You Can't Get There From Here (Vibraphone/Marimba Duet)

A celebration of the life of the composer's grandfather, You Can't Get There From Here is a beautiful intermediate duet for vibraphone and marimba that would be appropriate in any number of performance situations.

Genre: Duet for Vibraphone & Marimba | # of Players: 2
Level: Medium | Duration: 5:20

Instrumentation
Vibraphone
Marimba (5-octave)

Program Notes
Norm was a classically trained musician, teacher, entrepreneur, and long time church choir director, in addition to a husband, father, and grandfather. When his form of dementia worsened, he had to undergo a series of tests. One of these tests included testing his writing ability. Norm, by this time, couldn't recall what day of the week it was, his children's names or the names of his grandkids. He was asked to write a sentence-any sentence-on a piece of paper. What Norm wrote the doctor could only describe as "profound." On that single piece of paper, Norm had written, "You can't get there from here." Another curious thing about Norm was, even though late in the states of dementia, he was still able to recall every note and line of every hymn in the Baptist Hymnal from memory. In this piece, you will hear the marimba voice moving through a series of themes that seem to be unrelated, representing the confusion of Norm's later years. All the while, the vibraphone part steadily supports the marimba lines and provides the familiar refrain of two well known hymns, "Blessed Assurance," and "Man of Sorrows, What a Name.: Norm Hopper was a fine man, and he was my grandfather. - AH