Crazy and Dissonant, with Audience Participation

Near the beginning of “Odin,” Joshua Brennan’s piece for concert band, the musicians stomp their feet and holler. “It sounds like there’s an army running,” says Brennan, a Keene State senior double-majoring in music composition and music education. “They stomp their feet randomly, starting quietly and getting louder, and just yelling – a vicious ‘aaaaargh’ – and that simulates running into battle. It sounds pretty cool.” Even cooler, “Odin,” named for the Norse god of war, was performed in concert at the College’s Redfern Arts Center in October, conducted by James Chesebrough, associate professor of music.

“It’s action music,” says Brennan. “Crazy, dissonant chords. I gave the woodwinds a lot of fast, chromatic runs” – meaning scales that incorporate all the major keys plus sharps and flats – “because chromaticism fits the style of action or craziness.” Brennan, who watched the band perform from the side of the stage, where he could also catch a glimpse of the audience, wrote the piece for fun. “I like doing large ensemble stuff,”he says. He even incorporates the audience into the ensemble. “Toward the end of the piece, there’s a section that gives you the feeling that Odin’s army is going to lose. There’s maybe one soldier left, and the pace is really slow. It’s pretty sad. And then the band starts stomping their feet in unison, like an army marching. It starts quietly, like it’s coming in the distance, over a mountain or something, and then it gets louder, and then eventually the audience is cued in to start doing the stomps with them. So they go through this whole stomping thing, and that symbolizes the army driving the reinforcements. They’re arriving at the battlefield, and then, in the next couple of seconds, the audience is cued in to yell. And this is for the army to start running into battle again. Then the last battle starts. And it finishes to the end, and it’s crazy.” “Odin” begins with the smooth, even tones of a saxophone and is heavy on woodwinds and percussion. Brennan wants people who hear the 10-minute piece performed live to feel like they’re in a battle zone. “That’s why I added the audience participation,” he says. “At the Redfern performance, they were really into it. It was awesome.”