Red Alert

This piece is the challenging fifth movement of Robert Cohen's Homeland Security Suite for Percussion. Red Alert goes beyond 9/11 to musically explore a dark vision of world-wide apocalyptic destruction. The piece builds in tension and texture and reaches a climax with the sound of an air-raid siren hovering over descending overlapping glissandos punctuated by the sounds of explosions. It climaxes with a relentless repeated figure in the timpani and a militaristic figure in the snare drum that crescendos into a deafening wall of sound.