High Density Metals

Description

This product is a downloadable PDF ONLY.

Duration: c. 7’00”

Composer’s notes:

A work for percussion and organ presents challenges that do not regularly occur in chamber organ compositions. The organ is almost exclusively a wind instrument, the stops rarely contain percussive qualities (and even when they do, it is quite slight). Conversely, pitch is often not a concern for percussion. This presents the two instruments as oppositional forces rather than complimentary. That, of course, is something that a composer relishes in exploiting. High Density Metals uses a constant driving pulse, a twelve tone-row (all twelve notes of the scale in a predetermined order), several chordal sequences based on the row (inspired by the late and wonderful composer Joseph Willcox Jenkins), and rhythmic schemes devised from the relationships between the pitches of the row. Mix these elements together and the result is a work that is not exactly melodic, but rather pitch and pulse driven. One may be tempted to call it “heavy metal.”