Twilight Offering Music

Second place winner in the 1988 PAS Percussion Ensemble Composition Contest, Twilight Offering Music incorporates multiple keyboard instruments and a full battery of other percussion instruments. This twenty-eight minute major work will challenge all twelve players.

Program Notes

Twilight Offering Music is an impression for percussion ensemble, an evocation that traverses some two million years into our past. It recalls that monumental epoch when humankind first emerged from the depths of the evolutionary chain and looked upon the earth and sky with a mind that for the first time was able to wonder. This music is at once poignant and forceful; at times, contemplative, and at others, ritualistic; constantly bordering between undulating calm and volatile spontaneity. It does not attempt to draw from or expound upon any documented fragment of primitive music. Instead, Twilight Offering Music strives to recreate the awe, confusion and wonder that these primordial ancestors must have experienced as they stood below the night sky and looked to the celestial bodies above. Out of fear, or perhaps, simply out of desperation, they would soon have begun to regard them conscious and superior entities and would have ultimately surrendered to them sacrifices of appeasement-an event that would serve as the very dawn of the religous thought to permeate the ideologies of the human race for the entirety of its existence.
- Notes by the composer

Twilight Offering Music was premiered April 21, 1987, in Norman, Oklahoma, by the University of Oklahoma Percussion Ensemble, Dr. Richard C. Gipson conducting.

This work is the recipient of 2nd Prize in the 1988 Percussive Arts Society Composition Competition.

About the OU Percussion Press
In 1977 the OU Percussion Orchestra and Ensemble embarked on a project that developed into a national model for the encouragement and development of new music for percussion ensemble. The OU Percussion Ensemble Commissioning Series regularly engages outstanding composers to write works for this medium. The Commissioning Series is responsible for the creation of some of today`s staples in the percussion ensemble repertoire.

In 1983 the University of Oklahoma funded the establishment of the OU Percussion Press, a non-profit extension of the percussion area. Through the Percussion Press, the commissioning series compositions plus other works expressly written for the OU Percussion Orchestra and Ensembles have been made available for purchase and performance by the world`s leading percussion ensembles. The Percussion Press` catalog numbers more than 50 works, all published in a non-profit venture as a service to the profession.

Grade Level: 5
Copyright: 1991
Number of Players: 12
Duration: 28:00

Listen to Recordings

Instrumentation

Percussion 1 (4.3-octave marimba)
Percussion 2 (4.3-octave marimba)
Percussion 3 (4.3-octave marimba)
Percussion 4 (4.3-octave marimba)
Percussion 5 (5-octave marimba)
Percussion 6 (vibraphone, maracas)
Percussion 7 (vibraphone, temple blocks, log drum)
Percussion 8 (xylophone, bongos)
Percussion 9 (chimes, , orchestra bells, Chinese cymbal, temple blocks, 2 suspended cymbals, triangle, 3 gongs, timbales)
Percussion 10 (bongos, 2 congas)
Percussion 11 (3 bass drums, 4 concert toms)
Percussion 12 (timpani, claves, snare drum, 4 cowbells)