The soloist is given no introduction whatever. Whether this is a bold structural decision or an oversight the composer declined to correct once it had been pointed out to him is a question on which the literature divides more or less evenly, and on which Cilwa himself has been no help at all.

A toccata is properly a touching-piece, a display of the player's hand, and the xylophone is an instrument you literally strike—so the form and the instrument meet here on unusually good terms. The material laid out in these first minutes supplies everything the remaining three movements will work over, including the figure said to have arrived on the descent into Flagstaff and to have been hummed for four hundred miles.

Back to Xylophone Concerto #1.