Concerto for Solo Percussion and Gamelan

Conductor's score and parts on hire

978-0-19-355831-1 02 August 2001

Price: Available on request

Customers in the US order from C. F. Peters Corporation

for solo percussion and gamelan

Forces or Category

Solo percussion & gamelan

Duration

20 minutes

Difficulty

Moderately difficult to Difficult

Orchestration

perc solo, gamelan

Programme Notes

I Maestoso - Tranquillo
II q = 69 - q = 92 -
III Very Still
This piece was inspired by pictures of deep space taken by the Hubble Space Telescope which show nebulae - enormous clouds of dust and gas which are thousands of billions of miles long. There is an intense grandeur about these distant objects, which contain extraordinary hues and colours and which radiate a peculiar, eerie light.
For reasons I can't explain, the resonance of some of the gamelan instruments seemed to reflect this sense of the unearthly, perhaps the numinous; Indonesian custom has it that the gongs of the gamelan were originally used as a kind of celestial signalling system amongst the gods, although it was not this that influenced my choice of subject matter.
The first movement is a prologue. There is a chorale (Maestoso) followed by a longer passage specifically concerned with the clouds in the universe where new stars are incubated and born. Here there is no division between the ensemble and the soloist; perhaps the music of the gamelan actually gives rise to the soloist, whose existence as a separate unit is not really established until the next movement.
This concentrates on the periodicity and the mechanical aspect of the universe. There is regularity and irregularity, which becomes growth; some of the soloist's music is directly inspired by the sounds of pulsars - stars which send out radio waves in regular pulsations from far across the universe.
The final movement, which follows the second without a break, is partly about light and partly about the demise of the universe. It opens with a second chorale; then, as the music progresses, the ensemble's components are gradually turned into beams of light by the soloist, until the soloist and ensemble together are radiating an intense white glow.
Scientists now believe that the universe, which has been expanding since the first seconds of the big bang, will not collapse together again in a 'big crunch' as previous theories had predicted, but go on expanding forever into infinity. If this is correct, the stars and galaxies will all move further and further apart until they run out of fuel and are extinguished one by one, leaving the universe a cold, dark place.
© Richard Causton
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

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Concerto for Solo Percussion and Gamelan

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