Informationen zu "David Heyes Invocation Double Bass Trio, Double Bass Ensemble"
Verlag: Recital Music
Verlagsnummer: RM952
EAN: 9790570459520
ISMN: M-57045-952-0
Beschreibung
Invocation began life as a Christmas work for SSA choir and commissioned by
Sarah Poole, the composer's wife, for a concert in December 2016. The choral
version is wordless and the slow moving harmonies and sound world lends
itself well to the double bass trio, also playable by massed basses. David
Heyes writes: 'The piece was for female voices only (SSA) and I decided to
use recurring cells of melody, but with a hidden drone of the note 'A' held
throughout but passed from voice to voice. Most bars were repeated to create
a mesmeric and chant-like effect, the short musical motifs were shared and
eventually the music drifted away to a unison 'A' which gradually faded away
to silence. The piece has no text and was called 'A Christmas Garland' and is
dedicated to Sarah. I knew that it would work for double bass trio and set
about transcribing it a fifth lower. Now centered around D minor, but with a
flattened 7th, it worked beautifully for basses and I was able to add an
occasional open D string to ground the piece and also to use high octave D's
to add height. Admittedly my students thought their bowing arms were about to
drop off by the end of the first play-through, but I was so pleased with the
new arrangement which has already been played in Britain, America and Spain.
In February I conducted a massed bass orchestra performance, and the larger
forces allow bassists to occasionally relax for a bar, and it was a great
success with many wonderful comments about the performance and the piece
afterwards. It was rechristened 'Invocation' and I quite liked the meaning as
'an incantation used to invoke a deity or the supernatural'. Invocation was
premiered on Sunday 13 November 2016 at Wells & Mendip Museum (Wells,
Somerset) by Alex Heather, David Heyes and Jan Cowell, as part of the Wells
Double Bass Academy workshop. It was also played at the Royal Northern
College of Music in Manchester on the same day and received its US premiere
in Los Angeles on 8 December 2016. The Spanish premiere was performed by
massed basses, directed by the composer, at the Conservatorio de Culleredo
(Galicia) on Sunday 19 February 2017. 'Invocation is gorgeous in its
simplicity and promoted an interesting discussion about how to make a
performance flow.' [Gemma Ashcroft] David has been Specialist Double Bass
Tutor at Wells Cathedral School for 20 years and received a prestigious award
from the David Walter Charitable Trust of New York for his pioneering
activities as a soloist, teacher, publisher and commissioner of new music for
double bass. He works with composers throughout the world and is particularly
interested to expand the double bass repertoire, by commissioning new works
and by rediscovering forgotten ones. Over the past 30 years he has
commissioned more than 500 works, from beginner to virtuoso, and from one to
twenty basses. David has transcribed more than 200 works for double bass,
many published by Recital Music, and in recent year has also composed a
number of original works for double bass which have been performed in
Britain, America, Venezuela, Turkey, Spain, Mexico, Germany, Ecuador and
Czech Republic. David is self-taught as a composer and his music has been
described as lyrical, evocative and accessible, but certainly of the
21st-century. He was Featured Composer at the 2017 Galicia Graves Double Bass
Competition & Festival in Spain and recorded an entire CD of his own works
[No Man's Land] for Prima Facie Records in January 2017.
