The Angels’ Share

The Angels’ Share was written for the Shhh!! Ensemble, Edana Higham, piano and Zac Pulak, marimba and percussion. The title refers to the amount of Scotch Whisky lost to evaporation during the aging process. The title was an afterthought. I had already begun working on the piece when Zac asked me for a working title, for promotional purposes. Having no particular idea, I gave the first dozen ideas that sprang into my mind, and asked him to choose. One of those was “Like a fist to the jaw”, a description of a Scotch whisky. That was his favourite, and did seem like an apt title for the first movement of the piece, which was largely written at the time. In the course of working on the piece, it became clear that this was not an appropriate title for the piece as a whole, so I searched for other whisky-related terms to use as titles, subtitles and performance instructions. The Angels’ Share and all of the subtitles resulted!

The piece is in five movements, which seems to have become a current norm for me. Some movements use material directly borrowed from earlier pieces, something I am doing consistently in my recent pieces. The movements are highly contrasting. Movement 1, “Like a Fist to the Jaw” is raucous and uses a very chromatic, modernist harmonic language. Movement 2, “Smells like Vanilla Ice Cream”, is excruciatingly slow and diatonic. “A Spicy Little Dram” is like a scherzo, quick, witty and surprising. “Tastes Like Bandaids” is unrelentingly pointillistic in the best Darmstadt tradition. The last movement, “Like Butter” like some of my other final movements, is inspired by Robert Schumann’s final movement of Kinderscenen, “Der Dichter Spricht”, an apparently rambling sequence of music thoughts, invoking the imagined (but rarely accurate) creative process of an artist.

The Angels’ Share was premiered on Jan. 31, 2020 by the Shhh!! Ensemble at the Canadian Music Centre in Toronto.

The video on this page is of the final performance in their 2020 tour, March 13, at Freiman Hall, University of Ottawa, the evening before the Covid-19 shutdown!