The poor double-bass, it gets no respect as a solo instrument.
Just ask Xavier Foley, the young Sphinx Competition and Avery Fisher Career Grant award-winning double-bassist, who decided that if he couldnβt find enough repertoire to play, he would just write his own.
βI ran out of music to play so I had to make it,β the 26-year-old Marietta, Georgia, native said last week, calling from home in New York.
Foley pulled on musical influences from Celtic, Russian, Iranian, Persian, Mediterranean and Chinese styles to create works that highlighted the double-bass.
Foley has been composing since high school, and he admits his early works were not good. When he went to the prestigious Curtiss Institute of Music, he studied double-bass performance and composing, graduating in 2016.
Over the last handful of years, he has composed dozens of works including his popular βIrish Fantasyβ that he will play when he makes his Tucson debut this weekend with the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music.
Foley and pianist Kelly Lin will perform as part of the Friendsβ reimagined digital season. The Friends announced in mid-August that it was postponing its 2020-21 season in response to COVID-19. Instead, it is hosting a number of concerts online including on Dec. 16 with the Juilliard Quartet and a concert Dec. 19 with Pacifica Quartet, two regulars on the Friends stage over the years.
Foleyβs concert on Saturday, Nov. 21, will include three of his compositions as well as Bachβs Cello Suite No. 2 in D minor that he arranged for double-bass.
βBach never wrote double-bass material so I steal,β he said with a laugh, explaining that he plays the Bach Suite up an octave to mimic the higher range of the cello.
In addition to his βIrish Fantasy,β he will perform his newest composition, Etude No. 3 βLament,β a lyrical work that he wrote last spring during the nationwide pandemic shutdowns. He dedicated the piece, which he says sounds like voices singing, to his bass teacher from high school who died in 2014.
He closes out the concert with his three-movement piece βAlways On the Moveβ with nods to jazz and classical genres as well as a little βCSI Miamiβ atmospheric undertones.
βYou never heard anything like it, trust me,β Foley said.
