(1999) for wind ensemble

instrumentation

duration: 5 minutes

grade level: 5

premieres: IU & Musashino Academy Wind Ensembles, Ray Cramer, 1999

live performance audio excerpts:
mp3 excerpt 1 (start)
mp3 excerpt 2 (end)

Program Note

Winner of the 2001 Walter Beeler Memorial Composition Prize, Ithaca College

This work was commissioned by the Musashino Academy of Music, Tokyo, Japan, in honor of their 70th anniversary, and is dedicated to Ray Cramer.

In April and May of 1999, Ray Cramer conducted the first performances of Myaku, with the Indiana University Wind Ensemble and the Musashino Academy of Music Wind Ensemble.

Opening with gentle waves of woodwind oscillations and building to powerfully repetitive arpeggios near the end, this fanfare for wind band takes two main ideas as themes: Pulse (Myaku, in Japanese), and the number 7 (from the 7 decades the Musashino Academy is celebrating). The pulses occur on many levels, often as groups of seven evenly spaced articulations, but also as rhythmic underpinnings. Working the number seven into the fanfare in various ways accounts for the tempo markings of 140, 160, and 77.

The principal musical motive is a four-note subset of a pentatonic scale: A, B, D, and E. There is also extensive use of diatonic clusters (built by stacking up transpositions of the above motive) and the ascending melodic minor scale.

Myaku is dedicated to Ray Cramer, (former) Director of Bands at Indiana University and tireless supporter of contemporary music for wind band. I send the fanfare to the Musashino Academy with best wishes for another 7 decades of fine music making.