Christina Viola Oorebeek, composer

"Yombé" for cello and partially prepared piano

clips of an Aka dance (2012)

duration: 3'30"
a commission from the Cello Sonata Foundation for Album, a project for amateur cello-piano duo’s

'Yombé is of medium difficulty for piano and cello and published in Album, Volume 3.
It is a composition introducing the kind of polyrhythms which occur in Aka music. The Aka peoples are an indigenous groep of hunter-gatherers, living in the Central African Republic. Their complex polyfonic music has been studied by a number of musicologists. In 2003, their oral traditions were added to the list of Masterworks of the Oral and Immaterial Legacy of Mankind by UNESCO.

In this composition, the rhythms are layered one by one in the cello and piano. There are also different time measures in 'Yombé' which are meant to make the polyrhythms easier to play, and also, to introduce irregular time measures in music notation, in general.
Donemus Webshop
September 9, 2012
Gaudeamus Music Week
Museum Speelklok, Utrecht, Netherlands
Frans van Ruth, piano
Doris Hochscheid, cello