facing the mirror…

Facing the Mirror, for percussion quartet and surround sound tape is a result of my fascination with fusing the sounds of human speech and percussion instruments.  Written for the New York Percussion Quartet (of which I was a member from 1997-2002) the tape consists of it’s members mother tongues; Benny Koonyevsky’s Hebrew, Pablo Rieppi’s Spanish, David Rozenblatt’s Russian, and I spoke English.  The meaning of what was recorded bears no importance because it would be “chewed up” all together and spit out as a new dialect.  The piece is organized by analogous movement, color, and the  development of sound between the performers and the tape.  The texts are fragmented and recombined into a new syntax resembling the sounds of the instruments.  The tape uses different delay speeds and panning to distribute movement of sound that is echoed by the performers patterns of augmentation and diminution of the rhythms used.  Each performer is equipped with his own speaker and microphone for uttering phonetic sounds, echoing each other and the tape to create a continuous circular movement of sound around the hall.