Little Variations no. 4 by Alain Londeix

“Dedicated to my younger daughter Nina, this five octave marimba work is the jury president’s repertoire contribution towards the 10th anniversary of the Universal Marimba Competition to be help 23-30 July in 2011 in Sint-Truiden, Belgium. 

Neenah is a word of ‘water’ in the Winnebago language, but it is also a town in Wisconsin, United States. The population was 2,657 at the 2000 Census. Some claimed that the name of the locality originated in the answer an old Native American once gave to Governor James Duane Doty when the latter pointing to the Fox River asked ‘what is that?’ meaning to ask the name of the river. The Native American, supposing that white man wished to know what water was called in his language, answered ‘neenah’, which means water or running water. As a parable of artistic interpretation, the above story implies that the impression in the artist’s mind might (or shall I say should_ different from actual reality and hopefully open up new perspectives.

Despite the popular joke that defines the general disposition to expect the best in all things as just a lack of information, this music rather optimistically aims to leave the impression of a ‘marimba reduction’ of an orchestral piece. Adaptable to other instruments, the musical material plays with a variety of orchestral instruments in which individual voices are developed in contrasting ranges or tonal colour resulting in frequent jumps between registers and timbres.

This compositional procedure is somewhat in contrast to so-called ‘idiomatic’ writing, but this author believes the fruit of such creative process might still be positively accepted as his humble contribution to the already tremendously rich marimba literature. – Igor Lesnik, Zagreb, December 2010