Chamber Concerto

for percussion soloist and ten winds

1975

17 minutes

[Withdrawn, not available for performance.]

Instrumentation: percussion soloist (xylophone, marimba, vibraphone, and non-pitched instruments), flute/piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, piccolo trumpet, trumpet, and trombone

Premiere: Larry Snider, percussion soloist
American Composers Ensemble
April 20, 1975, Urbana, Illinois
Thomas Siwe, conductor

Movements:
I. Andante con moto
II. Scherzo
III. Adagio
IV. Theme and Variations

Composer Notes: Chamber Concerto challenged the performance skills of the whole ensemble. In particular, the percussion soloist needed to perform at virtuoso levels on multiple instruments. Conceptually, this work often pitted the soloist and ensemble against each other as antagonists.

The music for this work was rhythmically complex, highly dissonant, and highly chromatic. In some passages, the music sounded atonal and non-metric. In other places, it sounded ambiguously tonal and metrically complex.

After this work premiered, I decided most of the materials and techniques I used to compose it were a dead end for me. After I turned toward other materials in the following years, this work felt so remote from my deeper aesthetic interests that I withdrew it.