Pipe Dreams has always been one of my favorite pieces, but I've always felt like my idea was better than I could write it. It started out as a piano work before Carlyle suggested that it could be a percussion ensemble. So it became a percussion ensemble, when my percussion chops weren't quite what they are today. When I started my master's degree, I worked on it with Marvin and it tripled in length. A few years later I decided that it should become a wind ensemble piece, and thanks to Roland, it did. But the percussion writing was still…not quite right, mostly due to its size. For a four minute piece, it used six percussionists (and timpani). The Symphony uses six percussionists too, but it's nine times longer and the percussionists play actual percussion parts instead of just one instrument.
So over the past week, I consolidated the percussion into three parts (plus timp.), and so here's the (new) final rendering:
In the process of consolidating the percussion parts, the non-pitched percussion was mapped onto a piano stave, which created this delightful dissonance, which I quickly exported and renamed “Pipe Nightmare”.
