Located in the UK
Located in the USA
Located in Europe
- Piers Hellawell
Takla Makan
- Peters Edition Limited (World)
This marimba solo was written for Evelyn Glennie, commissioned with funds from South West Arts, and was premiered by her at the 1995 Cheltenham Festival. It takes its name from the desert that lies between Mongolia and Tibet, whose name ‘Takla Makan’ means ‘you set out and you never return’. Its duration is 12’. The Citizen reported of the premiere that “the best marimba piece was the one specially commissioned by Glennie from Piers Hellawell …. It contained much beauty and there was a lovely returning motif on the lower notes.” The Gloucestershire Echo added that “More satisfying musically was Piers Hellawell’s Takla Makan… the work is a powerful evocation of the desert landscape … and explores to the full the tonal effects of the marimba.”
Programme Note
This work was commissioned for Evelyn Glennie with funding from South West Arts, and was premiered at the Cheltenham International Music Festival in July 1995.
The composer wrote: “I regard all my recent works as evocation of landscape, whether actual (my recent High Citadels) or metaphorical. In this work, which takes its name from the great desert that lies around the Silk Road, between Mongolia to the North and Tibet to the South, some landscape imagery is clearly explicit. The impulse for the piece came from Colin Thubron’s film about the Silk Road, but the remorseless desert landscape itself was less important to me than its name: ‘Takla Makan’ means to the Ouiga people ‘you set out and you never return’. Apart from its healthy respect for this formidable wilderness, the name embodies for me a view of music – that it picks us up in one place, and sets us down, changed by the experience, elsewhere. Elements of ‘return’, such as themes or sections ‘coming back’, make less sense to me outside for example the tonal sonata-language; music’s time dimension does after all preclude that it can ever, really, return to anything, without new context. So I now tend to write pieces that finish somewhere new.
This piece follows such a course via two elements, which alternate. After an introduction comes the first of three ‘excursions’ , a limping-footstep motif in the low, resonant register of this magnificent instrument. Intertwined with this and the other excursions are fantasias; these become more extended and diverse, as the excursions become curtailed – the imaginary taking over from reality. The material of the two also becomes harder to separate, as delirium takes over. ‘You set out and you never return’.
The work is dedicated to Tim Martin – who visited Takla Makan – and to Patricia Martin, and to the memory of Dame Freya Stark.
Piers Hellawell 1995/2024