Dancing Deep-Sadness: for String Orchestra

Research output: Creative WorksComposition

Abstract

Dancing Deep-Sadness was developed for the Orquesta Marga Marga in Chile during a time of sadness for me, after the passing of my father before the chaos of the worldwide pandemic numbed emotions. The music works as a type of sad emotional residue in its static chromatic sonorities where hints of dance energies-Afro-Cuban salsa son clave and free-jazz energy-crash into distilled spectrums of interval-rich clusters and shimmer chords in slow slabs of sound, inspired by the ritualised stasis of Japanese Gagaku music. The living life thread through these oppositions is a changing timbre coloured solo viola line inflected with Korean gayageum-like rough 'inside-the-note' colour changes that gradually accelerando to an intensification dance moment and then rallentando to almost nothing, ended by a sudden salsa flourish. Its musical form is an intensification structure inspired by Korean gayageum sanjo-an accelerating form. My music uses contrasts of salsa-derived dance material against linear colour-inflected line within periodic spacings of gagaku-derived slow stasis cluster richness that accrue motif elaborations and speed towards a rhythmic dance intensification golden section point, and then dissipates back to a slow stasis. The music intensifies and passes as if life and sorrow had passed through the sound.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationGrosvenor Place, N.S.W.
PublisherAustralian Music Centre
Size1 facsimile score, 31 pages
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Dancing Deep-Sadness: for String Orchestra'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this