contains fragments of contemporary American pop music, set as the opera opens. The two excerpts are from Lisa Prosek's upcoming opera "Trap Door" commissioned by The Lab and to be premiered in San Francisco in June 2008.

Life Is Like That was written specifically for the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, its standard instrumentation plus a synthesizer. The performance is scheduled for September 15, 2007. Click on the SFCCO link for information about other pieces scheduled for that concert, as well as directions. This will be my fourth autumn concert in a row with SFCCO, on the occasion of SFCCO's fifth anniversary. I'm very excited about the piece, which was written over the course of 2006 and tweaked in the past year. Several metaphors were developed from clichés into music ... Life Is Like That uses a 5+4/4 motif, which weaves into an uncertain rhythm that is vaguely familiar. Harmonies, at times both consonant and dissonant, elide throughout the piece; one chord passes into another, almost unnoticed. Moments of apparent clarity are interrupted by childish pranks and surprises. And it ends with a question mark.

The Pied Piper Suite Concertino for Orchestra (after the poem by Robert Browning) was composed as a commission from the Diablo Valley Philharmonic to be premiered in March 2006,. The work was extracted from the composer's 23rd opera, The Pied Piper of Hamelin,commissioned by Harriet March Page for San Francisco Cabaret Opera's Fresh Voices VI (May 2006). The six selections are derived from the overture and five scenes of W.A. Mozart's Cosi fan tutti, with additional infestations from Philip Glass's Glassworks and Songs from Liquid Days, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Claude Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Alban Berg's Wozzeck, Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Maurice Ravel's Pavanne for a Dead Princess, Giacomo Puccini's La Boheme, Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, 12-bar blues, and vaudeville shuffle. The work is styled as both a baroque suite -- with titles after J.S. Bach and Ravel -- and as a concertino, where various instrumental groups are given prominence, ideally including four flutes (including piccolo, plus alto and bass flute) that characterize the Piper's magic. The Ouverture is an abbreviated sonata-allegro, the Air a three-part collision of found musics, the Menuet an abruptly cut-off Minuet and Trio, the Badinerie a locrian-lydian boogie, the Pavanne a minor retrograde of Ravel, and the Rondeau a St. Vitus Dance Rondo of 13 motives and themes.

Mordake Suite appropriates a few themes from one of my current works in progress, an opera consisting of three intertwined stories. The first is about Edward Mordake, a young Victorian aristocrat and his 'devil twin,' a man tormented by a voice coming from a woman's face on the back of his head. Unable to integrate these two parts of himself, he destroys himself and his family. In the second, a present-day James Ives has achieved his dream to star in a film; however, the director wants him to play the role as Madame Starr—the burlesque drag act that made Ives famous—and not as himself. In the third, a geneticist of the future faces a difficult question: to take a final step that would integrate us all into a perfect homogeneity, removing all our monsters, all our differences. These three threads weave together through the metaphor of the mythological chimera, a union of lion, serpent and goat, a perfect metaphor for today, the uneasy unity of our culture, strengthened and troubled in equal amounts by its diversity. The libretto for the work was written by Douglas Kearney, a poet and playwright from Los Angeles. In the sections tonight, we hear a bit of the libretto in recorded form, sung by Diana Pray and, at the beginning, a small fragment of Antonio Scotti singing Pagliacci as Edward Mordake listens. The piece will premiere next spring in the San Francisco International Arts Festival with John Duykers in the solo role. Additional performers: Antonio Scotti, tenor (recorded), Diana Pray, soprano (recorded)

Dancing on the Brink of the World: San Francisco - 1600 to The Present, a 14 Movement piece on the history of San Francisco - 1600 to the Present. Seven other movements have been performed in previous SFCCO concerts. This piece was made possible by a Creative Connections Award from Meet The Composer.

9. Playland - 1920’s

As early as 1884, there was a roller coaster at Ocean Beach, but Playland-at-the-Beach really began in 1928. At the entrance to Playland, “Laughing Sal” was the mechanical laughing lunatic who greeted visitors to the Crazy House, later called the Fun House. It housed the worlds greatest mirror maze, saved from the Midwinter Exposition. High above the moving sidewalks, shooting air holes, and staggering staircases, loomed a 200-foot, six lane slide of polished hardwood, the largest indoor slide in the world. There was a great Roller Coaster, a scary Haunted House dark ride, a Diving Bell, Bumper Cars, many other rides, and hundreds of concessions and minor amusements. A carnival atmosphere prevailed in this cousin of Coney Island. At night, the place glowed with thousands of glittering lights, creating a "fairy-like effect." In the 1960’s it began to run down, and developed a rather sleazy ominous atmosphere, however, it still retained much of the magic and joy of an earlier era. Sadly, Playland was torn down in 1972 and replaced by condominiums. The sounds of Ocean Beach and Laughing Sal begin this movement. Laughing Sal and many of Playland’s original player pianos and other wonderful curios can still be experienced at the Musee Mecanique at Fisherman's Wharf.


11. North Beach - 1950’s

Along with Chinatown and the Barbary Coast, this was one of the original parts of San Francisco. For more than a century North Beach has been a predominantly Italian neighborhood. The Beatnik era of the 1950’s attracted poets and artists here from around the world. When I was a kid my parents would frequently take me out to dinner to one of their favorite Italian North Beach restaurants. I loved the narrow streets, the steep hills around Coit Tower, the Beat scene, and a girl who worked in an art store who looked like she was from the “Adams family”. When I grew up I wanted to be a Beatnik. Today, North Beach is still the Little Italy of the West Coast, as well as a home for Beatniks and Hipsters.


8. Earthquake and Fire - 1906

Just after 5:00 AM on April 18, 1906, San Francisco was devastated by a major earthquake, and then ravaged by a great fire that burned for four days. Over 3,000 people lost their lives. A quote from an Oakland paper read: “After darkness, thousands of the homeless were making their way with their blankets and scant provisions to Golden Gate Park and the beach to find shelter. Everybody in San Francisco is prepared to leave the city, for the belief is firm that San Francisco will be totally destroyed.” Culled from hundreds of photographs, life stories and letters written during this period, this movement was created during the earthquake’s one hundred year anniversary. The movement begins with the clock striking 5:00 AM, then uses percussion and effects to create the quake and it’s aftermath. Various themes are occasionally enhanced by the haunting qualities of a musical saw.