clarinet
Dual Confinement
Mon, 05/19/2008 - 12:34am — NathanSix Hours in the Isolation Booth
Sun, 05/11/2008 - 1:27pm — Nathan
Six Hours in the Isolation Booth was inspired by my friend Eleanor Saxton telling me the story of one of her early breakups. I was so moved by her story, in fact, that I immediately grabbed my clarinet and began composing, and in the middle of the night, I had completed a 10-minute composition in little more than two hours. The piece, however, is not so much about the breakup as it is about my own reactions to hearing her tell the story. Ellie's story depicted bitterness and rage, but left me feeling lonely and vulnerable, and it is these latter emotions that made it into my composition. In this respect, Six Hours is one of my more personal compositions. In fact, it is probably the first composition that really reflects my experience with clinical depression. Although I have been struggling with depression for most of my life, most of my compositions have been more optimistic in mood, and Six Hours is one of the few pieces that depicts my more somber moods.
Aspects of my depression find musical expression in Six Hours in a variety of ways. The texture is quite sparse, even for a solo instrument, with breath-length phrases consisting of only three or four notes fading in and out of existence, bracketed by silence. These phrases attempt to coalesce into longer overarching lines, but they often stumble, get caught in a web of false repetitions, and come out staggering in a different direction. Rather surprisingly to me, this form built on false starts and repetitions has become an underlying structure in many subsequent pieces. Later works, such as Triple Point (2005), Blues With a Drone (2006), and A Very Wibbly News Flash (2006), owe much of their shape to Six Hours, though they have markedly different moods.
Six Hours in the Isolation Booth has also had a much more tangible influence on my subsequent output. In the months following the composition of Six Hours, I wrote three additional pieces which are compositional "remixes" of Six Hours. First came Interruption (2006), for chamber wind ensemble, which reproduced the original solo in the clarinet part, while the other instruments offer additional depth, shading, or even independent commentary in their accompaniment. Soon after, I wrote Dual Confinement (2006), for clarinet and alto saxophone, which splits the original melody, with some distortion, between the two instruments, and also adds layers of sonic effects which are meant to evoke the sound of electronic music. In both of these compositions, Six Hours serves as a jumping-off point for additional musical explorations.
The third "remix," 6n Hours (2006), is not so much a new composition as a reconception of the original piece. In 6n Hours, multiple clarinets, or one or more live clarinets with a prerecorded CD, all play through Six Hours in the Isolation Booth as written. However, as many of the notes and rests in Six Hours have independent durations, specified by fermatas, each performer gets to make their own decisions about these note-lengths, resulting in an overlapping network of phrases and echoes. If you are performing 6n Hours, please note that that is only the general title for the piece. The title for a specific performance should reflect the number of performers: a performance for two live clarinetists should be billed as 12 Hours, while a performance for four live clarinetists and one prerecorded clarinet should be called 30 Hours. Although the various clarinettists are not expected to play in unison, they should not be completely independent, either; each (live) performer should listen to those around them and make informed musical decisions. While Six Hours in the Isolation Booth is quite sparse to begin with, clarinettists should make sure that the group performance does not get too cluttered. With more performers taking part, the lengths of the rests should increase on average, and if there are more than three performers in total (live and prerecorded), it would be advisable to have only one performer or recording play the entirety of Six Hours, while the other performers may choose to omit individual phrases as they see fit.
In both its solo and ensemble incarnations, Six Hours does not make many technical demands of the player. It does require a good deal of breath control, and the ability to project subtle dynamic nuances. As such, it is an excellent vehicle for intermediate clarinettists to show off their expressive talents. As a matter of fact, I have found that a less advanced clarinettist, such as myself, can perhaps embody the vulnerability of this piece more ably than a seasoned professional. Professional clarinettists should, in turn, take this as an opportunity to prove me wrong. While Six Hours in the Isolation Booth as a piece of music is quite bleak, the title has a much lighter inspiration. It comes from a comic strip by internet humorist Lore Sjöberg. My composition has nothing to do with that strip, but I thought the phrase "six hours in the isolation booth" aptly described the piece's mood. The strip itself is about "the worst music on the planet," and while I hope that that designation will never apply to my compositions, I think that I could come to enjoy the company of squeezebox shredders and piobaireachd hard-boppers.
6n Hours
Sun, 05/11/2008 - 1:05pm — Nathan6n Hours arose from a collaboration between the music and dance programs at Tufts University in spring 2005. The musicians were asked to provide music for a choreographers concert, featuring pieces choreographed and performed by dance students. The dances were created independently from the music, much like some of the collaborations between Merce Cunningham and John Cage. We musicians were informed of the duration and general content of the various pieces, and given free rein to fill those durations however we saw fit.
One of the dances pieces on the concert was "Death Solos", an arrangement of several individual reconstructions of Yvonne Rainer's "Death Solo" from 1963, lasting about nine minutes. This was roughly the same length as my clarinet solo Six Hours in the Isolation Booth, written in October of 2004, so I decided to recast Six Hours as a duet. I had already composed two "remixes" of Six Hours, Interruption and Dual Confinement, which both added new material to that was not present in the original, but this time, my idea was much simpler: have two or more clarinets playing Six Hours simultaneously. The score to Six Hours contains many notes of indeterminate length, so two clarinettists playing the same score -- or one live clarinettist and one prerecorded clarinet -- need not stay together. Furthermore, the overlapping of multiple realizations of the same score seemed to nicely echo the overlapping of different interepretations of the same solo in the choreography. Lastly, I cannot understate the appeal of being able to create a "new" piece of music without having to expend any substantive effort on my own part.
Actually, it required more effort than I expected, but not a lot more. I already had a recording of Six Hours in the Isolation Booth, so I burned a copy and brought it to the dress rehearsal, along with my clarinet. The combination seemed to work well musically, but I found that the dance lasted a bit longer than I had anticipated. Even though the last note of Six Hours can be arbitrarily long, and I indeed held it as long as my lungs allowed, the dancers continued to move for another 30 seconds or so after I stopped. This was not necessarily a problem -- the dancers did not need music to coordinate their actions -- but I was somewhat dissatisfied. So I decided to doctor the recording somewhat. Many of the rests in Six Hours are also of indeterminate length, and I went over the whole recording, and inserted an extra one to five seconds of silence in those intervals. All told, I was able to extend the length of the recording by 30 or 40 seconds, and, using the recording as a guide for the progress of my live performance, I could hopefully cover all of the dancers' movements. The following night, the choreographers concert was presented twice, at 5 and 7 PM. In the first performance, I tried to time my playing to end the same amount of time after the recording as I had the night before, only to find that the dancers had slowed down somewhat. I held the last note as long as I could, and the dancers were still moving for another 15 seconds after I had ended. Since I couldn't make any further edits to the recording, I just kept in mind that I'd have to give myself more time after the recording was over in the second performance. So I stalled, and stretched things out, and yet again, the dancers continued long after I had ended. Every time I tried to slow my performance down, they got even slower. Maybe they were listening to my performance after all.
If you wish to get some of your friends and/or music playback devices together to perform 6n Hours, I have a few suggestions. First, note that 6n Hours is just the generic title for a multiple-clarinet interpretation of Six Hours in the Isolation Booth, and specific performanced should be given a title appropriate to the value of n. Thus, a performance by two live clarinettists would be entitled Twelve Hours, while a performance by four live clarinettists and one prerecorded clarinet would be 30 Hours. Also, keep in mind that the more clarinets you have playing simultaneously, the more time the individual clarinets need to spend between notes. While 6n Hours does not take place in an isolation booth, it should still have a lot of space. In fact, if more than three or four clarinets (live or recorded) are involved, I would suggest that only one of them play the entire score as written. The other players should omit some of the phrases, to keep the performance from getting too cluttered. With large numbers of clarinets, it may also be useful to spread out the performers spatially. Since synchronization is only an optional issue, it would not be unfeasible to have performers scattered throughout the hall. Of course, in any performance of 6n Hours, the live performers should be listening around themselves at all times, though they get to individually decide whether to react to what they hear, and how.
