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:
“His reversed body gracefully curved, his brown legs hoisted like a Tarentine sail, his joined ankles tacking, Van gripped with splayed hands the brow of gravity, and moved to and fro, veering and sidestepping, opening his mouth the wrong way, and blinking in the odd bilboquet fashion peculiar to eyelids in his abnormal position. Even more extraordinary than the variety and velocity of the movements he made in imitation of animal hind legs was the effortlessness of his stance.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Justice begins with the recognition of the necessity of sharing. The oldest law is that which regulates it, and this is still the most important law today and, as such, has remained the basic concern of all movements which have at heart the community of human activities and of human existence in general.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)
“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.”
—Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274)