Steven Mackey (born 1956) - Five Animated Shorts

Recorded Live on 8th March 2008
Duration: 26 minutes 27 seconds

Credits

Nicholas Kok

Conductor

Psappha Ensemble

Kevin Gowland

Flute

Dov Goldberg

Clarinet

Richard Casey

Piano

Tim Williams

Percussion

David Routledge

Violin

David Aspin

Viola

Jennifer Langridge

Cello

Five Animated Shorts

1. Depending
2. Dancing For Sarah
3. Slippery Dog
4. Still in Motion
5. Lonely Motel

The idea to write a piece for cimbalom and mixed ensemble came from Tim Williams. As a percussionist and artistic director of the contemporary chamber ensemble Psappha, Tim had often performed my music and knew that I was sympathetic to 'underdog' instruments - instruments not entirely embraced by the western concert music establishment. Tim taught himself how to play the cimbalom out of love for the instrument and he is now one of only a few concert cimbalom players outside Hungary.

I primarily associate the cimbalom with gypsy, vernacular music although I am familiar with its use by composers such as György Kurtág. Tim and I were both interested in an ensemble piece that used the cimbalom within a group rather than as in a concerto. I again thought of the cimbalom in a more indigenous setting (like at Tim's wedding) where it plays exhilarating folk music with other instruments (guitar, violin, bass etc). In that context, at times the cimbalom leads the music - in the way that a singer might, by presenting the tune and embellishing it - while at other times it is simply part of the ensemble. The cimbalom is never in opposition or competition with the group as a concerto soloist often is.

All of the instruments, at some point, have important soloistic roles. The piano, in particular, shares the spotlight with the cimbalom. The different but related timbres between the two instruments, both struck with felt hammers, is an important orchestrational focus of the piece. The primary effect of the cimbalom in the ensemble is to transform, from within, the familiar modern music group into something more exotic.

The form and substance of Five Animated Shorts were influenced by discussions and preliminary work I had done with a frequent collaborator Rinde Eckert. We were leading a workshop on creating experimental music theatre for which he invented a character - a scientist performing psychological experiments involving the identification of out of focus slides. Rinde wrote the following text:

Slide
Slide of
Slide of dog
Slide of dog running
Dog running
Running

This was just one of many hypothetical images that Rinde described on behalf of his psychologist alter ego. Rinde and I are both dog owner/lovers. I liked the idea of writing music that would both set this text and animate the implicit motion in a still photo of a running dog. I liked the simple additive and subtractive process that connects the single word 'Slide', at the top, to 'Running', at the bottom. The motion between 'Slide' and 'Running' connects them as action words even though 'Slide' started life as a noun. Issues pertaining to this line of text permeate Slippery Dog and Still in Motion.

As I began composing for cimbalom with all these ideas as a backdrop (instrumental folk music via cimbalom, dogs, running, sliding, creepy scientists with projectors, etc.) the music started to take shape as four short character sketches followed by a long lullaby (Lonely Motel). Each movement seems to have a little narrative to share or scene to draw and because of the quirky characters and generally bright, playful colours, the medium of short animated films seemed like a helpful metaphor to invoke in the title, not to mention the fact that four of the five pieces are animated and relatively short.

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