by Andy Akiho (b. Columbia, SC, 1979)
Duration: 17 minutes
Instrumentation: string orchestra, piano and percussion
Before devoting himself to composition full time, Andy Akiho performed widely as a virtuoso percussionist, and percussion still plays a central role in his musical thinking. His most recent release, Seven Pillars, is a collaboration with Sandbox Percussion, a four-member ensemble based in Brooklyn. Akiho's work Oscillate, commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 2012, also centers around a large percussion battery, which largely defines the sound world of a composition the composer has described as “autobiographical.” Even the strings and the piano are often used as percussion instruments. The strings occasionally have to play what the composer calls “scratch tones”: “Apply hard pressure to the bow near or behind the bridge to produce a loud and unpitched grating sound.” They are also asked to “percussively slap open strings against fingerboard with hand, imitating the timbre of a snare drum.” The pianist sometimes has to use a credit card to strike the strings, or to scrape the tuning pins in a sideways motion.
The seventeen-minute piece is divided into three musical “days,” each based on a set of rhythmic patterns repeated multiple times, sometimes in identical form, and sometimes with surprising alterations, generating high levels of energy. After the whirlwind activity of “Day 1,” “Day 2” begins with a section where the rhythms are less repetitive and most of the sounds are unpitched, before the vibraphone enters with some new material. The piano and the strings then establish a new repetitive pattern that becomes more and more frenetic, until “Day 3” dawns with an insistent, soft single note on the piano. Drawing ever-wider circles around that single note, the piano is eventually joined by the violins and then by the rest of the orchestra. Soon the rhythmic activity becomes more intense again. An enormous crescendo leads to the concluding section, where a broad string melody, developed polyphonically, cuts through all the frenzy and finally takes over completely. The frantic rhythms come to a standstill, and the piece ends quietly and peacefully.
Peter Laki