For marimba and audio playback. Duration 8:10 minutes. Available from Promethean Editions.
Premiere performance: July 2015. Beverley Johnston, marimba. IKMA Festival, Hannover, Germany.
Phosphorus for marimba and audio playback was composed soon after the death of Cameron Haynes, my wife’s nephew. Cameron had engaged in a year-long battle with cancer and passed away almost immediately after his 25th birthday. Throughout his life, Cameron suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder, and he required extra attention and care from his family and those close to him. Living in a small town and having been educated in a public school system not equipped to deal with children with special needs, he was often the target of bullying and this, along with the behavioral side effects of his condition, made his way through life rather challenging. All this notwithstanding, he remained positive and optimistic and, in the end, his battle with cancer revealed a person of courage, poetic strength and, however hidden and unarticulated, an empathy for others atypical of his condition.
My wife, percussionist Beverley Johnston, and I had been very much affected by Cameron’s passing. I dealt with my grief by examining my own feelings and understanding of human mortality by the best available means to me: music. Two musical characters engage in a virtual conversation with each other in this eight-minute-long work. They are: (1) a quiet lament-like harmonic sequence for the marimba over descending minor thirds and (2) segments extracted from a dj mix by Cameron called Phosphorus, which he had proudly sent to us a short while before he was diagnosed with cancer. These two musical themes, which in my mind gradually came to represent Bev and Cameron as the two characters in this conversation, inhabit two different tempi, Bev’s at 75 bpm and Cameron’s at 100 bpm. They are radically different musical expressions: soft classical music that is close to my and Bev’s sound world on the one hand and a heavily distorted, de-sentimentalized, but otherwise matter-of-fact report on the properties of the chemical element Phosphorus on the other.
Even though in his mix Cameron speaks in a detached manner about things devoid of any emotion, I felt that in some deeper way, perhaps unbeknownst even to him, he was talking not about Phosphorus but about himself. His evasion of being personal was consistent with his medical condition. I could not help, however, but read a metaphor about his own difficult life in this text, particularly after his passing when I started using it for the present composition. I chose to leave his text musically untreated, just like documentary material, since I believe that it speaks powerfully and profoundly about the human condition in spite of the seemingly humorous and comical surface. The marimba is trying to come to terms with this material by attempting a metric modulation into Cam’s tempo (the two tempi have a three to four ratio relationship) and towards the end, as understanding grows, the marimba surrenders her original tempo and abdicates to that of the phosphorus mix.
After completing this work, I realized that all three of my compositions for marimba and audio playback have a prerecorded documentary aspect. Fertility Rites, the earliest work in this series, references Inuit throat singers, while In the Fire of Conflict references the rap ponderings of a young man under severe socioeconomic duress. Phosphorus continues this theme with the voice of a young man who at one point of his monologue points out that “In Greek, phosphorus means the Light Bearer.” Cameron Haynes has been this Light Bearer for a lot of people, including us, and this work is dedicated to his memory.
Johnston's marimba sometimes appears solo, often layered with a techno track Haynes created to musically and humorously detail the nature of the title element. The result is haunting, luminous, humorous, dizzyingly lively and only occasionally sad. This is the kind of celebration of a life tragically lost that we all wish we could summon up in the midst of grief.William Bamberger Amazon.ca review
April 05, 7:30 PM. Phosphorus. Guillermo Rodríguez Calero, marimba. Conservatorio Profesional de Musica, Arturo Soria. C. del Estrecho de Mesina, 2, Cdad. Lineal, 28043 Madrid, Spain.
November 26, 7:30. Phosphorus. Dongfang Li, marimba. Pina Bausch Theater, Wuppertal, Germany.
November 26, 7:30. In the Fire of Conflict. Wan-Man Yen , marimba. Pina Bausch Theater, Wuppertal, Germany.
April 30, 2:00 PM. Phosphorus. Guillermo Rodríguez Calero, marimba Performance and masterclass. Folkwang. room, S010, Universität der Künste, Essen, Germany.
April 15, 8:30 PM. Phosphorus. 張愷芯 Zhang Kaixin, marimba. Dance Theater, Taipei National university of Art, Taipei, Taiwan.
December 04. Phosphorus. Guillermo Rodríguez Calero, marimba. YouTube video of live performance. IKMA. Akademia Muzyczna im. Stanisława Moniuszki w Gdańsku, Gdansk, Poland. click here for video.
July 17. Phosphorus. Guillermo Rodríguez Calero, marimba. International Katarzyna Mycka Academy (IKMA). Akademia Muzyczna im. Stanisława Moniuszki w Gdańsku, Gdansk, Poland.
June 08, 1:15 PM. Phosphorus. Clara Graham, marimba. Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda's College. University of Oxford, Oxford, England.
May 16, 7:30 PM. Phosphorus. Jose Maria Palacios Munoz, marimba. University of Cologne, Wuppertal, Germany.
October 24, 6:00 PM. Phosphorus. Vito Mužević. Marimba. Concert of music by Christos Hatzis. Akademia Muzyczna im. Stanislawa Moniuski (aMuz) in Gdansk, Poland.
January 22. Phosphorus. Premiere video performance. YouTube video. Felix Reyes, marimba; Rebecca Hodgson, visual model; Video/Audio: Four/Ten Media. https://youtu.be/5EWp587L42o. click here for video.
March 20, 7:30 PM. In the Fire of Conflict & Phosphorus. Beverley Johnston, marimba. . Wattenbarger Auditorium, Bryan Fine Arts Bulding, Tennessee Tech, Cookeville, TN, USA.
December 10, 2:00 PM. Phosphorus. Beverley Johnston, marimba. Seicho-No-le, 662 Victoria Park Avenue, Toronto, ON, Canada.
July 04, 7:30 PM. Phosphorus & In the Fire of Conflict. Beverley Johnston, marimba. Barachois Summer Music Festival, Barachois, NB, Canada.
December 07, 7:30 PM. Phosphorus. Canadian premiere. Beverley Johnston, marimba. Faculty Artists Concert featuring Beverley Johnston, Christos Hatzis and friends. Other Hatzis works on the program: Canadian premiere of Phosphorus (Beverley Johnston, marimba); Arctic Dreams( (Susan Hoeppner, flute; Beverley Johnston, vibraphone); In the Fire of Conflict (Beverley Johnston, marimba); Atonement (Rachel Mercer, cello; Angela Park, piano), and Parlor Music (Peter Stoll, clarinet, Beverley Johnston, vibraphone, Rachel Mercer, cello, Angela Park, piano.). Walter Hall, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto, 80 Queen's Park, Toronto, ON, Canada.
July 23, 7:00 PM. Phosphorus. World premiere. World premiere of Phosphorus. Beverley Johnston, marimba, in a concert of Hatzis' music for mallet instruments on July 23, 7:00 PM. Other Hatzis works on the program: Modulations 1 for two vibraphones and two marimbas (Yuka Maruyama and Wenja Xu, vibraphones; Sergi Santamria Carrasedo and Mayaka Hashimoto, marimbas); European premiere of In the Fire of Conflict, for marimba and tape (Katarzyna Myćka), World premiere of Eternity's Heartbeat for marimba and piano by Anne-Katrin Abt, marimba and Huan-Jou Hsu, piano; and Fertility Rites, for marimba and tape (Jonas Krause, marimba.). University of Music, Drama and Media, Hanover, Germany.