First Performance
January 1987 St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
Leonard Slatkin, conductor
St. Louis, MO
Instrumentation
3.2.3.3. 4.3.3.1. timp 3 perc hrp strings
Duration
12'30"
Listen
Program Notes
After the success of his orchestral piece Infrared Only (1985), Ince decided to write a companion piece to it, calling the entire work Infrared. He thought of the companion piece as a piece that would slowly bring us to the energy level of Infrared Only. Before Infrared is to be played first when played as a set. Either work can also be performed alone. Before Infrared is a piece that travels, somewhat making the composer think of what space travel must be like. It starts slow with almost unintelligible slow harmonic shifts. The tempo slowly starts to pick up, with some lyrical lines starting to show themselves. Eventually after a take-off the music becomes very fast. The various destinations are marked as Destination 1, Destination 2, etc.. At times it may feel like a fast train travel, even with seeing passengers faces, like a broken video, in a train that is traveling the opposite way. There is at last the Final Destination where there is a feeling of a final arrival. The work ends with Remembering the Past, where the music reminisces about where we came from, slowly dissolving into silence.
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