Ringing Changes

I have always loved bell choirs; not only the resonant sound of the instruments reverberating in a large space, but the ensemble interplay among the members of the choir itself, locking the many parts together as though played by one performer. Though Ringing Changes is intended to be more than just a "colorized" bell choir piece, it does contain music which has some of the same qualities as a bell choir performance, an interlocking of many parts to create one sonorous whole, a technique that Estonian composer Arvo Part has referred to as "tintinnabuli style". The piece is a test for the orchestra's dynamic control and ability to listen carefully. I was living in Maracaibo, Venezuela during the time that Ringing Changes was written. Most of the composition was done at a Catholic girls' school near my home in a large room with hard floors and walls and an old upright piano. The resonance of that room inevitably made its way into the piece so that the orchestration tends to have a certain amount of reverberation "built in". The piece was commissioned by the Montgomery Symphony Orchestra in 1990, premiered by them in March of 1991 and was performed by other orchestras during a brief period thereafter. I then withdrew the piece with plans to revise it and the present version includes those changes.