Let The Madness Come
This work is, without a doubt, the purest distillation of what I love about music.
This Could Be Madness, my new percussion concerto for the amazingly talented Cameron Leach will receive its world premiere next week in Ypsilanti as part of ÆPEX Fest, the first iteration of a new annual contemporary music festival my concert presenting organization ÆPEX Contemporary Performance is bringing to Ypsilanti. This is a hugely exciting event for me, Cameron, Kevin Fitzgerald, ÆPEX’s amazing music director, and our community, and it is also my first in-person world premiere since 2019!
The piece responds to the major developments in the last two years of my life, namely the birth of our first child in 2020, as well as the psychic impact of the COVID-19 on music making around the world. New and enormous strings now impinge on the traditional modes of ‘being a composer’ — that is, writing a piece for presentation on the concert stage, hopefully many times over — and have dealt me as intense and existential shock as has the constant balance of parenthood with making art.
This Could Be Madness addresses these concerns with boldness and intensity. This work is, without a doubt, the purest distillation of what I love about music. It is brash and dissonant, full of eruptive contrasts, and driven by relentless, rhythmically explosive riffs. As I have written this year, heavy metal music is one of my strongest influences, and This Could Be Madness takes this to a new extreme, particularly in the second half of the piece, which features three distinct sections that allude to different metal styles and tropes. The title of this piece even responds to the line, “let the madness come”, from a track off American progressive thrash metal band Black Fast’s 2015 album Terms of Surrender.
Kevin asked me to write the piece that would become This Could Be Madness back in the spring of 2020, when we thought the pandemic would be over in a few months. Of course, that hasn’t been the case, and the incredible strain of living through the COVID-19 mass death event informed the piece’s scale and unapologetic expression. Although I have found the comfort of small, simple things grow to new extents over the last two years, my approach with This Could Be Madness was to leave nothing on the table. I wanted to find a way to blend everything exciting me about music at the moment, and I could not be more happy with the result.
My initial brainstorming for a percussion chamber concerto dates back to 2018. After I composed the marimba duo Noa (2017) for Chrisophet Froh and Mayumi Hama, I dreamed up a larger piece for percussion soloist and a group of accompanying instruments that would use the aleatoric techniques I explored in Noa on a larger scale. At the time, I was working on quantitative data analytics tracking interactions within a specific musical community on Twitter, and I was deeply inspired by the visualizations of interactivity my research partner, Luke Overbey, created.
This Could Be Madness finally brings aspects of those ideas to life. The work’s opening section is totally aleatoric, with Cameron’s solo part cueing different pairs of instruments within the ensemble, which, in turn, create their own parts spontaneously in response to what else is happening around them. The remainder of the piece uses traditional notation, but the whole work continues to play on the themes of connectivity and togetherness suggested by this more experimental introduction.
For example, in a slower, more lyrical section during the first half of This Could Be Madness, Cameron’s vibraphone part is echoed by individual instruments in the ensemble playing at different speeds. This passage essentially orchestrates what a handful of delay pedals might do, and also features several organic tempo changes in which rhythms are reinterpreted from one phrase to another, “resetting” the underlying pulse, while maintaining rhythmic continuity. Overall, the first part This Could Be Madness yearns for some kind of stability. The music changes often and dramatically, contrasting ideas pass from one to another capriciously — sometimes they stick, sometimes they don’t. This part of the composition is intentionally introspective and intimate, to effect an impatient search for something enduring and sustainable, which prepares everyone for the virtually unwavering bombast of the closing section.
The final part of This Could Be Madness is a high-intensity, unceasingly energetic tour-de-force that draws deeply on heavy metal influences. To be clear, almost none of my references to this genre ore superficial reiterations of its melodic tropes. I seek to capture the visceral intensity of its rhythmic and timbral language, though there are, of course, some killer riffs in this piece. Looking back at my other metal-inspired compositions, this substantial closing section reminds me the most of the final movement to my 2015 song cycle Bound, though that is maybe one third the length of this part of the culmination to This Could Be Madness. I don’t want to give anything away, but I am more proud of the form of this piece, because of its incredible closing material, than anything I have ever written.
If you’re in driving distance of Ypsilanti, MI, come down on the evening of June 3 to hear the world premiere of This Could Be Madness! If you are not, we will stream the concert and will share more information about accessing that next week. I also plan on posting more content about this piece, its composition, and the rehearsal process to my Twitter, Instagram, and Tik Tok accounts over the coming days, so please follow me there if you want more insights on this milestone piece of music.
