Although the music of Thunder Drum's outer movements are reminiscent of 19th century Western European music and more recent epic film soundtracks, the underlying theme is informed by a vision of human prehistory expounded by the American mystic Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) related to the shifting fortunes of what has been traditionally known as the "red race", the native inhabitants of the north and central regions of the American continent. A great and lasting influence in my thinking and artistic imagination, Edgar Cayce had mentioned in several of his trance utterances that the antediluvian world we know through legend as "Atlantis" was an advanced civilization dominated by the "red race", which had reached knowledge and technological heights comparable to our own. It fell spectacularly, having pushed its unquenchable thirst for ever increasing energy and power to ecological havoc, as our current civilization too is in danger of reaching with an exponentially increasing likelihood.
The first movement, Elegy for a Lost World, is a musical meditation on this loss, which is traumatically felt by our collective psyche as deep-seated memory, in spite of the absence of any external evidence for the existence and loss of such an advanced civilization in our collective past. Beginning and developing along 19th century European common harmonic and melodic practice (another vanishing world), the music is a vague reminiscence of a two-theme classical sonata form. The melodic/harmonic discourse is gradually overtaken by denser chromaticism and accompanying musical tension, exacerbated by the technological "fly by" sound effects of the playback audio which are becoming ever more prominent.
Games, the second movement, is a great leap to the present moment. The industrial-like "quantized" loops in the playback audio, with their unexpected twists and turns, are combined with pre-recorded samples of Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq. This sonic background constantly challenges an agile orchestra to technically rise to its unpredictable rhythmic demands, a task increasingly frustrated by metric modulations and other devices of rhythmic complexity.
Without any pause, Reconstitution, the third movement, begins quietly with a timid thematic development of the aggressive modal gestures that concluded the previous movement. The music once more picks up pace and energy and, this time around, it ends in an epic, triumphant but also hollow ending with the opening theme of Thunder Drum modulating to an altered major-like mode. In the aftermath of this triumphant conclusion, however, the two modes, the major and the minor are constantly alternating, suggesting an ambivalence and incompleteness that needs to be meditated upon in a future compositional essay.
Thunder Drum is a sumptuous, complex orchestral work…the electronic, technical tones that appear in short bursts or waves cause the music to take on a three-dimensional complexity that was marvelous to hear. The closing movement utilized all the colours of the orchestra, but rather than ending with a resounding crescendo, the work ends delicately, sweetly, ambivalently. This is a wonderful new work that I expect will find its way into the repertoire of many Canadian orchestras.
