![]() ![]() There are surprising, jarring harmonic shifts and much canonic casing. The theme, once stated, is fair game for contrapuntal and rhythmic distortion. Only the basso ostinato still clings, giving the music a macabre aspect. This new thematic fragment is first heard superimposed above a quiet recapitulation of the opening, but then breaks free and in complete form proclaims itself, fortissimo. At length, from these shifting ashes, the opening phrase of Paganini's twenty-fourth Caprice (called Omaggio a Niccoló Paganini in my score) drifts up. Thereafter, the whole conflagration dissipates, leaving mysterious, smoldering musical embers-harp and celesta arpeggios, muted brass, woodwind and percussion tremolos. A brief, more playful episode interrupts, but the music, ostinato-driven, presses on, now toward a blazing, grandiose climax. With brass and percussion to the fore, sonic peaks steadily rise. A somber, majestic theme is heard in horns signaling the forward march. any continuous drumming, rapping, etc.Īlmost randomly, tiny shards of percussion, isolated pizzicati and, finally, tubas punctuate the silence, then coalesce into the basso ostinato that will dominate the twenty-minute course of Tattoo. a signal on a drum or bugle summoning soldiers to their quarters at night. (Or, more picturesquely, the victim about to be crushed in the maw of the beast observes perfectly, for a millisecond, a single physical detail.) ![]() In Tattoo, I wanted to have it both ways: the finely wrought contrapuntal detail wed to an inexorable momentum. The orchestra is, after all, a kind of musical monster, with its more than 100 independently moving parts, each of which, like tentacles, can be given its own life or all can be harnessed together to do a composer's bidding. Interestingly, a recurrent image during composition was that of a juggernaut- the huge machine moving forward with irresistible, terrible force. But what seems a new twist is the music's unrelenting rhythmic drive. True, the elaborate orchestral apparatus is still enthusiastically in place and the harmony remains richly tonal, though now, perhaps, it bears a more dissonant burden. Those earlier pieces- extravagant, ecstatic and, yes, innocent-are some distance from the darker, more ominous tread of Tattoo. ![]()
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