Tattoo

Tattoo is not Alice. Those earlier pieces— extravagant, ecstatic and, yes, innocent—are some distance from the darker, more ominous tread of Tattoo.

True, the elaborate orchestral apparatus is still enthusiastically in place and the harmony remains richly tonal, though now, perhaps, it bears a more dissonant burden. But what seems a new twist is the music's unrelenting rhythmic drive. Interestingly, a recurrent image during composition was that of a juggernaut— the huge machine moving forward with irresistible, terrible force.

The orchestra is, after all, a kind of musical monster, with its more than 100 independently moving parts, each of which, like tentacles, can be given its own life; or all can be harnessed together to do a composer's bidding.

In Tattoo, I wanted to have it both ways: the finely wrought contrapuntal detail wed to an inexorable momentum. (Or, more picturesquely, the victim about to be crushed in the maw of the beast observes perfectly, for a millisecond, a single physical detail.)

Tattoo. 1. a signal on a drum or bugle summoning soldiers to their quarters at night. 2. any continuous drumming, rapping, etc.

Almost randomly, tiny shards of percussion, isolated pizzicati and, finally, tubas punctuate the silence, then coalesce into the basso ostinato that will dominate the twenty-minute course of Tattoo. A somber, majestic theme is heard in horns signaling the forward march. With brass and percussion to the fore, sonic peaks steadily rise. A brief, more playful episode interrupts, but the music, ostinato-driven, presses on, now toward a blazing, grandiose climax. Thereafter, the whole conflagration dissipates, leaving mysterious, smoldering musical embers—harp and celesta arpeggios, muted brass, woodwind and percussion tremolos. At length, from these shifting ashes, the opening phrase of Paganini's twenty-fourth Caprice (called Omaggio a Niccoló Paganini in my score) drifts up. This new thematic fragment is first heard superimposed above a quiet recapitulation of the opening, but then breaks free and in complete form proclaims itself, fortissimo. Only the basso ostinato still clings, giving the music a macabre aspect.

The theme, once stated, is fair game for contrapuntal and rhythmic distortion. There are surprising, jarring harmonic shifts and much canonic casing. A siren, even, enters the fray. When the omnipresent ostinato itself begins to disintegrate, the end seems near. Paganini, however, makes one last dramatic appearance, but his theme breaks apart, its swirling fragments, moving faster and faster. Enough! A low wind rises and blows all the music away.

Compositional Note: When I accepted the commission to compose a work for the Concertgebouw Orchestra commemorating the 250th anniversary of the F. van Lanschot Bank of the Netherlands, I had already written a complete sketch of Tattoo. Only one thing troubled me:
J.C. van Lanschot, an admirer of Paganini's music, requested that I incorporate into my composition the theme of the celebrated twenty-fourth Caprice. With Tattoo so close to completion, this request seemed impossible to fulfill. One evening weeks later, however, I had a strange yet compelling urge to sit at the piano with both the Paganini and my own composition before me. Immediately, I saw a connection: the first two measures of the Caprice fit exactly above the opening two measures of Tattoo. Not a note needed to be altered. The insight seemed heaven-sent and it lighted compositional fires. I not only included the famous theme, but nearly doubled the length of Tattoo by composing an entirely new section exploiting the musical possibilities of this serendipitous discovery.

– DAVID DEL TREDICI