Nineteen to the Dozen (Percussion Ensemble)

Listen to the work here!
 
Nineteen to the Dozen is a work for percussion ensemble, an arrangement of a previous work for solo marimba, written in the style and idioms of South Indian Carnatic music. The work utilizes a meter of 31/16, although in essence the use of sixteenth notes is subservient to the “31-ness” of the phrase length, in an additive meter presented as 19 + 12, hence the title of the work. The title also is borrowed from the idiom “nineteen to the dozen”, which refers to anything, particularly speech, which is faster than normal or crammed into a space not meant for its magnitude. As a fast talker myself, this phrase seems like something people have likely been calling me behind my back for years.
Melodically, this work utilizes one of the 72 Mēlakartā ragas that are used as the tonal basis for Carnatic music, specifically the Hemavati ragam, numbered 58 in the Mēlakartā system, on the tonic note D. This is equivalent to a Dorian scale in Western music, with an augmented 4th scale degree instead of the natural 4th scale degree. This work was commissioned and premiered by the UNT South Indian Cross-Cultural Percussion ensemble, conducted by Poovalur Sriji.