Atlantic Opalescence V: Timeless Sea Breeze (2019)

Description

Recorded by: Stephen Weigel (Dulcimer) and Ari Fiekowsky (Cello)
at the Gesundheit Institute, Hillsboro, VA | UnTwelve Festival 2019
Recording engineer: Stephen Weigel.

Perusal Score:

01 - Full score - Untitled Project 1 - PREVIEW

Instrumentation:

Cello
Hammered Dulcimer

Technical Notes:

This composition is written in the 31 Equal Divisions of the Octave tuning system, notated using Fokker Notation.

The performers should be familiar with extended techniques, playing the instruments with non-standard equipment, and performing aleatoric, box, and chance notations.

The hammered dulcimer player will play the instrument, in addition to the ordinary way, by:

• • Strumming and picking the strings with a plectrum
  • Strumming and plucking the strings with the flesh of a finger
  • Knocking on the wood of the instrument

The cellist will need to be adept at the following extended techniques:

• • Overpressure
  • Fingernail Pizzicato
  • Gradual changes between sul ponticello and sul tasto
  • Jeté
  • Col Legno
  • Indiscriminate Pitch

Performance Notes:

Atlantic Opalescence IV: Timeless Sea Breeze is a work for cello and hammered dulcimer based upon a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke of the same title. The work takes the form a short rhapsody, progressing freely, without a time signature or barlines, making use of aleatoric cells and free development of ideas. The ideas of the poem are painted aurally through the music, and it progresses from quiet breezes to the waves lapping onto ancient rocks. The pieces ends with a brief melodic fragment teased out of the currents of the beginnning of the piece, as the moonlight shows on a fig tree and the rocks and beaches of the surrounding shoreline.