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"Also impressive was Denver composer Gregory T.S. Walker's 10-minute micro*phone for Amplified Orchestra, in which instruments were called upon to make insect noises, quarter-tones, rattles and other "extended" sounds in five movements named for microscopic amoeba. 
Especially alluring was the third movement night music for harp and hesitant cellos." --Denver Post

"...reflects his acute sensitivity to the extended vocabulary of musical expression emanating from diverse sources." 
--American Academy of Arts and Letters

Symphony Magazine 
A Composer's Wild Ride: Musicians Meet the Avant-Garde By Gregory Walker

This isn't exactly another new music success story. It's more of a glimpse into the ways that everyone from our perennial champions of contemporary music to the presumed bottom dwellers of the orchestral ecosystem can nurture new music. It's the story of micro*phone for Amplified Orchestra, a composition of mine that's all about the tiny, hidden sounds of musical instruments, and the microphones placed in different parts of the orchestra to capture them.

My original plan was to get a job as an astronaut-to explore strange new worlds, to take the wild ride. This was my destiny, until thwarted by a musical upbringing from the age of seven. When I went to Indiana University to study violin and saw how competitive our musical world had become, I wanted to find another world, the wide-open frontier of electronic music. In the 1980s I attended the University of California at San Diego and Mills College where composers Roger Reynolds and Anthony Braxton roamed the halls. I thus immersed myself in the sonic possibilities of technology and "decomposing" music until there was nothing left but its gestures and the inside of the sounds. It was only then that I found myself drawn back to the violin, which taught me that to bring music to life you need the heart and soul of the live performer.

I came to be employed as concertmaster for the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra during the course of a doctoral program at the University of Colorado, and I watched the orchestra
reverse its fortunes with a budget that quadrupled to $2 million within a ten-year period. When the orchestra turned professional, hornist Tina Herod and other musicians who had
performed as volunteers retained a certain awe of what the BPO had become, but they left to help start other groups. Soon after Tina took over as general manager of the fledgling Timberline Symphony Orchestra in Lafayette, Colorado, she persuaded that orchestra's board to engage me as conductor, violin soloist, and..."Oh, maybe he could write a piece for us, too!"

Arithmetically challenged at the concept of a real commission, I agreed to a figure that will probably have to be censored in a national music magazine. While I was dimly aware that I had lowballed my fee, Tina was grappling with the reality that the Timberline Symphony did not even have a line item in its budget for commissioned works. Months after, I was horrified to learn that she had gone to the orchestra during a rehearsal break and passed the hat for $500 in donations.

When I found out that the musicians had been guilted into paying a composer that most of them only knew as a violinist, for a piece of "music" that would stretch their definition of the 
word, I was embarrassed and over whelmed by a sense of artistic responsibility. Actual living performers, instead of computer chips, had given of their wallets for me in blind faith, and I owed them.

I felt I could devise a work that would give a community orchestra a greater likelihood of satisfaction than they might chance with their annual Brahms symphony driveby. But I also 
was aware that to be true to myself, the final product would be considerably abstract for amateurs whose threshold of pain was Stravinsky. I wanted them to make this<

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