I. Horse Thief

            II. Noble Prairie

            III. Rodeo

            Robert Edward Kreutz was an American composer of Roman Catholic liturgical worship music. He studied music at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, Illinois and at the University of California-Los Angeles. He was best known for the Eucharistic hymn: Gift of Finest Wheat which was first performed at the International Eucharistic Congress in 1976, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

            Thierry De Mey is a Belgian film director and composer. The incorporation of movement and rebound are the common thread at the core of his work: "the rebuttal of the idea of rhythm as a simple series of durations in a time frame, but rather as a generative system for impulses, falls and new developments” constitutes the preliminary overture for his musical and cinematic endeavors.

             Musique de Table is for three percussionists, each using a small wooden table. The various sounds are produced by different ways of striking the table with the hands and are amplified by means of contact microphones. The piece is precisely notated with a combination of traditional and graphic symbols.

Tribeca Sunflower incorporates rhythmic ideas from the gahu music of the Ewe people of Ghana in West Africa and from traditional North Indian classical music. The marimba mallets are wrapped in dowel rods to create a rattle effect, suggesting the African amadinda, a log xylophone.

            Log Cabin Blues - featuring Bob Young

            Spanish Waltz - featuring Dan Danch

            Xylophonia (composed by Joe Green) - featuring Kevin Rabold

            During the last twenty years of the 19th century, a revolutionary method of playing popular music emerged in the United States - a style of creative, syncopated transformation and embellishment of a melody. Essentially an Afro-American phenomenon, the style was crystallized by Black pianists into a genuinely classical composition called the “Rag”, a word probably derived from vernacular descriptions of the highly syncopated melodic lines as “ragged”. These melodies were set against a steady, march-like bass pattern played by the pianist’s left hand.

            After 1915 the rag began to be transformed, and its infectious syncopation was applied to many types of popular and some classical music. Stravinsky’s “Ragtime for Eleven Instruments” and Debussy’s “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” are examples. The term “ragtime” came to refer to all music that used the characteristic four-against-three syncopation of the earlier piano rags.  By 1920 a type of ragtime became popular along with a new dance called the fox-trot. Known as “novelty ragtime”, this music was highly technical, programmatic, and speedier than previous rag music, and it was a perfect vehicle for the xylophone which had recently been engineered to a high standard of quality by manufacturers in the Chicago area.

            During the 1920’s the xylophone as a solo instrument reached a peak in popularity. Xylophone soloists appeared with piano accompaniment, in dance orchestras and concert bands, and were heard regularly on radio broadcasts and phonograph records. George Hamilton Green, Sammy Herman, and Harry Breuer, the best-known xylophonists of this era, won critical acclaim as well as tremendous public esteem. All were great artists, but perhaps the most important was George Green, who, until his retirement in 1940, reigned supreme among xylophonists. He was a great technical innovator, as well as a prolific composer, and hence played a major role in the creation of an extensive solo literature for the xylophone. This body of music came to include transcriptions of standard overtures, Hungarian rhapsodies, violin concertos and concert piano selections, as well as original compositions for the xylophone in the form of medleys, rags, and novelty dance music. Notes by Bob Becker

             Bob Becker, who arranged this music, is a long-standing member of the renowned Canadian percussion group Nexus whom have championed a revival of these historic tunes. These unique arrangements are scored for xylophone solo, four marimbas, and a potpourri of percussive accents.