Composer's Notes Sextet was commissioned by Laura
Dean Dancers and Musicians and by the French Government for the Nexus
Percussion Ensemble. The first performance under the title Music for percussion and Keyboards
was given at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on 19 December 1984 by Nexus
with guest artists playing keyboards. The last movement was then revised
in January 1985 and the title shortened to Sextet. The
American premiere was presented by Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians at
Brooklyn Academy of Music’s New Wave Festival on 31 October 1985 as the
music for Ms. Dean’s Impact. The American concert premiere by
Steve Reich and Musicians was performed on the Great performers Series
at Avery Fisher Hall on 20 January 1986. Sextet (1985) for 4
percussionists and 2 keyboard players is score for 3 marimbas, 2
vibraphones, 2 bass drums, crotales, sticks, tam-tam, 2 pianos and 2
synthesizers. The duration is about 28 minutes.
The work is in
five movements played without pause. The relationship of the five
movements is that of an arch form A-B-C-B-A. The first and last
movements are fast, the second and fourth moderate and the third, slow.
Changes of tempo are made abruptly at the beginning of new movements by
metric modulation to either get slower or faster. Movements are also
organised harmonically wit the chord cycle for the first and fifth,
another for the second and fourth, and yet another for the third. The
harmonies used are largely dominant chords with added tones creating a
somewhat darker, chromatic and more varied harmonic language were
suggested by The Desert Music (1984).
Percussion instruments mostly produce sounds of relatively short
duration. In this piece I was interested in overcoming hat limitation.
The use of the bowed vibraphone, not merely as a passing effect, but as a
basic instrumental voice in the second movement, was one means of
getting long continuous sounds not possible with piano. The mallet
instruments (marimba, vibraphone etc) are basically instruments of high
and middle register without a low range. To overcome this limit the bass
drum was used doubling the piano or synthesizer played in their lower
register, particularly in the second, third and fourth movements.
Compositional techniques used include some introduced in my music as early as Drumming
in 1971. In particular the substitution of beats for rests to
"build-up" a canon between two or more identical instruments playing the
same repeating pattern is used extensively in the first and last
movements. Sudden change of rhythmic position (or phase) of one voice in
an overall repeating contrapuntal web first occurs in my Six Pianos
of 1973 and occurs throughout this work. Double canons, where one canon
moves slowly (the bowed vibraphones) and the second moves quickly (the
pianos), first appear in my music in Octet of 1979. Techniques
influenced by African music, where the basic ambiguity in meters of 12
beats is between 3 groups of 4 and 4 groups of 3, appear in the third
and fifth movements. A rhythmically ambiguous pattern is played by
vibraphones in the third movement, but at a much faster tempo. The
result is to change the perception of what is in fact not changing.
Another related, more recent techniques appearing near the end of the
fourth movement is to gradually remove the melodic material in the
sythesizers leaving the accompaniment of the 2 vibraphones to become the
new melodic focus. Similarly the accompaniment in the piano in the
second movement becomes the melody for the synthesizer in the fourth
movement. The ambiguity here is between which is melody and which is
accompaniment. In music which uses a great deal of repetition I believe
it is precisely these kinds of ambiguities that give vitality and life