"I smell the Unicorn" and "The Doppelgänger"
When I was researching works that fitted the topic, "Music of the last 25 years Aus focus", I came across this piece and found the title quite intriguing - the idea that each movement refers to a different type of hallucination ie. aural or visual. As I was studying this piece in more detail, I found the following teaching points:
Orchestral score: understanding the instruments that make up a typical orchestra and the order in which the instruments appear on the scor
Structure of a concerto: solo instrument (trombone) vs orchestra which is especially obvious in "The Doppelganger" movt 4
Roles of instruments eg. harmonic support, melodic role, etc. and at what points these roles are transferred to a different instrumental family
How Carl Vine creates the idea of a "hallucination" through experimentation of the concepts eg. Duration - quintuplets/sextuplets all cleverly layered to create this whoosh of sound and sense of space
How to write for trombone
Hence I created a page on the website resource including:
Carl Vine's Meet the Music seminar on the composition process of this work
A melodic dictation (with rhythm given) of the theme in Movt 4 "The Doppelgänger" with embedded audio excerpt
Musicology activity to encourage students to think more deeply about the chosen tone colours and ideas Vine features in his work