From darkness, clapping emerges to a quick beat. Forte! The orchestra joins in with erratic pulsations of dissonance as the screen flashes quickly fading images of black and white leaves blowing in the wind. Then, the tense struggle resolves into a majestic climax that floods the gray screen with color. The triumph settles to a wandering and uncertain melody.
Behind the commotion, a young man with short dark hair and black-rimmed glasses waves his silent instrument to bring the orchestra to life. Carefully, the baton carves details into the air in front of him. In slow motion, his hands sway as if they, too, were led by the wind.

These are the sounds and scenes that resulted from Scott Ordway’s two-month hiatus last summer, to a remote cabin in the northern Californian wilderness. Ordway, 24, is finishing his master’s in composition at the University, and has directed and conducted the Eugene Contemporary Chamber Ensemble for two years. Tomorrow, the young, award-winning composer will premiere “Symphony No 2, Crime in the House of Names.”
“It is hard even when asking myself … I’m still trying to figure it out,” said Ordway, who was writing program notes when asked about the mysteriously named composition. “I guess, it’s an emotional reconciliation for all the beauty and all the brutality of the world … It reflects all the different shades of feeling that things inspire in us.”
Originally from Santa Cruz, Calif., Ordway grew up listening to rock and playing the electric guitar. On his Web site, he describes himself as a “defected baseball star, amateur photographer, consummate dinner-partier, terrible painter, ex-indie rocker, gregarious chef,” among other things.
“As a contemporary composer, I draw on many influences when I sit down to write,” Ordway said. “It certainly reflects in my work when you hear it. It’s blended and synthesized with the classical tradition that I’ve been trained in.”
His music is now performed nationally and has even reached as far as Italy. Ordway’s first symphony won the 2008 John Kenneth Cole Composition Prize, and he was recognized for his Piano Trio No. 2, “We Were Lost, But There Was Laughter There.”
Most recently, Ordway conducted a “Filmusik” production with a 12-piece orchestra at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Ore. The music was set to Superman cartoons of the 1940s, including a wrestling match between the superhero and a Tyrannosaurus rex.
With degrees in music and English literature from the University of Puget Sound, Ordway is a composition graduate teaching fellow at the University and a Ruth Lorraine Close Music Fellow. Once Ordway finishes his studies, he looks forward to filling the position of associate conductor for the Juventas New Music Ensemble in Boston, Mass.
For now, Ordway focuses on his directorship of the Eugene Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. Founded five years ago, ECCE is a full chamber orchestra made up of about 50 University students and community members. The ensemble performs small- and large-scale works of the 20th and 21st centuries, with a focus on Oregon composers.
While most people would call the ensemble’s genre classical, he explained that the only thing the ensemble and genre have in common is the instrument line-up.
“It’s problematic to describe us as a classical ensemble,” Ordway said. “It has nothing to do with an era from hundreds of years ago … It has nothing to do with Beethoven or Mozart.”
Instead, he prefers the term “concert music” because the chamber tradition focuses on the live experience. “The style is inclusive; it includes various classical elements, but it also includes indie, experimental and pop elements,” Ordway said. ECCE has even performed a few amplified shows featuring the electric guitar, he added.
On Tuesday, Ordway will conduct the ECCE premiere of his most ambitious composition. At 45 minutes in length, the symphony is twice as long and composed for twice as many performers as any of his earlier works.
In an interview with Eugene Weekly, Ordway described his symphony as “equal parts Mahler and Milemarker, Ravel and Cursive, John Adams and the Appleseed Cast, Strauss and Fugazi, Botch or Refused. And, hopefully, they all get so stirred up that one is inseparable from the others, blending to make something with completely different appeal than any of the original ingredients.”
[email protected]