Movements
- Alarum
- Blues
- Etude
- Song
- Toccata
Alarum is a Shakespeare era stage direction indicating "a grand entrance" and an archaic word for a call to arms, so "Alarum" is a fanfare.
"Blues" and "Song" are both slow movements. "Blues" uses as blue notes the minor seventh (C-B♭) and mediant (in D dorian exactly halfway between E and G). "Song" is in E phrygian.
"Etude" is a study in serial technique and six-against-five polyrhythms in which Johnston indicates "blur with pedal". This, "clues us in that the linear intricacies are only part of the story here: the amazing swirl of overtones resulting from an atonal application of this tuning are of equal importance."
"Toccata" features diatonic outer sections and a spikier chromatic middle section.
The piece has been recorded and released on:
- Microtonal Piano by Ben Johnston (1997). Phillip Bush, piano. Koch International Classics 3-7369-2.
Read more about this topic: Suite For Microtonal Piano
Famous quotes containing the word movements:
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—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
“Virtues are not emotions. Emotions are movements of appetite, virtues dispositions of appetite towards movement. Moreover emotions can be good or bad, reasonable or unreasonable; whereas virtues dispose us only to good. Emotions arise in the appetite and are brought into conformity with reason; virtues are effects of reason achieving themselves in reasonable movements of the appetites. Balanced emotions are virtue’s effect, not its substance.”
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“In a universe that is all gradations of matter, from gross to fine to finer, so that we end up with everything we are composed of in a lattice, a grid, a mesh, a mist, where particles or movements so small we cannot observe them are held in a strict and accurate web, that is nevertheless nonexistent to the eyes we use for ordinary living—in this system of fine and finer, where then is the substance of a thought?”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)