Includes score.
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Review from Percussive Notes (2021):
blessed B
Erik Lund
This nine-minute vibraphone solo is written in a modern style that is engaging, rewarding, and extremely palatable. Written by a professor of composition at the University of Illinois, this piece contains modern (avant-garde) harmonies and musical gestures, while simultaneously weaving together and crafting musical figures with simple harmonic stability.
Structurally, this is written in a very broad ABA format. The opening and closing are anchored upon open 5ths and octaves, which serve to contrast and highlight the moments of dissonance, which are typically major and minor seconds. The opening phrases contain fluttering rhythmic figures on a single note, punctuated by open chords and simple harmonies. This makes for a very appealing musical statement, and also contains a lot of the energy that drives the momentum forward.
The middle section is very conversation-like in its presentation — almost like a recitative with softer figures that interchange between stable notes/rhythms and fragments of phrases. Throughout the work, sporadic musical figures are frantic rhythmically, but sound harmonically grounded. The piece comes to a very dramatic finish with nine chords that grow in volume from ppp to ffff.
This is a very appropriate piece with which to introduce students and audience members to a large-scale work that delivers a nice blend of safety and unexpectedness.
—Joshua D. Smith
