Ten Planets - solo percussion compositions performed by Rick Sacks

James Tenney’s Maximusic was written for percussionist Max Neuhaus.  It is brilliant in the simplicity of its design.  I love to think of it in terms of the section of 2001 A Space Odyssey when the astronaut enters a black hole, leaving our galaxy. Maximusic opens with the rich sounds of a cymbal roll and suddenly breaks through a barrier into a dense, pointillist barrage, an explosion of color.  At the limit of the performer’s endurance, a ‘breakthrough’ into a new, rich, long tone of complex harmonics, this time on a tam tam, takes us to the end of the piece, leaving us in a new space.

Verses for Vibraphone (for vibraphone and crotales) plays with the syntax and phraseology of the sounds, making an abstract statement that is as close to poetry as can be obtained in a language without words.  Barbara Monk Feldman's detailed dynamic structure and specific mallet requirements focuses the ear on a narrative propelled by subtle color shifts and combinations, and isolations of long tones - the poignant residue or memory of something ‘said’.

Ten Planets is a composition inspired by the discovery of 2003 UB313, a planet in the Kuiper Belt at the outskirts of our solar system.  Since its discovery, a number of scientists have redefined the solar system, taking the term ‘planet’ away from both UB313 2003 and Pluto (they are now called ‘dwarf planets’).  I am all for the rigors of science but believe the historic, popular definition of Pluto as a planet should stand and should also include UB313 2003 (which, at this writing, is officially named Eris).

The process of creating Ten Planets comes from my previous work Sparrows, a composition for the Evergreen Club Gamelan.  In that work I experimented with polyrhythmic overlays to create a dense, organic environment. The common denominator of pulse for Sparrows is so hidden as to make any one rhythmic pattern capable of being perceived as the focal point or ‘beat’ of the piece.  It is the listener who defines the beat.  In Ten Planets I created 10 modulating click tracks to represent a (gravitational?) relationship between the elliptical orbits, lengths of a year, diameters and wobble of each planet. Each click changes three (and in one case, four) times at intervals of roughly 3.3 minutes.  I improvised to a click set (a planet) and then improvised again while listening to the recorded tracks but this time with the next planet’s click set as the reference pulse. Eleven microphones were originally used to cover the multi-percussion setup so there were over 110 tracks to choose from. I sculpted the composition to create a vantage point for the listener focusing primarily on the tracks for Earth. Special: CD bonus material Listen to all clicks combined here Listen to each click track or combine them yourself. Click here (this page will take time to load)

Dialogue, argument, discussion, lament, explanation - in the abstract realm of music, Apollo’s Touch is all of these and yet is also none of these.  The interplay between the quarter note and the dotted quarter reminds me of African kalimba music.  The dissonances and chordal overlaps create that aura or blurring of perception that is like staring at a painting by Mark Rothko. The work floats away from the canvas or pulls the viewer into it, shimmering and refining the ‘moment’ into a consuming richness of experience. Sharman also uses the harmonic on the low F of the vibraphone as a fragile and provocative variation of touch and color when couched among the fundamental Fs naturally reiterated two octaves above. To a percussionist, touch is everything.  By creating so gentle and evocative a piece and invoking the god of sunlight, music and healing, Rodney Sharman’s Apollo’s Touch is a great gift to the repertoire of percussion music.

Glockenspiel, a delicate, poetic work by Barbara Monk Feldman, was written at the request of U.S. publisher Sylvia Smith (Smith Publications) who is collecting works for solo glockenspiel by a variety of composers.  I was delighted that Barbara mentioned it when I told her I was recording Verses.

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