Hi, I'm looking for a marimba solo to do for my junior recital. I'm more into contemporary stuff than cheesy. I'm looking at Henze's "Five Scenes," and Ichiyanagi's "Portrait of a Forest." Portrait of a Forest seems a little to hard perhaps, it looks like there is one section that needs % mallets, and one section where yopu have to playu quintuplets in one hand, and do aelotoric (spelling?) in another. I am also looking at a piece called Anima of a Tree, I forget who the composer is, but its for marimba and temple blocks. I'm not sure about the difficulty of this one. If any one has any advice or suggestions of other pieces, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! - Justin

Hey Justin -

If your looking into doing some contemporary marimba for your recital, I would recommend checking out some of the modern Japanese repertoire from the late '60's/early '70's. I would recommend purchasing the Ongaku book "Marimba Pieces Vol. 1 " and selecting something out of there. The book contains Miki Time, Ikebe Monovalence I and my personal favorite Sueyoshi Mirage.

If your not into the whole Japanese marimba thing, i would recommend one of the Moersch commissions like Reflections on the Nature of Water or Merlin. I also recommend Schwantner Velocities if your up for it.

Best of luck with your recital planning, i am doing my Junior Recital at Ithaca College this April. Feel free to check out my Top 10 Favorite Marimba pieces post for some more suggestions.

Sincerely, Lon Stetz

So what exactly is "cheesy" music? Did you mean to say tonal, or classical, or not good? Maybe you should consider carefully what words to use before you insult what a lot of people here consider to be good music. And just for the record, tonal music is much harder to pull off correctly than atonal music...