davesabine.com

Minimal, economical, and beautiful.

Links

Difficulty

Primary Instrumentation

Number of Performers

Suggested Performance Venue

Instrumentation

Brief Review

This is one of my favourite works for solo marimba. It's a beautiful piece; it's enjoyable for the developing student and virtuoso alike; and it's effective and pleasing to any audience.

Performance Notes

The following notes were contributed to my web site by Paul Smadbeck (I'm grateful for his input):

The original publication of Rhythm Song included the following performance notes which were inadvertently left out of the current edition from Keyboard Mallet Publications. I believe they are important in helping the player to understand what I intended, especially the part about style:

Rhythm Song was originally written as a marimba solo and is quite effective when performed as such. However, during the latter stages of composition I found that the contrasting parts were brought out more keenly and the overall impact was increased when the work was performed simultaneously by two players; one playing as written and the other an octave higher.

As for style, I drew upon elements of minimalism, American jazz/fusion, and African music. The best way I can describe my overall intentions is to instruct the player to imagine that the selected notes of the marimba are pitched drums and his/her mission is to perform a drum solo as one would on a traditional drum set. As such, the melodic and harmonic elements are subservient to the rhythmic contrapuntalism. This was, in fact, the whole point of the piece in the first place - I consciously tried to make the melody and harmony so simple as to form a canvas on which the rhythmic interplay could be developed and explored.

In the first section of the piece (prior to 6/8 time) the pulse should be driven ahead solidly and relentlessly with no fluctuation in tempo. Some jazz/fusion players would refer to this as "putting it in the pocket" - it should have a "groove". In the 6/8 section, the feel is decidedly African; smoothly, in two, but again, no fluctuation in the pulse.