para-parakeet (2023) percussion quartet · 7 minutes · advanced
para-parakeet was written for the University of Texas Percussion Ensemble, and premiered by Rubén Acuña González, Ethan Hall, Dan Hartung, and Caroline Richards.
You will be emailed a PDF file of the score and parts within 24 hours of your purchase, which can be printed from any computer.
- Player 1 - Glockenspiel (with pedal if available), body percussion
- Player 2 - Vibraphone, snare drum, body percussion
- Player 3 - Marimba (5.0 octave, shared with Player 1 and 4), crotales (2 octaves), body percussion
- Player 4 - Drum set (crash, hi-hat, ride, kick, snare), tuned pipes (Db4, E4, F4, Ab4, Bb4, C5, Eb5), body percussion
A few days into my freshman year of college, I inexplicably decided to walk in a random cardinal direction in order to explore this fun new city that I had moved to. So, I walked south. For two hours.
Sometime into "walking south", I was exhausted. I ran out of water. My phone was running out of battery. I was starting to get lost. I was probably not doing this whole "being an adult" thing correctly.
I look up. There are a dozen bright green parakeets in the middle of a city.
I calmly hoped I wasn’t hallucinating.
para-parakeet was written about a strange unexpected encounter with parakeets. The title comes from prepending the prefix "para-" to the word parakeet.
This new word—para-parakeet—feels very silly to me. It reminds me of the reduplication commonly found in the Mandarin Chinese language, where names are repeated as a diminutive. It also reminds me of similar drumspeak, e.g. "para-paradiddle". It’s a very silly name.
I make mistakes. I tend to make a lot of them. Most of them are a varying degree of seriousness, from "temporary embarrassment" to "probably could have died there" to "oh crap, I am a bad person". It's pretty easy for me to end up paralyzed at the thought of the stuff I've done wrong. Even the little things.
I can’t keep doing that. I can’t keep ruminating over my entire life every time I mess up something. I have to remember that mistakes are part of my journey—that I always learn something from messing up.
I have to remember the parakeets.
Musically, para-parakeet takes inspiration from math rock, jazz fusion, video game boss themes, and the contemporary percussion repertoire.
The body percussion draws upon the use of layered body percussion in pop music.
Much of the piece, rhythmically, is centered around the number eleven, and how it interplays on top of a regular bar of 4/4.