Twist It

Twist-It is a show built around a Rubik's Cube. Cube props in different colors move through the production, and the faces turn and re-sort as the music changes underneath them. There is no hidden meaning buried in it, the cube is the concept.

The show opens with Mahler's Symphony No. 2 in C minor, starting down in the low voices of the band, and while nothing about that music is named for a color it still puts one on the field. It is dark and heavy from the bottom up, a sonority you can see before anything else happens. The Mahler closes the show as well, which puts that weight on both ends of the production. It is public domain, so there is nothing to clear on it.

Two of the tunes are colors outright. Michael Torke's Green, and Andy Akiho's Aka, which is the Japanese word for red. Torke writes in short repeating cells that keep turning over without landing in the same place. Akiho is percussion-driven and harder-edged.

Coldplay's Fix You is the middle of the show, and it carries a duet between trombone and euphonium, the warmest moment in the production and a feature for two low brass players.

Twist-It scales to any size band and sits at a medium-advanced difficulty. The visual concept does most of the work here, the cubes are cheap to build and they read from the box at any distance, so a program that is short on numbers but willing to commit to the prop gets a lot back for it. The low brass duet in the middle is the one spot that asks for two players you trust.

The music:

• Symphony No. 2 in C minor (Gustav Mahler)
• Green (Michael Torke)
• Aka (Andy Akiho)
• Fix You (Coldplay)

Copyright clearances required: Green (Michael Torke), Aka (Andy Akiho), Fix You (Coldplay). The Mahler is public domain and requires no clearance.