Donemus Webshop — Grab it!

Grab it! : Version for soprano or alto sax, trombone, baritone sax, bass trombone, percussion & soundtrack with video ad lib. / JacobTV - Jacob Ter Veldhuis

Other authors:
Veldhuis, Jacob ter (Composer)
Description:
Originally composed for tenor sax November 1999 for Arno Bornkamp with financial support from the Dutch Performing Arts Fund. The world premiere took place at a concert called ‘Who’s afraid of…” at Vredenburg in Utrecht, February 2, 2000. After a performance by Arno in July 2000 at the World Sax Congress in Montreal, Grab it! became a repertoire piece and by request arranged for other instruments and combinations.

Growing up in the '60s with blues, jazz, and rock, American music had a profound influence on me. In Grab It!, I sought to explore the 'no-man’s-land' between speech and music. Speech inherently possesses melody and rhythm and I discovered that these qualities often intensify when people become emotional. Grab It! is based on the original speech of life-sentenced prisoners, whose verbal aggression aligns with the harsh sound of the tenor sax. I composed Grab It! as a duet—or a 'battle,' if you will—between the tenor sax and speech grooves, often in unison. The soloist 'competes' with a relentless barrage of syllables, words, and one-liners.

In jail suicide is not uncommon: ‘He tied one end around the pipe, and he hung himself. So he went out the back door rapped up in a green sheet with a tag on his toe…You lose everything!‘ Still Grab it! should also be understood as a ‘memento vivere’. Death row as a metaphor for life: Life is worth living. ‘Grab it!’

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