My intention was to compose a short piece for marimba and a short piece for vibraphone. Only later did the happy thought of a glockenspiel piece come to mind.
The inspiration for a marimba piece came from an illustrated lecture on the works of Leonardo da Vinci. I was impressed that he created such beauty sometimes using only shades of brown: Brown Ochre, Manganese Brown, Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna and others. At the same time I was impressed by the gentle meditative quality of many of the works. I wondered whether such a quality could be incorporated into a piece of music. This seemed a nice challenge, since most of my music is restless.
In the end, the meditative sections formed about half of the resulting composition.
The main part of the composition has an ABCBA form.
B consists mostly of quiet chords.
One of the beauties of a marimba is that chords, sustained by rapidly striking the bars, have a shimmering quality.
C is also quiet and meditative, but with a regular pulse. The second half of C is a repetition of the first half, but upside down.
A is not at all regular. It's a series of attempts to take apart and re-think the complicated figure
that appears in the short introduction to the piece.
The name of the piece had to be Meditation in Brown because it had been inspired by Leonardo's brown pigments and — a happy coincidence — the wooden bars of a marimba are brown.
To the eye, the vibraphone looks like a metal marimba, and one might think that the two instruments are played in the same way and produce similar results. But in a sense they are opposites. A note struck on the marimba will very quickly die, so in order to produce a sustained sound it's necessary to keep re-striking the note. A note on the vibraphone will last a very long time and the challenge is to damp each note so that a melody can be clarified.
The form of Meditation in Gold is simple. There are five sections — meditations, if you will — interrupted by short (but in a sense timeless) sequences of two or three chords. The final note of each meditation is repeated several times, and returns as the first note of the subsequent meditation.
The third meditation becomes agitated and its final note bursts in as quickly as possible to begin the fourth meditation. The energy dissipates only at the end of the fourth meditation and we find the fifth and final meditation to be the calmest of all.
Critics might point out that not all vibraphones have gold bars. But those of Gary Burton's vibe are gold, and that's good enough for me to appropriate the color for my title.
My planned pieces for marimba and vibraphone were completed. I turned my attention to a very, very different sort of piece, the Interlude for string orchestra. But just as I completed that, news came that I had been granted Irish citizenship (thanks to my grandmother). I felt so happy that I wanted to celebrate, and what better way than to learn the Irish national anthem? Lo and behold, the Republic has two anthems. One is rather old and says unpleasant things about Saxons. This is not a popular anthem in Northern Ireland and a solution had to be found for those occasions when both parts of Ireland joined forces for international rugby. A less divisive anthem, Ireland's Call, was commissioned by the Irish Rugby Football Union for the 1995 World Cup. Slowly overcoming opposition, it has now been adopted by the hockey and cricket leagues. I hope that its all-inclusive spirit will win more converts. And I hope that no one will assassinate me for using it as the basis for a glockenspiel piece.
Not wanting to tax the listener's tolerance for extremely high bright notes, I kept the piece to a minute and a half. Into that short time it manages to squeeze several quotations from the anthem, including a four-part canon on the phrase "four proud provinces" (in which the northernmost voice is in contrary motion). Throughout, the anthem is running simultaneously in fast and slow speeds, and in different keys, a happy welter of viewpoints.
Filling in the spaces between very long notes there is an almost constant filigree of tiny decorations, inspired by the Book of Kells. Ireland, your new citizen salutes you.