Percussion

This work takes its name from the Voyager 1 spacecraft launched by NASA in 1977. As it flew past Saturn, Voyager used that planet's gravitational field to propel itself toward deep space, becoming the first human-made object to leave our solar system. Voyager's journey is immense. Traveling about 1,000,000 miles a day, it will take 20,000 years to leave the gravitational field of the Sun. Voyager will then enter deep space and travel for billions of years. At some point during this journey, the Sun will be no more than a charred cinder and human beings may no longer exist. But Voyager will be traveling on.

mccandlessvoyagerexcerpt.mp3

Bust a Flame, composed for Flexible Music, was written during February of 2009. It’s dedicated, with love, to my son, Isaac. I want to express my gratitude to Flexible Music for their musicality, virtuosity, and commitment.

 I found my way into the language of the piece gradually, a language conditioned by Flexible Music's unusual instrumentation of tenor saxophone, guitar, piano and percussion. This instrumentation, suggestive of a jazz group, steered me further in a direction that I'd already been pursuing: incorporating some of the vitality and spontaneity of the music that I first played as a saxophonist (and love to this day) into the music I've been composing. I knew early on that I wanted to take advantage of Dan Lippel's considerable skill and experience as an electric guitarist and that I wanted to use a drum set, instead of the percussion instruments that I'd written for in the past. The 'drumsetness' of the percussion part comes into prominence little by little until it emerges completely fairly late in the piece.