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Umberhulk
2000
flute doubling bass flute and shaker
bass clarinet doubling shaker
percussion
bucket o’ stones, castanets, claves, 3 korean blocks, maracas, pebbles, pedal bass drum,
rulerphone, sandpaper blocks, 3 suspended cymbals, 3 temple blocks, 2 tom-toms, triangle
piano
violin doubling viola and shaker
cello doubling shaker
duration 14'
first performance:
Boston Musica Viva , cond. Richard Pittman
Tsai Performance Center / Boston / April 22, 2000
SCORE
RECORDING—first performance:
PROGRAM NOTE
Usually for me a work's title gradually reveals itself during the composition process. With Umberhulk the title came first. I read the word in an interview with a heavy metal guitarist who claimed to have invented it. 'Umberhulk' immediately suggested textures and sounds I wanted to work with. I looked it up online and found that, in fact, the guitarist hadn’t coined the word but instead it was the name of a creature from a fantasy role-playing game. I have no knowledge of (nor much interest in playing) these games, however the description of the umberhulk so meshed with the kind of piece I wanted to write that I read more. An umberhulk is, apparently, a huge, mean-spirited, subterranean creature able to burrow through rock. It does this in pursuit of prey and to crush anything which threatens to plunder its vast hoards of gold and precious stones.
Umberhulk the piece is not exactly a narrative work but you can hear the umberhulk snoring, dreaming of a slithering tango and of his glowing piles of treasure, and cocking an ear out for unusual scratchings in the caves around him. You can hear water dripping from the tops of huge caverns into dead lakes, and the umberhulk suddenly wake up to make a relentless pursuit of some foolhardy trespassers. The chase leads up to the surface of the earth where perhaps the pursued spring into the air as the umberhulk lurches after them. The massive creature sinks back down into the earth as, above ground, the evening air is filled with cool breezes. Umberhulk, concerned as it is with a heavy, solid, earthbound protagonist, is scored for the lowest possible version of this ensemble: bass clarinet, bass flute, viola (detuned to produce a lugubrious and unathletic sonority), along with a percussion setup which includes pebbles tapped together and an upturned tub of stones, among other more orthodox instruments.
REVIEWS
Andy Vores’s Umberhulk in which the music acted out in dark-timbred, cartoonlike gestures a vignette of a slumbering underground behemoth.
Anne Midgette • The New York Times
•
“You can hear water dripping from the tops of huge caverns into dead lakes,” the composer writes. So indeed you can. But you can also hear a wild, quick-changing play of rhythmic, motivic, timbral invention that’s fascinating in itself. Some really lightning-quick hand-eye coordination must have been required to get it all on paper. We’re ever so glad he did. Vores is in his prime, he’s writing like this, and he’s here. Lucky us
Richard Buell • The Boston Globe