Commissioned by the Parsons Dance Company, with funding from the Parsons Dance Foundation.
Premiered September 21-22, 2001. The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.
Choreographed by David Parsons.
This is my longest work to date. It was commissioned for the opening of Kay Theater at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. The concept was to create a work that could be performed live by a college-level ensemble, allowing the piece to tour to universities at a nominal cost. This would also allow the music department at the various colleges to participate in a large dance performance. The snag with this idea was that the abilities of music departments varies greatly from school to school, which meant I couldn't write anything overly virtuostic. My solution was to create a work for a significant number of college players (in this case, a brass sextet, a brass choir, and a percussionist) and augment that ensemble with a professional string quartet. The string quartet would be given the most virtuostic music, as those players would be selected by me and brought with the dance company to each college performance. The other concept -- due to the premiere coinciding with the opening of a new hall with fantastic acoustics -- was to place several of the brass players antiphonally, that is, surrounding the audience, creating a true "surround-sound" effect.
This work is in 5 sections, with the first two joined together. The first section is primarily a cello solo, introducting the theme of the second movement. The second movement is jazzy and very mixed-metered, rarely remaining in the same meter for more than two bars in a row. The third movement is in a simple A-B-A form, with a big build right at the end of the "B" section. The fourth movement is very slow and features a back-and-forth dialogue between the strings, the brass sextet, and an antiphonal trumpet. (The effect is intentionally similar to Ives' "The Unanswered Question.") The fifth movement is the big "barn burner" movement in which the antiphonal brass really get going. The effect, when live, is very dramatic.
In 2003, I re-wrote three movements for full orchestra. That version is called "Antiphonal Dances."
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Movement 2 |
MP3, good-quality (160 kbps), stereo, 4:14, entire movement, 4.8 MB |
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Movement 3 |
MP3, good-quality (160 kbps), stereo, 4:05, entire movement, 4.1 MB |