Title: Broken Meditation

Instruments: Trombone and Marimba

Program Notes:

This piece uses interactions between the vibraphone and trombone to drive the music forward. In the first section, the vibraphone meditates on repeated triads (a tritone apart) which build up a chromatic completion. The trombone tries to assimilate with this undulating ostinato, but fails, unleashing frustrated bursts of sound. This continues until the two instruments take a more hostile attitude in the middle section, where dissonance and rhythmic complexity come to the fore. They come together and work as a blended unit by the end, with only a few echoes of the earlier conflict.

Written for the Nobue Matsuoka and Todd Baldwin

First Performed: April 2014: Montgomery College Masterpieces Festival