Commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davis, Music Director, Microsymph is a large-scale, five-movement symphony that has been compressed into ten minutes of concentrated music. The result is a frantically paced, restless quick-changing kaleidoscope built from a whirl of diverse and colorful materials into an eclectic amalgam of constantly changing sounds, colors and musical ideas. The orchestra, standard in size (winds in threes, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, harp piano/celesta, four percussionists and full string section) is employed with great resourcefulness and the composer's fastidious ear for colorful instrumentalcombinations is always very much in evidence.