Videos
Highland Park, MI: City of Trees by Rick Robinson
6 Jun 2018
CutTime Simfonica launched with the premiere of this work in 2010, painting a bittersweet, autobiographical scene growing up in this enclave surrounded by Detroit. As in many inner-city neighborhoods today, students who want to learn, read books and speak mainstream English are attacked by street thugs, under-achievers and even relatives just for trying to become educated. Successful students often have to be stealthy to keep their dreams intact.
This is a LIVE performance with the quartet at Fox Run community in 2018. More information about CutTime, which emerged from within the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 2012, can be found at cuttime.com .
City of Trees is the culmination of my work to reconcile classical music structure/convention with familiar urban pop grooves such that each hand washes the other and a broader public might hear themselves in classical expression.
Musicians for CutTime ensembles vary since 2012. The musicians here are:
Eliot Heaton, violin I
Dan Winnick, viol