Thursday, August 16, 2018

Music for multiple pianos

I have exactly one piece for multiple pianos, and it's for two pianos eight hands. Eighters Gonna Eight was started in February, 2017, backburnered, returned to in July, 2018, and finished in August, 2018. It's a project originated by Sarah Bob to play with Marilyn Nonken, Donald Berman, and Geoffrey Burleson. It was finished a day before this post, so what I have is crappy MIDI.

There are four movements, taking 21 minutes to play. The MIDI of three of the movements is embedded below.

The first movement is slow to develop, and is originally about hocketed E's passed between the pianos, and the upbeat figures that slowly develop to become the main material.



The second movement is about fast swing eighths and is jazzy.

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The third movement is a slow movement, and slow piano music in MIDI sounds about as bad as anything in MIDI sounds, so I haven't included it here.

The fourth movement begins with dorky middle register stabby stuff that resonates on the low strings of the piano, which the secondo players depress silently -- the resonances are not in the MIDI. The stabby stuff eventually acquires a low bass partner that becomes a bass line somewhere between walking bass and funk; at times there are stabby parallel fifths in the bass as well, in tribute to John Mackey. The hocked unisons return as a third element, and at the ending, the resonances return. Bye.

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Symphony #7

My seventh symphony is 31 minutes long, and consists of four tone poems: Water, Air, Earth, and Fire. I wrote in in May to December of 2017. Here is the New England Philharmonic's premiere of it in April, 2019, Richard Pittman conducting. Water depicts flowing water and the reflection of sunlight on water; Air is airy, and has a heterophonic trumpet fanfare in it; Earth develops stark crescendo gestures and overlapping falling lines; Fire is about a fire catching and then smoldering.