Rhapsody No. 1 for Timpani by Alexis Orfaly

Rhapsody No. 1 was written in the spring of 2001 for my good friend and colleague Matthew Bassett. The version here is a slightly modified version as it was originally premiered in 2001. It takes an irregular (thus a Rhapsody) form of many intervals of slow and fast sections with a middle slow section as a resting point. A tonality was sought by employing many of the same pitches from the timpani tunings into the mallet percussion parts. There is much dialog between the solo part and the percussion parts. A great deal of the time, the solo part sits atop the other parts, but also at times is required to function as part of the ensemble. Different colors are achieved on the timpani by using such specialty mallets such as blasticks and maraca sticks.