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First Atlantean Dance - Josh Oxford [DIGITAL]
Genre: Marimba (4-mallet) + Track
# of Players: 1
Level: Medium Difficult | Duration: 4:30
Publisher: C. Alan Publications | Copyright: 2020
Download mp3 | Click on images to left for score sample
DOWNLOAD ACCOMPANIMENT TRACK
Rating:
Price:
$20.00
Item #:
27550D
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Notes & Instrumentation
Influenced in part by Viñao's "Khan Variations" and EDM music, First Atlantean Dance is a fun & challenging work for solo marimba & track that will have the audience on their feet dancing in the aisles.
DOWNLOAD ACCOMPANIMENT TRACK
Genre: Marimba (4-mallet) + Track | # of Players: 1
Level: Medium Difficult | Duration: 4:30
Instrumentation
Marimba (5-octave)
Program Notes
A long, long time ago I played a piece I wrote for Naoko Takada, who suggested I write something Egyptian sounding. Fast forward several years, I was hanging out with Chris Demetriou, from The Kraken Quartet, (who was shedding Viñao’s Khan Variations in his room,) and music educator Ian Cummings (who was listening to EDM while Chris was practicing). The combination of the two musical styles blew my mind, and inspired me to write a piece that uses both a foreign sounding mode and side-chained bass. My mother said that the piece sounded more "under water" than Egyptian, so it became an Atlantean Dance. The title also refers to my mentor, friend, and inspiration Gordon Stout's hit single (in the charts, with a bullet) "Two Mexican Dances."– OX
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Product Reviews
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Percussive Notes New Literature Review
Josh Oxford’s new solo for marimba and track is influenced by both “Khan Variations” and EDM music — a slightly odd combination that could be interesting! The solo begins without the track, using a developmental canon that starts the main theme in the low voice, sending it up the keyboard in a variety of ways at each repeated pass. Rhythms develop slowly until the top voice is covered in sextuplet scalar runs against the repeating bass pattern from the beginning, leading into a false release of the phrase that climbs right back up in excitement until the very end of the first part of the piece, helping to establish rhythmic motives for later. In this first section, elements of Viñao’s “Khan Variations” can be heard, particularly the focus on shifting meters between voices and the multiple rhythmic pulses of the theme occurring in one phrase. At the end of the first section, the track is cued, and a completely different style emerges. A bass drum kicks off the next phrase in the electronic track characterized heavily by upbeat techno hi-hats, a backbeat from an electronic snare, and repeated melodic lines that are passed between the marimba and synthesizers.
To get a feel for the electronic track, imagine an upbeat EDM groove with light syncopated synth hits along with longer melodies from a synthesizer imitating a theremin similar to the one used in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” The piece moves to a triplet feel slightly closer to dubstep, before somewhat disintegrating to a less-than-satisfying ending. Given Viñao’s compositional aesthetic and integration of electronic musical concepts into his process, a combination with EDM elements should fit nicely together in a unique way...
Matthew Geiger
PERCUSSIVE NOTES
VOL. 59, NO. 3, JUNE 2021 Matthew Geiger on Jun 29th 2022
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