Beneath Ice and Snow

World Premier of Beneath Ice and Snow by the UNL Wind Ensemble

Preview Score

Program Notes: The piece starts above sea level with an unaccompanied flute solo, representing the vastness and

seeming emptiness of the arctic tundra. This is also represented by the intermittent pauses in the flute solo.

There is a brief pause before the piano and percussion come in to represent the epipelagic zone. This part of

the ocean is more colorful and supports a very strange and diverse ecosystem. I tried to capture the

atmosphere and complexity of this zone through both the harmonies in the mallet percussion and piano and

the polyrhythmic material to make both the tonal center and the pulse more ambiguous. I tried representing

the growing complexity of the ecosystem by having some of the woodwinds enter to create a new texture

leading to a trumpet solo that transitions to the entire band playing.

As the piece progresses, the depicted environment becomes deeper and murkier due to the decreasing

sunlight in each zone. One of the ways that I tried to express this was by gradually transitioning the melodies

into the lower voices in the band. I also decided to make the intervals within the harmonies closer together as

the piece progresses to convey the increasing water pressure as the zones descend. The mesopelagic zone

features the melody in a wider range of voices. There are still melodic lines in the higher woodwinds.

However, a lot of the middle and lower voices tend to be driving the main melodic content in this section. I

used the glockenspiel in this piece mainly to represent light. In the mesopelagic zone, the glockenspiel and

the high material in the right hand of the piano are used to represent sunlight. However, in the bathypelagic

zone, they are used to represent bioluminescence because the light of the sun is essentially nonexistent at

that depth.

In the bathypelagic zone, I tend to keep the melody in the saxes, horns, euphonium, and tuba. I also

utilize several glissandos in the trombones to create an eerie atmosphere. After the first climax of the

bathypelagic zone, I used the higher mallet percussion as well as the flute and oboe in order to release some

of the pressure of the lower instruments. I also made the intervals in the piano and vibraphone parts wider to

create a sense of levity but slight disorientation due to their material mostly moving in fifths. The last part of

the bathypelagic zone uses the entire band in order to create an even greater sense of weight, as well as

convey the full gravity of the nightmarish environment that is the bathypelagic zone. I wrote a grand pause

where the percussion and piano are just reverberating in order to create a sense of emptiness again to

transition into the abyssopelagic zone. I wanted it to mirror the emptiness of the tundra but initially maintain

the pressure so that after the grand pause, there is an unaccompanied tuba solo playing the same melody

that the flute did at the beginning of the piece. The ending is meant to reflect the mysterious but beautiful

nature of the abyssopelagic zone, and I reused material from the epipelagic zone with different orchestration

to convey this. The piece ends with the piano playing one of the dreamy-sounding figures that I originally

used in the epipelagic zone to emphasize the dream-like beauty and mystery of the ocean as a whole.