Breakout
for two or more cymbals

Work no. 43
2013

The idea of this piece came from an old (pre-Internet, early nineties I believe) piece of Russian digital folklore: an elaborate parody of Winnie the Pooh stories in which most of the characters were hackers or programmers, used bulletin board systems to download and/or spread pirated software, played video games, and Tigger was an aspiring composer whose pieces were made using Screamtracker 3, "very noisy" and using an inordinate amount of percussive effects. For several months in 2012–13 I was composing nothing but percussion music, and the memory of this humorous jab at amateur tracker composers came to mind.

Breakout is a very technique-oriented piece: isorhythms, local symmetries, and the golden ratio govern most of the music. In hindsight, it was probably too much mathematics, at least for this particular work. Still, tempo is variable, dynamics are free, and many notes are either optional or undefined technique-wise, so I think the music has space to breathe. This was the final piece in a series of eight percussion works I composed during that period.

The piece was premiered by Eduardo Ceballos Guillermo at el Centro Cultural "La Ibérica" (Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico) on 21 August 2018.