Name: Malone, Kevin: Metropolis
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Malone, Kevin: Metropolis

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Immediately after watching Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis, I was inspired to write an overture as a homage for this cinematic masterpiece. The film's brilliant geometric vision and truly heart-felt humanity – fused in a unique and volatile cauldron – were aspects of music with which I had been concerned for several years. Thus, I see the city and the orchestra as one and the same: a densely populated organism which requires tasks to be performed over and over in order to be productive and to serve the greater good of communicating a clear message to the audience.

The basic themes of the music are that of inexorable machine repetition, ecstatic human dancing, and compassionate reflection on the plight of those less fortunate. There is such a strong sense of social responsibility in Lang's work, a sense captured at the end of the overture as the individual's immersion in nightclub hedonism gives way to an overwhelming crescendo of the population's plight. At the end of the millennium, these themes are at the forefront of society and of musicmaking.

The music opens with a fanfare followed by two mechanical themes which often abruptly intercut each other. A lyrical theme develops the fanfare material until cascading gestures return the mechanical themes. After a brief pause, the lyrical theme returns in a series of mocking dance variations which build to riotous debauchery. Fragments of all themes then return, jostling for prominence until they coalesce into a uniform plea for humanity.

Metropolis was premiered by the Dnipropetrovsk Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Vyaceslav Blinov.

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