The LAPQ's Repertoire (from 2009) click on a title for more information
John Luther Adams - Always Very Soft Mark Applebaum - Catfish John Cage - Third Construction Bob Clendenen - The next three miles... Steve Forman - Sloop Dreams(r) Steve Forman - Three Chances(r) Eric Guinivan - Ritual Dances(c,p,r) Sean Heim - Rūpa-khandha (c,p) Jeffrey Holmes - Occasus(c,p) Jeffrey Holmes - Rays of Twilight David Johnson - Quartz City David Johnson - The Oregon Variations Bruno Louchouarn - Alcances (p) Istvan Marta - A Doll House Story Alex Miller - Disappearance (c,p) Shaun Naidoo - Bad Times Coming Joseph Pereira - Repoussé Ben Phelps - Year of Solitary Thinking...(in Metal) (c,p) Gerald Strang - Music for Percussion James Tenney - Three Pieces for Drum Quartet Iannis Xenakis - OKHO
c - LAPQ Commission p - World Premiere r - Recorded by LAPQ
This incarnation of Bad Times Coming (for piano and percussion quintet) was completed early in 1998, and is preceded by a version for piano and electronics.
Writing about the original version the composer notes the following:
Bad Times Coming uses the factory presets on a Roland JV1080 synthesizer module as the basis for the tape part. The mainly percussive sounds were selected largely for their referential quality - often evoking echoes of B- movie scores, cabaret and rock music. These sounds, in combination with a frequently adversarial piano part explore in the first two sections the juxtaposition of violence and ironic humor - B- movie/video game violence in the first part and random "pastiche" violence near the end of the second part. The humor disappears in the final section, and although the piano seems to win the game, the victory is quiet, dark and enigmatic. While the revised version loses the referential quality described above, it retains the rhetorical thrust of the original, and adds the dimension of human interaction.
Bad Times Coming was written for Vicki Ray and is dedicated to the memory of maverick South African rock star James Phillips.