Prairie Sky
- Instrumentation
- Cello, Other
- Composed
- 2013
- Duration
- 8'
- Publisher
- Canadian Music Centre (unpublished, printed by CMC)
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About this piece
Prairie Sky is a concertante work for solo cello and concert band, written in 2013 for conductor Wendy McCallum and cellist Leanne Zacharias, and commissioned by McCallum and the Brandon University Symphonic Band. Zacharias, McCallum and the band gave the premiere on 27 April 2013 at the Whistler Conference Centre in British Columbia. The amplified cello opens alone with a quiet, sliding line marked 'glissando between notes', and the band enters around it. It is one of the few cello-and-band works by an Indigenous composer, and one of the few with a public perusal score.
Technical overview
About 8 minutes for amplified solo cello and concert band, opening at crotchet = 76 with a quiet line of double-dotted figures joined by glissandi, in a flat-heavy chromatic language. Later sections set the cello in treble clef for triplet double stops and in long passages of accented sixteenth-note double and triple stops. There are also trilled and tremolo double stops, frequent changes between 4/4, 3/4, 2/4 and 3/2, and dynamics from p to f.
Technical focus
- Double Stops
- Shifting
- Dotted Rhythms
- Meter Changes
- Accidentals
- Hairpin Dynamics
- Dynamics
- Ensemble Skills