Delta
Chris Becker
About this work:
Commissioned by Dan Sumner and The Bloomington Classical Guitar Society. Funded in part by the American Music Center’s Composer Assistance Program.
Year composed: 2009
Duration: 11:00:40
Ensemble type: Solo instrument, non-keyboard:Guitar (Classical/Acoustic)
Instrumentation:
Instrumentation notes: Classical Guitar (the last of movement of this three movement work utilizes a CD recording of crickets made by the composer).
You can define a delta as a fractal maze of waterways that appear where a river meets an ocean. This description of a delta in Romania: "An incredible marshland, a tangled amphibious world, with floating islands of vegetation, muddy forests, fever-infested swamps and, living in this hostile environment, where wildlife thrives, a few wretched fishermen…” appears in Ned Sublette's remarkable recent book The World That Made New Orleans and could easily describe South Louisiana’s fast diminishing wetlands. A delta is a place where it is hard if not impossible to tell where the land ends and the sea begins. The unique natural environment of a delta has inspired the harmonies and rhythms of my piece.
Delta consists of three movements: a slow free associative introductory movement that explores triads generated from a two bar melody (appearing in the bass) and its harmonic relationship to the triads, a second rock influenced movement in 5/4, and a mysterious third movement where chords informed by rural blues are accompanied by a thick prerecorded texture of cicadas and crickets. (I recorded the crickets in August 2008 at midnight along Tangipahoa River in Southeast Louisiana).
One of my goals with this piece is to evoke the ever changing physical characteristics of a lake, a river, and a swamp. The moving roots of the first movement, the constant changing of key in the second, and the tension between musical and environmental rhythms in the third, all evoke the experience of being in a delta as well as the experience of being displaced from such an environment – perhaps as a result of conditions beyond one's control.
I've posted an mp3 and score for Delta's third movement.