Jennifer Fowler: Echos from an Antique Land (1983)

Abstract

"Echoes from an antique land is a piece for five percussionists using tuned percussion instruments. It is a development of a piece which began life as a flute solo. In the flute piece, I was making explicit something that I've always felt strongly: namely, that rhythm and metre are quite different concepts. Rhythm, of course, is of basic importance in music, but the idea of having an underlying metre, in which the rhythms of the separate lines of music coincide all too frequently at every bar line, tends to have a constricting effect on the feeling of rhythmic flow. In the flute piece, I was concerned to progress in bundles of notes of differing length, based on a basic pulse of demi-semiquavers, and to use the expansion and contraction of these groups of notes to emphasise the feeling of phrase. In this percussion piece, I have used this same idea, but with the added parts following differing ways of expanding and contracting within the phrase. A regular metre is also present, so that there can be a tension between the parts which emphasise metre, and those that flow over it. I have been concerned to keep the whole thing very simple, but instead of the parts coinciding frequently at bar lines, they coincide at the beginnings and endings of phrases: that is, they flow in longer sections. In a similar way, the phrases begin on a particular note centre, and gradually expand out of it. Sometimes they return to the same note centre, but mostly they expand and 'settle' on a different centre. These different centres are part of a larger design of expansion and contraction. In the places where the feeling of settling needs to be particularly emphasised to show the end of the whole section, I have deliberately used some devices of archaic cadential formulae, to achieve extra anchorage. Hence the title of the piece: Echoes from an antique land." -- Jennifer Fowler