Bagatelle

The main theme from Bagatelle was originally written by Gloria Roy for the piano. Before her junior recital in the Spring of 2018, Gloria asked me if I would be willing to arrange her melody for alto flute, cello, and marimba. She premiered the piece along with two of her peers a few months later.

The piece begins with a slow statement of the theme from the alto flute, with the cello accompanying on a light pizzicato and the marimba coming with occasional tremolos. This sets a scene of mystery, and the instrumentation gives one a feeling of being lost — although not necessarily unhappily lost — in the woods. This opening section flows into a faster, metrically unstable section that is more focused on rhythms than on any melodic material. The theme is passed around to all the instruments and altered slightly in both rhythm and pitch.

For the most part, the development of Bagatelle is more of a continuous upwards slope than a true arc. From its tentative beginning, it grows progressively into a joyous conclusion. While I’m happy with the musical ideas in the piece and excited about how they developed, I think this piece exhibits some of my weaknesses as a composer, particularly when it comes to writing logical parts for these specific instruments. If you look at the score, you’ll notice there are no bow markings in the cello part. Of course, there should be. For the last few years, however, I’ve intentionally left string bow markings out of my scores for the most part, and have worked with the performers throughout the rehearsal process to determine the most logical bowings. Additionally, the marimba part had some extremely illogical passages, where the player would have to twist in all sorts of ways to avoid hitting his sticks together.

The rehearsal process for Bagatelle was probably the most fulfilling and enriching of all the pieces from my recital. With two freshmen and a sophomore as my trio, I had a very young group with minimal experience in playing college-level ensemble music. This not only presented several challenges, it presented challenges I was not well-equipped to solve. I can take little to no credit for the final performance of this piece, which was nothing short of excellent.

Lauren had some difficulty learning certain passages in the alto flute part, but after a great deal of practice and drilling, she smoothed out the wrinkles and gave an exceptional performance. It was an extremely difficult part (and probably not well-written), with some extended techniques and erratic patterns. Since I wrote Bagatelle for Gloria to play on her recital, I intentionally made the alto flute part challenging so she could show off a bit. And Lauren handled it like a champ.

Trenton did not have much difficulty on the marimba, as it wasn’t a particularly difficult part. The biggest issues in that area were simply the revising of the marimba part to make it more idiomatic and logical for the player, a process which Trenton made very easy and painless.

And then there was Donny… I can’t say enough about Donny’s preparation (though I’ll say some here and more in a couple weeks). The cello score is… absurdly difficult — especially for a college freshman. The part goes as high as an F5 (nearly an octave and a half above middle C), includes some stacked chords, and ends with furious arpeggios that the performer is supposed to play almost flippantly. Donny nailed all of it. I don’t want to take away from the other performers and their preparation, but it is a simple fact that Donny’s part required him to put an enormous amount of time into this piece, and he did it with minimal grumbling.

from Donny Snyder, cello:

Bagatelle was an interesting piece to me. Challenging and beautiful, it brought three very different instruments together: the alto flute, the marimba, and the cello. When Smith sent me the music, I thought that he had calmed down since there were not as many fast notes in the piece.

I was a fool. Smith had not calmed down.

When I sat down to practice Bagatelle, I quickly realized how important counting was going to be, since a different time signature was used in basically every other measure. And then there was the end. Smith had graciously given the cello sextuplet arpeggiating runs in the beautiful and convenient key of C# major. One day, he stopped by to listen to me practicing this monster he made and I talked to him about the runs. He quietly got up, shrugged his shoulders and said “sorry bud”. After kindly crushing my hopes, he decided to do something devious. He told me that the last time this was played, the cellist asked for a simplified version of the runs. He lit a fire under me to push myself beyond what I thought I could do because he knew I am competitive. Last year, Smith pushed me past what I thought I could do. He encouraged me, mentored me, and even let me bully him a little. I am so thankful that he gave me the opportunity to play his pieces!

If you’d like to purchase the score and/or audio for Bagatelle, please contact me for rates.