Description
ORIGINAL WORK: Funk Loops II, by the Scottish composer and percussionist Cameron Sinclair, was commissioned by Lisa Portus in 1989 and given its première at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in June of that year. The piece uses many of the same musical procedures as Sinclair’s earlier work, Funk Loops I for 3 marimbas & vibraphone: a gradual building of syncopated lines, briefly forming shifting canons before morphing into the next interlocking pattern. Like its forerunner, Funk Loops II is inspired by musical procedures found in African drumming and the medieval device of hocketing. Influenced by the austere minimalism of Steve Reich, it plays out its musical material over a much shorter time frame than Reich’s slow processes, lasting eight and a half minutes.
As played by Laurence Perkins in his UK-wide Autumn tour, 2015 – Bassoon Voyager.
Performance notes:
In live performance the players should be arranged in a semicircle starting from the left (as viewed from the audience) with player 1, then 3, 6, 5, 4 and 2 (at the front right hand side). If performed solo with backing track, the performer should record parts 2 – 6 and play part 1 live. The backing tracks should be played through a pair of stereo speakers and the performer’s live sound mic’d up and fed through the mix. It may also be desirable for the performer to have a foldback monitor speaker.
Funk Loops II is an outstanding work very much influenced by the austere minimalism of Steve Reich. This is a fabulous piece that I was honoured to have premiered. Here it is published it for the very first time.
