Cascades

Cascades is sound as sculpture. A blunt musical object dissolves and transforms before coalescing into an augmented version of its original form. This piece is about structural process and force of sound— the visceral pleasure of musical mass and volume. Cascades is blunt, brutal and simple music.

 

Composed in 2018 for the SCM Wind Symphony, this piece comes from a time when I was beginning to explore how to use such large and powerful forces as a Wind Symphony. As such, my approach landed somewhere between Bruckner, Ligeti and Xenakis, to give you some idea. The wind symphony is treated much like an organ, but imagine that organ is played by someone with 50 fingers.

 

In my musical output, Cascades is something of a one-off for those reasons. It’s also quite unusual in the broader wind band repertoire. When listening, pay attention to the overall direction of the music; the way the piece creeps from one harmony to another via long strings of scales; how the piece constantly yearns towards harmonic resolution and is always thwarted before exploding in the final moments.

 

Thanks to John Lynch and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Wind Symphony for playing this unusual beast.