Bleak Friday (Digital Download)

Instrumentation:

Marimba soloist
Fixed stereo audio media

Please note: a stopwatch/timing device is required for the marimba soloist to roughly align with the fixed media

Duration: 6 minutes 25 seconds

Listen to Bleak Friday as performed by Dr. Duane Bierman at the University of Nebraska at Kearney New Music Festival:

Program Notes for Bleak Friday

This piece was born out of boredom on Black Friday 2015, when I decided to strap contact microphones to my car and take a drive. The marimba soloist serves loosely as a consumer wandering through the bleak expanse of our monied existence, sometimes getting drowned in the commercialism we endorse, and sometimes catching a breath of air—and maybe even reflecting on how bleak this existence is. In all, this serves as a postminimalist excursion into what it means to swim as a consumer in our sea of mercantilism, or even to try to extricate oneself from any sea—the sea of lies in our political discourse, the sea of misinformation and sensationalism in our media, the sea of misdirection and anti-intellectualism in our education system, the sea of sugarcoating in our popular music, etc. Take it as what you will; this is not a perfect definition or portrayal of the problems our world faces, but mainly asks us if we get lost in the bleakness, or if we can catch a breath of air in the haze.

Dan Lis, December 2015