Thread: Intense virtuosic music

John Psathas is one of the most popular composers in the world at the minute.
One of his most challenging works, Happy Tachyons features not only
ncreadibly hard music but the skill of performing on two instruments at
once.

I would love you to go to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w39M...e_gdata_player

And watch me perform the Australian premiere of this work

Sure Lunasong. There are two major challenges in this type of playing.

The first, is the fact that the pitch in your left hand is higher than your right, like putting your hands over the top of each other when you are playing a piano. This took me some time to get use to, as your ear take a while to adjust.

The second big challenge is the fact that i am playing the lowest notes on the marimba and the highest notes on the vibraphone at the same time, and both have different spaces between notes. So performing fast paced passages in this work is a dam challenge in the fact that the gap difference between notes are different on both instruments. If you playing marimba with four mallets at least there is a consistency between the gaps between the notes, so this setup make this a challenge especially when performing works like this.

Has this answered your question ?... If you have any more throw them my way

it changes between positions, i.e if you are auditioning for assistant timpani with occasional percussion you would get hit harder with timpani repertoire.

You have to be proficient in every instrument and show a skill in all as most works call upon you to perform on all of them, like if you are in a ballet or opera orchestra. Snare is really important and so is glockenspiel and xylophone, these would be the main instruments to focus on. Its rare for orchestras to ask for marimba auditions. One of the things i find a challenge is the fact that i am a soloist and performing audition excepts is to my specialty as i always seem to perform them in a soloist manner instead of being part of the ensemble.

hahahah thats a great fact. I love Evelyn got some great comments from her towards the direction of this work