Word: timpani
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Chicago's Ravinia Park music festival looked like an Eastern bazaar. Strewn around the stage one evening last week were 47 pieces of Western and Ori ental hardware: four full-grown timpani, four little timpani, three barrel drums, nine objects that resembled brass flower pots (they were Buddhist prayer bells), an array of bamboo, glass and wooden utensils, and lots and lots of gongs...
Boos and Bravos. Penderecki scored the opera for an 80-voice chorus and a massive orchestra: 32 woodwind and brass instruments, 42 strings, an organ, harmonium, electric bass guitar and a diverse array of percussion instruments, including timpani and musical saw. Though it produces the now familiar range of Penderecki sound-semi-tones and quarter tones, tone clusters, glissandi and primitive knocking noises-the orchestra plays a secondary role to the chorus, which is constantly busy humming, singing neo-Gregorian chant, screaming, laughing, muttering and yelping...
...lithe figure moves barefoot through the semidarkness of a candlelit hall, stroking an outlandish array of gongs, cymbals, chimes and timpani. Amid the swelling percussion, a bamboo flute emits a low plaint. Sound ebbs and flows, rising to a crescendo, then dwindling to mystic silence...
...that of the audience, Tree is apt to walk down an aisle, rhythmically striking a gong or gently shaking a pair of copper baby rattles from Japan. Onstage, he may build a sonorous tremolo of several gongs, mixing in a tinkling of glass chimes or a booming thunderclap of timpani. At times he pauses, changes mood, and elicits long, random notes from a homemade North African-style flute or dramatically raises a six-foot Tibetan temple horn and blows a resounding blast. The concert is over when Tree feels it should end, sometimes after 45 minutes, sometimes after an hour...
...structural logic. During his Philharmonic stay, he attracted a younger, more intellectual audience than usual. Even the hard-to-please orchestra was impressed with his mentality and uncanny ear. "He's probably got the greatest musical ear in the world," says Saul Goodman, who has been playing timpani for the orchestra since the Mengelberg days of the late 1920s...