Bates: Mainframe Tropics
Expected to ship in 2-3 weeks.
- Composer: Mason Bates (1977-)
- Format: Score & Set of Parts
- Instrumentation: Piano, Violin, Horn
- Work: Mainframe Tropics
- Size: 9.0 x 12.0 inches
Description
I. SILICON BLUES
II. MARINE SNOW
III. GREYHOUND
In searching for a way into the horn trio, which offers at least as many pitfalls as it does wonderful opportunities, I looked to the inside of the piano. Adding a few rubber washers up top, a machine screw in the middle, and a square eraser in the low end, I suddenly had a pianist doubling as percussionist. These Minor piano preparations are not the focus of the work, which is equally concerned with lyrical (and virtuosic) violin and horn lines. But the new sounds encouraged a lighter approach to the piano that better balances with the melodic instruments. So hatched "Mainframe Tropics," a work informed by both digital and marine. The opening "Silicon Blues," which began life as a piece for jazz pianist Rex Bell, is imbued with a pulsing electronic heart (brought to life by woody clicks from the "percussionist"). Its irregular rhythms chug along as persistently as the grooves of contemporary techno, hiccupping from measure to measure as rapidly as data quietly flashing on the silicon innards of a computer. The morphing beat, at the movement's climax, begins to lengthen persistently, and by the time we enter "Marine Snow," this pulsing piano figure becomes a distant, out-of-tune gong. Over this hazy resonance, the violin and horn sing a bending, shimmering melody. in the deep ocean, marine snow is a continuous shower of organic detritus — primarily made up of dead and dying animals — that falls for weeks before reaching the ocean floor. Conjured by the piano's murky textures, this suspended animation (a nod to the Floridian element of the premiere) serves as the quiet backdrop for the gentle lines of the violin and horn. As the marine snow drifts lower, the gentle pulse returns with growing insistence. The prepared low-end of the piano finally presents itself in "Greyhound," a mad dash across bumpy terrain. The piano's muffled thuds are a subsonic reincarnation of the work's opening mechanistic element, over which the violin becomes a bluesy fiddle and the horn offers sardonic punctuations. By the work's end, we return to a clunkier version of the silicon-based world that began the piece — like an old-fashioned mainframe computer doing a lopsided dance.
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Set of Parts
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Bates: Mainframe Tropics
