Bryan Teeters - Master's Recital
Ben Wahlund was inspired to write this piece while visiting a family friend in 2006. This friend gave Wahlund a tour of his workplace, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), where Wahlund witnessed the work of physicists, their machinery, and the subatomic particles that they were studying. Wahlund found that there are six varieties of these particles called quarks. They are categorized into these six “flavors”: Top, Bottom, Up, Down, Strange, and Charm quarks. Experiencing the serious and professional nature of physics, along with hearing light-hearted terms such as “flavors,” “strange,” and “charm”, Wahlund was inspired to compose this piece. He created a seven-section piece of music, one section for each quark, and then a seventh section entitled Collision. To accompany the soloist, Wahlund composed what he calls a “soundscape,” a digital track is solely comprised of edited and synthesized field recordings from Fermilab’s Collision Detection Center.
In 1983, Christopher Deane, created his first composition for concert solo vibraphone. Mourning Dove Sonnet, is a unique sonic exploration into the vibraphone, utilizing non-traditional or extended techniques presented as commonplace throughout this composition. Deane was inspired to include extended techniques in order to bring “timbral interest” to the vibraphone, an instrument which he describes as having, “…static sound: tonally crystal clear.” This thinking allowed Deane to create what he refers to as, “…an art song without words.”
Stuart Saunders Smith, an American composer born in 1948, has composed many diverse pieces of music. Some of which include: jazz, solo percussion, poetry, and experimental theater. One common thread of many of his compositions is improvisation. Through the use of detailed performance instructions, Smith provides opportunity for this indeterminacy to be used concurrently with the written notation. Songs I-IX is aptly titled, for it is a collection of vignettes for the actor-percussionist, which have also been referred to as “speech songs.”
Mirage is one of the first marimba solos commissioned by Keiko Abe. With her reputation among composers as a virtuoso marimbist, and her collaborative nature with them, Abe and Sueyoshi aided in Japan’s early contribution to solo marimba literature. This piece is composed in six distinctively different sections despite the few common themes reoccurring throughout. The use of imagery plays a central role in the interpretation of this piece. For example, one may hear a distant parade that quickly approaches and then fades away, or even the depiction of the dramatic “Lion Dance” performed at the end of traditional kabuki theater.
The Gentle, the Penetrating is the third of four movements in Per Norgard’s multiple percussion solo I Ching, which shares its name with the ancient Chinese book of change. In this text, one finds sixty-seven hexagrams, comprised of six lines. Each line is either unbroken or broken, signifying yin or yang. These hexagrams are interpreted as the states of being that any human life may present itself in. The most common entity historians and scholars relate these changes to, is life. This movement is based on the fifty-seventh hexagram. Unlike the much larger setups required in the other movements, this movement requires a music smaller setup comprised of a kalimba to be placed on a single pedal-tuned timpano between two temple cup bells (also called Tibetan singing bowls or temple gongs). In addition, the performer wears a cluster of various ankle bells. Further, the performer pedals the timpano after playing the kalimba and/or temple bells to create a “wah-wah” tremolo effect.