“The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World” by David A. Jaffe is a piano concerto performed by a percussionist. It is the premier work for a new hybrid acoustic instrument, the “Radio-Drum-driven Disklavier,” which allows the gestural vocabulary of a percussionist to speak with the voice of an acoustic grand piano. The sound of this new instrument is massive and grand, even monumental, giving a new sense to the word “pianistic”, and is further extended by a unique ensemble of acoustic plucked string and percussion instruments. All sound is entirely acoustic and performed as it would be in a concert setting–there are no loudspeakers, electronic sound or over-dubbing.

Commissioned by a National Endowment for the Arts Collaborative Fellowship, it involved a collaboration between composer David A. Jaffe and percussionist Andrew Schloss. The two worked as Resident Artists at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1992-1993, where they developed the new instrument and refined the solo part. The work was released on CD in October, 1996 on the Well-Tempered productions label. The premiere live performance was January 20, 1998 by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players at the Yerba Buena Theatre in San Francisco.

This clip an excerpt from movement 5, “The Temple of Artemis.” the Mother Goddess (Ephesus, Turkey; 360 B.C.) Artemis, known also as Dianna, was the most revered and powerful goddess of Asia. Her sacred house at Ephasus inspired Philon to write, some 300 years later, “He who has laid eyes on it once will be convinced that the world of the immortal gods has moved from the heaven to earth.” The music serves as the climactic center-piece of the entire work, and is an unbridled ecstatic celebration of this goddess of wild animals to the Greeks, and of all Nature and motherhood to peoples farther East. It depicts a gradually-coalescing religious procession, focused on the carrying of the cult statue, and suggests the collisions of cultural influences that resulted as such pilgrims encountered one another, while migrating West. The musical cultural references are draw from around the world, ranging from jazz to popular music to folk musics from Ireland, Mexico, Spain and the American Appalachians, suggesting the vastness of Artemis’ influence and the rapidly-changing cosmology of the time.[Author’s notes]