SOUND CROSSING (world premiere)
Elliott Gyger, 1999

Sound Crossing is a set of five short pieces, designed to be performable either as a continuous suite, or broken up across a concert program to provide a "frame" for other music. The exact grammatical relationship between the two words in the title is deliberately ambiguous. However, the connotations are hopefully fairly clear: sound moving from one place to another, or different sounds being juxtaposed and mixed - ideas thoroughly appropriate in the context of the CrossSound festival.

These ideas are brought out in the music in a number of ways. Sometimes two or three different layers of music are combined, either running simultaneously (e.g. in parts of the first piece, Triple Fanfare) or "cross-cut" as in a movie (e.g. in Scherzo with Distractions). Elsewhere, a single line of music will be broken up among different instruments: this is particularly important in Signals with Echo, where the horn's solo is gradually taken over by the trumpet and euphonium. Both techniques are prominent in the final movement, which reworks the Renaissance/Baroque model of the passacaglia. In its conventional form, the passacaglia is a set of variations over a repeated bass-line theme: as the title implies, this Double Passacaglia has two repeating themes, of different lengths, which are introduced separately and then superimposed.

The elements described above are strongly related to another Renaissance-inspired feature of the music: the physical positioning of the players, which is different for each movement. The technique of dividing the performing forces for a piece into spatially separated groups has a long and illustrious history, but is particularly associated with the music of 16th-century Venetian composer Giovanni Gabrieli and his contemporaries. While Sound Crossing is not influenced by Gabrielis musical style, the basic reasons and principles for the use of spatial separation remain much the same: creating call-and-response patterns, dramatic entrances, echo effects, and more generally surrounding the listener with festive cascades of sound.