Two More Songs (2019)

for music box and ensemble

Score: https://webshop.donemus.com/action/front/sheetmusic/25283

This piece was written for the Saxophone project at the Royal Conservatoire and it was supposed to be performed during the Spring Festival in April 2020, but the festival got canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The [original] instrumentation [was] 12 saxophones and 4 music boxes and the structure is very similar to [two songs] but in reverse. It starts with all musicians (saxophones and music boxes) playing a melody together in unison, but then at some point, the music boxes have to stop and the saxophones have to finish playing the piece by themselves. Like in the previous piece, the saxophones do not know when the music boxes are going to stop, so, when it happens, the saxophones find themselves in a very short moment of intense dialogue, trying to find a way to immediately reorganize themselves as an ensemble. A similar dialogue occurs between the music boxes. All of them decide separately on when to stop, but they all have to stop whenever the first one does, so this
moment is also unexpected by three of them.

The melody is also different from the one in [two songs]. Since the
saxophones need to play together until the end, it is a long continuous line
instead of a short repeating one. Yet, the modality and character of the
melody remain the same.

Pilchen, D. (2020) Losing Time. Master’s Thesis. Royal Conservatoire The Hague. pp. 29–30. Available at: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/814062/868046.