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Mosaic (2017) for 13 instruments

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This is, to my mind, one of the most important educational contributions I’ve made at the Tianjin Conservatory of Music: coaching and rehearsing this piece was a transformative learning experience for the thirteen students that premiered the piece.  I personally invested 60 or more hours in rehearsing Mosaic, from one-to-one coaching, to sectionals and full rehearsals.  I firmly believe that we as teachers/musicians sometimes should not judge the value of our work on the basis of the performance that results: behind that performance is a lot of learning and growing on the part of the students involved.  This is a far from ideal performance, but I put it up here in humility, as I know how much this performance meant to all of us (performance from the 2017 May Music Festival):

 

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzE2NDYwNDY5Ng==.html?spm=a2hzp.8253869.0.0

 

卢长剑作品«镶嵌»简洁:

这部作品的创作是从2016年夏天到2017年4月截稿的。 促使我创作这部作品的念头是在与英国作曲家Tom Green讨论由作曲家Thomas Ades在创作中使用的一组著名的和声对位重复形式而萌生的。 在此之后,我开始研究这组重复的和声对位进行,对它其中隐含的可以控制整部作品的功能意义着实着迷。这部作品的创作同时也是对变速结构的探索,也就是说在音乐中每部分结构以速度变化的方式划分比例。具体来看: 作品的前四个部分在速度上呈现出不断上升的状态,到作品高潮部分的速度是开始处的三倍,而在作品尾部,通过音值缩小三倍的方式,迅速回落到乐曲开始处的速度。

 

George Holloway(Mosaic)

I begun Mosaic in Summer 2016 and completed it in April 2017.  It was prompted by a discussion with English composer Tom Green, who introduced me to a repeating contrapuntal-harmonic formula famously used by Thomas Ades.  I began exploring the formula myself, fascinated by its possible function as the underlying syntactic principle of an entire piece.  It is also an exploration in tempo modulation (where precise ratios govern the relationships between different tempi in the music).  The first four sections incrementally increase in tempo, reaching at the climax a tempo three times that of the opening, before in the final section returning, via a divison of three, to the original tempo (and material).