eero (2019)
TWA Hotel at JFK Airport, NYC
Choreographed by Peter Walker
Commissioned by Access Contemporary Music and Open House New York
Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Cello • 4 minutes
ABOUT EERO.
This work is dear to my heart; in high school I drove my first car, a 1983 Studebaker Avanti, back and forth to youth orchestra rehearsals on the University of Michigan's North Campus every Sunday. In writing this piece for the commemoration of the grand opening of the TWA Hotel and witnessing the midcentury designs of Eero Saarinen come back to life, I learned that Raymond Loewy, the designer who created my Avanti, had helped with much of the industrial design of the interior of the terminal. And in taking Saarinen's building's shape, tracing it on score paper, and working with that to create a cohesive structure for my own art that exists not on a canvas of public space but in the canvas of a public audience's temporal experience, I realized that this piece was meant to more than anything capture the experience of iconic TWA luxury and the adrenaline and exhilaration that comes from the moment of being in a plane as it takes off. As I neared the end of writing this piece, I learned of the place where Saarinen had passed away in 1961: in Ann Arbor, Michigan, overseeing his latest project, a building for a university music school that would some decades in the future hold those very same youth orchestra rehearsals that I attended.
PETER WALKER
CHOREOGRAPHER
Peter Walker is from Fort Myers, Florida, where he began his early dance training at age eight with teacher Judy Murray in tap dance and the next year at the Gulfshore Ballet with Melinda Roy. Mr. Walker began studying at the School of American Ballet (SAB), the official school of the New York City Ballet, during the 2006 and 2007 summer courses and enrolled as a full-time student in the winter of 2007. In the spring of 2011, Mr. Walker became an apprentice with NYCB and joined the Company as a member of the corps de ballet in Fall 2012. He was promoted to soloist in October 2018. Mr. Walker’s first work for the Company, ten in seven, premiered at NYCB’s Fall 2016 Gala. His second work, dance odyssey, premiered in Winter 2018.
ACM + Open House NY
commissioners
Peter Walker is from Fort Myers, Florida, where he began his early dance training at age eight with teacher Judy Murray in tap dance and the next year at the Gulfshore Ballet with Melinda Roy. Mr. Walker began studying at the School of American Ballet (SAB), the official school of the New York City Ballet, during the 2006 and 2007 summer courses and enrolled as a full-time student in the winter of 2007. In the spring of 2011, Mr. Walker became an apprentice with NYCB and joined the Company as a member of the corps de ballet in Fall 2012. He was promoted to soloist in October 2018. Mr. Walker’s first work for the Company, ten in seven, premiered at NYCB’s Fall 2016 Gala. His second work, dance odyssey, premiered in Winter 2018.
GALLERY.
