In the first post in this series breaking down my 2022 percussion concerto This Could Be Madness, I explain that heavy metal is one of its biggest sources of inspiration (a common theme in my work, overall). Last week’s post showed different, more experimental practices that define the piece’s beginning. Today, I will write about the riffs that give the second half of This Could Be Madness its most powerful moments. If it strikes you as odd that a composer of concert music would draw on heavy metal, it is actually pretty common. As I cover in an article published in VAN Magazine a week ago, there has been a strong, mutualistic connection between classical music practitioners of all stripes and heavy metal musicians for many decades.
This Could Be Madness expands on an approach to engaging heavy metal aesthetics that I first used in my 2015 song cycle Bound, the final movement of which features an intricate series of riffs, and even double bass drum, to reach a calamitous climax. It takes a little longer than halfway through This Could Be Madness for the rhythm to coalesce enough to convey even the vaguest allusions to metal music. Prior to this, the music, while very rhythmic, is too restless and capricious to support this symbolism. Of course, this is deliberate. In order for the second half of the piece to cover new expressive territoy, each must have its own distinctive characteristics. In my opinion as a composer and listener, this quality of creating negative space, in an expressionistic sense, is at least equally important to the notion that differing sections should share some content.
Rhythm before the riffs
In the first fully-notated section of the piece (that is, after the aleatoric opening I wrote about last week), the percussion part bubbles with highly gestural ideas as the soloist attempts, unsuccessfully, to transfer potential energy into the rest of the ensemble. You can watch Cameron Leach beautifully perform some of this material in this clip from the soon-to-be-released video recording of This Could Be Madness, which also features an exception ensemble of ten wind instruments conducted by Kevin Fitzgerald:
Another decidedly rhythmic, but very much not riff-y, part within the first half of This Could Be Madness is the slowest, most lyrical passage in the whole piece. Here, a vibraphone solo is echoed at different rhythmic rates by individual members of the accompanying ensemble. As I described in the first post of this series, my goal here was to mimic what a bunch of differently-calibrated delay and reverb pedals might do. I love the clashing rhythmic and sustaining layers that seem to emanate from the vibraphone melody:
Another interesting rhythmic aspect of this ambient material is its many metric modulations. This concept is a little difficult to explain without getting overly technical, but, essentially, it refers to re-contextualizing a duration of musical time, or rhythmic value, between adjacent moments in a piece of music. This results in an audible change in the speed of the music, but there is continuity across this tempo change becuase a particular rhythm fits into both speeds, only with a different meaning. Perhaps, this image from the score will help explain:
Before ‘J’ this distinctive rhythm in the flute part here equates to one fifth of the beat (technically referred to as a, ‘sixteenth note quintuplet’). When we get to ‘J’ there is a metric modulation, which changes the orientation of the music’s beat to its rhythms such that the same durations that were notated as one fifth of the beat now become one quarter for the beat (or, in musical terms, we transform sixteenth not quintuplets into regular sixteenth notes). As a result, the notated tempo (expressed as beats per minute) increases to 60 (one beat per second). This is not a new technique by any means, and different versions of it happen pretty commonly in popular music, as well as other traditions. It looks fancy and complicated on a score, but it is fairly intuitive to perform: you simply ‘re-set’ the beat around a new rhythmic value that already exists in the music you’re playing. And, as you can see from the above excerpt, I made sure to have the determining rhythmic value be audible when these changes occurred.
When the riffs arrive
In structural terms, the goal of the first 15 minutes or so of This Could Be Madness is coalescence, especially with respect to rhythm and meter. We begin with an extended period of aleatory, which gives individual players and small subsets of the ensemble an incredible amount of freedom. Then, we turn to traditionally notated and conducted music, which is energetic and gestural, but refuses to come together into something with stable enough patterns to support a riff. The slow section with metric modulations I just discussed initiates the transition to a more regular structuring of rhythm and meter, and eventually achieves this goal in a lovely ensemble passage I will feature later in this Substack series.
Then the marimba interrupts everything.
The second half of the piece begins with a fast, dominating, virtuosic marimba solo that plays with combinations of 2 and 3 sixteenth notes. Despite the fact at the all the music here fits into an 11/16 time signature, it continues to resist the kind of metrical regularity that enables something resembling a riff until its conclusion. This culminating passage is the first time in the whole piece that we have a clear, recurring meter and rhythmic pattern (3+3+3+2), an outline of which you can here in the marimba part. The wind melody that enters here, though not highly suggestive of heavy metal, is scored in octaves and fifths to evoke resonant power chords on an overdriven electric guitar:
The transition passage I’ve shared earlier in this series immediately thwarts the emergent regularity of this excerpt’s 11/16 pattern. Over the next sixty-six measures, the basic rhythmic grouping steadily decreases in length from eleven sixteenth notes (3+3+3+2) to five (2+3), leading into an extended passage of 4/4 time, which is when the most obvious riffs in This Could Be Madness arrive. The scheme for this explosive section is that there are three different melodic ideas that cycle through each other in an irregular, unpredictable way. Each of these ‘riffs’ has a distinct orchestration, stylistic influence (one, for example, evokes djent), tonal center, and characteristic percussion part, so that it feels like the piece is erratically flipping channels:
Compared to the previous excerpt, this material is much longer, more intense, and simultaneously more direct and sophisticated in its allusions to heavy metal music. One of my favorite things about this moment in the piece is that it feels very climactic. After it buils to a soaring melodic passage in the winds, we head into a sudden energetic downturn, which may misdirect the listener into thinking that the loud, rhythmic part of the piece is behind them. However, following what is the longest ensemble-only passage in This Could Be Madness, the percussion part drags the whole group into the biggest, loudest, and most desperate section of the piece. Unlike the agile and adroit riffs in the above excerpt, this final flailing of the work’s heavy metal influence draws on the noisy, unrefined subgenres. The way the percussion part blankets and ensemble with a wall of blast-beat-like rhythms is inspired by the music of Napalm Death, which I listened to for the first time because I saw Steve Smith, the acclaimed New York-area music critic, tweet about the band. Here is an excerpt of this part of the piece: