Edison

Listen to the work here!
 
Edison is an ostinato-based work for solo vibraphone, based on and named after the American inventor. Thomas Edison has certainly had a huge impact on the development of technology and the industrialization of the Western world. However, it is my belief that Edison’s achievements must always be discussed alongside his penchant for stealing the ideas of others and passing them off as his own. His most notable feud was with the inventor Nikola Tesla, but there have almost certainly been other snubbed creators whose names and contributions have been lost to history. Edison’s development of industrialized society through less-than-upstanding means is explored in this vibraphone work in two ways. The first is the repetition and variation in a quasi-minimalist sense that characterizes the first large thematic section of the piece. This is in no way my attempt to describe minimalist composition as lazy, but to characterize Edison’s inventions as “mentally-labor-effiicient” in a tongue-in-cheek way. The second is the work’s cadenza, which is built on melodic fragments of previous works of mine, specifically fragments from works with opus numbers which spell out E-D-I-S-O-N in the A1Z26 Cipher. Ironically, some of these works of mine are in themselves arrangements of existing works, though unlike this piece’s namesake I make no attempt to pass off those original works as my own. Lastly, I associate the Mixolydian mode with ingenuity, giving Edison at least the concession that he was at least smart enough scientifically to know and apply the ideas he was stealing.