Thunder Drum (Preview)

Programme Note
I Elegy for a Lost World
II Games
III Reconstitution
From the composer:
Although the music of Thunder Drum’s outer movements are reminiscent
of 19th century Western European music and more recent epic film
soundtracks, the underlying theme is informed by a vision of human
prehistory expounded by the American mystic Edgar Cayce (1877-1945)
related to the shifting fortunes of what has been traditionally known as
the “red race”, the native inhabitants of the north and central regions
of the American continent. A great and lasting influence in my thinking
and artistic imagination, Edgar Cayce had mentioned in several of his
trance utterances that the antediluvian world we know through legend as
“Atlantis” was an advanced civilization dominated by the “red race”, which
had reached knowledge and technological heights comparable to our own.
It fell spectacularly, having pushed its unquenchable thirst for ever increasing
energy and power to ecological havoc, as our current civilization too is in
danger of reaching with an exponentially increasing likelihood.
The first movement, Elegy for a Lost World, is a musical meditation on
this loss, which is traumatically felt by our collective psyche as deep
seated memory, in spite of the absence of any external evidence for the
existence and loss of such an advanced civilization in our collective past.
Beginning and developing along 19th century European common harmonic
and melodic practice (another vanishing world), the music is a vague
reminiscence of a two-theme classical sonata form. The melodic/harmonic
discourse is gradually overtaken by denser chromaticism and accompanying
musical tension, exacerbated by the technological “fly by” sound effects of
the playback audio which are becoming ever more prominent.
Games, the second movement, is a great leap to the present moment.
The industrial-like “quantized” loops in the playback audio, with their
unexpected twists and turns, are combined with pre-recorded samples of
Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq. This sonic background constantly challenges
an agile orchestra to technically rise to its unpredictable rhythmic demands,
a task increasingly frustrated by metric modulations and other devices of
rhythmic complexity.
Without any pause, Reconstitution, the third movement, begins quietly
with a timid thematic development of the aggressive modal gestures that
concluded the previous movement. The music once more picks up pace and
energy and, this time around, it ends in an epic, triumphant but also hollow
ending with the opening theme of Thunder Drum modulating to an altered
major-like mode. In the aftermath of this triumphant conclusion, however,