Derrick Skye was born in Los Angeles in 1982, the year after John Adams’s breakthrough work Harmonium was premiered in San Francisco. His new 20-minute orchestral work Nova Plexus – a Proms commission, premiered by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and its California conductor Ryan Bancroft – shares that west coast sensibility of maximalised minimalism. Three amplified instruments – electric bass, electric guitar and synthesiser – represent the ways in which the sun’s power reaches Earth, from radio waves to cosmic particles. Sounding suitably massive, these stimulate responses in the earthly, unamplified instruments of the rest of the orchestra: one tune for flutes and unison strings sounds like birdsong. Skye draws on a plethora of musical traditions – west African, Persian classical, Balinese. A solo cello plays a simple melody whose notes are tuned according to an unfamiliar, non-western scale; cellos and basses make drums out of the bodies of their instruments. It’s rhythmically powerful stuff, at times an invitation to dance. But harmonically it feels static, and those complex rhythmic patterns are largely grouped into predictable, four-to-the-floor phrases that make the music feel bound by its dance-like energy rather than freed by it.
