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So-Called Laws Of Nature Analysis

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Analysis of The So-called Laws of Nature — a piece follows the idea of minimalism and classical music style The So-called Laws of Nature is a minimalist music composed by the American minimalist composer David Lang in the year 2002. The piece is in a 32-minuets large scale, and written for percussion quartet. There are three parts in the piece. According to David Lang’s performance notes, the first and second part can be played independent of the other parts. If the first two parts are played together, the part 3 must be played. The instrumentation in The So-called Laws of Nature is unique--three distinctive instrumentation organizations are presented in the piece. In the first part, each percussionist has assigned to 7 graduated woodblocks or other pieces of wood. In the second part, each percussionist has 7 tuned pieces of metal, 3 graduated toms, 1 rock bass drum with foot pedal, and 1 brake drum or other nasty piece of metal. In the third …show more content…

The first part “The So-called Laws of Nature” was premiered on the Bang on a Can Marathon at the 2001 Next Wave Festival at BAM. The second part was premiered in October 19, 2002, by So Percussion Group at the Miller Theater, New York. Analysis of Part 1 Part 1 develops with messy wood percussion sounds--well-organized materials are hidden beneath messy sounds. On the one side, the composer followed minimalism style to develop and organize motives and materials. On the other side, he kept the classical musical structure to unit the piece as a whole. There are three large sections in Part 1, including A section, B section and A’ section. These sections constitute a traditional ternary form. A section is from measure 1 to measure 451, B section is from bar 452 to bar 845, A’ section (recapitulation) is from measure 846 to the end. Each section also includes some smaller parts. The structure is shown below. (Ex.

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