Sagittarius Beat (UPDATED)
Sagittarius follows Scorpio, a movement built upon glissandi. When Sagittarius begins, the downward glissando figure is segmented into discreet pitches with a decidedly swinging rhythm. It definitely felt to me that a jazz-leaning Hip-Hop beat would hit the mark here. After establishing a drum sound and pattern that followed the metrical changes of the written melody, then extracting a bass line (bass-register marimba) from the accompaniment, I just started vibing with it and matching selected samples to the central C-sharp. I drop some samples from a gu zheng improvisation by Du Yun, and a single tone from the 1968 Soviet Armenian film “The Color of Pomegranites” by Sergei Parajanov. I like the bending string sound of the gu zheng, which I relate to the pulling back of the string on the bow of the archer Sagittarius. In the live performance, I am imagining Brian and I playing fragments of the melody on 2 toy pianos. We’ll have to figure out how to transition into Brian’s starkly spectral, multiphonic chorale that begins Capricorn.
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