Long Exposure (2020)

Long Exposure was composed during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and was the result of a consortium led by Steve Weiss Music, commissioned by 43 percussionists around the world. Due to the unique circumstances of the time, the two composers worked together remotely, through the use of video and audio software.

The title comes from a photography technique called "long exposure,” which uses long duration shutter speeds to catch the “blur” of quick moving objects. This method inspired the use of the switch in our work (a thin rattan/bamboo rod) - similar to the common practice of writing in the air with a sparkler on the 4th of July. 

The entire piece is structured around an 8-bar repeated phrase (3/4, 5/8, 3/4, 4/4, 3/4, 5/8, 3/4,10/8). While the work never strays from this cyclical timeline, there are many instances throughout that purposefully obscure the musical formula.  Beginning in complete unison with body percussion, the piece continues to develop until arriving at the main theme at letter G (heard in the switch part). At this point, for the first time in the work, the players begin to separate while maintaining the unison switch pattern. Seemingly a mistake at first, a glitch in the system, the variance eventually infiltrates the entire previous pattern until the zabumba enters and re-establishes the main theme, now split amongst the two players. As the zabumba music evolves into a rhythmically intricate texture, a canonic section emerges, ultimately resolving back to the main theme in prime form. Now the players have added pitched handbells to the body percussion material. The handbells eventually become the zabumba mallet, creating multiple layers between the pitch of the bell, the batter head, and the resonant head of the drum before culminating in a short presentation of the original theme to close out the piece.