Ten Tides

About this piece

A single-movement piece for six cellos, about ten and a half minutes long, written in July 2024 to mark the composer's tenth wedding anniversary and dedicated to Sarah Marie McNeal. In his note, Bromberg says he wrote ten chords, one for each year of the marriage, and the piece cycles through them again and again like a passacaglia. It grows through changes of density rather than melody. The score is marked 'Fluid, without an overly defined feeling of pulse' (crotchet = ca. 70), and all six parts move between low and high registers in soft, sustained textures with frequent changes of meter. The recording on the composer's label credits Bromberg with all of the cello parts.

Technical overview

Mostly slow, sustained playing at soft dynamics, with long crescendos and diminuendos in all six parts; the upper parts hold high notes in treble clef, every part shifts between bass, tenor and treble ranges, and the players have to keep quintuplets and triplets together through bars that change between 5/4, 4/4, 3/4 and 2/4.

Technical focus

• Ensemble Skills
• Sustain
• Meter Changes
• Hairpin Dynamics
• Dynamics
• Shifting
• Rhythm
• Tempo Changes
• Accidentals