Rube Goldberg Variations

Instrumentation: tuba-euphonium quartet

Duration: 9′

Program note:

In this work, I desire to seek out connections between functional characteristics of the Bach sound world in which the music dwells and a more immediate, primitive quality of sounds as building blocks from which familiar musical rhetoric may (but not by necessity) develop. A vacillation between the familiar and unfamiliar takes place. The piece has “abstract” sections interspersed with fragments of the Goldberg Variations — like one of those Rube Goldberg machines that has a chain reaction of events that trigger other events (a domino effect kind of thing).