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| little 7 | |
| Date Completed: | April 3, 2010 |
| Duration: | about 4 minutes |
| Instrumentation: | flute, two violins, trombone (or bassoon or cello), accordion, claves (also plays glockenspiel) and vibraphone/glockenspiel (also plays tam tam). |
| First Performance: | as part of a Culture Club event at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA on April 15, 2010 |
| Comments: | for Cecil Balmond at Carnegie Museum of Art |
| Program Notes: | little 7 ( a short septet) was written in response to Cecil Balmond's mysterious and elegant installation, H_edge, for presentation by composer/performers from the University of Pittsburgh Department of Music in the Carnegie Museum of Art's Culture Club series. For this work I revisited some of my earlier ways of working with such techniques as soggetto cavato ("carved subject"), numbers and proportions. To begin I found five musical letters in Cecil Balmond's name - c, e, a, b flat (= b), e (= m) - and combined them with b natural, g, f and d to create a series of 9. The ascent from c to e and then gently back down to d generated more detours than I expected, so that it took a good month to write a concentrated bit of music that I hope levitates in harmony with the wonderful H_edge. The performers included Kerrith Livengood (flute), Ben Harris (violin), Chuck Corey (vibraphone), Matt Heap (claves), Sean Malloy (accordion) and Burkhardt Reiter (trombone) along with myself on violin. RZ |