Gwyn Pritchard: Earthcrust
percussion sextet (1980)

This piece is so named. as its structure is, like the surface of the Earth, made up of superimposed layers. Each of these musical layers is clearly audible at its first appearance and each is characterised by a specific instrumentation which remains unchanged throughout the piece. In order of appearance they are as follows:
     1)  Tom-toms, Bongos, Xylophones and Marimba
     2) Latin-American drums, Gongs and piano (played, on its strings, not the keys)
     3)  Vibraphone, Glockenspiels, and Maracas
     4) Wood blocks, Temple blocks and Cymbals 

By means of a highly complex structure, these basic ideas are continually emerging and then disappearing again - giving rise to ever changing combinations of material. The overall effect is not unlike that of a landscape in which sections, of rock strata have been eroded away leaving a lower layer of rock exposed.

About half way through the piece all four of the layers stop abruptly together – like a great geological fault. At this moment a new, fifth, idea is revealed - scored for tuned Cowbells, tuned Gongs (Burmese) and bowed Cymbals. (When this material reappears  at the very end of the work it also includes Hand Bells.) Throughout the second half of the piece the same basic material is represented in a kind of distorted mirror of the first half.  The instrumentation of each idea is slightly enlarged (for example the unpitched Wood and Temple Block group now includes pitched Slit drums) and the material itself is transformed in response to the new combinations of the basic ideas that arise.

Earthcrust  was composed in 1980 and is dedicated to Hubert Rutkowski (who had played in my piece Nephalauxis  in the 1979 Warsaw Autumn Festival) and the Warsaw Percussion Group. It was first performed in New York in 1982.

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