Composer, Dave Maric created Sense & Innocence, a fairly substantial (10 minutes) four-movement work for live and sampled percussion, in 2002. In performance, the music is realized by playing an assortment of tuned percussion instruments – mainly vibraphone and marimba. We also hear profuse playing of various cymbals and crotales: a chromatically-tuned array of small, cymbal-like bells that can either be struck or bowed. The performer brings the score to life against the sampled framework: a pre-recorded aural canvas of sounds and effects from a variety of other (and some of the same) percussion instruments. The net effect is a rich sonic smorgasbord that beguiles the ear and mind alike.
Lynn Vartan in a 2012 performance of Sense & Innocence
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBfPDbKIcjA
The first movement serves as a sort of dreamy and rhythmically vague prelude, establishing a sense of anticipation. The listener won’t pick up on a distinct tempo until the music breaks into movement 2’s more driven passage that gradually rises to an almost frightful climax. But stark contrast soon arrives, as the musical violence comes to an abrupt halt with the lush third movement – in which the performer plays a variety of bowed sounds on her crotales and cymbals – in a kind of atmospherically abstract “duet” with similar sounds from the sample track. The pace picks up again with the finale, which assumes a more perceptible harmonic and rhythmic form as it takes us to another smashing climax … before a final brief coda restores the fantasy-ridden atmosphere of the work’s beginning.
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