To ShowThem

SCORE
Artists/Composer Mena Williams  
Duration: ~ 5mins
 
To Show Them is based on Composer Steve Reich's 1966 piece Come Out. Reich's piece is a sound collage of edited tape footage from the Harlem Six; the Harlem Six were six black youths who were arrested for the murder of Margit Sugar, a Hungarian refugee, in Harlem in the weeks following the Little Fruit Stand Riot of 1964. From the 70 hours of tapes, Civil Rights Activist Truman Nelson presented to Steve Reich, Reich only used four seconds, using the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the boys involved in the riots, but not responsible for the murder. At the beginning of Reich's piece, Hamm says, "I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them." (Alluding to how Hamm had punctured a bruise on his body to convince police that he had been beaten while in jail.) Within Reich's piece, the full statement is repeated once; Reich then re-recorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which at first play in unison, then gradually slip out of sync to produce a phase shifting effect; the listener is only left with the rhythmic and tonal patterns of the spoken words. To Show Them is the product of my coming into contact with the question, can Steve Reich's electronic piece, Come Out, be considered music? I decided to test the theory by taking the rhythm from the loop "come out to show them," then adding a melodic line of my own over the rhythmic ostinato. While composing To Show Them, the virtuosic melody took on a jazz-like form. Starting out with a simple melodic line that starts with the second clarinet, soon evolving into a chaotic call and response between six woodwind instruments, with the ostinato still going strong in the background.
Arrangement Format Woodwind Ensemble
Instruments: Clarinet, Alto Sax, Tenor Sax, Bass Clarinet, Baritone Sax
Difficulty Advanced 
Genres 21st Century, Chamber, Classical, Contemporary, Jazz