Manoury - mvt 2 Video
The second movement of Philippe Manoury’s piece “Le Livre des Claviers” is a marimba duo. Rob and I (this is David writing by the way…) have been performing this particular movement of the piece for almost 2 years on tour across the country. Playing this movement of the piece is what attracted us to the idea of putting the full 6 movement piece together.
We’ve played this movement for audiences ranging from high school band kids to (traditionally) conservative chamber music audiences to our own seasoned new music fans in Chicago. The music really has something for everyone.
Rob does a great job of introducing the piece before we play it…the program note below is a more formalized version of what he might say before we perform the piece:
“The marimba duo consists of approximately 40 short musical fragments, with pauses in between each. These fragments range from a single gesture or chord to a solid minute of running notes. Within this structure exist moments of solidly grounded rhythm as well as passages filled with disorienting, arhythmic gestures. Manoury’s real genius in this work is in the way he creates a coherent narrative by relating these two extremes, transforming one into the other, juxtaposing them, and finding middle ground between them.”
