Gobi Gloria belongs to a series of compositions that grew out of my admiration for Mongolian music. The series include Feng (for cello solo, written for Feng Hew), Gobi Polyphony (for erhu and cello, written for Xu Ke), Gobi Canticle (for violin and cello, written for Masuko Ushioda and Laurence Lesser), and Serashi Fragments (written for the Arditti Quartet). The melody is played against its own inversion, retrograde and retrograde-inversion in an otherwise mostly heterophonic texture. The piece alludes to various genres of Mongolian music that include the longchant, as well as the music of dance and shaman rituals. It concludes with a rendering of a folk song that I heard during my visit to Nei Monggol region in 1996.
Instrumentation:
string quartet