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:
“The short lesson that comes out of long experience in political agitation is something like this: all the motive power in all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling. All the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else. Conciliation is the enemy.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)
“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)
“Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)