Interview: Emojis Go Classical in Alexander Miller's New ROCO-Commissioned Work

The next time you're sitting alone in your middle-management cubicle, staring at your illicitly open Facebook page, trying to decide which emoji best captures that post-lunch feeling of ennui that never fails to overtake you, stop and take a second to really think about those round little faces.

You may suddenly find it quite curious, like composer Alexander Miller.

"Everyone thinks that [emojis are] these fun little things, not really serious, but when everybody is using them, then it is worth taking a look at," says Miller. "So, I thought I'd write the first serious piece of classical music that was devoted to exploring just what emojis are."

For the resulting work, ROCOmoji, premiering this weekend during ROCO's last "In Concert" program of the season titled "Double Trouble," Miller spent months studying different emojis before choosing five and organizing them into something almost like a cycle. Each of the movements has no title, only a corresponding emoji (pictured below).

Miller says he chose to start the piece with a sparse, profoundly lonely first movement in order to underscore the genuine feelings that people express through these cartoon faces.

"I actually received this emoji one time from someone close to me at a time when I knew that this was an absolutely sincere thing that they were saying to me, about [how] they were very, very depressed - they actually have clinical depression," says Miller. "That was the only thing they sent and I felt it in my gut, this incredibly sad sensation, and it was just from an emoji."

From this dark place, the piece springs to life with virtuosic passage work in all the double reeds in the second movement, followed by a beautiful oboe melody in the third. What Miller describes as that "perfect moment of falling in love" then turns into greed in a short, funny fourth movement consisting entirely of recreated slot machine sounds. And for the final movement - and the cutest anecdote - Miller got an assist from his newly adopted poodle, JoJo.

"The entire movement just has this frenetic energy that will not let up, and it's because I was composing with this dog pulling at my leg," says Miller.

"So, it's like you start out sad, something catches your attention, you fall in love, then you get greedy, and then you get mad. And then after you get mad you probably would segue back to the beginning where you're sad and lonely again," laughs Miller.

Miller says ROCO's willingness to commission ROCOmoji speaks to their interest in the new and unusual, which is pretty special when so many ensembles and orchestras act as if music stopped being written after Brahms.

"I think because I know that I'm writing for a group like [ROCO], it makes me go to even greater distances, and that's why I felt free enough to just experiment with this emoji idea, which even I thought was a little crazy at the beginning," admits Miller. "I thought 'well, you know, if there's a place I'm going to do this, it would probably be with ROCO,' and that's why I actually incorporated their name into the title, because this is a piece that could not exist without ROCO and without [ROCO founder] Alecia Lawyer."

Conductor Steven Jarvi and concertmaster Scott St. John lead the orchestra for "Double Trouble" featuring not only the world premiere of Miller's ROCOmoji, a concerto grosso for double reeds, but also Saverio Mercadante's Concerto for Flute in E-minor, Gustav Holst's Green Brook Suite and Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht.

7:30 p.m. Friday, March 31, at The Woodlands United Methodist Church and 5 p.m. Saturday, April 1, at St. John the Divine. Saturday's performance includes a Composer Talk at 4:15 p.m. For more information, call 713-665-2700 or visit rocohouston.org. $15 to $35.

And for more information about Alexander Miller, please visit alexanderlamontmiller.com.

Photo credit: Photo at top by Joel Luks, The CKP Group

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