The orchestral score even appears to quote from Maurice Jarre's undulating Lawrence theme.
Ensemble SurPlus devoted most of its Tuesday program to thornier works, including Lukas Foss's Music for Six (1978), with its undulating, birdcall-like theme and hazy textures, and Brian Ferneyhough's "Coloratura" (1966), a characterful, pointillistic score with an appealing, virtuosic oboe line.
It aims for wonderment and grandeur, seeking them in undulating Debussyan stasis and, even more, in solemn themes, grand fanfares and orchestral chimes directly out of Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition".
What I mean is that Sibelius has sped up the music so much that time slows down (a sort of musical version of a common optical illusion, when spinning objects seem to slow down the faster they revolve) so that the hectic crotchets of the symphony's last scherzoid music become the undulating accompanying bed of sound for the trombone's theme.
From the start, sections of the orchestra, especially the strings, play undulating, lapping motifs that murmur and bustle, as if rhythmic riffs and whole themes were trying to coalesce into forms more concrete.
People in factories and animals in factory farms, worshipers and prisoners, dancers and undulating waves — these things exist in a visual and choreographic harmony that allows you to infer themes that link them: work in the global economy, the state of the environment, the interactions and collisions between industry and nature.
We open on a close-up of the undulating folds of a crimson dress, resembling both a heart and flower, signalling the thicker-than-water themes that will course through the narrative.
Hills are a theme from the start as the route scuffs along the northern edge of Dartmoor national park through undulating country roads and quiet villages, before a blissful long descent into Exeter, well worth a stop to explore the Cathedral and Quayside.
Struggle on the undulating course?
And there you are — undulating".
