Casino

2000

CASINO is a composition in three movements for wind quintet and sound score which is synchronized in live performance.

CASINO combines the lively sounds of gambling (slot machines, roulette wheels, dice, poker chips, coins, cards, the big wheel) with the voice of a philosophizing dice caller named Tom Martinet.

Martinet was trained to be a priest but has worked in Las Vegas since 1974 and collects gambling lore. Phillip Bimstein interviewed Mr. Martinet, edited and reassembled his colorful comments, and then processed, manipulated and sequenced his words along with the casino sounds. Phillip simultaneously composed a wind quintet score which grows out of—and interacts with—the voice and gambling sounds.

CASINO was premiered by Sierra Winds in Las Vegas in 1997 and was performed at the Bang on a Can Festival in New York in 1999. The Sierra Winds recording of the work is available on Phillip Bimstein’s Larkin Gifford’s Harmonica CD released by Starkland in 2006.

CASINO was made possible by funding from the New Forms: Regional Initiative regranting program, co-administered by Helena Presents and the Colorado Dance Festival with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts’ Presenting and Commissioning Program, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. It was commissioned for the Sierra Winds by the Nevada State Council on the Arts, with additional support from New Residencies, a national program of Meet The Composer supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, The James Irvine Foundation, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., AT&T, and the National Endowment for the Arts.