His Second Time (percussion sextet, audio track - from Between Zero and One)

One of the works/movements from the concert-length show "Between Zero and One" created in collaboration with New Zealand's Strike Percussion.

‍

This piece brought together two ideas; one of them terrific, the other awful. I had this idea of building a piece for percussion based on the most prominent cellphone ringtones of the time. I had the (in retrospect, cringe-worthy) idea of interrupting the performers (as they tried to play His Second Time) by having someone's cellphone repeatedly going off in the audience. The plan was for the performers to then imitate that cellphone ring on the vibes and build a vast texture of ringtones. Musically it had legs, but as theatre, I didn't know what I was doing. we even planted a speaker under some unsuspecting punter's seat and triggered the ringtone to come from there. I gave it a working title of Glitch Symphony (thinking it was a clever play on 'Phoney-Sim' - too funny 🫥).

I've included the score in the image gallery. I chalk it up to a learning experience. Eventually in the show we removed the opening of this piece to escape hearing the audience laugh because they felt they had to (ouch). My original midi demo mockup is in the SoundCloud playlist above.

The second idea - which worked really well - was to adapt the first movement of the piano solo Songs for Simon for the percussion sextet of Between Zero and One. This first movement - called "His Second Time" - translated beautifully to mallets and percussion. I was able to pull some of the midi percussion from the original backing track, into the real world and have it played live. Things like shakers, sleigh bells, Udu, etc.