Burritt-MAG7: Rhapsody No. 1 (SP)-2B/2V/Cro./2M/P

MAG7: Rhapsody No. 1 was written in the summer of 2017 and dedicated to my seven graduate students (The Magnificent Seven) who so brilliantly brought my new opus to life. The piece opens with a solo "riff" on marimba that serves as the seed for entire work. The rhythmic and metric development play with the quintuplet, first introduced in the opening section, as a tool for polyrhythmic hemiola and metric modulation. This is fully realized in the center of the work as the entire ensemble is playing varying layers in multiples of 5 tethered to a 5/4 meter. Like most of my music, MAG7 is a melting pot of genres and artistic influences coalescing in a pseudo-rhapsodic form.
-Michael J. Burritt

Number of players: 7
Difficulty: Advanced

Instrumentation

Player 1: Marimba (5 octave) shared w/Player 2, 2 small concert toms
Player 2: Marimba (5 octave) shared w/Player 1, 2 large concert toms, cajon
Player 3: Marimba (5 octave) shared w/Player 4, 2 medium concert toms
Player 4: Marimba (5 octave) shared w/Player 3, concert bass drum, 2 large concert toms, 2 caxixi, glockenspiel with pedal
Player 5: Vibraphone, crotales, bongos
Player 6: Vibraphone, crotales, congas
Player 7: Djembe, small bass drum, mounted tom tom, hi hat, ribbon crasher, glockenspiel with pedal, sizzle cymbal, China cymbal, tam tam