Marimba Fantasy
Marimba was and still is my favorite percussion instrument to play. The technique is unusual-looking, the instrument is massive, and it can be pretty athletic just to perform some of the harder pieces. It’s just so much fun. When I was learning, the main technique book as “Method of Movement”, which is the Steven’s grip and technique. Each mallet can move on its own (with some limitation), and all the strokes are variations of rotating around some axis. Combine the finer movements at the finger and palm with wrist and arm and footwork, and it gets to be so much to manage. It’s a lot like playing drumset, actually. The technique, like all other instruments and techniques, is a mountain. Once you’ve got a handle on single-independent strokes, then you can work on single-alternating or double-alternating or one-handed rolls or ripple rols or double-laterls or this or that, and then scales and independence and on and on and on.
It is fun, really. And then there’s solos, percussion ensembles, marching band, concert band, orchestra (very rarely, not a lot of marimba in hundred-year-old western European music it turns out). My point is that there’s endless opportunities for the instrument, and it’s just getting more and more popular all the time. There’s an endless supply of marimba music, and a lot of really good marimba music, being written all the time. So, I want to submit my first piece into that giant ocean of music, and I hope you’ll enjoy listening to it or performing it!
The piece is titled “Fantasy Number 1”, and yes there will be several of these. Originally, I was going to make it a divertimento, but I plan to write a percussion ensemble that’s a proper divertimento. A divertimento is a light instrumental piece, usually several movements, and generally pleasant. Persichetti’s divertimento is 6 movements and a concert band staple, Mozart wrote a few, as did Malcom Arnold, Alfred Reed, Stravinsky, and Britten. Pretty much everybody. You don’t have to write one to get your name in the books, but the odds are good at least.
So “Fantasy Number 1”. The intention was to explore some straightforward, homophonic (melody + accompaniment) writing on marimba, and I didn’t want to do an arpeggiated thing since there are ton of really good pieces based on that already. I settled on idea that’s more like a drumset that a piano. The right hand plays an ostinato on fixed notes, essentially a time-keeping pattern, while the left hand has these chromatic, jazzy chords. There are some tutti chords with the time keeping pattern filling the space between them, which develops and does some interesting inversions, and then changes to a full on groove. I say tutti, it’s solo marimba, but I was thinking of it like writing for a jazz trio, just a bass, piano, and drums, with each register of the marimba acting as a separate voice. The fun thing for the player is that the right-hand ostinato changes from single-alternating to single-independents, and back to single-alternating but in the reverse direction, and then back to single-independent on the other mallet this time. It’s a bit of a workout but it’s not too crazy.
The groove section is in 7/8 which I think is required for modern percussion music. They don’t even let you publish it if there’s not a 7/8 groove somewhere. I don’t make the rules. That section has an accented pattern in the left hand with single-alternating strokes, but you have to change the interval size while doing it and keep the rhythm constant. That part is actually fairly tricky. And then to make it very tricky, the right hand does a melody in octaves. To make it less tricky, the melody lines up with the accents in the left hand.
After the groove, it’s back to the opening material but constantly swapping between each hand, and then the performer gets to flex with this big crescendoing chromatic scale, silence, and then big open chords with nice open voicing. The last couple notes are especially challenging, because the outer mallets have a 10th plus an octave between them. Can’t hide any wrong notes in a part like that – you could probably sneak some by in the groove – and it’s the last thing the audience hears so there’s extra drama. I could have ended it on octaves in both hands, and a lot of virtuoso solos do that, but that doesn’t have the same kind of jazzy color I wanted and to be perfectly honest, I don’t think open octaves sound cool in this context.
Fantasy No. 1 Score Video
Fantasy Number 1 is available now here from my shop for a 20% discount with the code FANMARIM (they do let me pick the codes, but they probably shouldn’t), and on JW Pepper.