Glockenspiel Pieces

This post lists the compositions I've listened to which feature glockenspiel. I was surprised at the lack of
solo pieces for the instrument (more about that below), also true for solo works with accompaniment.
This is why the list mostly includes the pieces written for glockenspiel within an
ensembles/chamber/orchestra.

Solo Glockenspiel

Ive searched quite some time for solo glockenspiel pieces, however, I could barely find any. Most of
these were commissions made by those, who wanted to expand the repertoire, such as Sylvia Smith and
Brett Dietz. Scott Steele mentioned in this post that Dietz wrote an article for Percussive Notes, where
he recognized that many composers and performers prefer marimba and vibraphone for extended solo
works. Unfortunately, I am unable to get a copy of the Percussive Notes, but this volume, and the paper
in general, is definitely on my future reading list.

The reason why many prefer marimba and vibraphone may be because of the glockenspiels special
high-pitched sound, which makes it sound cerebral and esoteric. But as Dietz wrote on his website,
what is wrong with that?

The first collection Ive found was Summit (published 2007), consisting of eleven pieces for glockenspiel
by different composers, commissioned by Sylvia Smith. Dietzs website, which I included above, has all
the recordings, to which he added several more pieces, which he in turn commissioned. You can also
find the Dietz own performance of the pieces on his youtube channel here. Unfortunately, since I found
very little notatio, I may not be able to provide a deeper understanding for some of them, and the short
analysis which I include in my impressions may depend on other sources.

Roscoe Mitchell - Bells for New Orleans

Douglass in his doctoral dissertation described this piece as a tone poem. While this is usually reserved
for large orchestral works, such as Strauss's Don Juan and Liszt's Prometheus, Mitchell wanted to use
glockenspiel to tell the story of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans:

The instrument provided me with a platform to convey the feelings I had; I knew some of the people
who were affected. (Mitchell, 2015)

Douglass divides it into five parts, all of them moving from carastrophic chaos to mournful order. Two
intervals occur very interestingly - the minor second with tremolo serves to convey a sense of pain,
while tritone the feeling of somberness. Beside the texture created by syncopation and tuplets, what I
found particularly fascinating is the simultaneous ringing of the pitches in a few places to convey bells
ringing throughout the city. This is especially in the last part of the piece, where the ringing conveys "an
unresolved but acquiescent state of mind."

Will Ogdon - A Little Suite and an Encore Tango

As Douglass points out, this piece demonstrates glockenspiel's abilities to "... create
primary melodic lines (musical foreground) and secondary
accompaniment lines (musical background)," resulting in an interesting
homophonic texture. From the excerpts given by Douglass, what illustrates the
homophony further is the two-stave notation.

The piece consists of four miniature movements. The first, Night Song starts off really
sweetly, in a style reminiscent of the lullaby. Soon though, harmonic shifts in the
background become apparent, as if painting the mysteries of night. I especially liked the
interaction between these two different musical images and the use of roll and tremolo.
Second movement is A Quiet Midnight, continuing the mysteries of the first movement.
Especially interesting is that the two staves have separated dynamics, making the
homophonic texture even more layered. Indeed, it sounds to me as if several parts are
playing. Sylvia Smith, who commission the pieces for the Summit wrote about this
piece:

It is tricky because he has markings where you have a crescendo in a

place where you dont strike. So you have to really think about, as a
player, how youre going to do that. I ended up thinking it and imagining
singing it and it seemed to come out closer to what he wanted.

In the third movement, Morning Bells, we find double-stop octaves, which further
develop the idea of homophonic sound. I love that being morning now, the music goes
back to the sweetness which we've encountered in the first movement. The final
movement is An Encore Tango. It is different from the rest of the movements, because
all the music is in the foreground. The rhythmic is the syncopated Habanera of the
Argentinian tango and its variation. As Douglass writes: "...it sounds like a
rhythmic, mechanical music box that has just been wound to full capacity
and turned on." The piece ends with disintegrating the rhythm: "...similar to the
way a mechanical music box would slow down as the tension in the
winding mechanism is gradually released."

Honestly, before this piece, I would have wondered if voice-layering would be possible
to produce on an instrument such as glockenspiel. Now I have no doubt.

This piece, which describes a tragic story of a hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, really showed me
glockenspiel's capabilities of being an expressive solo instrument, which as we've seen above, is usually
unnoticed by many.
Glockenspiel in Chamber music

Morton Feldman - Why Patterns? (1978)

This piece is written for glockenspiel, flute and piano. Keillor writes that the piece is inspired by
Feldman's passion for abstract expressionist art, as well as the antique Middle Eastern rugs patterns:

"The master rug weavers, to Feldman's eye, laid out a set of patterns to be woven concurrently, with no
pattern holding precedence over another. They coexist in the final product, running their course on the
rug with separate rates of recurrence. Why Patterns? follows the same procedure. Each instrument has
a separate rhythm, and the instruments are never synchronized until the final bars. They each follow
their own logic."

Feldman himself said about the piece:

"The work is notated separately for each instrument and does not coordinate until the last few minutes
of the composition. This close, but never precisely synchronized notation allows for a more flexible
pacing of three very distinct colors. Material given to each instrument is idiomatically not
interchangeable with that for the other instruments. Some of the patterns repeat exactly others with
slight variations either in their shape or rhythmic placement. At times a series of different patterns are
linked together on a chain and then juxtaposed by simple means."

We also see this in notation - each instrument has its own time signature. Generally, the idea of using all
of these elements in music was completely new to me. Anyway, I especially enjoyed the coloring by
glockenspiel, first in quadruple stops and double stop, then sixteenth notes, and finally the descending
chromatic ending. The way this was coupled with piano and flute was lovely.

I should also mention that Feldman was aware of the special treatment of the glockenspiel in this
composition, something quite rare at the time:

"I didnt have to be ashamed to make a lady, so to speak, out of the glockenspiel. [Why Patterns?] is
the only piece I know of that treats the glockenspiel as a very serious instrument. It was a big
psychological decision it wasnt a choice of a novelty."

Stuart Saunders Smith - Over

Another composition for solo glockenspiel by Smith. I was pleasantly surprised by this
one, since it demonstrates the glockenspiel's ability to create polyphony, written in two
staves. As Douglass (2016: 48) points out, the cantus firmus of the piece is the famous
melody of Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz (1939), on which Smith creates a
contrapuntal improvisation. In the beginning part, the melody is alluded to directly,
while later in the piece the melodic fragments are very much hidden by all the
improvisational techniques.

Much like the homophonic capabilities of glockenspiel, I was also unaware of its
polyphonic property, which is why this piece was another important eye-opener for me.
The author's comment was also something I really liked:

"And the piece, like a lot of my pieces, has a subtext: what does mortality
mean? The word over is to be used a number of different ways, as well as
the song Over the Rainbow. What is gonna happen to us once were
over? Is there a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (chuckles) or is it just
simply over? We dont know. So the piece should be played as an elegy."
(Douglass, 2016: 59)

Marta Ptaszynska - Katarynka

This one was my absolute favorite! I was a bit puzzled by the title, only to learn that
katarynka is the Polish name for barrel organ (Fig. 1), a small mechanical organ in
which a barrel with pins or staples is made to rootate by a hand crank, engaging the
individual pipes to create sound. (The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2003: 87)

Fig. 1. Katarynka or barrel organ

The piece imitates this instrument wonderfully, not only in the timbre created by a
range of techniques, but also by the way sections interact in tempo, specifically through
the slow-fast-slow pattern of the sections, and accelerando and ritardando - just like
when you turn the handle of katarynka. In the interview with Douglass (2016: 30),
Marta called this whirling. She was even so imaginative as to include the following effect
in the piece:

When you stop turning the handle, it starts to produce the same sound
until you start around again. You have to move the handle very smoothly
and after a couple of times around the katarynka starts to produce the
round sound. Otherwise, its just got a crackling sound. (Douglass, 2016: 33)

Besides this, what left a really strong impression upon me were the tonalities employed,
such as the whole-tone scale, and there are even interesting instances of bitonality.
Despite not having a score to truly appreciate this composition, I was truly mesmerized
by all the sonorities and the colorful texture Marta's piece pulled me into. Simply
enchanting!