Often in the west coast radical music the focus is on the low and the slow, acoustic territory in which magic can readily happen. Here is the score (a big file, 3.6MB scan of the public domain ms. score) to the LONG-WAVE QUINTET of Bhisma Xenotechnites, for 3 contrabassi, bass tuba and contrabassoon, with gran casa. (The composer wrote to me: "To the question of Why six players in a quintet? I can only answer, Why four players in a Trio Sonata?".) Seven points to anyone who recognizes the source -- almost verbatim -- of the bass drum part.
I have placed some other scores by this composer online: a Piano Sonata, a String Quartet, and a set of Watergate Rounds.
Could he or she be German?
ReplyDeletezeno
No, it's the pseudonym adopted by the Oregonian composer Douglas Leedy.
ReplyDeleteI knew that.
ReplyDeleteAs to your post's embedded question, Do you and Mr
Xenotechnites Love Wagner?
z.
Zeno:
ReplyDeleteAm I the only person on the planet who thinks Wagner took a wrong turn after Die Feen?
As to the question, the quote is most definitely not from a score by Wagner.
Probably not.
ReplyDeleteI'm quite partial to Parsifal, but might say he took a detour somewhere between his early Dresden works and that late masterpiece (to me). [I have fine memories of a Werner Herzog production of Tannhäuser, for example.]
I guess I should have gone and actually looked at what a gran casa part might have looked like in Siegfried's death march. I knew it was somewhat off.
z.
I do like the idea of Wagner spending some time in the gran casa.
ReplyDeleteCharles,
ReplyDeleteWagner did spend time in the big house in Paris, a fact -- as Nicolas Slonimsky loved to point out -- which he omitted from his Autobiography.
I'd love to find a list sometwhere of composers who have been arrested...
Is it the Symphonie Fantastique, slow movement?
ReplyDeleteThomas,
ReplyDeleteNo, it's 20th century.
a
ReplyDelete