Fever Dream
Fever Dream is a colorful battery percussion quartet that draws inspiration from the composer's personal experience with a cycle of post-apocalyptic nightmares that a accompanied a nasty bout of tonsillitis. The piece takes the listener on a powerful journey through several textures and moods.
Medium: Percussion Quartet
Publisher: C. Alan Publications
Composed: 2017
Duration: 7:10
Difficulty: Grade 5
Commission: University of Texas at Arlington, Dr. Michael Varner
Instrumentation
Player 1 (Db crotale on 26" timpano, bell tree, 4 pitched aluminum pipes [C5, F5, Bb5, Db6], snare drum)
Player 2 (concert bass drum, 2 congas, bongos, 2 cymbals stacks, sizzle ride, 2 low hardwood slats)
Player 3 (tam-tam, 4 pitched aluminum pipes [Db5, Gb5, C6, F6], 3 graduated triangles, 2 brake drums, China cymbal)
Player 4 (kick bass drum, 4 concert toms, snare drum, 2 low hardwood slats)
Program Notes
In the fall of 2016, I experienced a nasty bout of tonsillitis that landed me in the emergency room, as my tonsils were so swollen they were starting to close off. Leading up to this, the climax of my sickness, I had a seemingly never-ending series of high fevers. With each passing cycle, I would fade in and out of restless sleep, which produced some of the most vivid and bleak dreams I’d ever experienced. These dreams/nightmares created a vision of a post-apocalyptic world filled with crumbling rubble, twisted metal, and sunless skies that I was desperately trying to escape. I attempted to capture one of these fever dream cycles in this, my first battery-only percussion quartet.
I started with the word “fever” and translated each letter into a number using one of my favorite indeterminate tools. The result was the numeric palindrome 5-4-9-4-5. These numbers informed everything in the piece, from basic rhythms to accent patterns to time signatures to phrases to overall form to the aluminum pipe pitches.
Fever Dream was commissioned by the University of Texas at Arlington Percussion Ensemble, directed by Dr. Michael Varner and Dr. Andrew Eldridge, and received its world premiere on April 10, 2017.
- NHD
