Water Tropes (2009)

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Program Notes:

This piece is inspired by the idea of troping environmental sounds explored by Ingram Marshall in several pieces. The idea is to trope, or ovelay, the environmental sound with musical responses.

In Water Tropes I use the string quartet, throat singing (singing more than one pitch at a time), to imitate and respond to the percussive bubbliness, and the trills of the water sounds. Over time, the musical response gains independence, forcing the water sounds to trope the music.

Eventually, the music loses cohesion and start returning to water, creating an overall "from the water and back to the water" theme for the piece.