Five Inventions
Instrumentation: Trio Instruments: English Horn, Oboe
Genre: Contemporary
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2 Oboes and English Horn:
I am an oboist, so when I was asked by the Can-Am Oboe Trio to write a new work for them, I felt right at home. For once, I could try out the parts and know if they worked without asking anybody else. My next concern was to figure out a theme that would suit the ensemble as well as offer a unifying thread. Throughout history, the number 3 has had magical connotations and this piece was to be written for a trio so I decided to further the synchronicity by writing three part inventions. That led to an interpretation of the word, “invention,” which in the case of Bach, is a musical form but for most of the rest of the world describes an object that has been newly created for a specific purpose. I decided to combine the two definitions by writing three part inventions with titles describing actual physical inventions. I wrote five movements with their names and styles depicting the following inventions.
1. Spinning Wheel without which we would not have the ability to make cloth. You can hear the turning of the wheel and the up and down of the pedal in the music.
2. Space Through a Telescope evokes the vastness of the universe giving a sense of galaxies and nebula unimaginable distances away.
3. The Telegraph was an invention that allowed people to send and receive messages over long distances. Samuel Morse developed a “language” of dots and dashes to spell words that became the standard means of communication. Morse code for the word, “oboe.” is --- -... --- . the rhythm upon which this movement is based.
4. Video Games are possibly one of the most ubiquitous inventions of recent times with the accompanying music vying with the movie industry for popularity. This movement has a chase alternating with a superhero.
5. The Dev’lish Angel Horn features the English horn, the lowest voice in the group. The name, “English horn” was originally thought to come from a mistranslation of the French word, anglé since the early English horns were bent. However, more scholarly research has found that it actually refers to the word “Angel” because many of the paintings of the Middle Ages had angels playing a bent woodwind instrument which they called “angelic horn.” In this movement, the “Angelic horn” is a bit of an imp and insists on being naughty at times and going her own way before she is hauled back into the angelic ensemble.