Mentacide (snare drum, audio track, video)

Mentacide, commissioned by Shaun Tilburg and published by Pocket Publications, is for solo snare drum(s) and digital audio, with the accompanying text drawing inspiration from Henry Giroux's 'The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine.'

The score and performance audio is available here: Mentacide Score

A performance video (by David Downes) is also available. This spells out (literally) the words that are being generated in the digital audio. The video is available for download form the store on this website here: MENTACIDE PERFORMANCE VIDEO

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Programme Note

mentacide
an erasure
of historical memory a deadening form

of historical and social amnesia has taken over
extreme violence and inequality are normalized

the marginalized are considered
entirely disposable
y? y? y? y? y? y? y? y? y? y? y? y? y? y? y? y? y? y? y? y? y? ......the swindle of fulfilment......

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Performance Notes

In my computer rendering the piccolo snare drum sounds very high, certainly higher than a standard piccolo concert snare drum tuning scheme. These are the samples i fell in love with when writing the piece.

This sound is  possible to achieve on a piccolo concert snare drum, it would just require re-tuning the drum. Once the sticks come in, the sample almost sounds like a popcorn snare. Here's a video of a popcorn snare drum (this one is tuned a bit lower than usual).

The sounds in my MIDI renderings are usually the exact sounds I’d prefer, so I would suggest either tuning up a piccolo concert snare drum, or using a piccolo drum set snare drum (which tend to be smaller than concert piccolo snares).