Vox Populi by Brett Abigaña

By Brett Abigaña

Duration: 5 minutes
Grade Level: 4

Vox Populi is one of a series of pieces of mine dealing with recent world events. Needless to say, there’s a lot of anger and frustration in the world right now and, like many other composers, I wanted to give that a musical voice. The piece begins with a frantic, aggressive fanfare before progressing into a dissonant set of variations. The music comes together on a single pitch, almost like a scream, before abruptly dissolving into an odd, ethereal sound- scape wherein fragments of different anthems can be heard, each representative of a group of people which has felt targeted. Slowly, the dissonance creeps back in before erupting into the original texture, but with more dissonance and aggression. The anthems come together in a triumphant response, and the piece ends with those anthems evolving into a single defiant pitch.