Pratt, Milwaukee Symphony music director Andreas Delfs and the Seattle Symphony premiered the piece in November of 1999 in Seattle. Shapiro grew up in McLean, Va., and attended Brown University before moving to New York to work on a master's degree at Juilliard. I played in rock bands, and rock and pop were important inputs in my musical life, but in my prior concert music they had not been represented in any way. Avenues' is an attempt to put the two together. He did not want it to sound like orchestral rock, and 'Avenues' does not.
Harmony ranges from crashing clus-ters to soothingly consonant chorales.
To my ear, jazz influence is more in evidence than rock, but Shapiro doesn't think so. It's almost a homage to Iggy Pop's 'Lust for Life' while the piano is playing those flat palm clusters. The rhythm and energy feel more like rock than like jazz. The first is loud and fast, the second slower and softer, a pattern of alternation that holds to the end. The fast sections are driving, rhythmic, percussive and tend toward cluster harmonies.